It is my firm belief that not all people are created the same and even though they have certain plumbing, have different goals, wants, and desires.
Take women and motherhood for instance. When I was growing up I was taught that all girls aspired to grow up and be mothers. Since then over the years I have learned that this is not the case. Although to balance that out I also feel that their is a certain percentage of women who have ZERO desire for job and career and want only to be a full time wife and mother.
Most women fall somewhere in between.
Granted, some of this can change over time. I grew up with a girl who said she intended to never have children and would get operated on to prevent it yet now she has 4 children. Other women never wanted kids yet because of family and society pressure, or by accident, had 1 or 2.
So in my opinion I feel that about:
10% of women do not want children at all.
20% just want to be mothers.
70% - the rest, fall in between with the majority falling in the middle. They want children but also want to devote most of their energies to career and other personal enrichments.
Now if your asking about men, I think it’s similar where about 10% dont want to ever be a father and the rest are ok with a couple while maybe 25% love kids and want alot of kids. This is an issue one should always work out before getting married.
You’re suggesting that there’s a complex human behavior that, when measured in a population and plotted on a graph, gives a bell curve?
How terribly fascinating and surprising. This would be rather more likely to yield a discussion if it were based on something more solid than your own personal “I reckon”.
When you’re young, you think all sorts of things that end up being counter to how you live your life later. For example, I swore up and down (at around age 10) that I’d never, ever used tiredness as a reason I couldn’t do something. Around age 13, I never wanted to have sex. In high school, I believed the way to live one’s life was in a remote cabin, without running water or an indoor toilet. Because back to nature is the only way to go. Same applies to several things I held steadfast to in my twenties, but ended up changing my mind about later. That’s not unusual at all. It’s just how life works, for both women and men. Amazingly, this includes childbirth and motherhood.
So, to paraphrase: some women don’t like kids, some do, and some are “meh” on the subject but have kids to shut their own parents up. Same with men. That’s the premise of the OP.
It’s hard to get good data here as it’s taboo to say that you regret having kids.
When I was a kid myself I always said I didn’t want any. I grew up with four younger brothers and sisters in the house so I had a good idea what kids are like. So far, I haven’t changed my mind. I just don’t see the appeal, and it’s not like the world is in desperate need of more people. (Also, the process of having them is gross.)
While your rectally derived numbers may hold true over a lifespan (although they may not, who knows), as far as individual pregnancies go, you vastly overestimate women’s desire to have babies. Almost half of fetuses weren’t conceived out of a desire to have a baby.
Many women do have their unintended baby anyway, either because they can’t get an abortion, or they don’t want an abortion, or they are surprised (either in a positive or negative way, these stats don’t say) but decide to have the baby anyhow.
So, start revisiting your assumptions there. Not all women with children actually wanted them.
Well unintended is different than “didn’t want”. I’m sure there’s plenty of couples that said to themselves, “We’ll have that baby in about 3 years” and then the birth control fails and they’ve got that baby early. Unintended, but not unwanted. And there is of course the families that say “3 kids is fine; we’ll stop there, thanks” and then the vasectomy fails and they’ve got another. Unintended, but different than “I don’t want kids” and “unwanted”. All of those situations will go under the unintended pile as listed in the statistics but in no way does that equivalate to people who didn’t want kids.
Read the PDF a bit more deeply, over half the respondents simply mistimed their baby arrival (making it “unintended”) but still wanted the baby. A bunch more simply “didn’t mind if [they] got pregnant” so weren’t really doing anything one way or the other, but since it wasn’t “planned” it’s “unintentional”. At the end they state that 13.8% of all births in 2008 were entirely unwanted.
Most people, regardless of gender, want children. The biological imperative is just that strong.
I think most people, regardless of gender, would rather not work outside the home if they didn’t have to. If society didn’t frame “home-making” as woman’s work and stay-at-fathers were the norm rather than the exception, I think many men would see that as a reasonable alternative just as many women do. The reason that so many women do is because society gives us a stigma-free “pass” to bow out of the workforce. If a woman decides to forgo career for her children, she’s a saint. If a man does it, he’s lazy and effete.
I think women feel a lot more social pressure to have children than men do. I was talking to a guy a couple of weeks ago who just assumed that because I was a woman, I had always had visions of getting married and having children. When I told him that his assumption was quite incorrect, he kind of looked at me like I’d just admitted to eating babies or something. To be fair, a childless woman at my age is a bit unusual…and people have a natural aversion to being too different. Hell, if I woke up tomorrow to discover that I was pregnant, I would be terrified out of my mind (who is the father!?), but part of me would really embrace it because being a mother would finally make me a “member of the club”, so to speak. I think people care about belonging to the “club” just as much as they care about passing on their genes. Which is why I think there are so many awful parents out there. They thought they wanted children, but what they really wanted was whatever it is parenthood symbolizes to them.