Comments on: Should we all have children ?

By: mandarine

mandarine — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 20:05:43 +0000

The people I know who grew up in large families all consider 3 as the minimum reasonable number of children. Those that are from more traditional catholic bourgeois background set their threshold at 4 or even 5.

I agree that there is a generational trend: my mother and father (and aunts and uncles) grew up in families with six children, while my 20 + cousins and I were only three siblings on average. Now the new generation considers either two kids or none as the right number. But I am still convinced that it is easier for someone who had only one sister and three cousins to decide not to have kids than for someone who had half a dozen siblings and two score cousins.

By: Dorothy W.

Dorothy W. — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 19:43:15 +0000

Hmmm … I know I read this before, and I’m surprised I didn’t comment. This doesn’t make much difference to your overall argument, but I do think that growing up in a large family doesn’t necessarily mean that the children think large families are normal and will want large families of their own. I am the oldest of 7 children, and so far none of us has begun a large family or has expressed an interest in a large family. I think this may show that larger cultural norms — it’s growing more and more acceptable not to have children or to have only one or two — have a big influence on our thought, and it’s not just our families that instill values in us. But I realize I’m only arguing from my own experience and have no statistics and so don’t really have a good argument!

By: mandarine

mandarine — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 18:02:35 +0000

Yes I did! “My personal reason was that having children is a neat way to (culturally) justify selfishness”.

FYI, Mandarine is a he (I borrowed my cat’s name).

By: Scott

Scott — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 15:47:01 +0000

Three cheers for Charlotte’s kid-loaning model.

Many of us who don’t have kids nonetheless like them. One aspect that Mandarine hinted at, but didn’t explore (and she might not have said this,
[….But if we have children, it’s OK if we just focus on our family, build a really cool house to keep them warm, and grow a really nice vegetable garden to feed them home-made ketchup….]

but I will) is that sometimes having kids is just a way of being selfish– People have houses, cars, everything larger than they have to– and then say that it’s for the kids. I also find that parents are committing themselves to a time-bind: they are so crunched that they need to hire a babysitter to have some free time to think.

I feel this way with my sister– I’d like to explain Peak Oil to her, but she is so crunched with 3 kids that finding the time to explain it, and then do Q&A isn’t there. “I’ll think about that when the oldest goes to high school”, she might joke. But it’s more serious than she might think.

But just to contradict myself, having 3-4 kids doesn’t mean no time to think. Peak Oil blogger Sharon Astyk has that many kids, and has more original ideas in a week than I have in a year. And to her (and many parents), taking time to craft a better world isn’t a distraction from parenting– it is parenting.

By: mandarine

mandarine — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 02:55:28 +0000

The tricky part of deciding to have children or not is probably to reach a definite understanding early enough with the person one is going to spend the rest of one’s life with. Things turned out all right for us, but I am quite sure our minds were still a little fuzzy when we married at 22.

By: Becky

Becky — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 00:25:04 +0000

Congratulations!

We are not having children. I made that decision fairly early in life and have never once regretted it. I am unable to see any negatives to the decision but there are countless positives. But the societal pressures were certainly there for a few years and it used to annoy me no end. Now, when asked, I just blithely say ‘I don’t like children’, and the last person to hear that response said ‘Good for you!’ (The not-liking of them doesn’t prevent me from realising that other people really do like them, thus my congratulations are genuine.)

By: mandarine

mandarine — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 00:31:30 +0000

I have just realized that the extended family model is just perfect to pass the cultural message “you don’t have to have children”. In the nuclear family model, all kids will think adults have to be parents, because that’s what they see around them; whereas in the extended family, they are possibly much more closely acquainted with an aunt and uncle who do not have children of their own.

By: Emily Barton

Emily Barton — Sat, 31 May 2008 23:43:16 +0000

Congratulations! Parents like you obviously SHOULD be having children. And by now you must know that I couldn’t agree more with you and your idea of the extended family all living and raising kids together as a standard model (I see it here now with the Amish, and I can’t see that it is anything other than good for the children). I also wish we lived in a society in which everyone was told “You don’t have to have children,” and no one ever questioned anyone’s decision not to do so. Like Charlotte, I’ve known quite a few people who love their children dearly but have told me that if they had it to do over again, they wouldn’t have one (one of whom said to me, “Good for you!” when I told her I’d decided not to have any).

By: mandarine

mandarine — Wed, 28 May 2008 15:03:16 +0000

Smithereens: I am OK with personal choices, as long as people can make the choices freely, regardless of the cultural norm.

Maria: #1 has known it for a long time. The hard part is telling him he doesn’t get to choose the baby’s name.

Courtney: thanks.

By: Courtney

Courtney — Wed, 28 May 2008 14:45:07 +0000

congratulations!