Narcissism and Childlessness

Today’s young adults don’t want to have kids because they prefer to be their own kids.

By Kyle Smith

Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Free Expression is a daily newsletter on American life, politics and culture from the Opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal. Sign up and start reading Free Expression today.

There’s a lot of chatter out there about what is causing the sharp decline in birthrates, especially in the richest countries. Many theories don’t pass the laugh test. Economic insecurity? Ask your grandparents what they got by on when they were starting out. I can almost promise you that their stories will make you feel ashamed at how easy you’ve had it. My own parents, who married in 1962, never tired of telling their upper-middle-class sons that they couldn’t afford to buy an ice cream cone from the Friendly’s across the street when they first wed.

Climate change? Some ideas are so ludicrous I can’t accept that even intellectuals hold them. If you’re old enough to consider reproducing, you’re old enough to notice that the climate isn’t drastically different from what it was decades ago. It probably won’t be that different decades from now, not that any size family will have any effect on the climate in a world of billions. Moreover, generations of parents who raised their kids under the shadow of potential instant nuclear annihilation understood that it’s human nature not to give up on the future because it’s unpredictable.

The overwhelmingly obvious reason why so many couples are ruling themselves out of becoming parents is simple narcissism. Having kids means accepting certain limitations. It means you can’t stay out all night drinking PBR on someone’s roof in Brooklyn. It means a certain amount of planning and responsibility. Kids can be annoying. You have to drag them around a lot, you have to deal with their tantrums, and periodically you have to feed them. When you and your partner are both at work, you have to find someone to take care of them. All of these factors provide constant reminders that you’re no longer the center of your own world.

Moreover, having kids is guaranteed to cast you into an unfamiliar, even scary role: being a grown-up. In a thousand different ways, young adults today willfully cling to childhood like no previous generation, ever, in the history of civilization. Maintaining a perpetual state of childhood-adjacency is simply another form of narcissism. Today’s young adults often don’t wish to have kids because they prefer to be their own kid, to indulge their juvenile desires with adult levels of freedom and disposable income.

But the childless brigades should ask themselves something: Why do parents report that having kids is the best decision they ever made? To an outside observer they spend all their free time wiping little-people vomit off their shirts or struggling with diabolically complex car-seat installation. Why does virtually every parent think it’s worth the price, and then some?

Just in time for Father’s Day, the news this month showed that fatherhood reshapes the male brain in positive ways, is associated with greater life satisfaction and may even slow aging. Men with two children exhibited an estimated brain age of 0.6 years younger than those without. The effect was even more pronounced with three children. These numbers roughly equate to the benefit from 2.5 hours of exercise each week.

But you don’t need to read the medical literature to learn about what fatherhood does for you. All you need to do is watch “Bluey.”

In the episode titled, “Exercise,” Bandit, father to the girls Bluey and Bingo, starts out by saying he’s going to the gym, but never gets there because dealing with the nuttiness and mischief his daughters dream up provides an excellent, unusually fun workout right in his yard.

The immensely popular series of eight-minute animated episodes from Australia is a sneakily accurate portrait of family dynamics. What the scientists in lab coats struggle to prove is simply presented as obvious fact via Bandit, the true star character of the show (as Homer is the true star of “The Simpsons”), created by Joe Brumm.

Though the cartoon is great fun for kids, it’s adults who see it for what it is: one of the greatest sitcoms of this century. Via Bandit’s go-for-it attitude to fatherhood (his wife and the girls’ mother, Chilli, is in the somewhat stereotypical position of being the voice of reason) parenting is recast as a never-ending improv comedy routine. As every student of the form is taught, its main rule is, “Yes, and . . . .” Whatever you’re given, you keep rolling with the premise. Bluey and Bingo see fun everywhere and gamify everything. Bandit mostly cheerfully goes with the flow and even adds new characters, situations and fantasies to keep the skit lively.

One background lesson of “Bluey,” which my colleague Louise Perry has praised for giving families a break from strident progressive propaganda, is that having kids is a great way to relive childhood, to regain the ability to shed inhibitions and to be silly with others. As much as having kids restricts parents’ options in some ways, it expands them in others. In “Pavlova,” for instance, when the kids scheme to get around their parents’ refusal to allow them to have a sweet treat by pretending to operate a cafe, Bandit (brilliantly voiced by David McCormack) outplays them by pretending to be its supercilious French waiter, who has a habit of getting all orders wrong. “Unicorse,” the name of the hand puppet Bandit initially deploys to model good behavior for the kids, turns into a hilarious force of anarchy. What other condition but fatherhood brings with it a captive, enthusiastic audience for your comedy stylings?

Bluey’s dad is so admired that he fills the role previous sitcom dads did in generations past—Fred MacMurray in “My Three Sons” and, er, Bill Cosby in “The Cosby Show.” Bandits: the Bluey Group for Dads has more than 100,000 members on Facebook. Many of them seem to find the hangout a safe place for venturing into emotional terrain they don’t often visit when engaging in more typical dude interactions such as watching sports. “Bluey” isn’t only a show for kids. It’s the most convincing possible argument for creating kids in the first place.

Mr. Smith is a Free Expression columnist at WSJ Opinion.