Lovely article on having children by Janice Turner

[Swoopy]

I so agree with her about the joy of it all and feeling you’re not really supposed to express it.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/874a2d65-8938-4433-a58b-adf3c62535e7?shareToken=b60694d08ea4051e62db552e0ff8288c

Yes, I completely agree. I complained pretty solidly for at least 3 years but that core of joy at the heart of it all... I can't imagine having missed that.

I'm fairly sure that joy is also achievable with nieces/nephews (I feel it with my niece) but I am very grateful I got the chance to experience it with my biological children too.

Motherhood is beuatiful for some but not for all. Women must have the right to choose.

What a beautiful article. She has expressed it so well.

I agree that motherhood has bought me incredible joys. I think it’s wrong that the younger generations only see negative depictions though. Social media is full of shiny happy American mums being all peppy about having 10 kids. They are like weird adverts for extreme motherhood. Both my teen girls see that sort of content much more than Motherland which is not aimed at their generation. They both want families but the cost of doing that may put them off given they are Londoners born and bred.

I don’t think anyone would disagree with that.

So beautiful...I struggled to conceive and only have one child. When things are tough in other parts of my life I just make sure I have a moment with him. My dp sometimes says "I miss toddler attictrollsbaby" and I know exactly what he means. On those threads where the ask what you'd tell your younger self I always think "find just a good enough man so I could have started trying to have babies earlier as my biggest sadness is only having one."

But saying that I would miss dp and my real son's quirky wonderfulness madly.

I dont know that media has much of an effect tbh. Motherhood is just so instinctive for some people, and not being a mother is instinctive for others.

For a natural mother to be a mother is the best thing in the world for them. For someone who does not want to be a mother to feel pressured into it has terrible outcomes for everyone.

Most of us are somewhere in between the two extremes, but we know where we are on that spectrum

For me, being a mother has been the best part of my life. I have loved it.

I don’t think anyone disagrees that motherhood is joyful. But it also takes a lot away.

It takes your freedom away, which for modern women is a greater loss than ever before. It takes your earning ability away, unless you earn enough to cover childcare (barely possible on the average salary) or have helpful family nearby. In many cases it takes your attractive body away, which is a big deal in this social media obsessed era. Then on top of that it ties you to the father, and women are no longer willing to be tied to someone they don’t like.

If I had my time again, I can’t say I’d have kids. Of course I’d miss them if they vanished. But I’d have my attractive body with no loose skin, my career which was destroyed because I couldn’t afford childcare, and I’d be able to leave their father and enjoy being with an attractive man instead and have a sex life. If I’d understood what I’d be losing I think I’d have chosen differently.

I’m detecting a pattern based on my family:

Grandparents (born 1920ish): had 7 kids.

Parents/uncles/aunties (born 1940s/50s): 3 kids on average (some 4, some 2).

Cousins (1960s-80s): 2 kids max.

Younger cousins (born circa 1990): no kids.

We are definitely heading towards rapid population decline.

A lovely article. I had an incredible time in my 20’s working abroad, travelling the world and loving life. Throughout all that thought I always knew I wanted to have my own children eventually, and since becoming a mum it truly is indescribable. Sure, it can be hard at times, but I wouldn’t change it for the world.

We are lucky however to have no mortgage due to inheritance which obviously helps massively and allows me to work minimal hours to spend time with my DS. It would be such a struggle without this help and I certainly don’t take this for granted.

This just makes me extremely grateful for contraception.

The world is overpopulated.

Women had very little choice due to no and poor contraception regarding how many children they had in the UK till the end of the 1960’s. Also pre 1960’s it was incredibly rare to travel overseas. We live in a completely different time if we live in a developed country. When women are allowed a choice and are educated and can earn their own money then the population decreases. When you look at countries with few rights for women they are the countries with young populations.

We were all born in my family born before the pill was invented. My Mother had six living children and 5 miscarriages. I can tell you right now she did not want to be pregnant that many times or have that many children she was just very fertile.

Read up on Thomas Malthus a philosopher, his theory in population growth, what insight that man had.

Good. There are more people on our poor exhausted planet than it can sustain.

The part where she talked about feeling like you can't talk about the positives of motherhood resonated with me. I was attacked on the feminism section of another site when I talked about how being a SAHM by choice for a few years until my DD started school was the happiest time of my life. Some childfree women (not all) seem to have a real hatred of anything to do with motherhood and seem to be of the opinion that being at home with your own child can't possibly be as fulfilling as climbing the career ladder but that wasn't my experience at all.

I wasn’t complaining, just observing. I agree that there are too many humans on the planet. However, population decline isn’t a bed of roses; an ageing population is extremely problematic for society in myriad ways.

I've read so many of these kind of articles and still don't think they adequately describe that sense of joy which motherhood is supposed to give a woman. The article above seems ambiguous and lacking. I'm not a mother, so I don't know, but I want to know.

A lovely article! Thanks for sharing it OP. She summarises it all really well, including the drudgery and the joy.

I find it really upsetting when people say 'these are the best years of your life' such as at the end of the article.

perhaps it's fallout from covid but I've found the last 4 years with small children pretty traumatic. Perhaps I might have felt like that anyway without covid but it certainly didn't help.

I've no doubt it's true, so it's upsetting to know that particularly horrible time in my life is apparently something I'll reminisce fondly about in the future, that the better times aren't seemingly just round the corner as I keep hoping.

Early motherhood for me was the definitive “best of times/ worst of times”.

I agree with the article that yes, I would love to time travel back to a day when my DC were tiny. To smell their heads and hold their pudgy hands. But I wouldn’t want to live through it again. It was hard, relentless.

But it has also been the best thing that has ever happened to me, by far.

Malthus wasn't right though. He didn't understand the potential of human ingenuity to increase food supply, he thought contraception was evil and he didn't even begin to understand that what drives birth rates down most of all is female education and choice.

I'd also say that although non-hormonal birth control techniques are fallible for individuals, as your mother sadly knew, they can make a huge difference at the population level. Lots of countries experienced massive declines in birth rates before the introduction/legalisation of the Pill.

Nobody says you're 'not allowed' to express joy about being a parent. This is the stupid pronatalist framing you're going to increasingly hear in right wing media as the powers that be have a collective meltdown about collapsing birth rates.

BTW - the best time in my life was when I had three children under 6. I loved the intensity of it. Loved living in the day, because that's how small children live.

But then I had a secure home & a decent household income. A kind and loving DH. A brilliant children's centre within walking distance. A supportive extended family who helped me with my children all the time.

I thought it was a lovely article too. I’ve also got two boys and I also absolutely love being a mum. I remember very hard bits when they were little but I also remember so much laughter, fun silliness, absolute joy and my feeling of pure unadulterated love for them is absolute.

The most important part of motherhood is who you have a child with.

I agree with the contentment, a pile of dad, baby and toddler on the couch, nothing comes close to that happiness.

But the space and luxury to enjoy your baby and children for me is completely tied to being with, still with, an amazing husband and dad.

I don't know if there are many counter articles from men, saying how work is work but when they get home that is their reason for working, the fulfillment they get in supporting a household because it has his babies in it.

So perhaps the number of men a similar age happy to commit and sacrifice their individual lives contributes to the lower birth rate.

But I guess women will always get the brunt of the blame, I mean not wanting to be financially reliant on a grunt is a good thing. If society needs more babies perhaps work on the males as well.

If society needs more babies perhaps work on the males as well.

absolutely.

If you want to understand why women are increasingly choosing to have no/fewer children, look at the poor quality of men available us to breed from.

The impact of all the other stuff would be significantly reduced if men played their equal part in child rearing and the mental load. They don't, mostly, but it's still apparently women's fault for equally not wanting to succumb to domestic drudgery.