[osullivj]

The shift from child free adult to parent is similar in scale to adolescence. Can you remember being a pre-sexual child, all the confusion of teendom, and then sexual maturity. As a sexually mature adult, would you ever elect to revert to being a pre-sexual person?

That's the best analogy I can give to explain how parenthood changes you. Life is messier and more complex afterwards, just like sex, but immeasurably richer. And you develop parent-dar. It's like gaydar. Parenting changes you in a million tiny ways, and us parents can see that in others.

[Theory42]

I don't have kids; I really like this perspective, though. I don't happen to share it, but I can appreciate it.

It's obviously a necessary and good thing for people to have children if humanity is going to continue. However, one thing that isn't discussed much by Team Parents is the prospect of there being too much of a good thing. The population explosion over the last 150ish years is a clear trade between more people and less everything else in the natural world. At some point (now, anyone?), that trade is not worth making. It's an irresponsible trade. Does not promote the maturity of society, even if it matures the individual.

What say ye to this line of reasoning? I grant you that city-living and domestication is 'naturally' reigning things in as far as population growth, hence the article. I'm asserting that perhaps there is a kind of virtue in foregoing the wonderful self sacrificial experience known as being a parent, in that the childless are helping the general state of affairs.

[osullivj]

Perfectly sound line of reasoning. The obvious counter is to point out that many of the world's biggest economies require young productive folk paying taxes to support the elderly. That's a problem for developed economies with falling birth rates and low immigration. And the counter to that counter is to point at the economic model that bakes in the requirement for growth.

Remaining childfree avoids a lot of exhausting and messy complications. Just as remaining celibate avoids emotional entanglements and STDs, at the cost of loneliness. Historically, virtue has attached to celibacy in many religious traditions. Maybe a sufficiently strong and pervasive environmentalist worldview could impute virtue to the childfree. It is possible to change popular ethics in a decade or so: cf LGBTQ rights or attitudes to drink driving.

[AbrahamParangi]

This is a good analogy because parenthood is singular and profound. One of the few things for which is no replacement or equivalent experience.