Why is a life without kids still not promoted as a route to happiness?

[OptimismvsRealism]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/sep/15/parents-are-anxious-lonely-overwhelmingly-stressed-and-their-crisis-affects-everyone

Parenthood looks awful. Certainly worse than it needs to be in modern times but fundamentally wretched in many ways. An abandonment of the self.

Shouldn't we be telling young people not to have kids unless they really want to? Like we'd advise with anything so hard.

Where it is coming from in my case is neither here nor there. This is a post about norms and expectations that are placed on us, and what is being promoted. There is no answer to what we get in life, and whether it makes us happy. As for the poster who said that not having children would make her unhappy, well, since she's had them, she knows and loves them, and she's talking from the point of view of knowing and loving them If she hadn't had them, and known and loved them, she wouldn't feel the same way.

Still, I'm amazed you're unaware of the pressure for coupledom.

So i take it those are the professions you will be encouraging your kids into.

So i take it those are the professions you will be encouraging your kids into.

Ideally our children find jobs that suit them best, so no parent should 'encourage their children into" the specific professions. And it doesn't really matter WHO drives our buses, who flies our planes etc - as long as someone does.

Fair comment, Jennifer 😁

As an aside I think there is some fairly robust evidence that refuse collectors have a disproportionately high quality of life. It is active wirk, outside, companionable, well paid and v. family friendly hours.

Yes, it is a bit selfish if you know you don't have the resources to care for a child to bring them into the world. Mind you, things happen. Most of us are only a few pay checks away from poverty. There's no need for any child in the UK to be in poverty, we should have a good enough safety net to prevent that, and that's a governmental failing as much as a parental one.

I completely agree and I have nothing but compassion for those struggling to keep a roof over their children's heads.

We need to end the two child benefit cap and our dependence on foodbanks. We're a very rich and advanced country and our public services are in a disastrous state.

So i take it those are the professions you will be encouraging your kids into

My DC are not of working age yet, so can’t give you their future profession sorry. However, someone’s DC will definitely be helping you, and I, get up from your chair/ help bathe you/ take you to the docs when you are older, so best we encourage procreation, because if the birth rate falls off, we’ll all be living a lot shorter lives.

Still polishing that halo, eh?

No need, as it’s now so shiny I can admire myself in it.

My FIL was a binman, later drove a bin lorry, now retired. One hopes conditions have improved, but he’s left with a legacy of ongoing agonising pain from heavy work — not even just hefting metal bins in the days before wheelie bins, but later on, driving heavy lorries before four wheel drive became the norm. And based on how poor DH’s childhood was, it certainly wasn’t well-paid then.

For the good of those future people or for our own good? If we live shorter lives maybe that is less nice for us yes but I thought we should be self sacrificial for future generations? With AI, Climate Change etc etc there is a lot to consider before having a child.

Wow this thread has suddenly got a bit weirdly polarised hasn't it? It's kept me entertained on a long car journey though.

I always wanted children but couldn't sadly. I always recognised I wanted to for almost entirely self centred reasons though, no point pretending it's a saintly thing to do. There was also a lot of social conditioning behind it, but I've come to realise that with the benefit of distance. Still a massive gap in my life but it's taught me a lot.

My understanding of the original post in the thread was that it's a shame there is no validation of a life without children. That would massively help a lot of people including people like me who feel marginalised - either hated (as is clear from many of the later posts by mothers on this thread) for having - it's assumed - chosen a life where I am apparently entirely carefree so to no concern for anyone other than myself (and at a stretch my husband since I have one) or pitied for what I can't have and "not understanding what love really is" etc etc. Whichever it is, I'm second class.
Instead, I'd love to be respected for my life and see a normal depiction of it reflected back at me in culture and society. One way to normalise something is often to promote it more than you normally would. No one should really need to feel threatened by that.

Normalising not having children would stop some people having children where they shouldn't. For the rest of us, it'd just make us feel a whole lot better and accepted. Everyone else could crack on and have all the children they want.

Really appreciate the posts by the more level headed and empathetic parents on here, as well as those who don't have kids for whatever reasons and have articulated their reality.

Great post @BoofyBoo. Normalizing life without children would help those childless not by choice too. Stop them being seen as objects of pity.

As far as social conditioning goes I believe we are also conditioned to believe we will regret not having children. Possible future regret is often trotted out as a reason to have them.

Yes, it always reminds me of that bit in one of the Narnia books (The Magician’s Nephew, I think?) where two children go to another world via magic rings and come across a bell in a mysterious hall full of enchanted people with a message that says something like ‘Strike the bell, adventurous stranger/Ring the bell and bide the danger/Or wonder till it drives you mad/ What would have followed if you had.’

And one of the children (the girl) ‘Well, that’s silly, of course we’re not going to ring it and invite danger’ and the boy says, ‘But we’ll be driven mad by wondering if we don’t — we have to!’ (And holds the girl’s hands back and rings it and wakes up Evil Jadis…)

Possible future regret is a weird one, but I agree it’s become oddly culturally central, though for women only, not for men. Which does suggest that if women didn’t have the hard and fast cut off point of menopause, and could put having children on the long finger without a ‘deadline’, many more might just continue to say ‘Maybe, sometime — not that bothered now’…?

Well said, @OutsideLookingOut

We need to suffer some short term pain for the good of the planet and other species. It's not just all about humans.

Usually the theory is that you regret the things you don’t do more than the things you do. But, as a lot of us concluded, that isn’t so much the case with having children when it’s an irreversible decision with potentially awful consequences for you and others if you get it wrong.

I don’t think one is the route to happiness and the other is not. The only thing I notice when discussing the pros and cons of having children is that people often talk about children as if they are permanently babies and toddlers. That phase is intense but it goes very quickly. The reality is much more about the relationships you form with your children all the way through into their adulthood and much less about nappies and childcare.

Bye then 👋

Ahh bless, you are very innocent or very dense.

Neither dense nor innocent.. I wish I was innocent lol.

Yessss

This.Such a good comment, non judgmental and insightful.

A nice comment but not going to happen. Birth rates are plummeting. Whenever women have education and choice they plummet. For capitalism to thrive you need people and for the longest time women were fed the line that marriage and children would make them happy and to be single or childless was the saddest thing ever. Without this indoctrination society as we know it, would collapse. There will be people who want children but it becomes ever harder to have them too; financially etc so it exacerbates the issue and the last thing those in power will want to do is to promote being child free.

My theory: Ideally it would be good for the population to reduce gradually to a more sustainable fraction of the predicted max global population, but in tandem, for medical research to produce vastly extended healthy (productive and potentially reproductive) lifespans sort of at the right moment after we all stop having replacement levels of children (and when the population is low enough). In such a future, societies would effectively be reliant on most people not wanting many/any children for things to tick along nicely. But I think maybe without the pressure of a "biological clock" and impending infirmity and death, people would be (even more) content to delay having children (or not have children at all which is often the same thing).

It would be quite shit for the last generation(s) to grow old and infirm whilst the population is in descent, but ever after would be great and potentially solve a lot of the world's problems.

I say this as someone with 3 children who I very much chose to have!