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Here's an amazingly well-written article on the childfree perspective. I don't think I'm as angry about this issue as I used to be; sometimes I think growing older means getting less angry about 'issues'. Also I wouldn't paint this as a 'society believes this and that' deal- I think people replace 'everyone' with 'society' when they're trying to sound less black and white, but the thought's still there. But I've definitely run into the kind of thinking she protests, and it still irritates the hell out of me when I do. Anyway, she uses words like 'oeuvre'. I was impressed and enjoyed the article.
Edit: considering it's where it is, I worry this article may disappear so I'll just copy the whole thing here. I want to keep this one.
Why is it that as soon as a couple have a child, they suddenly claim that you can't fully experience life until you are a parent, or womanhood until you are a mother? Since when did parenthood turn into such a cult? By Zoe Williams
Saturday October 18, 2003
The Guardian
This is not about hating children. Some children I hate, yes; others I like. In this respect, they are just like adults and, like adults also, anyone with any interest in the furtherance of the species accepts that it's good for them to exist. Nor is this about hating parents (the same conditions apply). This is not about any flimsy concept of discrimination against non-parents - most non-parents expect to be parents at some stage and, besides, they can look after themselves.
No, the thing I have a problem with is the cult of parenthood. Modern parents are engaged in a ceaseless attempt to appropriate all human experience, from tiredness to spirituality, as theirs and theirs alone. This is about mature debate being corrupted by a mawkish focus on under-18s. This is about women's opinions being disregarded until they have reproduced (the women, not the opinions). This is about using kids as some kind of Get Out Of Ethics Free card. To read our newspapers, you'd think that no one had ever experienced hardship, unless they were a parent; that no one was capable of altruism, until they'd given birth. You'd think that there were no murders, bar those perpetrated against children; likewise, no sex crimes; that the only losers in the failure to protect the environment were our children (forget the developing countries, forget earthquakes); that the only people killed in wars were children.
If it sounds like nothing more than a benign to neutral change of perspective, it isn't. On some levels, it's neutral but, for a number of very pressing reasons, bits of it aren't benign at all. The first problem is the way mothers present themselves, in the media and beyond, as people who understood nothing, whose experience was partial and faulty, whose priorities were comically lopsided, whose femininity was unrealised and whose emotional life was meaningless before they experienced childbirth.
So much of the writing surrounding childbirth and motherhood really amounts to a litany of things that non-mothers cannot possibly comprehend. In a relatively cursory survey, I have read that, "You cannot understand what it is to be tired, until you're a parent" (Nicci Gerrard). Nor can you understand pain or hunger. I've heard that we cannot properly relate to our own parents until we have our own children; that "we only experience ourselves sacrificing things - time, freedom, pleasure, sleep - for our children" (Rachel Cusk). That we cannot comprehend love, protectiveness, altruism or, at the other end of the scale, loneliness, anxiety and depression; that we have no insight into the medical profession, "its telling, subtle but distinctive lack of compassion" (Naomi Wolf) without childbirth (I mean, if this really is about women, surely the lack of compassion would obtain in the treatment of breast cancer? And thyroid disorders?); that we cannot comprehend philosophical issues, such as what it means to exist, until we have literally created another human being; that "the barriers between you and the rest of humanity are shattered" only upon becoming a parent (Amanda Craig); that we are unaware of the true dimensions of womanhood until we have experienced motherhood; that we have no clue about our primal urges.
It is considered unsisterly to balk at all this, and it would be if I were just objecting to the tedium of it. But this is about more than being bored. There is no room here for analysis or imagination - for women, at least, experience is all. If we are to accept this as truth, then non-mothers exist in a kind of cognitive half-light, and we are inchoate and immature. Since the average age for childbirth is now around 30, this thinking effectively infantilises women below that age and completely rejects the opinions of the permanently childless. So much of the motherhood discourse is dressed up as feminism when, in fact, this does nothing but denigrate women by reducing them to their biological function and excising from all debate those who fail to fulfil it.
In fact, there has for some time been growing discontent at the way the condition of motherhood is taken to be the proper fulfilment of women in society. You may not be aware of this - it tends to feature most strongly among the permanently childless, who are few, and academics with an interest in the matter, who are even fewer, but it should concern us all. I asked Dr Annily Campbell, author of Childfree And Sterilised: Women's Decisions And Medical Responses, whether we were looking at a potential backlash against mothers. "We're not talking about a backlash, we're talking about a response by childless women to a prolonged attack," she said. "The decision to have children or not is really OK, but in social terms only one of those is taken seriously, which is to have children. And that's an outrage against women."
Every time a predictive study comes out, with figures on the birthrate 20 years hence, the chorus underlines this cultural assumption. Take this utterly typical remark from Allison Pearson in the Daily Mail: "One in five British women will never be a mother. A sad fact and a worrying one." The "sadness" comes from the notion that women are incomplete without a child. The "worry", one assumes, comes from the country's falling birthrate (currently at 1.6, ideally at 2.4), despite the fact that statistics have shown time and again that the falling birthrate has less to do with the childless than it has to do with parents electing to stop at a manageable two. Either that, or Pearson is worried that childless women might go on some kind of void-fuelled rampage.
Beyond the media, these notions are highly visible in the way the medical profession deals with women. I've heard, anecdotally, of doctors telling depressed women and, even more bizarrely, women with migraines that they should get pregnant. Campbell, in the course of her research, has found much more constant, across-the-board evidence that the medical profession is insultingly partial in favour of the childbearing. "All of the women I talked to had used contraception and found it unsatisfactory. Quite a lot of them had had an abortion. They lived in constant fear of becoming pregnant. Sterilisation was not a sudden, nor an unreasonable, decision. And yet none of them was taken seriously. Most said they felt completely powerless. They felt, 'How dare a doctor say to me, at the age of 32 or 35, you are going to regret it, when the choice of a 16-year-old girl who wants a child is respected?' Maturity for a woman is defined as the point at which she becomes a mother."
Gayle Letherby, deputy director of the Centre for Social Justice and editor of the forthcoming Mothers And Others - Continuums And Hierarchies Of Motherhood And Non-Motherhood, remembers in passing an interview with an artist who painted a portrait of Cherie Blair while heavily pregnant. "It was described as her achieving her true womanhood; as if womanhood and motherhood were synonymous; as if none of her other achievements, in her career or any other area, counted as fulfilment."
If there is a problem with the way mothers hijack the language of feminism and femininity to describe only themselves, there is a greater problem with the way parental rhetoric steadily evolves as a means of bypassing social responsibility. In Cherie Blair's grim televisual address to the nation following the Peter Foster scandal, she appealed to the audience as a wife, career woman, diplomatic consort, but choked when talking about being a mother. Who can say whether this was cynical or heartfelt? It nevertheless defined her speech as an appeal from a mother, and Tessa Jowell soon weighed in with the unintelligent notion that any other mother who didn't sympathise with Blair was "warped".
Now, the woman stood accused of lies, corruption, abuse of influence and misuse of governmental spokespeople, not to mention her boldly unsocialist intention of buying property to let. Being a mother absolutely didn't cover it. Still, since this was on some level a personal matter for Blair, her family status could just about be considered relevant - Jowell, on the other hand, neatly summed up why this kind of nonsense has no place in politics. She was effectively saying "all principles are secondary to the interests of one's children; all those with children will understand that".
This is ideologically similar to Cusk's position - it is predicated on the lie that self-sacrifice has no place in human dealings beyond the parental bond. This cannot be true, since even the mild level of social cooperation we have at the moment would not have evolved if everyone's interests stopped at their own front door. Second, parenthood is being conflated with need - the subtext here is that, in becoming a parent, one becomes the underdog. Self-interest has given way to pure altruism. Truthfully, though, unless one's interest extends to other people's children, and from there to society as a whole, then the self-sacrifice of the parent is hollow.
Of course, this rhetoric has nothing to do with the reality of parenthood - one of the reasons the childless are so often called selfish is not so much that they are denying their own parents grandchildren (though this line is often used), but rather that the social tendrils of the parent tend to extend so much further into the community, and on much less prejudicial terms. People are given a lot of stick for moving into posher areas as soon as they have kids, but the reason the childless don't give a stuff about local amenities is not because they're of a more broadminded bent, it's just that they never use them.
However, the ongoing development of the "superwoman" paradigm - also a keynote of Blair's display - has characterised society's ideal mother in such a way as to corrupt the entire language of motherhood. First coined in 1975 by Shirley Conran, as a very charming insight into her household ineptitude, this took off, with quite a different meaning, in the mid-1990s with Nicola Horlick. Horlick had five children, a stratospheric career in the City, pots of cash, all that. To her credit, she was always pretty derisive of the label - "It's ridiculous that I am known as 'superwoman'," she said. "Look at someone who has no help at home and holds down a job. Or look at me with my nanny and my secretary. Who would you call 'superwoman'?"
Nevertheless, the term swills around, and is never used to describe someone in low-paid employment, however hard they work. Nor is it ever used to describe a childless woman. The "super" element describes not the activity but the earning capacity; the "woman", not the gender but the reproduction. Superman wouldn't be superman on these terms, since saving the world never seems to generate any cash. And its only pioneering ideal, this creature (entirely created by the media), is that it be allowed to carry on spawning cash, without being made to feel guilty by its nanny or parents' evening.
Everyone who uses this term - whether to wriggle off some hook, or praise another parent - is buying into the idiotic idea that being a highly paid mother is harder (to a supernatural degree!) than being a low-paid one. In other words, our abiding cultural ideal at the moment is the point at which reproducing intersects with rabid possessive individualism. It's an ideological repossession of motherhood by the rightwing. It's very annoying. And the people who have allowed this to happen are not conniving far-right ideologues, they're middle-class parents who bang on and on about how hard it all is just because their lives are harder than they were before.
Well, obviously - but that's no excuse to consign to second-class struggle the very people (with or without children) who deal with genuine need and poverty all the time. This might sound like an irrelevance with which only the chattering classes concern themselves, but it's having a real impact on social policy. The fact that child benefit is awarded across the board, regardless of the wealth of the parent, is absurd. (I mean, come on - can it be right for a couple on a joint income of 80 grand to be receiving £15.75 a week for a child? When they probably don't even notice it? Isn't that counter to everything redistributive taxation is there to promote?)
But, more recently, family tax credits have been staggered so that a childless couple living jointly on 15 grand qualifies for no help, whereas a couple with one child whose joint income is £55,000 gets £210 a year. That's not very much, set against the cost of bringing up a child, but it's unarguable that the childless couple needs that money the most. The childless poor, at the moment, are subsidising the child-rearing rich.
In case this seems like an attack on mothers exclusively, fathers are engaged in myth-making of their own. Plucking an example at random, this is what happened on Any Questions not so long ago. That final "light" question, to show that politicians are also human, rolled around. It was about where the panellists felt closest to God. Tony Benn considered the leftwing thrust of Christianity. Someone else said they liked their garden. And Robert Thomson, editor of the Times, said, "I think you feel closer to God if you are like me, and you have small children. I find a conversation with a three-year-old the most spiritually rewarding of my day."
There's nothing particularly malign or outrageous about this statement, per se - but it does epitomise the trendy topsy-turveyness that delights in finding children more spiritual, wiser and more clear-sighted than anything adult society can offer. It is echoed in the Nick Hornby/Tony Parsons oeuvre, wherein men paradoxically find maturity through meaningful contact with infants. This isn't especially new ("from the mouths of babes" being a fairly ancient adage, and all that), but it is newly popular, and with a purpose: the aim is to characterise adult debate as all so much silliness compared with a child's purity. It purports to be an attack on grown-up qualities of deceit and sophistry, when really it is just hoary old anti-intellectualism with baby-soft cheeks.
Nobody is saying that children don't say the darndest things - the intellectual demands made on you by a child may be many and unexpected and, in all probability, will lead you to re-evaluate your own perspective before you blithely pass it on. However, to me it always sounds kind of smug, this talk, and it isn't just the regular smugness of people with kids who think their kids are marvellous. When you idealise the company of children, however precocious they are, you undermine the value of complexity and of challenge. This is not the stuff big ideas are made of. Like Jowell and her warped remark (no, I can't seem to let that go), it brings the focus of an individual's thought and engagement back behind their own front door. Sure, the heroes of Lad Lit might not be able to grow up until they have kids. But the answer to that is not have kids, they are the world, they are the future; it's try harder.
At its root, this problem is nothing to do with children themselves, but rather the way they are perceived. Currently, they are presented as midway between a smart consumer choice and a gift to society - which is to say, parents are allowed, on the one hand, to complain about having been sold a pup, and on the other to offer ceaseless paeans to their own selflessness, bounty and superior insight.
In reality, kids are more like siblings - some are blessings, some are a pain in the arse, most are both at the same time, all make radically unreasonable demands detrimental to one's own self-interest, but at the same time are utterly reasonable, since the pursuit of self-interest is self-defeating in the first place. Some people behave altruistically with their siblings, others don't - but even the ones who do rarely trumpet this as the reasonable limit of their altruism. People without siblings are neither empty nor weird, they simply exist, and furthermore - most importantly - they find other ways in which to express their generosity. And what this boils down to is, just chill out a bit. There. I bet a parent would never say that.
Edit: considering it's where it is, I worry this article may disappear so I'll just copy the whole thing here. I want to keep this one.
Why is it that as soon as a couple have a child, they suddenly claim that you can't fully experience life until you are a parent, or womanhood until you are a mother? Since when did parenthood turn into such a cult? By Zoe Williams
Saturday October 18, 2003
The Guardian
This is not about hating children. Some children I hate, yes; others I like. In this respect, they are just like adults and, like adults also, anyone with any interest in the furtherance of the species accepts that it's good for them to exist. Nor is this about hating parents (the same conditions apply). This is not about any flimsy concept of discrimination against non-parents - most non-parents expect to be parents at some stage and, besides, they can look after themselves.
No, the thing I have a problem with is the cult of parenthood. Modern parents are engaged in a ceaseless attempt to appropriate all human experience, from tiredness to spirituality, as theirs and theirs alone. This is about mature debate being corrupted by a mawkish focus on under-18s. This is about women's opinions being disregarded until they have reproduced (the women, not the opinions). This is about using kids as some kind of Get Out Of Ethics Free card. To read our newspapers, you'd think that no one had ever experienced hardship, unless they were a parent; that no one was capable of altruism, until they'd given birth. You'd think that there were no murders, bar those perpetrated against children; likewise, no sex crimes; that the only losers in the failure to protect the environment were our children (forget the developing countries, forget earthquakes); that the only people killed in wars were children.
If it sounds like nothing more than a benign to neutral change of perspective, it isn't. On some levels, it's neutral but, for a number of very pressing reasons, bits of it aren't benign at all. The first problem is the way mothers present themselves, in the media and beyond, as people who understood nothing, whose experience was partial and faulty, whose priorities were comically lopsided, whose femininity was unrealised and whose emotional life was meaningless before they experienced childbirth.
So much of the writing surrounding childbirth and motherhood really amounts to a litany of things that non-mothers cannot possibly comprehend. In a relatively cursory survey, I have read that, "You cannot understand what it is to be tired, until you're a parent" (Nicci Gerrard). Nor can you understand pain or hunger. I've heard that we cannot properly relate to our own parents until we have our own children; that "we only experience ourselves sacrificing things - time, freedom, pleasure, sleep - for our children" (Rachel Cusk). That we cannot comprehend love, protectiveness, altruism or, at the other end of the scale, loneliness, anxiety and depression; that we have no insight into the medical profession, "its telling, subtle but distinctive lack of compassion" (Naomi Wolf) without childbirth (I mean, if this really is about women, surely the lack of compassion would obtain in the treatment of breast cancer? And thyroid disorders?); that we cannot comprehend philosophical issues, such as what it means to exist, until we have literally created another human being; that "the barriers between you and the rest of humanity are shattered" only upon becoming a parent (Amanda Craig); that we are unaware of the true dimensions of womanhood until we have experienced motherhood; that we have no clue about our primal urges.
It is considered unsisterly to balk at all this, and it would be if I were just objecting to the tedium of it. But this is about more than being bored. There is no room here for analysis or imagination - for women, at least, experience is all. If we are to accept this as truth, then non-mothers exist in a kind of cognitive half-light, and we are inchoate and immature. Since the average age for childbirth is now around 30, this thinking effectively infantilises women below that age and completely rejects the opinions of the permanently childless. So much of the motherhood discourse is dressed up as feminism when, in fact, this does nothing but denigrate women by reducing them to their biological function and excising from all debate those who fail to fulfil it.
In fact, there has for some time been growing discontent at the way the condition of motherhood is taken to be the proper fulfilment of women in society. You may not be aware of this - it tends to feature most strongly among the permanently childless, who are few, and academics with an interest in the matter, who are even fewer, but it should concern us all. I asked Dr Annily Campbell, author of Childfree And Sterilised: Women's Decisions And Medical Responses, whether we were looking at a potential backlash against mothers. "We're not talking about a backlash, we're talking about a response by childless women to a prolonged attack," she said. "The decision to have children or not is really OK, but in social terms only one of those is taken seriously, which is to have children. And that's an outrage against women."
Every time a predictive study comes out, with figures on the birthrate 20 years hence, the chorus underlines this cultural assumption. Take this utterly typical remark from Allison Pearson in the Daily Mail: "One in five British women will never be a mother. A sad fact and a worrying one." The "sadness" comes from the notion that women are incomplete without a child. The "worry", one assumes, comes from the country's falling birthrate (currently at 1.6, ideally at 2.4), despite the fact that statistics have shown time and again that the falling birthrate has less to do with the childless than it has to do with parents electing to stop at a manageable two. Either that, or Pearson is worried that childless women might go on some kind of void-fuelled rampage.
Beyond the media, these notions are highly visible in the way the medical profession deals with women. I've heard, anecdotally, of doctors telling depressed women and, even more bizarrely, women with migraines that they should get pregnant. Campbell, in the course of her research, has found much more constant, across-the-board evidence that the medical profession is insultingly partial in favour of the childbearing. "All of the women I talked to had used contraception and found it unsatisfactory. Quite a lot of them had had an abortion. They lived in constant fear of becoming pregnant. Sterilisation was not a sudden, nor an unreasonable, decision. And yet none of them was taken seriously. Most said they felt completely powerless. They felt, 'How dare a doctor say to me, at the age of 32 or 35, you are going to regret it, when the choice of a 16-year-old girl who wants a child is respected?' Maturity for a woman is defined as the point at which she becomes a mother."
Gayle Letherby, deputy director of the Centre for Social Justice and editor of the forthcoming Mothers And Others - Continuums And Hierarchies Of Motherhood And Non-Motherhood, remembers in passing an interview with an artist who painted a portrait of Cherie Blair while heavily pregnant. "It was described as her achieving her true womanhood; as if womanhood and motherhood were synonymous; as if none of her other achievements, in her career or any other area, counted as fulfilment."
If there is a problem with the way mothers hijack the language of feminism and femininity to describe only themselves, there is a greater problem with the way parental rhetoric steadily evolves as a means of bypassing social responsibility. In Cherie Blair's grim televisual address to the nation following the Peter Foster scandal, she appealed to the audience as a wife, career woman, diplomatic consort, but choked when talking about being a mother. Who can say whether this was cynical or heartfelt? It nevertheless defined her speech as an appeal from a mother, and Tessa Jowell soon weighed in with the unintelligent notion that any other mother who didn't sympathise with Blair was "warped".
Now, the woman stood accused of lies, corruption, abuse of influence and misuse of governmental spokespeople, not to mention her boldly unsocialist intention of buying property to let. Being a mother absolutely didn't cover it. Still, since this was on some level a personal matter for Blair, her family status could just about be considered relevant - Jowell, on the other hand, neatly summed up why this kind of nonsense has no place in politics. She was effectively saying "all principles are secondary to the interests of one's children; all those with children will understand that".
This is ideologically similar to Cusk's position - it is predicated on the lie that self-sacrifice has no place in human dealings beyond the parental bond. This cannot be true, since even the mild level of social cooperation we have at the moment would not have evolved if everyone's interests stopped at their own front door. Second, parenthood is being conflated with need - the subtext here is that, in becoming a parent, one becomes the underdog. Self-interest has given way to pure altruism. Truthfully, though, unless one's interest extends to other people's children, and from there to society as a whole, then the self-sacrifice of the parent is hollow.
Of course, this rhetoric has nothing to do with the reality of parenthood - one of the reasons the childless are so often called selfish is not so much that they are denying their own parents grandchildren (though this line is often used), but rather that the social tendrils of the parent tend to extend so much further into the community, and on much less prejudicial terms. People are given a lot of stick for moving into posher areas as soon as they have kids, but the reason the childless don't give a stuff about local amenities is not because they're of a more broadminded bent, it's just that they never use them.
However, the ongoing development of the "superwoman" paradigm - also a keynote of Blair's display - has characterised society's ideal mother in such a way as to corrupt the entire language of motherhood. First coined in 1975 by Shirley Conran, as a very charming insight into her household ineptitude, this took off, with quite a different meaning, in the mid-1990s with Nicola Horlick. Horlick had five children, a stratospheric career in the City, pots of cash, all that. To her credit, she was always pretty derisive of the label - "It's ridiculous that I am known as 'superwoman'," she said. "Look at someone who has no help at home and holds down a job. Or look at me with my nanny and my secretary. Who would you call 'superwoman'?"
Nevertheless, the term swills around, and is never used to describe someone in low-paid employment, however hard they work. Nor is it ever used to describe a childless woman. The "super" element describes not the activity but the earning capacity; the "woman", not the gender but the reproduction. Superman wouldn't be superman on these terms, since saving the world never seems to generate any cash. And its only pioneering ideal, this creature (entirely created by the media), is that it be allowed to carry on spawning cash, without being made to feel guilty by its nanny or parents' evening.
Everyone who uses this term - whether to wriggle off some hook, or praise another parent - is buying into the idiotic idea that being a highly paid mother is harder (to a supernatural degree!) than being a low-paid one. In other words, our abiding cultural ideal at the moment is the point at which reproducing intersects with rabid possessive individualism. It's an ideological repossession of motherhood by the rightwing. It's very annoying. And the people who have allowed this to happen are not conniving far-right ideologues, they're middle-class parents who bang on and on about how hard it all is just because their lives are harder than they were before.
Well, obviously - but that's no excuse to consign to second-class struggle the very people (with or without children) who deal with genuine need and poverty all the time. This might sound like an irrelevance with which only the chattering classes concern themselves, but it's having a real impact on social policy. The fact that child benefit is awarded across the board, regardless of the wealth of the parent, is absurd. (I mean, come on - can it be right for a couple on a joint income of 80 grand to be receiving £15.75 a week for a child? When they probably don't even notice it? Isn't that counter to everything redistributive taxation is there to promote?)
But, more recently, family tax credits have been staggered so that a childless couple living jointly on 15 grand qualifies for no help, whereas a couple with one child whose joint income is £55,000 gets £210 a year. That's not very much, set against the cost of bringing up a child, but it's unarguable that the childless couple needs that money the most. The childless poor, at the moment, are subsidising the child-rearing rich.
In case this seems like an attack on mothers exclusively, fathers are engaged in myth-making of their own. Plucking an example at random, this is what happened on Any Questions not so long ago. That final "light" question, to show that politicians are also human, rolled around. It was about where the panellists felt closest to God. Tony Benn considered the leftwing thrust of Christianity. Someone else said they liked their garden. And Robert Thomson, editor of the Times, said, "I think you feel closer to God if you are like me, and you have small children. I find a conversation with a three-year-old the most spiritually rewarding of my day."
There's nothing particularly malign or outrageous about this statement, per se - but it does epitomise the trendy topsy-turveyness that delights in finding children more spiritual, wiser and more clear-sighted than anything adult society can offer. It is echoed in the Nick Hornby/Tony Parsons oeuvre, wherein men paradoxically find maturity through meaningful contact with infants. This isn't especially new ("from the mouths of babes" being a fairly ancient adage, and all that), but it is newly popular, and with a purpose: the aim is to characterise adult debate as all so much silliness compared with a child's purity. It purports to be an attack on grown-up qualities of deceit and sophistry, when really it is just hoary old anti-intellectualism with baby-soft cheeks.
Nobody is saying that children don't say the darndest things - the intellectual demands made on you by a child may be many and unexpected and, in all probability, will lead you to re-evaluate your own perspective before you blithely pass it on. However, to me it always sounds kind of smug, this talk, and it isn't just the regular smugness of people with kids who think their kids are marvellous. When you idealise the company of children, however precocious they are, you undermine the value of complexity and of challenge. This is not the stuff big ideas are made of. Like Jowell and her warped remark (no, I can't seem to let that go), it brings the focus of an individual's thought and engagement back behind their own front door. Sure, the heroes of Lad Lit might not be able to grow up until they have kids. But the answer to that is not have kids, they are the world, they are the future; it's try harder.
At its root, this problem is nothing to do with children themselves, but rather the way they are perceived. Currently, they are presented as midway between a smart consumer choice and a gift to society - which is to say, parents are allowed, on the one hand, to complain about having been sold a pup, and on the other to offer ceaseless paeans to their own selflessness, bounty and superior insight.
In reality, kids are more like siblings - some are blessings, some are a pain in the arse, most are both at the same time, all make radically unreasonable demands detrimental to one's own self-interest, but at the same time are utterly reasonable, since the pursuit of self-interest is self-defeating in the first place. Some people behave altruistically with their siblings, others don't - but even the ones who do rarely trumpet this as the reasonable limit of their altruism. People without siblings are neither empty nor weird, they simply exist, and furthermore - most importantly - they find other ways in which to express their generosity. And what this boils down to is, just chill out a bit. There. I bet a parent would never say that.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: Oct. 20th, 2003 08:56 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: Oct. 20th, 2003 09:50 am (UTC)From:i'm a breeder, as you know, but i can't imagine having more than two. unless the gods bless me with twin (please, no) the 2nd time around.
i've known some ultra shitty parents. and i feel like i have a full life, full of love and spirit, sans children.
i'm expecting to have less time to myself and a whole host of other things when i do breed. but i'm going to be at least 30 before that happens.
you obviously can't disagree with everyone having children. i mean, we wouldn't have more people.
and you can't stop the under-masses, they breed like mice. and would youw ant to stop the educated, who know the problems the population causes? because those are the future intelligentia of our world.
i hope to have intelligent, emotionally healthy adults. not just a widdle baby to cuddle and dress up. in fact, if i could skip the 1st 12 months... unfortunately that's not an option.
i am proud of you, you are a child free mama, and i will continue to call you mama, unless you make me stop :) (you don't need kids to be a mama)
and i know, gods willing, that i will be a child havin' mama.
i'll keep my spawn out of your hairs.
i love you!
no subject
Date: Oct. 20th, 2003 10:20 am (UTC)From:Sure I can- and I do. It's not a burning, all-consuming kind of wish- more like world peace. It will never happen, but I can still wish for it. It'd be nice if we could stop for awhile while we figure our shit out about the environment, feeding the ones we've got, etc. But like I said, it's only my own misty distant little wish, and I don't feel crushed when I hear someone's went and had a kid.
and you can't stop the under-masses, they breed like mice.
'Under-masses'? That sounds kinda snooty! And I realize I can't stop anyone from doing anything, but I can still wish. And send money to Planned Parenthood and live the shining example of someone who is fulfilled without kids... that sounds more over-blown that I mean it, but I am very against any sort of proselytizing, and stick with education, support, and living by example.
and would you want to stop the educated, who know the problems the population causes? because those are the future intelligentia of our world.
That assumes intelligence is genetically transmitted, and I don't believe it is.
I'm an equal opportunity non-breeder. I think everyone should not breed. :) If I had a magic wand to make anything happen, no one would for several years (5? 10? I haven't thought about it in that much detail). If people wanted to parent, they'd adopt a kid, and we'd all work on making sure we can take care of the home and the ones who are here before we invite any more people into it. But I don't make a point to share this (what I fear would be a) astonishingly unpopular viewpoint with anyone, especially parents, in the same way Christian friends of mine refrain from telling me they think I will go to hell for not accepting Christ- but if I asked them point blank, they'd tell me- because that's what they believe. If someone asks me point blank, I'll tell them. But I bear no ill-will against people who disagree with me- how could I, since I am in such a very, very small minority. I know you (and most everyone else) will have kids, and I'm at peace with that, and I know you'll be a loving, cool mommy. But if you (or anyone else) said 'what do you think? Should I have a kid?' I would 100% always say 'no- adopt one if you want to be a parent.' But no one has asked so far, and I don't expect it to come up a lot. :)
and i will continue to call you mama, unless you make me stop :) (you don't need kids to be a mama)
I've known this for some time, and I appreciate the sentiment. I don't think 'mama' is a swear word. ;)
no subject
Date: Oct. 20th, 2003 11:06 am (UTC)From:sorry, i meant to type under-educated masses...
and yeah i think 4 kids is an aweful lot, even for my family. my brother breeding as he is.
but my other brother is gay, and amber, well she 's a doctor, i'd like to see her try and fit motherhood into her schedule.
myself? i'll give it a few years. and yeah, i will have kids. for gods sake i take care of them for a living. at least i know what i'll be doing. and i feel very hapy and fulfilled without children. i'm not wanting kids to be more fulfilled, it's more like a future hope for mankind. i'll try and create the most educated emotionally healthy happy people i can, and hope they can work their love on the world as i try to. in their own way of course.
yes i'm trying to change the world. and for me, having children is part of it. and my spiritual path. which as you know, is most important.
ok, i can't breathe, i'm going to lie down.
love~
and yeah, a 10 year break would be good for the environment, but it ain't gonna happen, nor will world peace.
no subject
Date: Oct. 20th, 2003 11:23 am (UTC)From:Yes, that's what I said above. I'm fully aware of that, I was just speaking my wish.
yeah, i will have kids. for gods sake i take care of them for a living.
You really don't have to defend yourself to me. I read all of what you wrote, and still wonder 'so why not adopt?' but that is only my opinion, I'm not in any way trying to push an agenda on you. I'm sure many people out there, people I respect, think hub and I'd be better off if we had a child or two (and passed on our smarts, and so on). But I just happen to disagree with them, and that's okay. It's okay for you to disagree with me too, I promise. :) I've mostly gotten past the point where I get offended if someone else thinks they know what's best for me (mostly!).
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Date: Oct. 20th, 2003 11:51 am (UTC)From:i'd give money to planned parenthood too if i had any extra.
i'm all for not procreating. i'm definately not pro-procreation! i'm pro choice.
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Date: Oct. 20th, 2003 10:46 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: Oct. 20th, 2003 11:12 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: Oct. 20th, 2003 11:25 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: Oct. 20th, 2003 02:09 pm (UTC)From:Re: the discussion about birthrates and ZPG - I'm amused whenever people moan about falling birthrates. I mean, let's think about this. You have parts of the developing world that are badly overcrowded and resource-poor. And then you have us - lots of money, low birthrate. So it would seem that the best response would be, not to encourage people to have more kids, but to encourage immigration from high-density areas. And yet no one seems to be really keen on this...
While I'm definitely open to the idea of adopting if my eventual life partner is female, I really don't see it as an across-the-board answer, at least not at this point. This is especially the case now that I know more about how adoption works. If people want to raise a child from infancy, and if they don't want a child with severe health problems (neither of which is an unreasonable desire), then adoption can be very difficult.