[jah242]

'you want to be more selfish with your time and money' - from my perspective having children is up with the most selfish things an individual can do - you are spending a huge amount of time and resources replicating yourself (to as greater degree as possible with current technology) and then usually trying to give that replication as much advantage over other people's as possible.

From my experience parents are often great for their children but the trade off is they often become worse members of society, switching to focusing time and resources on their family (to give their genetic material an advantage) rather than any wider potentially more utilitarian outlets or considerations.

[engineer_22]

I think you should reflect a little bit more on what a society is and it's goals.

To my point, a society is made up of people. They must be born before they can be useful to society.

[Dracophoenix]

I don't think lacking a child would make someone any more considerate of society than they are. As the poster above you mentioned, many young couples don't want to have children because the economic and QoL calculation is unfavorable to doing so. They have no concern for the utilitarian needs of society (and for that matter, most people don't).

[DiggyJohnson]

Can you give some examples of this trade off? I have a different perspective: that non-parents have less incentive to build and maintains communities?

What sort of activities do non-parent adults engage in that is lost in this trade-off?