I think he/she means, Those who feel the same way would not contribute to the gene pool and hence eventually only those who want to have kids will remain, He/She of course makes the assumption that there is a Genotype or Phenotype to select for in the first place.
So what will be selected for is intelligent people who explicitly value having children and people who are unable to follow the instructions on the back of the contraception packaging.
There's no "reverse natural selection", the same as there's no "reverse evolution." If what you say is true (and I'm not certain that it is) then being intelligent and career driven is not a desirable trait for natural selection's purposes, and natural selection is working as expected.
There is no such thing as "reverse" natural selection. It's just that intelligence and being career driven are not a favorable trait for natural selection. It's working just fine.
Its time for humanity to realize that genes are no longer the only replicator driving our evolution.
Having evolved consciousness, we now have the ability to spread ideas, inventions, values, etc. -- memes if you will. This is why humanity has beat all other species, and what drives progress on a societal scale. Memes evolve much faster than genes.
The intelligent career driven people are busy replicating memes -- inventions, discoveries, institutions, influence, etc. The best memes survive and evolve. Is it better for humanity to discover penicillin or preserve a single bloodline?
Not zero: It is effort to argue with people that try to convince you to have children. And if they're e.g. family it's not always possible to avoid them.
These are all things that to varying degrees (and varying by locale) run contrary to social expectations and will be met with external pressure. I still don't see anyone writing up the grandiose titles above with a straight face.
I think the point of the article is that, while it should be achievable with 0 effort, in practice it is not. They are constantly having to justify themselves to others, which does take effort.
No, I think you just too used to it that you don't see it.
People judge you and you judge every other person on the planet based on every action they made, making and will make in their life.
There is a massive cultural pressure on women in America (and in many countries) to have children. Its in the movies, magazines, and comes up amazingly often in casual conversations. Regardless of what people say, it also comes with a social stigma in different cases.
The point of this type of attention is to highlight the validity of making this choice in the hope that it might reduce the cultural pressure. I'm sure many men don't care, since the pressure is generally placed on women.
As an almost 30 with my s/o, her parents my parents asking the same, and my male friends who are 30 or over and dating getting fuzzed about kids on their 4th date I can also attest to that.
While women have a cultural and physicall biological clock that ticks men aren't really in the clear.
Society needs procreation to survive and women still haven't mastered asexual reproduction.
It's funny how often it's brought up even before marriage.
Also, men have a huge legal disincentive to have kids anymore. If the relationship doesn't work out, you're on the hook for ~18 years of child support payments, and that whole system is designed to make men out to be nothing but a paycheck.
> It's funny how often it's brought up even before marriage.
What do you mean by this? Do you mean that the topic of children should not be brought up before marriage between two people in a relationship? Or do you mean that the topic gets brought up by family members before you're married?
I mean how often the subject is brought up by friends and family before marriage is. It's more often I get asked about kids than "when are you going to pop the question?"
Within a relationship, though, discussing kids and such are definitely something that should be done well before marriage.
On that I some what agree, men that pay child support should get joint custody / visitation rights unless there is risk of harm to the child, it's pretty bleak that men are still forced to pay child support and the mother can claim that they have no rights to ever see the child.
I also believe that child support should be for the child, the mother should not be able to use it for anything which isn't directly related to childcare, and it should be in it's base a flat amount based on living costs rather then a percentage of your income (unless you willingly want to pay more).
That said men have very easy way to avoid children and that's to use a condom or to pick a partner who does not want them, if you are both willingly make one or take on the decision to keep it own up to it the child should not suffer because of that.
Forcing women to have an abortion will never happen, forcing them to give the child up for adoption will never happen, men and women are not identical and so will never be truly equal in every regard, it's not like women can force sperm out of you without assault or rape.
And if there's some extreme case when fraud has actually been committed e.g. she intentionally sabotaged contraception or went "Satisfaction" on you taken your sperm while you were unconscious (which is technically rape) you should be able to sue for a weaver.
> That said men have very easy way to avoid children and that's to use a condom or to pick a partner who does not want them
That's not nearly as easy as it sounds, as condoms are not 100% effective and the partner may not be truthful when they say they don't want children. Women hold all of the power in these situations, as if contraception should fail they have the opportunity to abort or give the child up for adoption, meaning they can change their mind at any point. Men don't have such "second chance" options, as they are completely beholden to the woman's choice from conception on.
In an ideal and fair system, a man should be given adequate opportunity to declare their intent not to support the child, after which the woman will then have the opportunity to abort or put the child up for adoption, or know that if they keep the child then they will be raising it alone or with a different partner.
Life isn't fair, this will not ever be possible biology and modern values make it so.
You have other options, get a vasectomy or RISUG, use a condom and wait for the male contraceptive pill to come to market if you still some how manage to reproduce then you'll be the unluckiest person on the planet.
You can't force a woman to give up a child anymore than you can force her to bare one, most things in life have some risk associated with them,so does sex.
The problem is that there won't be a system that will allow for men to say "I don't want it" which won't be exploited, and children suffer, it suck yes, but we should rather focus on ensuring that both parents will have fair access to the child and act in it's best interests.
BTW if the woman gets another partner who becomes the legal parent of the child then you are in the clear for child support in most cases.
> The problem is that there won't be a system that will allow for men to say "I don't want it" which won't be exploited, and children suffer
Exploitability holds less weight to me than legal fairness. "Think of the children" is more often than not used to justify facilitating unfair actions, in my view.
Asking potential partners if they want to have children is a normal part of dating, and not at all the same as a pestering relative asking "when, when, when?"
(I am over 30, single and dating, and I expect it to come up naturally after you've spent enough time talking. Fourth date sounds reasonable.)
I'm not saying it shouldn't I'm just saying there isn't some magical barrier that protects men against pressure to have children.
Both men and women have a biological clock, women start to produce less eggs and those that are produced are of lesser quality, same thing happens with sperm.
There is direct correlation between health problems, IQ and various other factors to the age of both parents not just the woman.
At least as far as Europe goes from my personal experience having kids trumps marriage here, you'll see far more unmarried couples in a long term committed relationship (2-3+ years) with kids that are not married than in the US.
Is that pressure illegitimate? People "opting out" of having kids aren't opting out of social instruments that presuppose other peoples' investment into raising kids. Not just the obvious stuff like Social Security, either. Facebook stock would be worth a lot less if every tweenager that will ever live had already been born.
The only unfortunate part is that the pressure falls disproportionately on women.
I think it falls on men and women differently. Women have a clock with regards to children, so it is more visible like that. Men are definitely pressured to be successful so they can provide for the presumptive family.
imo, yes. saying there are "social instruments" just adds another ring around the kernel.
more economically developed countries tend to have lower birth rates. could be causal?
funny this was posted around thanksgiving when many people in the united states -- both male and female, albeit in different forms and degrees -- will be feeling it.
If it's causal, it's a problem with the system of economic development, because outside of Logan's Run, economically developed countries need to replace their populations in order to fund retirements --- not to mention drug discovery, ever-increasing Internet bandwidth, and new PS4 games.
Pretty much the whole of western civilization is organized around and dependent on families having kids.
We're discovering fewer, but not none. For instance, there are forms of leukemia that we have almost cured in the last 15 years. HIV seems like another good example.
HIV is the other good example. I'm pushing back against your argument that we need to make more people or we'll stop finding teh drugs. We were far better at finding them back when we had less than half the current population.
Do you really think there's a correlation between population and drug discovery effectiveness? I know part of the hypothesis here is that we generate huge amounts of data and not enough analysis, but analysis parallelizes too, right?
No, I don't think there's any correlation. I'm poking a hole in a tangential part of your argument, in the finest tradition of message board pedantry. We used to search for drugs differently, it was about 80x more effective, and therefore we could make way fewer people and still come out ahead if we just switched back.
I admit that the drug discovery thing was unnecessary filigree for an argument that could have rested with "we need more children so that old people don't end up starving to death".
You're asking him to "grow a thicker skin" about close relatives bickering him (and the related social pressure), when you can't even hold from expressing your annoyance about mere ARTICLES that you don't have to read and can simply skip.
Did you not read the article? The issues described here were one anecdote about one woman fighting to be allowed to have her tubes tied at 30 and another talking about the various cultural pressures involved by being a childless woman in Iran. It's obviously more systemic than someone's needling mother, and the fact that systemic pressure exists is interesting enough to write articles on.
I used to be avowed "childfree" from age 19 through 30, irrationally fearful of losing my time and my "freedom" to parenthood.
In hindsight, I was an insufferable fool. What people like the former me fail to realize is that burning your health and your years on the hedonic treadmill is its own kind of prison, and arguably far less "free" than choosing parenthood.
I know that's not exactly what you wrote, but if you don't mind clarifying... Do you think these women are also being irrational and possibly insufferable fools?
I don't know them, I can only speak for me. But I do consider my former self a pretty typical member of the "childfree" community. So I don't consider it too far a stretch to label the typical person with the associated mindset in terms that I see myself.
To RIMR's point above, I'm sure there are plenty who disavow children for reasons other than going racing on the hedonic treadmill.
We only really know the answer to that after the fact. Even then, we only really know they aren't if they accidentally conceive and still regret it.
It's not uncommon to know someone who was childfree for years and years, only do a complete reversal when they have children late in life.
That said, it's one of those topics of conversation where I might just say (to myself), "I hope you're right." To them I'd say, "oh, cool" and drop it. It's really nobody else's business.
Even if there are people making an irrational and foolish choice to remain childless (and I'm sure there are), there are certainly more people making an irrational and foolish choice to have a child. People just don't seem as comfortable calling out the later.
Or sometimes it wasn't a choice at all (/s), or rather the choice was disguised as the choice of whether or not to have safe sex when they weren't thinking of having children.
>burning your health and your years on the hedonic treadmill
Being childfree doesn't mean you have to be self-destructive. Maybe you were self-destructive, and maybe you wouldn't have been if you had kids, but that's you. It doesn't mean that it isn't possible to have a healthy, productive, child-free life; it only means that it didn't work for you.
I can't say that parenthood has more "freedom" since I am not a parent, but I do agree with your assertion that the vocally childfree types tend to be the type who favor the maximization of various treadmills.
You can tell by the reasons they give: want more time for job, want more money for travel, want more X for Y, and a kid would subtract a ton from X and therefore ruin the desired end, Y. I'm sure they're right by their standards of the moment in most of these equations, but given the pedestrian X's and Y's which they usually mention, I assume that they do not take "meaningfulness" or "fulfillment" into their calculus. It's shortsighted, but I can't blame them too much, since it's easy to forget to be human.
I also assume they don't understand the re-prioritization that occurs when people have children. I don't know first hand, but I've heard enough people squawk about parenthood to know that it reorganized their existence drastically.
It seems like parenthood is a fundamental human experience. I suppose that people can reject it, but I'm not convinced it's much different than people who reject romantic interaction and choose celibacy for essentially the same stated reasons. A valid life choice that we should accept fully, to be sure-- but a product of our fiercely competitive time rather than Platonically apriori, I think.
>but given the pedestrian X's and Y's which they usually mention, I assume that they do not take "meaningfulness" or "fulfillment" into their calculus.
OTOH, why "meaningfulness" and "fulfillment" are related to parenthood? The latter is probably quite the opposite, the all too natural reproduction step that any animal can do.
Wasn't Mozart's, Newton's, Turing's, etc life "meaningful" because? (Or Jesus', if one's included to that kind of thing).
>I also assume they don't understand the re-prioritization that occurs when people have children. I don't know first hand, but I've heard enough people squawk about parenthood to know that it reorganized their existence drastically.
It's also that later "remorse" about parenthood makes you considered a monster -- so most people would spin the experience as something amazing for that reason too.
But in practice if one counts how many sad family stories with bad parenting this "new priorities" thing is not always true.
> It's also that later "remorse" about parenthood makes you considered a monster -- so most people would spin the experience as something amazing for that reason too.
"Remorse" about parenthood is more like "remorse" about having bought a Ferrari. People might curse the maintenance and expense, but push come to shove, few would actually give it back.
Sure, it's a living thing that you made, and it's cute and everything.
With "remorse" I wasn't going for the "I want to give it back" scenario, but the "Hmm, this is great, but it isn't the all roses profound experience people tout it to be. Heck it isn't even the best thing to have ever happened to me, actually I liked life with my wife before more.".
If you are Mozart, Newton, Turing, or Jesus, you have a deck of "get out of parenthood debates on message boards free" cards, and as your attorney in this matter, I advise you to start using them.
My point wasn't that you have to "succeed" on the Mozart/Newton scale to be meaningful, but that being a parent is not a prerequisite for having a meaningful life.
I just used the examples that would make it easier for all to agree -- from them, it's all about what one considers a meaningful achievements.
Some people could not care less for either Jesus or Mozart, but could see that e.g. building a business or being a scientist or whatever can be meaningful too.
Can you go into more detail, what do you mean hedonic treadmill? I'm 30 and I've never felt like having kids. I just, idk, I just don't look at kids and go "yeah that seems like a fantastic idea".
I'm not sure you're the "childfree" demographic, actually-- they tend to mention it to everyone they encounter surreptitiously, as though they are anti-reproduction rather than reproduction-apathetic. That's just my experience with them, though.
Jeez, I've found the key is to make sure if a conversation steers toward it steer away, because when people have found out they find every excuse to show me pictures of how cute their kids are etc so they can say "see, now don't you want kids?".
I think his point was, that you can only go so far pleasing yourself. Eventually you want others to experience life's pleasures, having fulfilled yourself.
To be clear, there are other ways to solve that problem than raising children. Raising children just happens to be one of the more straightforward ways off the treadmill.
And, equally obviously, I hope, it's pretty easy to stay on the treadmill even after you have kids, which is a trap worth knowing about and avoiding. It took me a bunch of years to figure that out (we had our first when I was 22).
In my, to be fair limited, experience I haven't seen any of what you've described. My peers and I aren't avoiding children because of some fear of investment, but rather a stark understanding of how non-trivial child rearing is. We've watched our, generally well educated and well meaning, parents do a number on us and don't feel confident bringing in spawn to inflict the same, or new, mistakes on. Watching how much better my parents', and others in their generation, lives have gotten now that the kids are out of the house, I can't really say envy or desire their experience over the past 25 years in the slightest.
The problem with that if everyone will act this way, the world or at least the western world will die out within a couple of generation.
Europe is already beyond the point of no-return excluding immigration.
It's a bit of a shitty place we put ourselves in and I'm just as selfish as you to be fair.
I come home from work why would the hell would i want to change diapers instead of going to the gym, playing some games, or doing any other activity.
That said if i think about it I would've been much rather be 40 when the kids move out, then what now would be 50+, give it a couple of more years and it will be 60+.
Our parents at least had for the most part the bright idea and had kids in their early 20's now they can have their fun and laugh at us when we'll be still changing diapers at the age they sent us off to college and went on their around the world trip.
My kids are in high school, and my oldest is applying to college soon, and while I feel a lot of relief that I don't have any diaper changing in my immediate future (unlike a lot of my male friends around my age who do), the "getting my freedom back now that the kids are moving out" thing is bittersweet, and maybe even a little more bitter than sweet.
I kind of wish I had, like, years 6-12 again; I'd trade another 6 years of not being able to go out absolutely any time I want to for that. I'd have to think about it but I might even trade a few years of that for a couple more teenage years.
Maybe I'll feel differently once I "have my freedom back". :P
Worth remembering: the diaper changing thing is over in the blink of an eye (it doesn't feel like that at the time, but you will look back and be amazed at how quickly it shot by), and by the time your kids are teenagers they're pretty low-maintenance --- at least in terms of being able to go out drinking when you want to.
Something I think pretty much every parent eventually realizes is that no matter how carefully you plan and execute your job of child-rearing, you're going to do some kind of number on your kids.
Not knowing exactly how to raise kids "correctly" is not a very good reason to avoid raising kids.
On the other hand, feeling no calling whatsoever to raise kids, and/or not being in a stable relationship with a partner to share the burden, are pretty decent reasons not to have kids right this minute.
I agree with you only in my case I was 35. Now, I'm in my early 40s with 3 kids, one as young as 2. I wish I had my kids when I was younger because who knows how many healthy years I'll have to spend with them. I think often how I'll be in my 70's when my 2 year old is 30.
If people want to terminate their gene line which traces back to the genesis of life on this planet, I don't see why anyone should stop them or try to convince them otherwise. The entire point of a liberal society is to accept that what life is right for us is not the same as what life is right for another person.
Not having children actually does effects you, our whole system is built on the fact that we'll produce new generations which will be larger and produce more capital to support us.
So if people deciding enmasse not to have children at the appropriate age (this includes me btw) they are screwing things up for everyone.
Also if we all were polite and politically correct we would still be living in the dark ages, it was impolite to say the least to criticize the church, it was impolite to talk about ending slavery, integration, human rights, women's rights, gay rights and every other social movement that made our society what it is today.
Social changes can only be created when people act radically in direct opposition to the norms of society.
As it stands, there's the baby boomers waging war against their offspring by bleeding to death the societies they live in for their own benefit.
That notion of "new generations [are required] to support us" can go die in a fire. (was that sufficiently impolite to prevent living in the dark ages?)
>If people want to terminate their gene line which traces back to the genesis of life on this planet
MY gene line traces back all the way to when I was born, and no further. My family's gene line (the one that traces back to the first living cell) is being carried forward through other people (cousins, etc.). If I really want MY genes carried on, I'll go donate sperm...
Some of us don't romanticize the idea of having genetically-related children. My wife and I both have mothers who were adopted, so we have always felt that IF we decided to have a child, we would adopt, despite being fertile, simply because it would be better to give an orphan parents than to create another human life. Our mothers sure appreciated it when they were adopted into loving families.
About the alleged pressure on women to have kids: think about it another way, if somebody doesn't like you, why would they want you to have children?
I think it's really nothing more than people who have experienced happiness with children want other people to not miss out on that happiness. Since a woman's parents usually have had children, they are among the intersection of people who hopefully have experienced happiness with children and like you.
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Here's just one paper:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/585126?seq=1#page_scan_tab_conte...
Individual women who happen to be relatively well known have nothing useful to tell you about social trends.
Having evolved consciousness, we now have the ability to spread ideas, inventions, values, etc. -- memes if you will. This is why humanity has beat all other species, and what drives progress on a societal scale. Memes evolve much faster than genes.
The intelligent career driven people are busy replicating memes -- inventions, discoveries, institutions, influence, etc. The best memes survive and evolve. Is it better for humanity to discover penicillin or preserve a single bloodline?
"Desperate to not volunteer for military service"
"Desperate to not eat meat"
These are all things that to varying degrees (and varying by locale) run contrary to social expectations and will be met with external pressure. I still don't see anyone writing up the grandiose titles above with a straight face.
(You'd think the BBC needed advertising revenue, the way they carry on at times...)
The point of this type of attention is to highlight the validity of making this choice in the hope that it might reduce the cultural pressure. I'm sure many men don't care, since the pressure is generally placed on women.
As a man with a mother who asks when she'll get grandchildren at every opportunity, I'm going to have to disagree with you there.
While women have a cultural and physicall biological clock that ticks men aren't really in the clear. Society needs procreation to survive and women still haven't mastered asexual reproduction.
Also, men have a huge legal disincentive to have kids anymore. If the relationship doesn't work out, you're on the hook for ~18 years of child support payments, and that whole system is designed to make men out to be nothing but a paycheck.
What do you mean by this? Do you mean that the topic of children should not be brought up before marriage between two people in a relationship? Or do you mean that the topic gets brought up by family members before you're married?
Within a relationship, though, discussing kids and such are definitely something that should be done well before marriage.
As for your actual meaning, that is definitely a weird yet amusing trend. I haven't really heard much of either from my family
I also believe that child support should be for the child, the mother should not be able to use it for anything which isn't directly related to childcare, and it should be in it's base a flat amount based on living costs rather then a percentage of your income (unless you willingly want to pay more).
That said men have very easy way to avoid children and that's to use a condom or to pick a partner who does not want them, if you are both willingly make one or take on the decision to keep it own up to it the child should not suffer because of that.
Forcing women to have an abortion will never happen, forcing them to give the child up for adoption will never happen, men and women are not identical and so will never be truly equal in every regard, it's not like women can force sperm out of you without assault or rape.
And if there's some extreme case when fraud has actually been committed e.g. she intentionally sabotaged contraception or went "Satisfaction" on you taken your sperm while you were unconscious (which is technically rape) you should be able to sue for a weaver.
That's not nearly as easy as it sounds, as condoms are not 100% effective and the partner may not be truthful when they say they don't want children. Women hold all of the power in these situations, as if contraception should fail they have the opportunity to abort or give the child up for adoption, meaning they can change their mind at any point. Men don't have such "second chance" options, as they are completely beholden to the woman's choice from conception on.
In an ideal and fair system, a man should be given adequate opportunity to declare their intent not to support the child, after which the woman will then have the opportunity to abort or put the child up for adoption, or know that if they keep the child then they will be raising it alone or with a different partner.
The problem is that there won't be a system that will allow for men to say "I don't want it" which won't be exploited, and children suffer, it suck yes, but we should rather focus on ensuring that both parents will have fair access to the child and act in it's best interests.
BTW if the woman gets another partner who becomes the legal parent of the child then you are in the clear for child support in most cases.
> The problem is that there won't be a system that will allow for men to say "I don't want it" which won't be exploited, and children suffer
Exploitability holds less weight to me than legal fairness. "Think of the children" is more often than not used to justify facilitating unfair actions, in my view.
(I am over 30, single and dating, and I expect it to come up naturally after you've spent enough time talking. Fourth date sounds reasonable.)
The only unfortunate part is that the pressure falls disproportionately on women.
imo, yes. saying there are "social instruments" just adds another ring around the kernel.
more economically developed countries tend to have lower birth rates. could be causal?
funny this was posted around thanksgiving when many people in the united states -- both male and female, albeit in different forms and degrees -- will be feeling it.
Pretty much the whole of western civilization is organized around and dependent on families having kids.
It's odd that everyone believes we have developed a lot of miracle drugs in the last 30 years.
yep. i'm glad someone else said this. i deleted several sentences of rant about it from my previous post.
You're asking him to "grow a thicker skin" about close relatives bickering him (and the related social pressure), when you can't even hold from expressing your annoyance about mere ARTICLES that you don't have to read and can simply skip.
Everyone trying to pressure these people into having children, apparently.
Be a grown up and tune it out.
Parents, co-workers, friends, discriminating employers, even random acquaintances...
In hindsight, I was an insufferable fool. What people like the former me fail to realize is that burning your health and your years on the hedonic treadmill is its own kind of prison, and arguably far less "free" than choosing parenthood.
To RIMR's point above, I'm sure there are plenty who disavow children for reasons other than going racing on the hedonic treadmill.
It's not uncommon to know someone who was childfree for years and years, only do a complete reversal when they have children late in life.
That said, it's one of those topics of conversation where I might just say (to myself), "I hope you're right." To them I'd say, "oh, cool" and drop it. It's really nobody else's business.
Being childfree doesn't mean you have to be self-destructive. Maybe you were self-destructive, and maybe you wouldn't have been if you had kids, but that's you. It doesn't mean that it isn't possible to have a healthy, productive, child-free life; it only means that it didn't work for you.
You can tell by the reasons they give: want more time for job, want more money for travel, want more X for Y, and a kid would subtract a ton from X and therefore ruin the desired end, Y. I'm sure they're right by their standards of the moment in most of these equations, but given the pedestrian X's and Y's which they usually mention, I assume that they do not take "meaningfulness" or "fulfillment" into their calculus. It's shortsighted, but I can't blame them too much, since it's easy to forget to be human.
I also assume they don't understand the re-prioritization that occurs when people have children. I don't know first hand, but I've heard enough people squawk about parenthood to know that it reorganized their existence drastically.
It seems like parenthood is a fundamental human experience. I suppose that people can reject it, but I'm not convinced it's much different than people who reject romantic interaction and choose celibacy for essentially the same stated reasons. A valid life choice that we should accept fully, to be sure-- but a product of our fiercely competitive time rather than Platonically apriori, I think.
OTOH, why "meaningfulness" and "fulfillment" are related to parenthood? The latter is probably quite the opposite, the all too natural reproduction step that any animal can do.
Wasn't Mozart's, Newton's, Turing's, etc life "meaningful" because? (Or Jesus', if one's included to that kind of thing).
>I also assume they don't understand the re-prioritization that occurs when people have children. I don't know first hand, but I've heard enough people squawk about parenthood to know that it reorganized their existence drastically.
It's also that later "remorse" about parenthood makes you considered a monster -- so most people would spin the experience as something amazing for that reason too.
But in practice if one counts how many sad family stories with bad parenting this "new priorities" thing is not always true.
"Remorse" about parenthood is more like "remorse" about having bought a Ferrari. People might curse the maintenance and expense, but push come to shove, few would actually give it back.
With "remorse" I wasn't going for the "I want to give it back" scenario, but the "Hmm, this is great, but it isn't the all roses profound experience people tout it to be. Heck it isn't even the best thing to have ever happened to me, actually I liked life with my wife before more.".
I just used the examples that would make it easier for all to agree -- from them, it's all about what one considers a meaningful achievements.
Some people could not care less for either Jesus or Mozart, but could see that e.g. building a business or being a scientist or whatever can be meaningful too.
Makes me feel like a vegetarian at a bbq
And, equally obviously, I hope, it's pretty easy to stay on the treadmill even after you have kids, which is a trap worth knowing about and avoiding. It took me a bunch of years to figure that out (we had our first when I was 22).
I kind of wish I had, like, years 6-12 again; I'd trade another 6 years of not being able to go out absolutely any time I want to for that. I'd have to think about it but I might even trade a few years of that for a couple more teenage years.
Maybe I'll feel differently once I "have my freedom back". :P
Worth remembering: the diaper changing thing is over in the blink of an eye (it doesn't feel like that at the time, but you will look back and be amazed at how quickly it shot by), and by the time your kids are teenagers they're pretty low-maintenance --- at least in terms of being able to go out drinking when you want to.
Not knowing exactly how to raise kids "correctly" is not a very good reason to avoid raising kids.
On the other hand, feeling no calling whatsoever to raise kids, and/or not being in a stable relationship with a partner to share the burden, are pretty decent reasons not to have kids right this minute.
Also if we all were polite and politically correct we would still be living in the dark ages, it was impolite to say the least to criticize the church, it was impolite to talk about ending slavery, integration, human rights, women's rights, gay rights and every other social movement that made our society what it is today. Social changes can only be created when people act radically in direct opposition to the norms of society.
That notion of "new generations [are required] to support us" can go die in a fire. (was that sufficiently impolite to prevent living in the dark ages?)
MY gene line traces back all the way to when I was born, and no further. My family's gene line (the one that traces back to the first living cell) is being carried forward through other people (cousins, etc.). If I really want MY genes carried on, I'll go donate sperm...
Some of us don't romanticize the idea of having genetically-related children. My wife and I both have mothers who were adopted, so we have always felt that IF we decided to have a child, we would adopt, despite being fertile, simply because it would be better to give an orphan parents than to create another human life. Our mothers sure appreciated it when they were adopted into loving families.
I think it's really nothing more than people who have experienced happiness with children want other people to not miss out on that happiness. Since a woman's parents usually have had children, they are among the intersection of people who hopefully have experienced happiness with children and like you.