Some people really want children, yes, and are devastated when they can’t have them. But the dispute is whether there’s a strictly biological urge for it, it doesn’t seem as though that is the case. Some people just really like kids…some people become kindergarten teachers because they love being around kids so much. Many, many other people do not want to be around kids that much, and many don’t want to be around kids hardly at all. And there may be many other factors that go into not wanting kids, based on psychology, upbringing, personality, who knows what else. It’s not what we call a primal urge.
This is a bit oversimplified, in that the Total Fertility Rate has been slowly dropping since 1800, and there are times in history much earlier than 40 years ago when family size contracted quite a bit. Contraception got much easier in the 20th century, to be sure, but for the longest time, the incentives to contracept (urbanization and many more) were not present for the majority, and that made the biggest impact.
I rather resent this one. I have no plans to live that long.
Maybe, but the point is that it’s not a strict biological urge for humans to reproduce as much as possible, as you say it’s much more complex than a simple drive. Not wanting children is not some rare biological difference that can be compared to a same-sex preference or gender difference.
Five minutes of Googling isn’t helping me find any corroboration or refutation of this claim. It seems remarkable to me, given counterevidence ranging from spayed cats carrying socks around like kittens, to people talking about their ticking biological clock, to the tremendous emphasis in EVERY culture placed on having kids, but maybe there’s something there that I’m missing. If this is pretty well accepted, could you give me an academic source for this claim?
Last time I checked, there were no laws banning childfree people from getting married. Childfree teenagers aren’t committing suicide at a much higher rate than non-childfree teenagers. Parents aren’t disowning their children when they tell them they don’t want to have children. They haven’t been arrested, thrown in mental hospitals, tortured, beaten, or told they’re degenerates who are going to Hell for violating God’s law, and should stop “flaunting their lifestyle” in front of people. They aren’t accused of being pedophiles, or committing beastiality.
But I suspect you knew that already, and just wanted to shock people.
This is a huge pile of bullshit, since that’s not quite how birth control works. Birth control doesn’t “change your desire to have kids” or “what you look for in a mate”. Where the fuck did you come up with that dumbass idea?
But ultimately, Guin has the key point here…anyone who thinks that as a child-free person they are subject to the same persecution as gay people has a persecution complex.
Since when is having children a guarantee that one won’t wind up in some kind of care facility? One of the ‘little old ladies’ from my hometown became unable to care for herself years ago due to the onset of dementia; she’s going downhill very fast now. Her son put her in a cheap nursing home, went back to the state where he currently resides, and hasn’t been back since.
Her article–and the article it linked to for academic support–were part of my five minutes of Googling. Neither of them came anywhere close to providing clear research to back the claim that it’s the sexual urge, not any sort of reproductive urge, that evolutionarily leads to kids.
I tend toward the belief that humans have a buttload of instincts, so maybe that’s a difference, but I see no reason to suspect that the nearly universal cultural imperative to have kids has no biological basis.
This is not, of course, to say that there’s any sort of moral imperative to have kids. Plenty of our biological urges range from the gross to the horrifying. But it seems likely that a desire to have kids is going to be a common, not universal, result of our biological makeup.
You missed my point entirely, which was that when one does end up in a nursing home (regardless of having kids or not) the person who is going to be your attendant carer is going to be someone else’s kid.
I don’t think that was the point of her post. She’s saying that anyone who ends up in a care facility will have a younger generation to thank for that care.
I’m not saying it has no biological basis at all…I think it’s fairly instinctive, for instance, to want to care for children. Human instincts, though, aren’t like other animal instincts…we have choices about how we want to live our lives. I don’t really think there’s a specific, primal, biological driver for “wanting to have children,” like there is for, say, the sex drive. I think it’s made up of a variety of biological and sociological forces. I definitely don’t think that not wanting children is so wildly out of the norm that it could be considered a biological anomaly.
Thank you! People seem to think that they have no control over their desire to have children, and that it is so different than a burning desire to have/do anything else. I’m glad to hear that people are not as mindless and slaves to hormones that they claim to be.
I seem to be missing posts, dunno why;
Do you honestly think that if people quit having multiple kids, especially those who cannot properly care for them, that we would run out of people to do those sorts of jobs? Seriously?
I think you hit it yourself - there is tremendous pressure from society to have kids, so it’s something that people just assume they are going to do when they grow up/get married/finish school. There is also pressure on those who cannot figure out birth control, to have and keep every oops baby. Some of us manage to step out of the assumptions and decide we don’t want to have kids, and then society labels us as haters, freaks, insane. After a few decades of that, maybe those labels come true …
Actually, that is one of the major reasons why I no longer have any contact with my parents. They simply would not accept my - ahem - lifestyle choice.
…and I’m pointing out that if I can’t live like a man, I will die like one. My mother told me to shoot her so that she doesn’t end up like her mother. I plan to tell her that I won’t shoot her, but I will go to Mexico (or online?) and get the Nembutal, or otherwise make the world’s most powerful smoothy, if it comes to that.