to be amazed at how many people are still having 4 or more children?

[JackShit]

Yikes! I'm going to get a new one ripped here, but this has been bugging me of late.

Our planet isn't in a particularly marvelous state. Overpopulation is a very real problem. We are responsible for the legacy we leave our children and surely part of loving them is to be concerned for their future quality of life on this planet.

I know there are a lot of people with larger families on MN and I need to understand why, in full knowledge of the facts, people continue to have so many children? Just read a thread on facebook where a woman was proudly stating she has 11! 11 ffs!

I don't go for the argument about some having only one or two so it cancels out and I also don't believe in replacing our ageing population problem with an even bigger one.

So what am I missing here? Do people just not really give a shit? Does biology take over?

I have 1 btw.

Pyjamasandwine - I'm talking from a more fundamental biological level than all the arguments about needing children to support society/pay taxes to keep pensioners going and so on. When you boil it down, we're biologically driven to have children to pass on our genetic material. That's a selfish act. Biologically you want to have numerous, reproductively healthy children to in turn pass on more of that genetic material to future generations. When it's your genes talking the people with a dozen kids are winners, the 1.8 average are also-rans while I'm a dead-end entirely. You lucked-out there DNA, sorry.

Im always amazed that families get the blame for filling up landfill with nappies, rather than the politicians not providing better waste disposal.

Ah yes, significant other. Thanks.

I had two children.
Then I lost one.
I wanted a third more than anything - and was fortunate to be able to do so.

We have 3 DCs. We may or may not have more of an impact on the planet than your family with its 1DC. Not one of the 5 of us has boarded a plane in the last 10 years. The kids have never flown and my OH and I have never flown longhaul. We didn't drive at all until we had DC and now we drive about 20 miles a week and walk everywhere else. Air travel is wrecking the world at a much faster rate than anything else and it worries me that so many people think nothing of flying to America or Australia once or twice a year or of flying on a weekly basis for work. I wouldn't ask them to justify themselves though. Do you and your OH and 1DC fly much OP?

having children is an inherently selfish act. How so?

Pyjama - because I don't think anyone chooses to have DC for the greater good of the general population. They do it because they want to. Arguments about supporting the ageing populations / economy etc. are rationalisations, that's not why anyone has DC. Just as they don't NOT have DC because of concerns about the global population. That's a rationalisation too, they don't have them for personal reasons (don't want them, can't afford them).

I don't disagree that global over-population is a problem. But the first step is reducing global poverty and increasing both contraception availability and free choices for women. It is pretty clear that as poor countries become more developed, the birth rate falls drastically. The more economic choices women have, the fewer children they have (statistically of course - there'll always be your cousin's next-door-neighbour's niece's friend who's got eleventh-odd DC).

^"The world's over-population and excess resource demand problem isn't caused by developed world people having 4+ children.
It's caused by fragmented health and social care systems in the developing world, which mean that to ensure security in your old age that you NEED to have many children; plus social expectations that women and men should both have many children to prove their social status."^

Nice try. These attempts to blame the poorer countries for western created problems always annoy me.

However many kids they are having in developing countries, it is not them on the whole who are eating into earth's resources. It is the western world, the rich world, the high consumption world. Go look at the stats.

If all of those kids were consuming at the rate we do here you might have a point (and the climate change effects would already have been horrific) but they are not and demonstrably not.

I have 2 and I won't be having anymore. I won't have anymore because I'm too old, I find pregnancy difficult, I find the toddler stage exhausting, I don't have a big enough house, it's too expensive. I could add environmental reasons to the list but I would be lying, it's not something that most families consider when planning families.

I very much doubt I'd have considered more than one, even with the shit about 'lonely onlies' I have to put up with.

How do you give enough individual attention to 6 though?

sailor we don't fly. I am 40 and have flown once in my life. Very much in agreement with you over the impact of air travel.

I think thats an unfair statement purple. Due to a death im an only child. My parents always asked if i wanted a sibling but i said no.
I lost a parent not long ago yes it would have been nice to have had people who understood for support but who to say that that would have been my imaginary sibling?
As it happens i had my friends who supported me more than anyone could.
My ex and his sister detest ( even that isnt a strong enough word) each other.
They can't even be in the same room as each other.
Not all siblings love and support each other.

I guess it's a bit simplistic: you need to look more closely at what is meant by overpopulation and what resources are being overused where at a local level. And they can be managed at a local level. But the global climate change problems are caused by the west.

My grandparents were from families of 6. They had 5 DC, 3 grandchildren and 3 great-grandchildren with no prospect of more. We are doing our bit for population control

One of the reasons the planet can't support it's population is because the lifestyles of people in countries like UK, USA, western Europe is raping the planet. And all of those countries actually have either small population growth or slight decline.

People are not the problem, the way we currently live IS. People that have only one child are not actually doing dramatically more damage than a person who has 4. Especially if both families own car, heat a home, buy foreign food and use buy/replace cellphones. In fact smaller families often have more disposable income !!

I know a family with 5 children. They live in rural Brazil. They have their own pigs and chickens. They grow and eat all their own food and their car runs on alcohol. They clean with vinegar and lemon juice, use washable nappies and what food they do buy is all locally produced. Waste food goes into the pigs and chickens. They don't live like this because they're environmentally conscious, it's because there is no other way. Their carbon footprint is probably far smaller than yours.
What will not help is pointing fingers of blame at how many people exist within a particular family. If you're concerned about the planet be a big advocate for change and be positive by encouraging others to do the same.

I am pregnant with dc6.

I didnt take into account population size when deciding I just didn't.

I respect your opinion but it's the same as any other, just yours.

I don't get why people own cars in towns and cities (we don't we use public transport).

I don't get why people use disposable nappies.

I don't get why people with perfectly good gardens don't use them to grow food but then complain about how much they spend on food and about "food miles" and the like.

You and your one child probably fall into one of the groups above!

I could go on but at the risk of offending everyone on mumsnet I wont.

I think it's one of those things, we all have our issues and we all have our beliefs but it reality who knows who is right!

And on the subject of time and attention, I really think that's more about organisation and willing.

I have children yet. DH and I in an ideal world would like to have three.

My reasoning is that I have a lot of friends who are 1 of 4 children (Catholic school!) and they had ready made friends as children, there's always at least 1 sibling you get along with, and they help each other as adults and can share the burden of ageing parents. However, you can't fit 4 children in the back of 1 car, so we've decided on 3 as being the ideal number.

I'm Italian so I don't feel too guilty as my country's birth rate is dwindling and I feel it evens out.

Aubrianna wrong I'm afraid.

I cloth nappied DD
I grow my own veg
I don't have a car

I know a couple of families with 6 children and all children seem to get plenty of attention. No idea how this can be the case with the Radfords and their brood of 18 though.

Sounds like my MIL - "we had two and think two is enough for anybody". I so love the 'This is what we choose and I can't understand why anybody would do otherwise' brigade. It's so refreshingly open minded

It's not that many. According to ONS in 2012 only 1 in 7 families had three or more dependent children. However, this figure is higher than in three quarters of European countries.

One of my relatives had 15 children. She started at 16, finished in her mid-40s and had a baby every two years for 30 years.

She is now in her mid 60s. The fallout from it all is pretty tragic. Very few of her now adult children will speak to her, and there is an enormous amount of anger towards her, particularly from her sons. She has become a hermit and refuses to speak to anyone, even my grandmother who she loved.

Her eldest daughter now thinks that her mother had some sort of undiagnosed psychological disorder because as soon as a child reached two years of age, she seemed to lose interest and just wanted another baby -- as though they were dolls.

After the first five children, the rest just grew up almost feral because there was always a baby and a toddler in the house to take all the attention. I remember finding one of her children outside my gym one day; he was only about four or five, on his own, and the gym was about two and a half miles away from where she lived.

I really believe that unless you live on a farm or in some huge and safe space with a family business or something that can provide for them all and teach them key skills, it really isn't fair on your children to have such a big family.

The worst thing that we as individuals are ever likely to do to the planet is have children. A first world child will contribute in a far bigger way to global warming than a developing world child (or an animal, which some poster compared her children with). If you care about the future of the planet and the people who live on it, the best thing you can do is to minimise the size of your family.
Even if you know loads of people who have one or no children - you having lots of children does contribute to global warming and delivers the message made very clear on this thread: I don't give a toss.

I think these days that families with more than 3 kids are split into two categories.

Chavvy irresponsible benefit claiming women who seemingly have no control over family planning and pop out one screaming brat after another

Middle class lentil weavers

I can say that because I'm on DC4

I pay for my organic food and heuristic playgroups with my income support. Innit.