As someone who remained childless by choice until age 39 and now who now parents a twelve-year-old, I have a lot of experience on both sides. I think the issues are pretty well covered above, and I agree with most all of it, although I take exception to the notion that pregnancy itself is necessarily a huge, life-altering ordeal (it’s the stuff that happens AFTERWARD that’s life-changing). My own pregnancy was pretty unremarkable; I didn’t even feel particularly different, I just got to eat more and not have a period. This is not to say that there are not people who don’t have prolonged discomfort or permanent bodily changes - just that such outcomes are far from inevitable. Hey, come to think of it, I got permanently bigger boobs out of pregnancy - yay!
The only thing I would add to the comments of other posters above is so subtle as to be almost ineffable. Let me give an example rather than try to put my finger directly on it: When I was childless, sometimes my friends with kids would relate something about their experience with their kid; let’s say, “oh, Johnny is having trouble making friends at school; we’re trying to coach him through this situation.”
As a good interlocutor, I’d of course want to sympathetically relate, so I’d search for something in my own experience that I could use to create a connection between us. But, being childless, I’d end up saying “yeah, I remember when I was a child, there was one semester where…”
Conversations like that always made me feel a little infantilized. There was the other person, talking about handling life as a grown-up, and the best I could do was to recall something from when I was a kid.
Now as a parent, I don’t have to do that any more. And, in a related development, it is much easier to establish empathy and a vocabulary of shared experiences with most people, since for better or for worse most people ARE parents. To misquote Tolstoy, “families with children are all alike, but childless families are all childless in their own way.”
That’s not literally true, of course. But having kids does fundamentally alter the way you relate to people in a lot of situations. Your central reference point moves outward from your own experiences in a subtle but all-encompassing way.
Please, childless folks, don’t jump on me and claim that I am accusing childless people of being “selfish.” I know that this is a common assertion, but personally I don’t buy it AT ALL. Parents can be at least as selfish, if not more, than childless people. What I’m talking about is not so black and white, and doesn’t have to do with being a better or worse person. It’s just, as any person who has seen the world from both points of view can affirm … different.