The majority of people worldwide want children. Ask anyone who does not want children, and they will tell you it sometimes (often?) carries a certain stigma with it. At the very least, elder members of your family will heckle you at weddings for your child-less wishes.
Despite this seemingly universal drive to have children, very little research has assessed what causes this. One explanation is that children protect people from concerns over their own mortality.
Research, by Arnaud Wisman of The University of Kent and Jamie Goldenberg of The University of South Florida, randomly assigned people to write about death or other negative topics (e.g., failure, pain). All participants were then asked "how many children would you like to have in real-life?" and " how many children would you like to have in fantasy?", and for each question could circle any number ranging from 1-6.
When men and women were reminded of death, they responded by wanting more children. (For women, this was the case only when they were focused on how children would not interfere with their career).
Research conducted by different researchers has replicated this effect using German and Dutch participants. And further, this research found that thoughts of death increase thoughts of children (i.e., people completed word fragments such as c h _ _ _ with "child" instead of "cheer" or "chose," well at least the German equivalent of that).
And moreover, when people first think about the children they might have in the future, death salience does not cause people to become more psychologically defensive; in the absence of thinking about one's future children, it does.
It might be worth noting that these studies were all conducted with college students. So, no published research has asked people to think about their own children prior to death salience. Theoretically, however, the same effects should occur.
So why do people have children? One reason is to transcend the great specter of death. As cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker put it, biology ensures ephemeral beings can become immortal.
