The poor shouldn’t have kids because they will grow up to be welfare wastrels, and the rich shouldn’t have kids because they will grow up to be entitled asses.
Let me guess - the middling sort who are neither poor nor rich shouldn’t have kids, because they will grow up to be boring.
I’m just poking a bit of gentle fun. But I do have a few points:
(1) A parent’s parenting abilities are not predicated on their wealth or poverty, although obviously it is easier to parent if you have a certain amount of money, than if you do not.
(2) There isn’t a one hundred percent correlation between parenting ability and how kids turn out. Kids have their own little personalities and even good parents can have bad kids, and bad parents can have good kids.
(3) That said, certain people should not parent: certainly, those with anger control problems or poor impulse control generally (let alone the actively sadistic). However, there is no more a reliable test for that in the realm of parenting, than there is in any other realm.
I had some time to sort out my thoughts about this while on the bus. My problem isn’t that certain types of people should or should not necessarily have kids. My problem is that the decision to have or not have kids is one of the most important, if not the most important, decision a person can make, yet so many people put no thought into it.
In our last neighbourhood we routinely saw the 18 year old girls pushing their strollers along while they were smoking up a storm. Or the welfare recipient in Cornwall, Ontario several years ago who had something like five kids with four different fathers. Or a co-worker who admonished me to have kids “so I wouldn’t be lonely when I’m older”. Or another co-worker, when we were discussing the cost of raising a child said “that’s not the way to think! You just do it and it will work.”
No! You don’t “just do it and it will work.” If you can’t afford to raise children then you shouldn’t have them.
If you can’t quit smoking before having kids, then you shouldn’t have them. If you can’t control yourself with sexual partners (I don’t have a problem with this specifically) and don’t understand the science behind reproduction, then you shouldn’t have kids.
And nowhere does he claim that his feelings are universal among men. I can tell you that I share them to a significant extent. I would have loved to have been a father, but it hasn’t happened and it won’t happen, and that’s the way the cookie has crumbled.
:shrugs: You did make a damn interesting choice of places to edit my response in order to place your your answer “I am.”
Also, the grammatical response to my question “And you (and this you is specifically addressed to another poster, not to you) undoubtedly fail to see why these statements are contradictory to those huge numbers of people who have had transformational experiences after the age of 25.” would have been “I do” rather than “I am” which is grammatically correct for answer for the question
“Unless you are calling all of us mentally ill.”
As noted, this quote wasn’t even about you, did you respond to any of my other points other than the curt “I am.”
My take of the article was that it’s written deliberately overly dramatically to keep readers reading. Or he’s on drugs.
Mr. **Smith **was actually arguing in the thread that he believes in transformations, so he shouldn’t be arguing against that.
Many of us in this thread have have had transformative experiences as parents. Spamforbrains is essentially calling us “mentally ill” (or lying?) and yet she claims to be empathetic, which seems to me to be contradiction.
For the life of me, I fail to see Mr. Smith’s claimed point in his explanation to the mod note as the evidence doesn’t really match up. But whatever.
Yes. I understand that pool’s ridiculous comment about childless people being lesser somewhat derailed the thread, but some people also seem to think that the Guardian writer was attacking childless people, when he was just talking about his own feelings. I regret not being able to have a dog - does that mean I think everyone wants to have a dog?
He states his purpose outright:
He doesn’t say “some men,” because he’s only talking about men who regret not having children so there’s no need to add “some.”
You read it as an advice piece - what advice do you think is being given? Other than “people should acknowledge that men often have a gut-wrenching desire to have children, too” I can’t see how it’s purporting to offer advice.
And men are left out of these discussions a lot. Yes, it’s not quite the same because the age at which you can still have children is so much younger for women, but it happens anyway. At 52 it’s quite reasonable for him to be worried that time’s running out for him to be a parent, at least the kind of parent that can run around with his kids and watch them grow into adulthood.
It’s also different in that a woman who really wants to be a parent can have one without being in a relationship, and for men that’s not really possible. Sperm donor to a lesbian couple who want him to be involved in the parenting side? Maybe, if he can find such a couple, but it wouldn’t give him most of the things he dreams of in parenting, and wanting a child that looks like you and your partner, or wanting to tuck the child in at night, are not ludicrously unrealistic dreams. Most of his friends seem to have that, from his comments about school catchment areas, etc - if he knew more childless people he might not feel as excluded, so maybe one thing he could do is try to make new, childless friends - not easy but not impossible.
Men are still expected not to express emotions as much as women are (except anger), and this is one of the areas in which that occurs. I think he was trying to open up the discussion, and that’s all. People who don’t want children should not take someone else’s expression of a need to have children as an attack on their own choices.
The Guardian article is puerile. Perhaps the author comes from a Blank Slate social sciences background if he really thinks that the notion that men generally have an instinctive impulse to raise children is some radical insight. Does any thoughtful person really adhere to the view that only women have nurturing instincts, and that all men just want to spray their sperm around and vanish. In fact, humans exhibit one of the highest levels of male parental investment of any species.
On the other hand, humans are surely far more sophisticated than our raw instincts to eat, sleep and reproduce. With regard to this:
…may I express my agreement with Llama Llogophile in saying…
Humans invented birth control, after all, so that some of us could, as an entirely personal choice, spend less time changing nappies and devote more time to expanding our minds, climbing mountains, building space telescopes and writing fabulous poetry such as this:
[QUOTE=Philip Larkin]
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.
[/QUOTE]
“Get out as early as you can?” I don’t recall that Larkin actually took that particular bit advice. Most of us think life is rather nifty, parental handed-down misery or not.
As for the article: it is just one man’s personal musings on regret. I agree with SciFiSam.
I agree that the motivation lies in personal regret. The problem with the way the article is written is that, as I said, it’s puerile - claiming insight while apparently ignorant of the vast body of research on human nature. To the extent it is a personal narrative, as with pool’s comment, it seeks to project highly personal choices and feelings onto the rest of us.
I honestly don’t see any “projection” in the article at all. He’s not saying anyone else feels (or ought to feel) similar regret, or that people who do are better people - he’s just saying he does.
He further speculates that perhaps such feelings are, or ought to be, different as between women and men. I also don’t see any relevance of “the vast body of research on human nature” to what he happens to feel, or to him simply raising the question. He’s not writing a PhD thesis on gender differences here, he’s writing a personal reflection piece.
Just the title of this thread - “The Guardian nails it” - seems to indicate that the OP thinks the article’s author is correct to feel depressed about not having had children.
The article’s author may be sincere about his feelings, but this kind of thing gets published, IMO, because the majority of people who read it will be parents and will feel sorry for the pathetic creature who never had kids.
I guess it’s a matter of perspective. I’m 57. No wife, no kids. but I have friends. And hobbies. And the hobbies come with more friends.
I feel bad when parents ask me what I did on the weekend. Last weekend I went out with 3 different groups of friends, 2 events, 3 dinners. I rode my motorcycle for hours on end. I went to bed when I wanted and slept late. There weren’t enough hours in the day to spend relaxing.
But I do have a few points: