[fizzbatter]

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).

[gtaylor]

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.

[Aelinsaar]

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?

[Aelinsaar]

People don't like to question the basic assumptions they live with, such as, "Having children is a necessary part of a good and fulfilled life."

[Mz]

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.

[Aelinsaar]

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.

[Mz]

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.

[Aelinsaar]

I'm curious, if we take the failure rate of responsible protected sex, post-vasectomy sex, etc, for the planet...

... does that even start to contribute to replacing the existing population, or is it a statistical blip? Is this just a dead end you're trying to lead me down?

[DanielStraight]

No, people don't like solutions which ignore the problem.

Yes, by completely changing your plan for your life you can prevent certain problems, but that doesn't necessitate that you should make the change.

[Aelinsaar]

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.

[rayiner]

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.

[dctoedt]

> 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.

[Aelinsaar]

That's less "new", and more a re-emergence of feudal dynamics in child-rearing that probably never left as much as we'd like to pretend.

[spikej]

It's also the ending of Idiocracy (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/) :P