In some societies people want children for what might
be called familial reasons: to extend the family line or the family name, to
propitiate the ancestors; to enable the proper functioning of religious rituals
involving the family. Such reasons may seem thin in the modern, secularized
society but they have been and are powerful indeed in other places.
In
addition, one class of family reasons shares a border with the following category , namely, having children in order to maintain or
improve a marriage; to hold the husband or occupy the wife; to repair or
rejuvenate the marriage; to increase the number of children on the assumption
that family happiness lies that way. The point is underlined by its converse:
in some societies the failure to bear children (or males) is a threat to the
marriage and a ready cause for divorce.
Beyond
all that is the profound significance of children to the very institution of
the family itself. To many people, husband and wife
alone do not seem a proper family — they need children to enrich the circle, to
validate its family character, to gather the redemptive influence of offspring.
Children need the family, but the family seems also to need children, as the
social institution uniquely available, at least in principle, for security,
comfort, assurance, and direction in a changing, often hostile, world. To most
people, such a home base, in the literal sense, needs more than one person for
sustenance and in generational extension.