The choice not to procreate, I’m surprised, is often viewed as suspicious or selfish by those who breed. When people have children (or desperately want children) it seems as though they can not escape the egotism of their DNA, believing that bringing offspring into the world enhances the value of their lives and improves the general welfare, and think everyone else should feel the same way. What the child-burdened fail to realize is that a child-free life by choice can be every bit as be fulfilling and rewarding.
My wife and I are committed to living a child-free life despite the rebukes of family, in-laws, and the unspoken rule that married couples should procreate. The species will increase and thrive without our participation in the breeding game.
I would like to open up a discussion about the pros and cons of this subject: to have or have not.
I don’t ever want kids either, and most people react very strangely if I tell them this. Normally I get a comment like ‘You’ll change your mind when you get older’ or ‘Oh, I bet you’ll have them eventually’. This really annoys me. I’m 25, old enough to know my own mind. I admit there are people who have said they won’t have kids and then ten years later they have three, but this is a subject I am very definite about, I never want children and I won’t change my mind!
I don’t think there is any duty to have kids, the population will go on increasing without my help. I have had people say to me that I should be grateful I can have kids, some people desperately want kids and can’t have them. I have great sympathy for people who can’t have children, but that doesn’t mean I should have them because I can.
It is better now than it was in the 50;s however.
My mom tells me if you weren’t married by 25, you were consdiered an Old maid! ha!
I never wanted children.
Of course, when I married that all changed.
But I think its better nowadays, less of a stigma to being childless.
I’d never planned to have kids. Never had daydreams about my wedding etc.
Ended up with a child, and yea, I’m happy with that.
HOWEVER. I also have several friends who’ve opted for the no kids lifestyle (heterosexual married couples) and have NEVER thought it was my business to ask why or judge them in any way.
OTOH, having only ONE child, I’ve often been asked why I stopped at one. To those, universally, I’ve answered “you’ve met Ben, right? would YOU have risked it again?”
I feel you have a moral obligation not to breed. That is, you have that obligation. It means that my descendants will have less competition for resources, and my gene line will have a better chance at long-term survival.
You are exercising your option to “have not”. I can certainly appreciate your choice in this matter. I don’t think anyone has the right to fault you for it. You have no obligation to anyone but yourselves in the matter of procreation.
I as a parent of two I have also made my choice. I am equally happy with exercising my “to have” option. Neither my wife nor I could not imagine our lives without our kids. I’m certain you have to objections to our choice in this matter either.
Seems there’s very little room for debate here if we all remain reasonable and honest about our choices.
We have four children between the ages of 7 months and ten years old, this makes us very happy people. I get to spend my mornings taking care of our two daughters while Lola is at school. I wouldn’t trade this for anything.
You have no children, you don’t want any, and this makes you happy.
IF one does nto really, really want kids, they shouldn’t have Them. I didn’t want kids till recently. In fact, I had had a vasectomy (which has now been reversed.)
Now I really really want kids.
I have met many folks who decided not to have children. I never met few that did not seem musty and lacking in joi de vivre. personally, I think kids make you young and make life more fulfilling. But I am coming from an upper middle class, white, controlled fertility perspective.
Ask me again when I am g=staying up all night feeding and changing nappies.
Five cats. I also foster stray and abandoned cats for a non-profit origination until the cats can find permanent homes, so there have been up to eight cats in the house at once time.
Don’t have them if you don’t want them. Your first obligation in this life is to make yourself happy, contented, functional member of society. Next is to make sure that your partnership is one of support, compassion, mutual respect and joy. It is only then that you have the right to raise [this includes adoption] a child, but you have to give that support, nurture, love and direction as much as you can. I fully support folks who don’t want kids [I believed the same thing until I met Mr Kiffa.]
I think one of the worst human rights abuses is to raise a child without thinking about that child’s happiness, adjustment and future above and beyond your own needs. My stomache turned last night at my kids’ school when I heard a so-called parent say to his child, in front of everyone during open house: “Why do you do this shit to embarrass me?” The kid was mortified, his teacher shocked, other parents looked at their kids with the unspoken words “Please don’t let me do that kind of stuff to you”. It broke my heart.
I don’t mean to imply that folks who don’t want to have kids do so because they think they’ll act like an ass. I mean to say that it is really unfortunate that many adults don’t know how to parent and aren’t even interested in learning how to do their best. The upside of the story is that kids are so wonderfully resilient most of the times and I am sure that that kid last night will remember this incident for the rest of his life - hopefully not to repeat it with his own kids.
The one problem that I might have with your decision not to have kids is that you just might be a great parent while the jerks who should have decided no go on acting like a fool with their kids.
Unconditional love is one the bugaboos of emotional psychology, loudly and beautifully praised by the poets, but substantially elusive outside imaginative realms. If love is a trust between people, can not that trust be broken? I remember a story of a madman in early eighties who captured women, imprisoned them in is basement, raped and tortured them, and may or may not have killed some, the details escape me; when the media interviewed his father, his father said “If you put him the chair let me pull the switch.” Unconditional love is supposed to exist between parent and child, but did not the madman shatter the unconditional love of his father by his crimes? Would you love unconditionally a spouse or child who harbored plots and deeds of your death for insurance money? Could you love unconditionally anyone who turned emotionally cruel? I do not see how love can exist inside a vacuum, it is very conditional.
Love is causal, temporal, and malleable, but I’ll stick to quoting the poets for peace of mind.
I’m very glad to hear you say that… and thank you for skewing my statistics on people with multiple cats and no kids. I’m tempted to treat you as a tainted sample but I won’t.
Good question. There is no confusion. The answer is found in progression. You first have to have a degree of self-knowledge, self-acceptance, self-love and confidence in your ability to make decent decisions that don’t totally fuck up your life or that you have the ability to make corrections when you do fuck up. Second you find a partner who you can trust, share, grow and love. These two factors make it much easier to raise children however it is not absolutely essential to have the partner; ask single parents.
The self-awareness/love can help you minimize the issues that you bring to either an adult to adult or an adult to child relationship. This is extremely important when you start looking at what you need to provide a child to help them grow up to be a healthy adult or reach their potential.
I think it is very hard to look to the needs of your family when you yourself are not happy, are conflicted, are without goals and don’t like yourself. That’s not a solid framework on which to build healthy relationships.
You don’t want to have kids? That’s fine.
I’m more concerned about your apparent contempt for people who choose to have kids. (even those who do not hassle you)
You beat me to the punch, Phobos. I was just going to ask what motivated this debate.
I think that there can be very solid arguments on both sides for having/not having kids, but the OP seems to bring a certain amount of contempt for people who choose the route other than his own. I respect your decision to be child-free, Pyrrhonist, but throwing around phrases like “the child-burdened” and “the egotism of their DNA” doesn’t exactly position you in a light that will encourage objectivity by those of us who have been “burdened” with children.
What about those of us who do not personally want children, but whose partners do? My BF thinks it would be a good idea, but I don’t want to because I know I’m too selfish to be a good parent. He tells me he doesn’t want to be a biological dead end & stuff, but he’s not the one who’d be coping with the weight gain, the morning sickness, or the labor pains…not to mention the 3 a.m. feedings, the postpartum depression, & the vast majority of the childcare…
