DH wants to have only one child because of the environment

[Anonymous]

Your children will read this thread one day and wonder how you could be so selfish. Your desire for an extra baby was deemed more important than their desire for an habitable world. I really can't believe how many of you are so dismissive of this idea. You must care nothing about what will happen to your children after you die and what type of world they will actually live in. Nothing matters as much as your personal enjoyment of them while you are living.

[Anonymous]

The scarcest resource will always be human ingenuity. Have as many kids as you can love and provide for. Everything else will work out fine.

[Anonymous]

Wanting one kid for personal preference, environmental concerns, and a host of other reasons is a totally valid choice.

Is the issue that you think his reasoning is dumb, or that you just want another kid no matter what?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Your children will read this thread one day and wonder how you could be so selfish. Your desire for an extra baby was deemed more important than their desire for an habitable world. I really can't believe how many of you are so dismissive of this idea. You must care nothing about what will happen to your children after you die and what type of world they will actually live in. Nothing matters as much as your personal enjoyment of them while you are living.

Have you ever flown on an airplane? If so the same thing could be said of you. That your desire for a vacation meant more to you than your desire for a habitable world.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:That's one of the reasons DH and I only had one. We adopted a second. Not because we wanted two, but she was a member of extended family who needed an immediate family.

You post over and over about how you didn't want this child. Do you make her feel unwanted?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I hope DH also supports fiscally conservative policies. Stop supporting government programs that extend life or feed people. We'll all die faste, and won't need 3.5 people for every person on welfare. Otherwise, he's full of crap.

OMFG. Taking care of people who exist on this earth and are suffering =/= creating additional life that will expedite suffering. It's is not ethically inconsistent at all to believe we should care for the humans who are here while considering creating fewer humans in the future to protect those humans that will exist.

Some people believe euthanasia is more compassionate than extending life depending on the quality of life. Of course the debate will be who defines the quality.

Also irresponsible to continually INCREASE the financial burden children will have to carry before they are born. Taxes are impersonal and do not make people more compassionate or charitable. At some point they begin to have the opposite effects. Personal interactions lead to improved relationships and desire to help one another.

bottom line - if you have less workers (babies), then you need to find ways to minimize dependence on them.

[Anonymous]

For the persons up thread touting China's one child policy, consider the impact it has had:

http://fortune.com/2015/11/02/china-one-child-policy/

Let me be clear, if op and her dh don't want kids or later decide to have them, I don't care. However, I think having less children just for the sake of the environment is myopic without considering changes to things like economic plans.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Just make sure all extra children become environmental engineers or something.

I AM an environmental engineer and still wouldn't base my reproducing decisions off of this estimate.

[Anonymous]

That's cool. I chose to have three and feel confident that they will help our economy sustain itself.

It all balances out I suppose.

[Anonymous]

Yes! Less liberals around in the next generation. Wish I could be around for that. Heavens, what will become of NPR?

[Anonymous]

Perhaps people who will raise children who care about the environment should have more kids than those who abuse the environment?

[Anonymous]

Why is the wife's "want" the ultimate say? Everyone here seems to completely discount the husband's opinion--regardless of reasoning--which isn't fair. It takes two to make a baby. If this was a female saying she didn't want more than one kid and the husband was griping about it, nobody would be on her ass. The DCUM double standard is astounding.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:For the persons up thread touting China's one child policy, consider the impact it has had:

http://fortune.com/2015/11/02/china-one-child-policy/

Let me be clear, if op and her dh don't want kids or later decide to have them, I don't care. However, I think having less children just for the sake of the environment is myopic without considering changes to things like economic plans.

Did you even read this article? It was clearly written with a slant against China's one child policy, but doesn't make any kind of an argument that China has suffered economically from the one child policy. The only thing it says about economics is that there are economic realities of China that make people choose not to have a second child - such as expensive child care, higher ed for children, etc. China's economy is one of the strongest emerging economies.

I'll take myopic over illiterate.

[Anonymous]

If he really cared, you wouldn't have any children.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It's a factor for people, I have heard more than one parent say they are worried for the world their adult children and grandchildren will have to have. Not so much that it will be hotter, but that there could be widespread migrants, war, food/water insecurity and a breakdown in the rule of law due to climate change.

+1. I feel terrible for the kids I have. I can't imagine that they will grow old happily. I look at the old people in pictures of refugees and think that will probably be America in another 50-150 years. Maybe they'll manage to eek by before it gets awful, but probably not my grandchildren. It's so sad.

You need a stronger SSRI. Seriously, I'm not being an asshole.

I'm the poster you responded to. I'm not an anti-depressant and I don't need one. I'm not fixated on this, or moping around about it -- if you knew me, you'd know I am actually a very cheerful person and have a very hopeful and trusting outlook.

But it's a cold, hard fact that the climate is changing. Every time there are awful hurricanes and tornados, we all feel lucky not to have been hit. Guess what -- they will be more common. Remember the Dust Bowl of the 1930s? Well, that's probably coming back too. We all complain about how food prices go up a tinge when there's a little bitty drought. Get ready for not just increased prices, but shortages. Did you read the article about how a big part of the Middle East will be uninhabitable in the next 50 years or so? Where do you think these people are going to go? What about all the people in low-lying areas that will be underwater in the next 100 years? And let's not even think about all that lovely anthrax and other crap that is getthing released back into the environment (along with massive amounts of methane) as the permafrost melts.

Americans feel like just because things have been really good around here for as long as any of us remember, that it will have to continue that way. As they say in the investment world, past performance does not predict future performance...

I know 2 people that are top of the line climate researchers at top research facilities, and they both say that the only way not to fall into a deep depression about it is just not to think about it too much.

I do encourage my kids to be scientists and engineers. Some one has better be working double-time on a Star Trek style solution for this whole damn thing, or our grand-children are pretty much screwed. That's not depression. That's reality. And I feel badly that this is the crap world we're giving our kids. I can remember back in the '80's, having a mock debate in school about limiting CFCs in aerosol cans to try to prevent holes in the ozone layer and what we were calling the greenhouse effect back then. We were all mucking around talking about hairspray while the polar ice caps were melting.