> it's overtly obvious how much work a child is, It really isn't. My sister lived with me on and off during her kid's first years and I saw a lot of it (also

> it's overtly obvious how much work a child is, It really isn't. My sister lived with me on and off during her kid's first years and I saw a lot of it (also experienced the joys of being the cool uncle). But I still underestimated the amount of work you have to put in. Also: taking care of a 9-month old is possibly 81 times the work of taking care of a newborn. But evolution is funny like this: the payoff scales very close to the energy expenditure. It's really hard to explain the benefits one gets from having kids because, well, with your mentality one doesn't get any benefits. I was almost militantly "child-free" until something I can't quite explain happened to me, and put the world in an entirely different perspective. This is when we decided to try for a baby. We were different people already when the baby came. The differences in thinking between parents and the childless might well be larger than political, racial, ideological, religious etc. differences.