How Choices About Having Kids Really Get Made

This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.

At one point in her life, my colleague Olga Khazan thought that “if you don’t get baby fever, maybe that means you’re not meant to have a baby.” But she soon realized that cooing over pudgy cheeks and the new-baby smell didn’t have much to do with whether a person was ready for—or wanted—a child.

So what factors do play into the decision to have a baby? Today’s newsletter examines the role of family policy, government funding, and the less tangible but equally important needs and desires that color the choice to have kids.

On Having Kids

The Real Reason People Aren’t Having Kids

By Christine Emba

It’s a need that government subsidies and better family policy can’t necessarily address.

Read the article.

It’s Okay If You Don’t Have Baby Fever!

By Olga Khazan

A deep, sudden longing for babies is certainly real, but it’s not a prerequisite for having kids.

Read the article.

The Real Reason South Koreans Aren’t Having Babies

By Anna Louie Sussman

Gender, rather than race or age or immigration status, has become the country’s sharpest social fault line.

Read the article.

Still Curious?

• Cultural shifts alone won’t persuade people to have kids : You still need the economic winds at your back, Stephanie H. Murray argues.
• “Kids as capital” : “Americans like to think of their children as a source of pleasure rather than profit,” Jonathan Rauch wrote in 1989. But “not so many generations ago people had children because they needed them.”

Other Diversions

• Lighthouse parents have more confident kids.
• Five books that conjure entirely new worlds
• When one animal changes a human’s mind

P.S.

I recently asked readers to share a photo of something that sparks their sense of awe in the world. “It was through my camera that I first discovered many tiny, magical realms that often escape the human eye,” Kate Hoover, 68, from the Sonoran Desert, in Arizona, writes. “Walking our high-desert Arizona ranch, I first captured images of flora and fauna that I found to be picturesque in a fairly traditional sense. But as I looked more closely at plants, often sitting or lying on the ground to get a better view, or simply more closely examining my photographs, the world expanded before me.”

“While exploring the universe in microscale has its pleasures and rewards, it also comes with constraints … To simply sit amongst the flowers introduces the risk of harm to the microenvironments that bring me such joy,” she adds.

I’ll continue to feature your responses in the coming weeks.

— Isabel