You’re tired. You’re strapped for time. You are being asked to do an impossible amount. That’s what parenting is these days…and so much more. It can be thankless. It is tough. It pushes you in ways you never could have imagined.

Should it really surprise us that people are having fewer kids? Or that some people are deciding to not have them at all?

In a recent podcast Ezra Klein pushed back a little though, on the calculation that parenting is supposed to be awesome for parents.

“It is amazing that my children get to experience life,” he said. “Not because it makes my life better in every respect, though I can talk about the ways it does, but because their lives are precious things. And my parents gave up a lot to have me here. And my life has been a precious thing to me, and on and on and on, backward down the line.”

This isn’t to say that we’re just vessels for the next generation and we should sacrifice all our happiness for them. But it is a reminder that there is something fundamentally not about us about this. Having kids isn’t for us…it’s for the kids. And yet you hear so many parents today acting like their kids owe them some return for all that they’ve invested in them. “I do find the kind of weighing the ledger thing,” Klein continued, “to be distinctive to our era. And I’m not sure I think it is an ethos that speaks super well of our era.”

He’s right. As parents, we should recognize that giving the gift of life is enough. Our children don’t owe us anything for it, just as we owed nothing for our own. It was good that we brought them into the world. It’s good that they get to enjoy it.