No, the idea of Zero Population Growth is that we need to hold our population at a stable number (probably lower than it is now), so that we don’t have too many people competing (often violently) for too few resources. We believe that having children is serious business, not to be undertaken lightly and without consideration of all pros and cons and not to be undertaken without reasonably optional circumstances (i.e., a means of support, a reliable safety net, reasonable physical and mental health, etc.). A comatose woman completely incapable of interacting with the rest of the human race, but with a healthy uterus can give birth, but that doesn’t mean she should.
Like the writer of the article, I too am a 52 year old childless man. And I feel empathy for the way he feels, because obviously he has determined that he missed out on a chance at happiness.
BUT, that ain’t me. I’m not going to tear him down, but I will say that his feelings of regret do not apply to me. And, I would challenge the idea that having children instantly makes you a better person. When I think of most of the truly assholish people I know, the overwhelming majority of them have kids.
It’s funny someone upthread mentioned the term “yelling over the fence at each other” because that is oh so close to my experience with Greg, one of my neighbors. Greg and his wife moved into their house about 18 years ago, about one year after I moved into mine. From driveway conversations we knew immediately we differed on politics (me-liberal, him-conservative), but he didn’t seem extreme. Then he had kids. Two within a couple of years. His political arguments were now instantly bolstered by “when you have kids, you’ll understand.” He so frequently used this that I eventually blurted out “Exactly what in the biological process of reproducing supposedly made you smarter?” His answer was that somehow having kids made him less self-centered and he could now see the big picture. Somehow he was instantly more community and society focused, since he had children to grow up.
And yet, he still wanted school vouchers and tax cuts. He saw no reason to fight discrimination against gays and minorities. He was fine with cutting education spending, but still wanted vouchers to send his kids to christian school.
So basically it doesn’t make you less selfish, it just means you demand the world bend over backwards to accommodate your kids instead of yourself 
Before I was a father, I was the “cool” uncle doing many things with and for them. I’m sure I would have “taken a bullet” for them.
But it wasn’t until I became a father myself that this reaction became so visceral.
Again, this really needs the qualifier “necessarily” in there because for many people, it does “complete” their lives and it does affect their emotions and maturity.
It certainly did for me and many others that I know personally. I know others that it didn’t, but the negative does not negate the positive.
It can but it doesn’t do this for everyone.
And how can you talk for everyone else? This really comes down to accepting that people have
Does everyone who gets a job learn to become responsible? Is there no other path than work for people to become responsible individuals?
Does everyone who goes to college really become educated? Is there no other way?
One trip abroad is the equivalent to 18 years of devoted child raising, but that’s not the point. The point is that people can have transformative experiences and that your transformative experiences are not the same as others.
My parents utterly failed to have this transformation so we know that parenting doesn’t necessarily cause it.
I had a girlfriend who spend a summer backpacking and hitchhiking around the States and really changed. Maybe more so than my parents did in 30 odd years of parenting minor children.
You would be surprised by the ability of people to delude themselves.
And just because you as an individual have had a transformative experience, that doesn’t mean that society as a whole is going to benefit from your being more valuable or empathetic or whatever.
Suppose someone wrote an article saying, “I wish I had had a cat at some point during my life - I’m sad that I never had one.”
I would take that person at their word that they are, in fact, sad about never having had a cat. My next thought would be, why are you telling me this? If the article were couched (as I felt the one in the OP was) as cautionary advice to those who also never had cats, I’d then wonder if the author thought everyone came to their cat decisions under uniform circumstances and backgrounds.
My final thought would be, did someone actually get paid to write this article? As an essay of personal experience, I have no issues with it. But to me it reads as an advice piece, and from that POV it fails to the point of being the aforementioned “load of crap”.
So? It certainly won’t benefit from you not become more empathetic.
See, I saw it as being mostly the first part. I don’t see much advice there.
Maybe I’m mellowing as my age (must be my kids!) but I’m becoming more inclined to take a charitable view of people, and what I read in this gentleman’s column was not that he was hectoring people to have kids, and Christ knows that’s really a thing and I would NEVER do that to anyone, even as a happy parent.
What I read here, see, is an essay on longing and regret. I don’t think the takeaway, for me, necessarily has to be limited to “I never had a kid,” and I think that’s his point about asking if men cannot feel the same way many women do. I think a more general takeaway is that everyone has something they regret and long for. I would further suggest that it’s usually something they did not do.
I mean, I’m a happy guy. I have a lovely family, live in material comfort, and I’m healthy, knock on wood. But I’ll whisper down a dark well at night… what if, right? What if I had gone to Columbia? What if I’d married the right woman the first time around? What if I had gone back to Susan’s house that one night? What if I’d moved away from home earlier and tried to be a comedian before I had a family? Shouldn’t I have travelled more when I had the chance? What if I did this, did that?
Surely one of the sadnesses of life is that there is so much in it to experience and love and do that we cannot do it all. And no matter how hard you try, no matter the extent of your efforts, no matter how righteous your heart, you’ll always be able to say “I wish I could have done that, too.”
Based on 5 minutes of amatuer google-sleuthing, I’m going to guess he did get paid for the article. The author is a management and development consultant. Having been a consultant in a similar field before, I know one way to pad the finances between big projects is to write freelance articles, and seek news/lifestyle/portal websites who need content.
Speaking of travel, I remember being very young and asking my Dad why he cancelled a trip we’d planned together when my schedule conflicted and I couldn’t make it. I remember my Dad saying something like “travelling and having all of these neat experiences without being able to share them with you makes it less fun.” Basically trying to say that sharing in the joy of travelling was half the enjoyment.
I can totally see the joy in travelling alone, too though. I enjoy motorcycle backpacking and I can imagine dragging along a miserable wife or miserable son and ruining camping for them. 
You misunderstand. I’m saying that you aren’t necessarily going to be more empathtic to people who are not your children. That’s why society won’t benefit. Being a parent, or even being a good parent, doesn’t automatically give you qualities that will make you a good member of society.
Interesting perspective!
However, I am 55 and have simply never had the desire for marriage and / or children. I was (and am) a pretty good uncle, and have always liked kids in small doses, though. Just never had the desire to “own” any.
Yeh. Only my close family and a few of my very best friends are aware of it now. The writing’s been on the wall actually for at least a few years now. We both just realized we’re not the same people we were when we married, and decided to finally pull the plug this year.
It’ll suck not to be around my kids nearly as often, but I do look forward to a new chapter in my life. Thanks, Spice. 
I’m not sure why you picked that one point of my post to debate when I didn’t address that particular question.
And I’m not really sure why you would think that I believe that parents are automatically going to be more empathetic to others as I don’t believe parents are automatically going to become better people, period.
You’re reading into my post something which simply isn’t there.
So, you are simply agreeing with my post.
That said, being a good parent does benefit society as a whole in that it helps raise healthy children and society benefits by have healthy members.
Being childless doesn’t necessarily help society as a whole, either. Having a transformative experience outside of parenthood doesn’t necessarily benefit society so I’m not sure I understand your objection.
The way you become responsible is to take responsibility for things. The way you become educated is to pursue an education. Sure, there are more than one approaches. But you can’t just sit on your ass doing nothing for years and then suddenly declare yourself “responsible” or “educated” when you have no responsibilities or never cracked a book.
I can’t speak for your parents because I don’t know them. But I have to think that unless they are so wealth they can afford to have other people care for you 24/7, on some level they have to have been transformed by having children.
Although, I can imagine some people not liking the transformation and that manifests itself as anger or indifference towards their child.
Personally, I think there are very few things that transform people since people tend to experience things through their existing lens. A lot of people travel or go to college and they are basically the same people afterwards, just with new T-shirts.
What’s that magic number for human population?
I’d argue for more technology advancement in energy and transportation of goods and services. It’s the underdeveloped or war-torn nations that seem to be suffering of what you mention. The globe has more food and resources than we know what to do with, so that’s not really the problem. It’s making it accessible to everyone.
If we went back to 10 AD, when there was only about 200 million people on the globe, war, famine and evil atrocities were still playing out. Probably far worse than now. I don’t see how a larger population is related to these issues.
So, again, what’s that magic number that brings about a global utopia?
Personally, I think it is impossible to know whether a person’s personality has shifted because of a particular experience or whether it is because people inevitably change as they get older. I know I’m not the same person I was just five years ago, but I can’t identify a single experience that would explain this. I’m five years older, though. I always seem like a different person when I do a retrospective assessment on myself.
I don’t think there is much usefulness to ranking experiences since not everyone gets the same kick out of the same things. For instance, I felt like my first solo vacation was a peak experience for me because of the challenges I was dealing with at that time. But for someone else, taking a solo vacation just isn’t a big deal.
I believe it is human nature to find meaning in everything we experience. If you live long enough and you aren’t just sitting in a dark room somewhere, you will likely experience a “life changing” type of situation–or at the very least believe that you have. If kids don’t do it, the death of a loved one will. Or coping with a severe injury or illness. Or experiencing poverty or extreme wealth. Every time the phone rings, I brace myself because the news on the other end might change my life forever. So I don’t think people without kids have to worry about being spared from “transformations”.
I don’t believe in “transformations.” People don’t really change once they pass age 25 unless they develop a mental illness. I find the behavior of people who have children and then go around trying to pressure people who don’t have children into having children to be offensive. I particularly find the phrases “you’ll understand once you have a child” and “you can’t understand because you’re not a parent” to be extremely offensive. I’m perfectly capable of understanding without having to go through the experience. I have an imagination and empathy.
Rick Jay, I concur with you here: don’t see the article’s author as advising or pontificating at all. As you say, an essay on his own personal longing and regret. Where he writes “I feel I am not a real member of society – an unmarried man without children. I can’t participate in [the whole conglomeration of “parent stuff”]. I am outside, looking in”; and “because I don’t have a child… in some ways I don’t feel fully like a man”: that comes across to me as his telling of his own feelings – no suggestion of “all childless men are failures, who should rightly feel this way”. People are entitled to their own feelings, and feelings are not always rational.
I’m a straight male, on the brink of old age, never married or had kids – and the polar opposite of the author in that I’ve never had the slightest scintilla of a desire to have kids; but reading the article caused me to feel for the guy, and to regret his bad luck in missing out on the thing which he would wish in life, more than anything else (while gagging a bit on what was for me, the sheer goo-content). If he had seemed to me, to be ordering others about as to what should be their priorities and actions in life, my reaction would have been, “up yours, you arrogant jerk”.
The magic number fluctuates according to region, climate, culture, etc., if it’s even possible. Global utopia has never happened, but what can happen is a better world for more of humanity. Technological advancement in energy and transportation of goods and service doesn’t occur in an environment where everybody is fighting over resources to survive. They happen when we have enough of a surplus to educate people and do something other than fight over resources. Many of the factors that made life in 10 AD so hard have been greatly reduced by advancement of science and technology including most importantly the technology of birth control which freed generations of women and to a lesser extent men from the drudgery of child-rearing.