There're random factors you can't control. Good example is post-partum depression. Every child birth is 20% chance; once happening, it can significantly change both partners.
Not sure why you're downvoted. I suppose you're not contributing too much to the conversation, and it seems a little sarcastic (or something), but i often feel not having kids is a forgotten option. My SO and I chose long ago not to have kids (independently, fwiw), and people often look at us like we have two heads (.. each, heh).
It's not at all a forgotten option, it's just not one that the majority choose to take. There's nothing wrong with deciding to have kids. We're not running out of people, but we're not over-crowded and population growth is slowing in many places. There are certain geographic areas with more dire situations, but the whole isn't looking bad.
As far as their comment in particular:
> So don't have kids, we're not running out of people after all.
This adds zero to the conversation. It's like saying "You might get hit by a bus if you try to cross the street, so don't do it at all".
In truth, deciding whether to have kids is a much more complicated process than that. There's no "So just do X" or "So don't do X" advice that is helpful or constructive.
I'm sorry that my comment didn't meet your standards of excellence, but in fact a few billion less people would certainly make it possible to raise the standard of living for the rest. Given that a few billion people live in squalor now, it seems like overage, don't you think?
I didn't downvote, but if I had, it wouldn't be for that reason. It would be because having kids or not having kids is something many people speak of cavalierly as if it is totally in our control and this is often not true. If birth control fails, there are places where abortion is hard to come by (including large parts of the U.S., from what I gather). These attitudes disproportionately negatively impact women.
Much of human sexual morality is rooted in the thorny issue that mother nature makes sex pleasurable in large part to get you to reproduce and efforts to enjoy sex without it leading to babies are often unsuccessful. So, we have a long human tradition of things like shotgun weddings.
If every comment you come across accounts for the full spectrum of human and geopolitical variability, they would stop being comments and start being novellas.
It is possible to leave comments that are not novellas and that also are not sweepingly dismissive of underlying reality. All birth control methods have failure rates. None of them promises 100% protection -- except celibacy (assuming no one gets raped), which most married couples are not keen to practice.
It doesn't, but it suggests that people should consider it far more than they do. Given how often marriages end as a direct or indirect result of children, you'd think it would come up more.
Not having kids is an extremely common option that's growing in popularity. It's also incompatible with the modern welfare state as currently structured.
> Not having kids is an extremely common option that's growing in popularity. It's also incompatible with the modern welfare state as currently structured.
I've wondered whether we might be seeing a new division of labor emerging: An increasing number of educated professionals elect to have few or none of the kids needed for the next generation of workers, while some lower-income people take up the slack by having lots of kids. This might actually be a sustainable social model, but it would require two things: (1) "Talent," however you choose to define that, needs to appear in sufficient numbers of children born to low-income parents and not just in children born to educated professionals --- my guess is that this is indeed the case; (2) crucially, society must be able to provide the infrastructure needed to raise children to productive citizenship, especially when some of these children are being raised by parents who don't personally have access to the necessary financial- and other resources --- and that's very much only a partially-solved problem.
The myth of unadopted babies/kids is pervasive and pretty inaccurate. Most babies and small children who are up for adoption have multiple families vying to bring them home already...
If you want to talk about adopting preteens/teens/special needs children then it's a different ball game, but that's not what people try to do.
Yes, I wasn't implying an age limit on adoption. However, I think there's almost always some amount of self-interest in having kids:
Me and my girlfriend despise babies (for now) and simply don't see ourselves as being responsible/mature enough to raise kids yet. We do entertain the idea though, now and then, and for us the main attractions of having kids seem to be: Something we made together, a "substitute" of each other to live for after one of us dies, and something to carry on our legacy, such as it is.
With adoption, these things can be fulfilled if the child is young enough, to be molded into our image, as it were.
That's not to say that love for an orphan, no matter how old, cannot happen. Of course there can be selfless adoptions, where you just want to make someone's life better without regard to yourselves.
I hope there is some self-interest in having kids! One thing that I hope to impart on my child is that martyrdom is a terrible go-to practice.
The goal I have with raising my child isn't to create a miniature version of myself, it's to raise an autonomous individual with a robust moral framework. As far as self-interest goes, sharing this experience with my partner is one of the things I look forward to most over the next few years.
That is still your legacy; if you succeed he or her will have grown up to be an autonomous individual with a robust moral framework, because of you. He/she will still be what you wanted him/her to be.
But what if the child's own will decides to become an evil overlord instead?
such a valid choice! We should have irreversible sterilization ceremonies for couples that want to decide at age 30 they wish to remain married without kids for the rest of their lives. The trouble with the choice now without sterilization is the option to have kids is always there and available. i.e. if u have a kid the domino falls in one direction. But if you choose not to have a kid the domino never falls. People will say "irreversible sterilization" sounds so permanment! But so is your first kid.
Honestly, i feel like there is a lot of sarcastic tones in these threads... so pardon my ignorance if i miss any obvious wit.
With that said, i've always liked the idea of reversible sterilization as a standard. It is of course a worrisome proposition to suggest we forcefully sterilize people.. which i'm not exactly saying. I'm simply saying, what an interesting world would it be if reproduction was never by accident, and always intended.