Q. You know how people say “Even if you were the only person to become a Christian God loves you so much that he would have still sent Jesus to die for you” I sometimes wonder if God really loved us so much wouldn’t you think that he would be willing to give up all of creation if even one person was going to go to hell? Imagine you wanted to have children but there was a 75% chance that they would not know about you or not choose you and if they were in that 75% they would have long miserable lives spent being tortured and alone.  Wouldn’t the selfless thing to do be to not have sex, not have kids, and not have anyone tortured?  Hell seems like that times infinity.  I don’t understand how God can love people so much and yet keep creating creatures who will end up being subjected to eternal torture.
Defining the Dilemma
The dilemma expressed in the statement above represents probably one of the most common objections brought against the Christian worldview: that “a loving God would not send people (people who He created) to Hell.”  However, embedded in this objection is a problem with the definition of the word “love” as it is here being applied to God.  Certainly, God is loving (Psalm 36:7, 1 John 4:16), but He is loving in every sense of the word, not simply in a sense which ensures our uninterrupted pleasure.

We seem ever-ready to accept the image of a God who is loving toward us in a romantic, Utopian way, yet unwilling to accept the notion of a God who loves us enough to meddle in our business, or correct us on our errant courses.  The only source of the idea that God is perfectly loving is contained in the Bible itself.  Ironically, this is the same source which informs us that God is perfectly just as well.
God’s Love and God’s Justice
And have you forgotten the exhortation that addresses you as sons?  “My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord, nor be weary when reproved by him.  For the Lord disciplines the one he loves, and chastises every son whom he receives.” It is for discipline that you have to endure. God is treating you as sons. For what son is there whom his father does not discipline?  If you are left without discipline, in which all have participated, then you are illegitimate children and not sons. Besides this, we have had earthly fathers who disciplined us and we respected them. Shall we not much more be subject to the Father of spirits and live?  For they disciplined us for a short time as it seemed best to them, but he disciplines us for our good, that we may share his holiness. 
If we are ready to accept the idea of God as a God of love, we cannot patronize Him as a lover who wills only our continuous comfort.  To do so would be to shape and worship a therapeutic yet useless god, made in our image, and “loving” towards us on our own terms.  To ask God for His love without His guidance and discipline is to ask Him not to love us more, but less.
Probability vs. Providence
The questioner asks, “if God really loved us, wouldn’t He be willing to not have created anything in order that no one would go to Hell?”

First, if God had not created us, there would be none of us to love.  This is a nonsensical, backwards scenario, and nonsense is still nonsense even when you try to apply it to God.

Second, God does not work with probabilities.  He did not have to calculate the percentages of people who would accept Him, versus those who would reject Him.  He knew what would result from the creation, and that a great deal of people would reject Him.  Yet, because God’s glorification is all that matters from beginning to end, He deemed it proper to create a world in which some people would have the opportunity to love Him of their own volition.  Any sort of objection that this makes God an ego-centric tyrant misses the point: He is God; all honor, glory and praise is His alone.  He is incapable of selfishness because there is nothing else which deserves honor and glory more than Himself.

Third, the fall of mankind (of which Hell was a result) was the doing of man, not of God. Some would object that God could have done things another way, which might have avoided Hell altogether.  C. S. Lewis speaks to this idea directly: “Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free wills involve, and you will find that you have excluded life itself.”*
The Greatest Mystery
The fact of the matter is that you cannot dissect the character of God, elevating that which you approve, and indicting that which you do not.  The correct reaction to encountering God is not to feel emotionally satisfied by His love; it is to fall on our faces in reverent fear of His holiness.  Nor can we question his extent of His justness simply because he grants some people their greatest wish: not to be bothered by Him.  When you understand this, you will realize the real mystery is not that a loving God could allow the possibility of Hell, but how that magnificent God could allow any of us to enter Heaven.

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*Lewis, C. S. The Problem of Pain (HarperCollins: New York, 1940) p.25

Q. Should hell as described in the Bible be taken literally? How about children and hell?

Hell as described in the Bible should definitely be taken literally. Why? Because of the literal, and not symbolic nature of the terms that are used in the Bible.
Jesus Took It Literally
When Jesus talked about “hell” he used the expression translated in Greek as geenna (or gehenna).  It is a contraction of “ge” valley and “Hinnom” (which means sorrow in Hebrew).

The Old Testament refers to this same place that Jesus mentions as Tophet (Heb. the place of burning bodies, the place of fire) in Is 30:33 and Jer 7:31.  It was a literal place where people burned their children as sacrifices to Molech, the hideous god of the Ammonites. (2 Chron 28:3).

This was all done in the Valley of Hinnom, out side of the dung gate of Jerusalem.  So Jesus would look at this place on the southeast end of the city of Jerusalem as he would talk about future judgment, where the smoke continually rose from burning trash and dead animals full of maggots…and he would say: “cast into geenna fire that never shall be quenched, where the worm dies not and the fire is not quenched” Mark 9:43, 44, 46, and 48 (he just kept repeating this for emphasis).

Matt 10:28 “destroy both soul and body in geenna” – Jesus speaks to His disciples about the extent of the punishment (soul and body). Rev 19:20 tells us that the beast and false prophet “both were cast alive into a lake of fire burning with brimstone (flashing sulfur).” Rev 20:10 tells us that “tormented day and night for ever and ever” is the descriptive result.
Q. How about children and hell?
If one understands the Bible, then regarding this issue, one must think that there is some sort of theology of accountability. Romans 10:9 says that in order to be saved, one must “confess with (their) mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in (their) heart that God has raised Him from the dead.”

As we know, this is not possible for children under a certain age as well as those who suffer from certain mental disabilities. We see evidence of this in 2 Samuel 12:23 where David says after losing his infant son whom Bathsheba birthed: “I shall go to him.”