Babies
A friend of mine has just found out that he will be a grandfather in a few months. Delightful news. It does, however, cause me to reflect on the number of the women who were friends of mine in highschool and university who are now 50 and childless. I assume by choice.
Were it 2 in ten or even 3 I would be relatively indifferent. Choices and all that. But, in terms of the women who were closest to me only two of fourteen have had children.
These were immensely talented, intelligent people. Three PhDs, several lawyers, three artists – and a total of six children. Now, basic replacement rate suggests that these women could have borne 28 children. There are only six.
Twenty two children are missing. They are not answering the help wanted notices scattered through my town, they are not filling places in university nor will they be raising children or paying taxes.
My friend’s daughter is giving all of us the great gift of a child. My friends, no doubt for reasons which seemed sensible at the time, are not.
I think that is very sad.
May 5th, 2008 at 8:48 pm
Okay, I’ll bite; how many kids do you have?
May 6th, 2008 at 12:09 am
I’ve had a similar experience: I’m an engineer, and I know all too many of my colleagues—responsible, hard-working, highly intelligent people all—who have elected not to have children. The reasons? Generally, pure selfishness. For a childless couple pulling in $120,000+ per year, life is one long trip to Disneyland. Want that home theatre set, or that kitchen renovation, or that deluxe holiday, while still maxing out your RRSPs? It’s yours!
While I thought ‘Idiocracy’ was great satire, I’ve got to say I believe its fundamental conceit—of a world where the stupid have so outbred the smart that society falls apart—is not all that far-fetched.
May 6th, 2008 at 12:46 am
I wonder if they want children now?
May 6th, 2008 at 1:25 am
3
May 6th, 2008 at 2:50 am
alas only 1…but he DOES have three heads…?!....(oh my,i remember the arguing i had with the provincial gov’t. for the baby bonus milk money in the old days)
May 6th, 2008 at 3:34 am
As a young, educated and well employed professional, you wouldn’t believe the difficulty in finding someone I would like to get married to.
And almost exclusively, the sticking point has to do with children. I would like to have children, and more than just one! The amount of women who think children and motherhood is an honorable or desireable life path is INCREDIBLY small. My mother put aside her career aspirations to become… my mother…. and I will forever be thankful for that.
How many of these people even talk to their parents, I wonder.
It’s a sad reality of modern western life…..
May 6th, 2008 at 7:53 am
I almost choked on a chocolate chip, Just Me. Get you immediately to a Catholic or Evangelical or Jewish student college mixer, the local Newman Centre or any place where 21 year old religious women hang out. There you will find a LOT of women who want to get married, and have children, and even stay home while their kids are babies, but the guys their age haven’t yet become well-employed professionals. The guys are thinking, hmm, grad school?
Don’t worry. There are plenty of young women who want babies.
May 6th, 2008 at 8:33 am
Oh, dear. Remember that good old argument about “race suicide” ? This comes perilously close. A few points to address the underlying fallacies.
1. Smart people don’t burst fully-formed from the womb. Most of us had parents who were not greatly educated, yet we managed to carve professional careers. Other kids – and they don’t have to be ours – can certainly do the same from such humble roots.
2. There are TOO MANY PEOPLE in the world. Why bake more?
3. The old saw about professional women’s incomes not equaling men’s because women take time out for childhood? Not true – women in childless couples still don’t do as well. We have a long way to go, and childless women are helping bridge the gap between the idea of women as mothers to the idea of families as mothers. How? By setting an example for all of society that women’s choice to bear or not to bear is equality. When more than a tiny percentage of men start taking time out of their careers to raise kids (or adopt kids) then we’ll talk about childlessness being a problem.
4. How is reproducing yourself and your genes not selfish? How about using extra time and income to help an orphanage in Cambodia or volunteer at a rape crisis line any less beneficial?
5. What if not everybody is cut out to parent? Lots of parents who had no choice due to few birth control options and societal pressures may have wished they had the choice not to have kids (though they dearly love the ones they have, I’m certain). Lots of parents are lousy parents. Why not let the people who really want the job be the ones to perform it? The rest of us, we are better at other things.
May 6th, 2008 at 10:26 am
No wonder smart women think some men are thick.
Jay apparently assumes that knocking off a PhD or establishing oneself as a lawyer or artist is such a simple task that his all female classmates could easily have popped out (and raised) a couple of tots along the way. If he raised his three kids while their mother went back to work, he has every right to that assumption, but I’m guessing that’s not the case.
Just Me figures he’s quite a catch—“a young, educated, well-employed professional”—and he’s mystified why some woman isn’t willing to play brood mare for his benefit. It doesn’t seem to occur to him that his chances of breeding might improve if, instead of asking his prospective mate to abandon her career plans, he offered to put HIS “aspirations” on hold while his multiple tots made their way through those early years.
It’s all very well to ask others to walk away from an interesting and rewarding career and so very convenient to assume that raising children is every woman’s purpose and most profound wish. The evidence suggests otherwise.
You want kids? Man up and share the workload. Or stop whining.
May 6th, 2008 at 11:25 am
I suppose every generation says this, but I reckon raising kids is harder now than at any time in history. I grew up just outside a small town in Tanzania, where kids were pretty low maintenance. Traffic was light and slow, and we had never heard the word paedophile, so we could just wander over to other kids’ houses and basically leave our folks alone to do whatever they needed to do.
Fast forward a few decades and behold the contrast. In such a dysfunctional city as Sydney the main danger is of course traffic, but that doesn’t stop us worrying about the other, however statistically insignificant it may be. Our capacity for angst is infinite. As a result, I spend virtually every free moment with my young children. Even though I am not technically the primary carer, this affects every aspect of my life – I can’t do much (if any) overtime at work, my social calendar looks like the Great Gobi Desert, and what the little buggers do to my blood pressure when they put their minds to it is doubtless equivalent to half a million Big Macs (served with unwashed hands, truewest!).
If I had known hypothetically before I had, er, bonded, what parenthood would entail, I too might have been like Jay’s friends. Obviously it’s different now they are here and the apple of my eye,
Sure unimaginative tax policies don’t help, but I think the biggest deterrent is just city life.
May 6th, 2008 at 2:09 pm
Renee, you might wish to think otherwise, but smart people tend to have smart kids, and dumb people dumb ones. There are exceptions, but they are just that. Even if you fall firmly into the “nurture” side of the nature/nurture debate, it doesn’t make much difference: smart, responsible people tend to provide more stimulating, learning-friendly environments for their children. So the collapsing birthrate among middle-class professionals that I and others observe is a cause for concern.
As to your second point, given the continuous drop in worldwide fertility rates since the 1960s, the world’s population is likely to peak at between 8-11 billion by the middle of the century, then start to fall. We can quite easily accommodate another few billion, and like global cooling, we will probably find that population decline carries a fair amount of undesirable consequences with it.
Not interested in your third point, sorry.
Fourth, fine. I’m with those who believe that parenthood fosters community, because you take account of others’ needs beyond your own, and you naturally desire a happy future for your children. For childless couples, you can happily live for yourselves and for the moment.
Fifth, trite. Parenthood tends to bring out characteristics people didn’t know they had, and makes it difficult to maintain the extended adolescence we observe among so many childless 30- and 40-somethings these days. Are some people bad parents? Of course. So what? Most aren’t, and we need more kids.
May 6th, 2008 at 6:27 pm
Seraphic Single has nailed this one. Much to the discomfort of both the left and many libertarians, it is tied into religion or at least a religious impulse. Either you see life as something that is yours to craft for your happiness or you see it as a continuum with a purpose. We’ve had the doctrine of radical free choice respecting children for several generations now and the evidence all across the West is pretty compelling. Still, the collective denial on this question is deeply ingrained. Something to keep in mind the next time you hear Dawkins/Hitchens/Dennett et. al. go on about how religion is a parasite to be exorcised.
May 6th, 2008 at 10:41 pm
Hey Truewest,
Easier to call names and make assumptions than to deal with actual comments. Real classy!
If you figure out how men can carry and birth children then maybe your comments may have some validity, but otherwise it’s plain to see them as the hateful and immature prose they are.
It’s all very well to assume parenthood is an unrewarding and uninteresting career, and thereby smear every stay at home mother there is. Or that procreation and the development of a family is NOT the most basic of human attributes. The evidence is otherwise. How’s your mom doing?
May 6th, 2008 at 11:38 pm
mgl wrote: “Not interested in your third point, sorry”
Well, that settles it, doesn’t it? If you’re not interested, it can’t be relevant to the issue at hand.
But of course it is extremely relevant. Unless you assume that bring children into the world and raising them is the sole responsibility of women, the issue of who makes the sacrifices—not only economic, but intellectual, social, etc—necessary to raise children is central the question of declining birthrates. Intelligent, capable and ambitious women have choices these days, and need not resign themselves to life as brood mares for self-satisfied dugs like Just Me. If men want those women to choose parenthood, then their contribution to child-rearing, especially in the early years, will have to go beyond a paycheque.
May 7th, 2008 at 12:49 am
Well, it was late, and I thought the gender-equity argument was the most strawmannish of a distinctly yellow and flaxen bunch (Childless yups manning the rape hotlines rather than taking the Element to Whistler? The mind boggles), so I gave it short shrift. My apologies.
But I don’t remember where I argued, hinted, or implied that it was all up to the brood mar… uh, ladies (and what a nasty, dehumanizing term for those who choose to bear children, truewest). Most of my acquaintances (and siblings) who’ve decided to live the childless life have chosen self-gratification as their pole star, and are not animated by 1970s-style gender-political arguments about whether women should be shackled barefoot to the stove.
In any event, truewest and Renee, you’re right: we should just resign ourselves to the fact that Western Civilization has resolved to go out partying and get with the program. After all, if there’s no meaning to the universe, why not fill your life with goodies and perks? Those of us who do believe in the future (spoilsports!), and who forgo Soma in favour of children (killjoys!) should at least have the grace to let the wake proceed uninterrupted.
Party on!
May 7th, 2008 at 1:17 am
truewest:
I take it you know lots of professional women who only planned 0-1 children but changed their minds and had three because their husbands wanted them so and were so helpful?
It’s a nice little postmodern fairy tale you have going there, but it’s a crock.
May 7th, 2008 at 3:02 am
Looks to me like Truewest needs to take grade 10 biology all over again. That whole pregnancy thing is a real killer in reality. Innies, outies, real confusing.
Furthermore, he keeps lying about others in order to even make a point.
Pretty much sums up his entire viewpoint. Perhaps one or both his parents abandoned him at a young age, or just ignored him entirely. It certainly would explain his lack of logical thought and disdainful view of parenthood in general. Sometimes we should be thankful for those that choose not to have children as well, although I find it hard to believe truewest would fall into the target group we are discussing.
May 7th, 2008 at 4:04 am
silly people….don’t you know what that worm between your legs is for…and that incubator behind your navel….?
anything other than making full use of these bits and pieces of the poor forked animal is a stalemate at trying to understand life itself…do what the creator gave you as it was meant to be used…but don’t ever deny the divinely inspired impulse to live in ‘life’ and make ‘living’....
the understanding may come later and perhaps it won’t but there ain’t a mother born that didn’t love her baby more than her own life….THAT is all you need know.THAT love is what makes life livable…
May 7th, 2008 at 8:43 am
> “of a world where the stupid have so outbred the smart that society falls apart”
Replace “stupid” with “dogged and obstinate” and “smart” with “adept at spotting exceptions and excuses” and you have a less prejudicial discussion. Intellectually agile people are often better at coming up with rationalisations as to why a particular rule may be good generally but doesn’t apply to me right now. (Exhibit A: Clinton, WJ). The problem is, in the long term that may leave them behind the Boxer-the-Horse types who just get on with it, day after plodding day.
I include myself in the former category as I always have extremely good reasons as to why – although I acknowledge the great virtues of exercise, healthy eating and saving money – nonetheless it is justifiable why I need and deserve a cappucino or hot dog right now, and why going to the gym can wait til manana.
This may explain why people who are not especially quick-witted often end up more successful (in business, sports, the military, etc) – they keep accumulating a bit each day, even if they don’t notice the difference at once.
Apply this to having children: As either Chesterton or Dostoyevsky said, a truly rational person would neither volunteer as a soldier nor have children. It’s a huge step in the immediate short term. I am not anti-contraception – not in the Catholic sense of viewing condoms/ the pill as the moral equivalent of rat poison – but I do view them as the social equivalent of candy. Occasional treats (of sugar/ purely-recreational sex) are okay, but the problem is that people over-indulge and get addicted, and don’t want to eat their spinach (procreate).
As for childless people: Parents have little choice but to be “selfishly altruistic” – sacrificing their money, time, hair, waistline, and back muscles for the sake of other individuals who rarely thank them but whose existence, paradoxically, representss the closest verifiable thing this world can offer to life after death.
Childless people, OTOH, have a much wider choice. Some use that to be more selfish than parents are. It must be said, I know others who use their freedom to be more altruistic (helping strangers rather than kin). I know of one childless, unmarried woman who willed her house and money to her neighbours (unrelated to her), who had raised five children on a shoestring. A nice windfall reward for them, and a just reward, but it would never have come if the deceased had spent her money on her own children.
Australian academic Leslie Cannold recently noted (What, No Baby?) that in between women who had children and women who never wanted children is a third category, of those who would have liked children but never found a partner who was suitable and willing – or didn’t realised he was unsuitable or unwilling until she’d passed 40.
(Admittedly, Cannold holds some weird views on abortion – she has claimed that often killing an unborn is the best way you can care for it – and she doesn’t seem to have related this to her studies of women with “kidulescent”, child-phobic partners: she believes that becoming a mother can totally f### up a twentysomething woman’s life and lifestyle, but then is shocked – shocked! – when men believe that becoming a father might totally f### up a thirtysomething man’s life and lifestyle. Apart from this blind spot, though, her work is worth reading.)
May 7th, 2008 at 9:53 am
mgl,
If a twit like Just Me expect a woman to park her dreams to bear and raise children on his behalf (as he seems to) then perhaps “brood mare” is an accurate characterization of his view.
BTW, would someone explain to him that there is a difference between bearing children and raising them? While only a woman can give birth, that woman can usually do so without missing more than a few months of work. Any responsible adult can raise a child—a man as easily as a woman—but it can remove that person from working life for a number of years. And if the family doesn’t last, those years out of the workfoce can put that person at a profound disadvantage to life.
Acknowledging that economic reality does not diminish or dismiss the value of parenting. Reducing parenthood to a holy cult of the sacrificing mother (as Just Me would have use do) does.
I can say from experience that being a parent is challenging and rewarding work – but while it may be driven by love, it remains work. Moreover, it is not – or should not be—solely women’s work and in most modern families, including my own, it isn’t.
May 7th, 2008 at 10:24 am
Peter,
I thought you folks on the right understood that people were economic beings. Assuming that same reasoning applies to women, it follows that a woman who knows that the sacrifices of parenthood are going to be shared equally is more likely to bear more children than one who sees another kid as another five years of postponing her dreams.
That’s not a post-modern fairy tale; it’s common sense.
John,
It would be nice if it every woman loved her child more than her own life. If would be even nicer if every father felt the same way. Alas, neither proposition is universally true.
May 7th, 2008 at 11:46 am
As an academic with two children, I can attest to both the challenge, and the rewards, of having children (rather than buying a cottage by the lake, driving a new car, and ever having a chance to enjoy my jacuzzi alone). My teaching, my research and yes, even my service, has benefited from the need, the desperate need, to balance work and home demands. Seriously, tho, I cannot imagine that any economic, social or professional benefits will ever outweigh the pure delight that I experience when one of my children reaches for my hand, or gives me a kiss, or tells me I am beautiful and gives me their unconditional love—I would die for my little people, my children—I would never choose to die for my campus. For those who have yet to make the choice between money and the unconditional love between parent and child, or between professional / academic recognition and creating a new life, or between writing that one more article and going for tenure, then, well, all I can say is, you are missing out—big time.
May 7th, 2008 at 12:43 pm
“a woman who knows that the sacrifices of parenthood are going to be shared equally is more likely to bear more children than one who sees another kid as another five years of postponing her dreams”
Except that in many countries, time and again, once women get more status and power over their lives (education, equal property rights, stronger laws against rape, one or another method of avoiding unplanned pregnancies), the birth rate plummets.
However, interestingly it plummets most in the more socially conservative and sexist of the liberal egalitarian nations (Spain, Italy, Portugal, Russia, Japan). It remains relatively high in the more liberal egalitarian nations (Scandinavia), although not as high as in the repressive patriarchal countries (pick one).
From which I hypothesise that the worst of all worlds, if you want a high birth-rate, is to give your womenfolk the legal and economic power to say “forget changing nappies, I want to be a lawyer!” but let your menfolk continue to coast along reassuring themselves that a true good wife will quit her job and devote herself to Kinder, Kirche und Kuche like mama(/i> did. There will be a serious crossing of wires when they all hit 30-35.
Interestingly, Japan and Russia retain very sexist social attitudes despite having abortion available on demand – the perfect storm for a demographic taildive.
May 7th, 2008 at 5:35 pm
On a slight tangent, 50 year olds not having children? Hmmm wouldn’t have anything to do with coming of age in the 70’s, would it?
Remember, with the fruit fly guy on CBC every week telling us that by 2000, all 50 billion humans would be living in caves under the glaciers, unable to venture out without gas masks and lead lined underwear to protect against the deadly smog and the solar radiation not stopped by the missing ozone layer(destroyed by hairspray). And that was the best case scenario, cause it was a scientific certainy that that facist Nixon was gonna nuke us all to death.
For those of us who were 20 in 1978 the question is not why didn’t we procreate, the question is how we managed to survive when we discovered we were too late for the boomer “sex,drugs and rock n roll cause we all gonna die” party and all we had to look forward to was the hangover with our lives in Jimmy Carters hands.
May 7th, 2008 at 6:42 pm
truewest:
If economic rationalism drove all this, no one would have kids at all. Children are a blessing that enrich our lives and give them meaning, but they also deprive us of our time, freedom and money. The role of the father is extremely important (starting with whether the mother is confident he will be faithful and stick around)from the point of view of providing baseline security, but whether a woman has one or three children will be driven largely by how she defines her self-worth and life’s purpose. My wife is a primary school teacher in a private school. Most of the parents are comfortable and many mothers work succssfully. But she can always tell the difference between the mothers who try to arrange their work around their children’s needs and those who try to raise their children around the demands of their careers. The difference in the progress of the kids is palpable. Yes, there are exceptions at both ends (demanding professional career combined with several successful kids vs. resentful, selfish stay-at-home mom), but they are the exceptions. For pre-teens, the most important factor seems to be the dependable presence of the mother, especially psychological presence.
Whether the father contributes his fair share to the drudge or not makes a huge difference to whether the family is stable, happy and successful. Useless fathers are a terrible and damaging burden to both mothers and kids in many ways. (And so can be the fathers or pre-teens who think what their partners need is a “co-parent” making decisions rather than heavy-duty support). But I doubt fathers play all that great a role in deciding how many children they have in the first place unless the mother is faced with obvious dysfunctions and the whole eneterprise is unstable.
The issue is not whether a couple want children, but whether they will have 2-3+ as opposed to 1-2. You either think demographics are important or you don’t.
May 7th, 2008 at 7:41 pm
memento mori…i was of course referring to the ‘conqueror worm’.
May 7th, 2008 at 11:30 pm
Ah yes, more of Truewest lies to promote his narrowminded viewpoint.
Just for the record, I never once implied or suggested that anyone shoud “park her dreams to bear and raise children on his behalf” or “Reduced parenthood to a holy cult of the sacrificing mother”. Other than thanking my own mother for her sacrifice, of course.
Keep up the strawmen, genius. It’s hard to argue for your mostmodern fairytale without the imaginary trolls under the bridge.
Obviously Truewest has some reading comprehension issues to go along with his disdain for stay at home parents. The obvious jealousy he has for those of us whose parents made great sacrifice’s for our own benefit probably explains his anger, and perhaps his lack of general understanding as well. He completely ignores and nullifies the basic components of pregnancy… i mean hey, carrying and delivering a baby only takes a couple of months off of work…right?
He certainly cannot grasp the idea that for some, children and family are the dream, are the goal. His shallow interpretation of humanity puts physical objects, and titles, as the main goal of everyone, and anyone who disagrees is a ‘knuckledragging rightwinger’.
Thank goodness his opinion is far from reality.
May 8th, 2008 at 5:36 am
I didn’t note that any childless people wrote in, although they may not have identified themselves as such. I am childless, and although I won’t go into the whys & wherefores of that matter, I would like to say that if by choice, circumstances or inability, why are we judging these women? We don’t know why Jay’s friends don’t have children—there may be stories of secret pain, relief, joy or regret. There were many judgmental comments that seemed to condemn the childless, without knowing the circumstances of this situation. And frankly, their childlessness is really none of anyone’s business. I have had people ask me if I have children, and when I answer in the negative, I’ve gotten the third degree from relative strangers about my reasons and motivation. I’ve had advice about fertility treatments and doctors, and judgments on my choices, culminating with the kicker that I won’t have someone to look after me in old age. Well, maybe not, but having children doesn’t guarantee ongoing filial love and care.
Women are constantly bombarded with conflicting messages from various sources—be slim and beautiful, find a handsome man, have a successful career, have smart healthy children, be an incredible highly engaged mother, have a gorgeous home, be a delicious cook…In short you are a failure if you don’t fit many of these catagories (in fairness, men have their own crazy images to live up to as well). If you choose to or cannot be one of those stereotypes, women are judged harshly (and we’ve all done it!!). Women are able to be mothers should be supported and valued by society (and I don’t just mean with cheap daycare), and women who are not mothers should also be valued for the contributions they make to society through working, activism etc. Hey, who is finishing your assignment when you had to rush home in the middle of the day because your child was ill. That was me, and I’m fine with that too. (but that doesn’t mean I have to work all the holidays for you…)
So Jay has a right to be sad for these women, but I wish we could just accept that this is the way it is for them. We don’t know if these women are themselves sad and regretful, and at the risk of sounding like someone off a lefty site, without knowledge of their situation, we can only speculate and judge unfairly.
May 8th, 2008 at 9:28 am
Peter,
You open by dismissing the notion that economic factors play a role in a woman’s decision to have a certain number of children and close by asserting that they’re driven by, of all things, demographics.
I’ll have to survey some of my female colleagues, several of whom are carrying baby number 2, on that point—“So, did you decide to have a second child to forestall race suicide, stem the Islamic demographic tidal wave and thus allow Mark Steyn to sleep at night?” Interesting theory, though.
Seriously though, I’m not saying that economics is the sole driving factor, but that it is one factor among many that women take into account when deciding to have children or not. A number of women I know chose to remain childless because they looked honestly at themselves and thought they’d make lousy parents. Others were so driven to become mothers they decided to proceed without a partner. Others chose to have more children because their husband was willing to stay home and raise them.
For callow twits like Just Me, whose understanding of parenthood and child-rearing seems to be limited to what he learned in Grade 10 biology, the idea that anyone other than Mommy would be capable of raising children seems a “postmodern fairytale”. But as anyone who’s actually raised children knows, neither sex comes equipped with some innate knowledge on how to raise kids and every new parent climbs the learning curve with some trepidation and anxiety. It gets easier after that and the rewards are rich and plenty, but it’s never easy and it’s not all sweetness and light.
May 8th, 2008 at 11:45 am
truewest:
Economics may appear simplistically to play a factor at the micro level, but the macro level is surely much more ambiguous. The downturn in fertility to below replacement levels is contemporaneous with the hightest levels of prosperity in history. In contrast, high fertility rates globally correlate with economic disadvantage and distress. I believe a lot of couples believe they are making their family plannings decisions for economic reasons, but I think many are just fooling themselves.
Your humourous satire on the conservative concern that modern women are deliquent in declining to have have the children we need in order to to defend “civilization as we know it” is fair enough, but it it matched by the progressive fantasy that women would surely have more children if only they had publically-funded daycare and husbands grateful for the right to scrub toilets.
But frankly, neither the left nor the right have much of a grip on this issue. They run quickly to other matters when they realize it is taking them into (cue the ominous music) SO-CON territority. The horror, the horror. :-)
May 8th, 2008 at 12:11 pm
I’m childless by choice. It has a bit to do with money – not for me, but for any kids I’ll have. I’m a bluish-white-collar worker, and I don’t predict that things will get much better with time economically for my partner or I. Neither of us can afford to raise kids the way I was raised, and I can’t afford to raise kids the way they should be raised. Cramped apartments and moving every few years for work is no way to raise kids. Suburbia, even if I could break into it, is a sick culture anyway.
But, really, at the end of the day, I just don’t want kids. I never had the urge, and I’m fairly certain that it’s not the kind of thing you should jump into without a good, strong reason for doing so. It’s too important. So I do not plan on having children, and that decision disturbs me not a bit.
Of course, now that I know that I’m singlehandedly responsible for the Islamicists overrunning us like the Mongol Hoards, I’m thinking I should have one or two just to be on the safe side. For Canada. I’ll name them “Jay” and “Kathy.”
May 8th, 2008 at 12:18 pm
Go with that “one or two just to be on the safe side” thing.
I am always blown away by the “no kids, we can’t afford them” argument. Settlers on the frontier lived for years without seeing any money at all. Cramped apartment? Try tiny log cabin or sod hut.
Kids don’t care. If Mum – or better, Mum and Dad – love them and they have food they’ll be fine.
And, while I admire you for being honest, I have to note that it is an interesting reflection about how we live now that you simply cannot think far enough beyond yourself to imagine your children.
May 8th, 2008 at 1:28 pm
Jay,
Settlers on the frontier relied on their children for labour; they don’t call them family farms for nothing.
That said, I expect that their lives were as profoundly changed by the birth of their children as are the lives of parents today. Giving birth—even being present for the birth of your child—is a powerful and indelible experience. And it is the first of many, the momentum of which carry you through the early years. It also carries you through the challenges and difficulties and up the learning curve (which never ends).
“One or two to be on the safe side” is glib expression, but it’s not terrible advice. Most people can’t imagine themselves as parents until they become parents and most new parents haven’t a clue what they’ve got themselves into. But they learn. And while nobody’s perfect and some are awful, most parents muddle through on love, common sense and timely advice from a variety of sources.
Then again, some people just know they shouldn’t being raising kids. Rather than being scolded for their selfishness or pitied for their barreness, these people should be commended for their courage, honesty and self-knowledge. It’s all very well to bow down the bitch goddess Demographics, but none of us benefit from badly-raised kids or miserable, guilty and reluctant parents.
May 8th, 2008 at 2:08 pm
My point, truewest, is that a number of the women I refer to in the post would have been brilliant parents. And, no doubt, a few would not.
And, to respond to the implicit racism up thread, by no means all of the women I am talking about are either white or particularily Western in orientation; rather they are simply women who have not had children. This is not about “race suicide” rather it is about smart women making the choice not to pass their intelligence on.
May 8th, 2008 at 9:22 pm
Jay,
They might have been brilliant parents, average parents or awful parents. I don’t know that you can always tell. Unlike the women who came before them, however, they had choices, thanks to both the birth control and the (partial) elimination of barriers limiting women’s entry into the professions and other fields.
When intelligent people have choices, a myriad of factor will govern what determine which choices they make. My point is that if you want intelligent, accomplished women to choose to have children, the language of obligation, dutiful sacrifice or, worse, demographics isn’t going to do the trick. To accomplish that we need to more evenly distribute the sacrifices that are inherent in parenting, both within the family and within society. That means greater involvement by fathers in child-rearing, more generous parental leaves, better day-care availability, etc.
Or, I guess, we could just roll the clock back 50 years.
May 8th, 2008 at 11:18 pm
Implicit racism, Jay? Care to elaborate? The only mention of “race suicide” was one of Renee’s strawpeople.
I believe concern over the demographic decline in Western countries is not the sole property of white supremacists; in fact, I seem to remember one or two bestselling books on the topic.
May 9th, 2008 at 1:27 am
“That means greater involvement by fathers in child-rearing, more generous parental leaves, better day-care availability, etc.”
It’s true! These things are working wonders for Western European fertility rates*:
(Replacement rate = 2.1)
France: 1.89
Norway: 1.85
Sweden/Denmark: 1.80
Netherlands: 1.70
Belgium: 1.65
Austria: 1.40
Germany: 1.36
Meanwhile:
Canada: 1.55
Australia: 1.80
USA: 2.05
I maintain that Renee is, in this sense, the very model of a modern European: Pessimistic about the future and unwilling to risk her own self-fulfillment (so perceived) by adding children to her life. (I used to think suburbia was “sick” too, but then I grew up, and now wish I could afford to live in a place with quiet, hockey- and bike-friendly streets.)
I am not religious, but I believe that our societal reluctance to have children is, at least in part, a reflection of the replacement of traditional religious belief with a cult of shallow self-gratification. As I said above, when there’s no objective meaning to anything you do, you may as well just grab what you can while you can. Children anchor us in time, force us to weigh our own interests against those of others, and remind us that there’s more to life than having stuff.
*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_territories_by_fertility_rate
May 9th, 2008 at 1:17 pm
mgl,
You’re right. What we really need to increase the birth rate is more finger-wagging and scolding. It is, after all, common knowledge that accusing women of being shallow, selfish bitches makes ‘em hot as minks in heat.
Failing that, we can always impose quotas.
So, tell me, are you doing your duty in this demographic world war? Or, like Just Me, are you having trouble finding someone to help you pass the physical?
May 9th, 2008 at 11:10 pm
Hey Truewest,
Why do you hold so much anger against your mother for choosing to work over raising you at home? It was just a personal choice, nothing to justify holding these long lasting personal vendetta’s against others.
Perhaps another title will make you feel better. You can be Master of the Universe! There you go. Now run off to utopia.