The Case Against the Case Against Having Kids

where is all this anger coming from?

By: bham mom | Tue, 08/25/2009 - 11:52

As both a professional woman and a mother, I understand exactly where the author is coming from. What shocks me is the outpouring of anger in these comments. How could unconditional, animal love be a bad thing? Even for those who choose not to have children, the fact that parents continue to have children will provide the base for the social security system in the future, among many other more important things.

For those who have never experienced that animal pull of having a newborn, I would advise not disparaging the feeling. Delivering a baby is the most animal experience of most of our lives, and makes you feel connected to the world and to previous generations of women like nothing else. For those women who have children but have never experienced this opiate-like devotion, I am sorry for your loss. I thank the author for her beautiful piece.

You're allowed to have two.

By: Loth | Fri, 08/21/2009 - 14:04

As an adult in this society, you're allowed to get married and have two children. Any fewer and you're selfish, any more and you're a burden on society(although three is acceptable in rare circumstances). You're not allowed to have children without getting married because that's irresponsible. You are allowed to get divorced after you have children, especially if one of you cheats or is overbearing, although it is a darn shame. If you don't get married or have children, you must secretly be lonely and miserable.

Honestly, how much better would society be as a whole if everybody just did these two simple things: 1) actually cared about the welfare of the rest of society(even, gasp, strangers), and 2) minded their own business?

@Dausuul

By: rose555 | Fri, 08/21/2009 - 09:57

Agreed. There is much stigma attached to being single and childless, whether it is by choice or circumstance. When you are single, or if you don't have children, people think nothing of asking about your dating life (or lack thereof) or when you plan on procreating. Imagine if it was socially acceptable to ask people, even mild acquaintances, about the gritty details of their marriage, or to comment on your 4-year-old's bad manners. Sure, there are people who do this kind of thing. They're rude. But most people feel no compunction about telling me I need to settle down with a nice guy, or reminding me that my reproductive organs have a sell by date. We're not just talking about kindly elderly aunts here. When I told a good friend that I felt ambivalent, at best, about having kids, she replied without hesitation "Then what would be the point of your life?" I've considered telling people I'm infertile just because it might force them to keep their judgment to themselves.

The oddest thing about this argument is the refusal of so many to embrace the idea that the world is better off if some of us marry and some don't, some procreate and others don't. My lack of children means I can devote more time and energy to my employer, my community, and my extended family. My siblings get assistance from me, both financial and otherwise, with their children. No one loses. All I ask is that people stop judging me for my choice, stop telling me I'm "unnatural" or that I'll change my mind one day.

Single and childless by

By: Dausuul | Fri, 08/21/2009 - 07:24

Single and childless by choice is culturally acceptable? Hardly. There is a tremendous stigma associated with being single in our society. As someone who has been single most of my life, it has taken me a very long time to wake up to the idea that it is possible to be happy that way; that I do not need to spend my days feeling miserable or unfulfilled because I don't "have someone."

A large part of the reason it's taken so long is the people asking me whether I'm dating somebody yet... much like the people who ask my childless, married friends when they're going to have children.

Aren't they calling themselves selfish?

By: Rotten Candy | Thu, 08/20/2009 - 23:12

"The pro-child people say they’ll be better stewards of the environment because they’ve got someone to save it for."

As someone doesn't want kids and cares a lot about the environment (I always recycle, was using public transportation for as long as I could until I finally broke down and got a car - a hybrid (Prius), have all of my electricity generated by wind power, etc.), I find that statement both offensive and plain stupid. How incredibly selfish do you have to be to need progeny to save the environment for? What about saving it for the animals, the beauty of it, for other people who will be living on this planet after I'm dead? Those are my reasons.

I also think that the correlation between not having/wanting children and being very environmentally-friendly must be pretty high, since people who don't want kids are usually educated, liberal, and wealthy enough to afford cleaner ways of generating energy, more energy-efficient cars, etc.

It's such a hopelessly

By: schamber | Thu, 08/20/2009 - 20:26

It's such a hopelessly personal decision that it's hard to see how anyone could judge it, except in cases where (I'm looking at you, Octomom) the parent(s) clearly can't afford it or aren't capable of doing it. I've been married for almost five years and we're still ambivalent. I understand all too well the animosity that the non-parents bear for the parents, though, and it's largely an artifact of the kind of parenting people practice now, rather than parenting per se. It seems like it's impossible to go to an R-rated movie or an upscale restaurant without encountering a howling toddler. Mothers (and maybe fathers?) seem to be under the impression that they can't leave their children with a babysitter for a couple of hours: that they need to be non-stop episodes of Teletubbies at home and in private, a carnival of food and games and toys that never ends. I didn't understand why mothers said, "I can't get five minutes to pee" until I read the article on here about mothers never putting their kids in playpens. I remember things quite differently when I was growing up. When parenting was more of an automatic and less of a choice, mothers adopted a number of strategies for dealing with the tedium of infants and young children, including playpens and, you know, working non-childcare-related jobs. My parents had a regular evening out each week, and you'd better believe we didn't come along. I don't know if I'll have a kid or not, but the first thing I'm going to buy is a playpen.

Academia and Childbearing

By: ockeghem | Thu, 08/20/2009 - 18:55

@mtphila: It is an interesting phenomenon in academia. I described below that I was childless for 14 years of marriage. I am married to an academic.

In my opinion, it's the demands of the field. Add up the extreme uncertainty of getting a job even with a degree from a top school(especially today, especially in the humanities); the fact that most younger academics, at least, that I know marry other smart, career-minded people; the fact that it's very difficult to get a job in the same city with your spouse if you're both career-minded; and then the battle for tenure and the intensive research (often involving travel) required to publish, and you've got a lot of people who more or less have no choice but to decide not to have kids, or to postpone it well into their 30s, which increases the risk of fertility issues.

So perhaps academia tends to attract people who don't want children, but that may be because it's clear that the demands of the career make it tough to be an academic & have children. It's a chicken-and-egg question, I guess, although in my experience I've met plenty of people in academia who want children, nearly all of whom postpone it. So I'd argue the demands of the career are more influential in this question than the types of people attracted to academia.

Is discussing values and morality a bad thing?

By: rand | Thu, 08/20/2009 - 18:46

I don't understand how people can suggest this isn't an issue worth discussing (and more so how people can fail to recognize that there are valid points on both sides). This issue strikes to the very heart of morality: Is there something I value enough that I want to bring children into the world to advance it?

By way of example, suppose my spouse and I are both professors at quality universities. We value what we specialize in greatly and beyond that we both highly value education. If we have kids, the likelihood that they'll become highly educated is vastly higher than for the general populace. So maybe it's worth having that kid in order to make the world a better place (from our theoretical perspective).

But let's say, as I'm sure many are thinking, that such devotion to any one thing (be it education or medicine) is unreasonable. Does morality only offer negatives? We tend to agree killing is an evil, is there no balancing good of creating life? [The next statement draws no equivalences, it's simply a similar question that occurred to me.] PETA protests against the killing of cows; does it make no difference that we virtually created them (i.e. bred vast numbers of them)? Is pain the sole arbiter of morality?

It seems silly that anyone should argue against procreation on environmental grounds; I assume most want the earth to survive for the benefit of humanity. Hence we want some people to procreate. Myself, I wouldn't bother to fill out an organ donation card; it seems silly to worry about what will happen when the neurons have stopped firing and the world has ceased to exist. But people do care, each with some vision of a future he/she believes in. Aren't these visions and values interesting enough to talk about?

Feel free to argue.

The debate won't end, because we can't shut up

By: rose555 | Thu, 08/20/2009 - 16:06

I think the reason this debate arose in the first place is that heterosexual adults (especially women), both single and married, receive so much pressure from parents and peers to have children. For people who want to have kids, this pressure can be irritating, but it's not offensive. But for people who have chosen not to have kids (or are unable to have kids for other reasons, anything from infertility to not finding a partner early enough), this pressure can become offensive. It makes a lot of us childless folks defensive, and some of that defensiveness has taken the form of attacking people who do have kids. Unproductive, but I understand the instinct.

I don't see it going away. People will always stick their noses in other people's business. Parents will always push their kids to have kids. Married folks are always anxious for their unmarried friends to wed. Parents are eager for their friends to become parents. Partly people just want to share a life experience. Partly people want their own life choices validated. No matter the reason, people will push and assume and those of us who don't marry or procreate will push back. Unfortunately.

This whole debate makes me crazy.

By: Dana Stevens | Thu, 08/20/2009 - 16:05

Proselytizing either for or against having children seems to me as offensive, and as useless, as trying to get someone to change their religion or their sexual orientation. Every time I hear about one of these insulting "debates" about the supposed relative moral merits of reproducing or not, I'm baffled anew. This is a decision so personal and intimate, that's influenced by so many factors (family expectations, sexuality, relationship status, age, income, fertility, sheer chance), that no one makes it on the basis of pro and con lists, reductive magazine pieces making "cases" for things, or nasty reductionist flame wars. It really does remind me of crazies in the street trying to convert me with Jesus pamphlets (good luck with that!) or "conversionist" therapies that try to turn gay people straight.

As the commenter ockhegem observes below, even people who have made their choice one way or another are likely harbor some ambivalence about it (unless they're rigidly overcompensating to defend their "position," like the jerks on these message boards.) And splendid24, I don't think that choosing not to have kids means you and your husband are "lazy." You just want to spend your energy on other things. The word "selfish" seems to get thrown around a lot on both sides, but really, the decision of whether to have a child _should_ be selfish, in the sense that it should spring only from what the potential parent truly wants.