Reply to Neither AC wants kids. I can't help feeling like I failed.

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]They are not selfish to not want kids. It could be argued that it's more selfish TO have kids than not to. It's a difficult world to live in, especially at this point in history. Having kids is subjecting a new generation of people to the hardships of life. (I am saying this as someone who has 2 kids myself, always wanted to have kids, love my kids immeasurably but I'm the first to admit that me choosing to have kids was because I wanted them which is selfish).

I understand you are sad that you likely will not have grandchildren and won't get to see your kids as parents, which would be a joyous thing to experience I think. But it's not fair for you to be angry at them or accuse them of being selfish.[/quote]

I find these comments so surprising and I hear them often.  People today are better off than any other time in human history.  Obviously you know what a struggle life was in the 13th century when we had plagues and collapse of many civilizations.  Or during ww I or II or even the depression?  How can you call this a difficult world when history shows just the opposite?  Have we lost all sense of history? [b] I almost wonder if the LACK of hardship makes people unhappy because I hear this so often and it’s so objectively false[/b].[/quote]

This.  Life has never been easier.  [/quote]

The expectations for children all those centuries were very different. People often didn't name babies for a year because so many of them died. Children were working beside their parents in fields and factories at very early ages. They were not really nurtured or well educated among the majority of the populace. They were not cherished as they are today, and there was not an entire fetishization of motherhood/parenthood/childhood that comes with ridiculous costs of everything from onesies to childcare to school supplies and beyond.

And also, people didn't have a real choice about having children until a few generations ago - 50 years ago, give or take a few. Now they do, and they are choosing more and more commonly not to have them, or to limit the size of their families significantly. This is not a bad thing, because until recently childhood was much more nasty and brutish than loving and leisure filled. A great many people who had no burning desire to parent got stuck doing it because they had a burning desire to get their rocks off or take a load, and they were not good parents.

It's a different world, and thank goddesses we have choices. [/quote]

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