Never thought I’d have kids either. Was too good for it. Too good to believe in God as well. Thought I should be the end of the whole line that had led up to me and the whole culture around me was there to reinforce how intelligent I was being by choosing those options.
My son just turned nine months old and my wife and I are discussing when to start trying for number two.
To quote Cormac McCarthy: If the child is not the word of God then God never spoke.
Cormac! The David Lynch of novelists and master of written reality. (Read him lately? Thanks for the reminder.)
A handful of political grifters distorted feminism and capitalized on the throw away labor dreams of financial charlatans by selling a sterile anti-human philosophy disguised as science and human progress. Their land of the living dead manufacture of the paint all men with hatred, family is slavery, remove fathers N.O.W., good little robots, scream over the top of human reason insanity went hand in glove with the aims of criminal finance and morphed easily into the destruction of higher education, the creation of the white man bad, my feelings are hurt D.E.I. commissariat and the in your face butchery of the minds and bodies of the young.
They have served, enabled and supported (at personal profit and gain) the ascent of the IMF/WEF/CCP Juggernaut now attempting to overthrow Western Civilization. Love of the child, human connection, life itself, is their greatest enemy.
Yeah a version of this is what I believe replaced religion. If you follow the through lines the outcome is: it’s a better world if it has no people in it.
I've seen reports claiming Bill Gate's back ground included a lot of quasi-eugenicists. At some point our psychology must shift away from the belief that acquiring massive wealth qualifies one for political leadership.
Yes. Massive wealth is, in my opinion, a negative for political leadership. Rich people are used to saying "jump" and everyone replying "how high?" Their word is law and they do not have to take anyone else's views into account. That attitude makes it hard to be a good and effective politician, a job that requires finesse, getting along, compromise, and dealing with those who don't like you but that you don't have the power to fire.
I also would like to require that those running for Congress or the Presidency have served at least one term as a lower-level elected official. Four years on a school board or city council--even trustee of a mosquito abatement district--is excellent training for dealing with the public and with those who disagree with your decisions.
Too good to have children? My what weird thinking. I was a regular and popular kid who loved school and sports and did well in both. I was looking forward to having children when I was 14.
I had all kinds of tangled knots to justify it before arriving at “Okay asshole, someone probably had to punch a saber tooth tiger in the face so you be born one day so how about you get over yourself and find the bare minimum courage needed to take responsibility for you own life.”
Some anthropologists concluded that the healed fractures in the bones of pre-historic stone age peoples were so similar to those of rodeo cowboys that they may have been physically assaulting prey and predator. So yeah--somebody somewhere probably did punch a saber toothed cat in the jaw.
Was expressed from a place of having seen the error for whatever that is worth to you. To Terry’s point I do also think it’s widespread across my generation and feeds from a sentiment where everyone wants to be famous, everyone is encouraged to follow childish pursuits and simple pleasures, and there’s a lot of people telling you that humans are a virus who are killing the Earth so having children is selfish. You can end up in a place from those pressures where you think having children is absolutely selfish and God is for children.
Again, I now understand those things are foolish. But those are the whispers that, to my mind, encourage people to not have kids.
I know many people with adult children who are totally uninterested in having kids of their own. It's kind of sad. And before Terence blows another gasket, I'm not trying to be judgmental here. I'm just expressing a feeling.
You must not live in a city or be exposed to millenials much. Many of them are full fledged members of The Cult of Self and use things like climate change to justify their desire to not mess up future weekends full of sleeping in and late morning brunches. The higher they land on the socio-economic ladder the more roadblocks they create for themselves. Must have perfect career, perfect house, perfect car in place before even contemplating kids. They'll get a dog and pretend it's a starter kid instead.
To the contrary few to no children is the norm for those in the baby making age cohort. So, you knew some rare birds who are the one's with bizarre thoughts. But bless them, and Some Guy, for seeing the beauty in having children.
Could be a generational thing and of course this all varies by where you are born plus all kinds of other stuff. Hard to know which piece of the elephant you’re holding or what the whole elephant looks like, to mangle an old saying.
What he wrote was not at all bizarre. It was his feeling at the time, and he changed his mind. I find that admirable. So why are you kicking him like a rented mule? "I was a regular and popular kid who loved school and sports and did well in both. I was looking forward to having children when I was 14." Well, some don't have your surety and need time to assess what they want out of life, children being one of those things. Do you want a cookie for your glory?
What a horrible, twisted comment. Do you judge others in this world with you as the perfect example of human being and human behavior? Did you ever change your mind and ideas? When I was 14, unlike you, but along with the super majority of people my age, the last thing on my mind was having children. Did you have a troubled childhood like the author?
Appreciate the defense but I promise I wasn’t offended by it and maybe we both read each other weird. We probably all have lots of reasons to be friends here.
Relax Bruce. He said he "looked forward" to having children when he was 14. Not that he wanted to have them right then and there. I can relate to this myself. As young as 13 I felt the same, but in no way, shape or form did I think I was ready or want to have them at that time.
Only one of my 10 siblings (a brother) has decided NOT to have children - no one (including him) ever thought it was because he was too good for children. As it turns out he's an anti-social, ignorant, incessantly argumentative POS and he in fact has done himself, society (and any potential kids) a HUGE favor by not procreating...
You're one of 11; I'm one of 9. I had one sibling die by suicide and one sibling who is gay and choosing not to be married or have a family. The remaining 7 have brought 22 grandchildren and now 11 great grandchildren and 2 more on the way. Our mom is almost 90! God bless her and my deceased dad for giving us such a fabulous life together!
Sadly no chance. I was his last contact with the family and pretty much the only one he'd talk to but he decided (about 11 years ago) to just disappear somewhere around Eli Nevada...
I think You're mixing things up. Children are real. God is not. Loving their kids is what good parents do, not just for the kids' sake but also for the sake of those who will have to live with them down the road. Loving god makes You delusional. Loving an imagined fantasy figure is not healthy, at least not for adults. It's something children do. Loving their children is what healthy adults do.
Happy to have the discussion if you can sincerely promise me you won’t take everything I say to be the dumbest possible thing you can imagine and I’ll promise to do the same for you. Deal?
My experience is anyway that being delusional and believing in an imaginary figure doesn't necessary come with low intelligence. I know a lot of highly intelligent people who have these kind of believes.
Even extreme cases of religious delusions can still be highly intelligent. You remember this Haven's Gate sect who believed a UFO behind an incoming comet would pick them up if they commit suicide? Sounds pretty dumb. Doesn't it? But before they did that they were running a very successful software company. I couldn't do that. I'm to dumb to do that. Only people smarter people than me can do that.
So don't expect this ignorant arrogance of mistaking religious believes for lack of intelligence when talking to me. I'm too smart to be like that.
As a quick acknowledgement, I haven’t ever really seen an internet comment thread where someone changed their faith by the end of it and if that happened I think it would have to be called “The Miracle of the Internet Comment Thread” even if it was a religious person being converted to atheism. So most of what I’ll write here is just stuff to chew on that helped me to see it.
So here’s a couple of things.
-immaterial reality exists. Or there’s more to the universe than just all the stuff you can pick up and move around.
I’ll state this in the most boring way I know how. Say you have seven matches. You strike them. After a bit you have seven burnt matches and seven lit candles. You wait a bit and you have seven burned wicks. Material was used up at each stage of that. Sulfur changed compounds. Heat was exchanged. And if you put everything in a perfect box all matter and energy was conserved. There’s a whole rigorous system to account for the material components of the system.
But the thing we don’t even think about is immaterial stuff like the “sevenishness” in that system. Seven existed at multiple point when the matches were present, when the burnt matches were present, when the candles were present, and when the wicks were present. Sevenishness is outside of space and time. It just gets instantiated whenever there’s seven things and it doesn’t matter how many things there are that need sevenishness, or how far apart they are, there’s always enough sevenishness to go around and it gets there exactly when it needs to. Concepts like that are completely orthogonal to space and time, for some value of orthogonal because concepts like that don’t even make sense when you talk about things like that.
Ideas have a reality we don’t think of very much.
You can say that’s all anthropic labels made in a model that humans run in their heads but that just pushes the question back. You know you are thinking. You know you experience those things. Doesn’t really matter how you do it the same way that you don’t have to know how every part of your car works to drive. You can just do it.
Without talking a whole bunch about qualia there I don’t know how much more I can say, or monads, or forms, or whatever you want to call them. Joscha Bach is a great person to discuss this although he doesn’t believe in God, or at least not the same way that most people would describe it.
Part two will have to wait because I need to go feed the kiddo dinner and he woke up early from the nap and don’t want to lose the comment.
Just to give You an idea, where I'm coming from...
I'm a trained natural scientist. I studied biology and graduated with a diploma at a German university.
I believe that everything that exists can be explained without leaving the realm of the laws of physics. I do not believe there is such thing as the supernatural. Things we can't explain we only can't explain yet, but they are explainable by science, the science of the future.
As far as this imaginary figure some call "god" is concerned I have a rather radical view that would have easily got me burned at the stakes in other centuries:
"God did not create man! Man created god!"
That's all what god is. Just an imaginary figure invented by man and without humans pretending there is a god no god would exist. I even found an explanation why humans invented god(s). It's very strange that most if not all human societies that ever formed from the very beginning of humanity believed in something supernatural, in a single god or a whole bunch of them. Some theologians use that fact in order to prove that some kind of god must exist if so many societies independently believe in something of that sort. I strongly disagree with that, because that fact can also be explained by a common purpose this kind of believe can serve. It must somehow satisfy a need all humans have in common and that's why humans all over our planet invented such ideas independently.
I believe the key to understand why humans are inventing gods and other supernatural beings lies within a very unique aspect of human nature. Humans are very curious and they wanna find an explanation for everything around them. That curiosity is the engine that drives technological progress from the invention of the wheel to the construction of modern computers. So it's a very important feature of humanity, because it enables us to shape the world around us to serve our needs better and better.
But it comes with a serious downside. Our curiosity can really consume us. Have You ever made the experience that You found something in the world around You and no matter how hard You tried You were not able to find an explanation for it? But You also couldn't stop thinking about it?
Well, some phenomena turn out to be really beyond explanation, at least for now, and if You keep trying to find one nevertheless You're simply wasting Your time, which could be put to better use, thinking about problems, You actually can solve. It can even become such an obsession, that it renders You completely dysfunctional.
But how to make Your curiosity shut up, which is still trying and trying to figure out the stuff, that's out of reach for You? Well, here comes religion into play. This guy thousands of years ago who failed with trying to figure out where lightnings and thunder come from, invented a god, who made lightnings and thunder, thus could explain the unexplainable and made his curiosity shut up about this problem.
That means gods are some kind of valves for our restless minds to keep them from overloading and since all humans share this feature of human nature all societies had that need to invent gods and the supernatural. First there were specialized gods, for thunder, hunting, the wheather and so on. With scientific progress more and more of these specialized gods became obsolet. Who needs a thunder god when there is a scientific explanation for how thunderstorms work? In the end the menagerie of specialized gods was replaced by just one god responsible for everything we don't understand yet. And that's where we are now.
This also explains why believing in god(s) has nothing to do with lack of intelligence. It's more the opposite since smarter people are usually more curious and more prone to torture themselves with trying to find explanations for everything, thus they need this valve more than the dummies need it.
As far as Your concept of "sevenishness" is concerned, that's just an abstraction. Nothing supernatural about it. It's the kind of abstraction our brain uses to bring order into the chaos around us. This ability of the human brain is inseparably linked to the biology and evolution of our brain. I don't really see the need for the supernatural to explain this.
I believe there is one God, who emanates love for us all, and in whom we exist together and connected. I believe it in a way that is consistent with science and physics and the further you climb up either school of thought, the more the two merge into one, science and God.
To address a few things: from a certain perspective, yes, nothing is supernatural. Everything fits together as a piece just under some rules we do not yet understand. I do not, however, believe this was the thrust of my argument about immaterial reality. Ideas exist irrespective of a host substrate and cannot be described merely in physical terms. That’s been bothering people since Socrates. We never philosophically resolved this, we just stopped talking about it. There are a lot of great physicists who believe the universe is made of matter, energy, and information. A lot of them may disagree over what constitutes information but I think it’s hard to argue information itself has reliance on materiality.
That’s not an argument for God, by the way. I think it is the first step though to believing we understand much less of the universe than we suppose and that we live on the skin of something stranger than we learn about in school.
No arguments on the historical perspective other than I think man discovered God rather than created him. Won’t even argue on some of the particular absurdities. But if you look across cultures and across times some of those things match in striking, almost jarring ways. My main takeaway from this is: we are not the makers of morality anymore than we are the makers of thought itself. We think and we are moral but those things exist outside of ourselves in the universe itself. Perhaps as an emergent property, perhaps as more, but as Moses said “We are not free to break the law, we are only free to break ourselves against the law.”
Agreed that God economizes thought by breaking endless search loops you can otherwise get stuck in but I don’t think that means God (the idea of a being which exists outside of material reality) can’t exist. It’s a utility argument only.
As a bit of an aside before diving back into sevenishness I do think we live in an age where a guiding heuristic is “This is hard for me/most people to accept emotionally, so it must be true.” That seems to show up in everything from arguments about God to trans kids, etc. We have learned painful lessons about our limitations in the last hundred years as a species and I think it has made us overly cynical. I think that drives an immediate dismissal of otherwise pretty good arguments.
On the sevenishness stuff, I’m not sure if you have ever heard of the idea of a mathematical vs a computation universe but there’s a whole body of philosophy/literature out there on it and it’s a bit of a mind pretzel. The basic idea is that you can get stuck in a real loop on the question of “Is math real or is there only computation” which isn’t quite the same thing in some very important ways. It gets to what I mentioned above. You can imagine most material things in material form but some stuff isn’t like that. Math is the most obvious, rigorous example. I can’t imagine sevenishness. There are some cheat things people do to imagine it like thinking about the numeral of seven of a particular object but that doesn’t meet the standard. It’s completely amorphous and conceptual, just like addition and subtraction, etc. Yet I think you’d agree that when I use those concepts on physical things they seem to make valid predictions. There mere fact that I can make abstractions in my head that have predictive power is deeply, deeply odd and implies something about the nature of the world that we live in and I am not alone in that belief.
God is REAL. I'm sorry the dimensionality and transcendence of the dynamic escapes you. You might try removing the "word" and just attempt the experience.
There are a lot of things we experience as "real", but in reality are only delusions of our minds. So I don't need to "attempt the experience" I already made "the experience" many times and learned there's always a logical, natural explanation for what I might have perceived as somewhat "supernatural" when it actually happened. No matter how "real" it felt at the time.
As a matter of fact, that is one of the first things You learn when You're getting trained to be a scientist: Never trust Your senses completely. They fool You way too often. Something feeling real doesn't mean it is real. Better prove or disprove it's reality in a way that bypasses Your imperfect human senses with devices that only measure what's really there and aren't compromised by the neurological shortcuts in Your brain and Your biases and imaginations.
Had a weird religious experience in my mid twenties. (I know that is a really big thing to just drop into a comment) Somehow even literally seeing God wasn’t enough but it did get me to go to therapy. Then that got me to go to a support group for survivors of childhood sexual assault (another big thing to drop) and the person who led it was a Christian. Best man I ever knew. Wanted nothing from us but to help and as he was a survivor as well it helped him deal with his own demons. Mostly it was his demeanor and his caring. You could just tell the thing that had crushed me for most of my life was a moveable burden to him. First time I believed in goodness itself. Started to firm up when I met my wife and we got pregnant and a bunch of job stuff fell out in front of me and I looked back and realized how much of my suffering was me getting in my own way. I was finally able to look back at my own life and see goodness and purpose to it.
I had a very similar "conversion." For me, it happened the weekend I met my wife. I didn't just fall in love immediately. My mind filled up with imperatives and goals I'd never had before and many that I'd specifically rejected. Greatest thing that ever happened in my life; until the babies came anyway.
This is the most heartwarming article I have read in ages. Hugs to all of you.
The best times of my life, the most fulfilling, and the ones with deepest meaning are the ones I spent with my children. I started late and only had 2 although I would have loved to have had 3 or 4.
My son and daughter in law are expecting #3 and I am deeply glad about it. They are excellent parents and the world needs more children from excellent parents.
We were going to have condos all over the country. One for skiing, one at the beach for surfing, a hiking one. Instead, we have three kids and I have MS and mobility issues. I choose my current life and my family 100x over our planned jet setting childless life. It’s the folly of youth to think it’s all about you. It’s actually all about them. I absolutely loved this article.
People like you and your family still exist ? There's more like us? I've never had such a tsunami of relief to know that we are not a renegade group of aliens set on this earth that shames us for having large home-schooled families . Even more so now, than in the late 80s to early 2000s.
I grew up in a large but dysfunctional family. My husband and I wanted to create a nest of love, care and enjoyment of children as unique human beings with. Which included (for us) having more than two children . Announcing a new addition coming brought "You're pregnant again? Do you know what causes that? (No, I don't. Please explain it to me), the scowls as you walk through a grocery store with your little ones The disgust as you show up with all your children for the $1 movies (yes, they did exist back them) , the loathing as your family rides the metro in DC, the condescending looks and 'sophisticated' 'you're a bane to society' type of comments.
Then you tell them you're homeschooling all of them. After they recover from their horror, comes the 'you're not qualified', you're a quack, your kids will suffer, they'll won't fit into society (good), it's child abuse, you're sheltering them, and you'll scrape up roadkill for biology dissections. Blah, Blah, Blah. Nobody took us seriously.
Then comes Bethany Mandel who brings fresh and insightful understanding, wisdom, and affirmation to the table. You explain it as no other can. Thank you for such an outstanding article. I was uplifted and thoroughly enjoyed reading it.
The destruction of public education by utopian ideologues and its reduction to an indoctrination center by whacked out political operatives is perhaps THE greatest American sorrow. The child, the only human future that exists becomes prey. It is monstrous and the people doing it are not our friends.
As a 62 year old mother of 4 this is by far my favorite Common Sense article and favorite comment so far. Having kids in the 80’s and 90’s I heard every single one of those remarks (and yes, once, we did use road kill for a home school dissection). All grown, with 4 grandchildren and counting, my adult children are all well adjusted, employed and productive contributors to their communities. Despite the snark we received I wouldn’t change a thing.
R C as a mother of four this is the best reply on CS today, and like you I wouldn’t change a thing. My kids are great my grandchildren (7 of them)are fantastic, thank God all employed and thru Covid to, with some having to help each other which they all did willingly + productive people within their communities. I’m not saying it’s been plain sailing but we are fortunate to live in a really great country, but remember we have to keep it great,its going to take a lot of hard work but we can all do it together!🇺🇸🇺🇸
How sick that you get stares and rude comments for doing what used to be normal and expected only two generations ago. Let me guess, you're white? Because if you were black or brown with a brood of kids (which I see all the time), I guarantee you those people would not dare cast a look in your direction or tsk-tsk you. Because that would be racist!
I've been driving a 15-passenger van since 2001. Parking garages are the worst. I've had a number of roof-scrapes and several panic attacks over the years. I'm convinced the roofs get lower as you go higher.
Best wishes to your family. "No lost limbs, no felony records!" is my motto.
That's because, when your children are small, their clothes are small, especially in summer. When they are all teen-and-up size, you will probably do an average of five loads per day.
"You know you have a large family when you dream about living in a laundromat."
"You know you have a large family when there's a line for the bathroom - at midnight."
The one and only way in which my parents failed me was not making me do chores. They made sure I knew HOW to do them, but since I was an only child, my mom found it easier to just do things like laundry herself. So I had to learn as an adult the self-discipline to do unpleasant chores that I should have learned as a child.
My (three) kids had to wash their own clothes as soon as they were old enough to safely operate the washing machine. If they complained when it was their turn to load and run the dishwasher, I offered the option of doing all the dishes by hand (they didn't take me up on that one).
Same with dinner, too. I never made "special" food for the kids for dinner. Once they were old enough to eat regular food, they ate what we ate. Once they were old enough to make themselves a sandwich, if they didn't like what was on the table (they had to take at least one bite if it was something they had never tasted), they could go make something for themselves (interestingly, they rarely took that option; not much fun being alone in the kitchen when everyone else is already eating at the table).
Best machine ever the Speed Queen top loader. Every time it finishes a load I hug my machine, because without him/her/it I would be dead in the water. A washing machine is a must have next to a house and then a car.
Hopefully yours are not as expensive as they are around here. $6.75 for a load, all in quarters. At least they're big front loaders so you can get a lot done in one go.
That sounds about right for the giant one. Maybe a little less here. I usually go to the laundromat after campouts, when I have ten loads to do all at once.
I do enjoy them, but no, it won't. Probably never. I'm hoping to move out to a nice tent in the back yard. Son D, "Fang," is going to build a platform for me. He's good with tools.
Having children is not remotely selfish. But not having children isn't, either. People need to do what's best for them. Since the majority of people do have kids, I'm not worried about society running out of young'uns.
That was enjoyable, thanks. Here in Israel we didn't get strange looks with our eight kids. It's above average in our community, but only just.
You sound like very thoughtful parents. My approach was more Zen -- parenting is what happens while you're thinking about something else. Another word for it is "lazy". My wife, a woman of iron, was much more deliberate (and worked a lot harder), but she too never overestimated the good or harm any specific act of parenting would do.
Why am I going on about this? I guess you got me thinking about when our kids were younger. Today they range from 24 to 40 and we're watching them raise their own children.
All the best to you and your family in the new year. 𝘎𝘮𝘢𝘳 𝘵𝘰𝘷.
Israel is one of the only countries on the planet that is procreating above replacement rate. And that’s a great mitzvah. I visited Israel this past April and enjoyed it so much. My youngest daughter is planning to take a Birthright trip to Israel over her winter semester break at college.
Your daughter is the luckiest person on the planet to be doing the Birthright trip. Its Gan Adan there Brian we just came back from a two week break we had the best time ever with the no nonsense nation, amazing people the Israelis. Wishing you a good Yomtov and a happy succot!
Yes, it is still very difficult to put into words my experience in Israel. My reaction, similar to yours, is that Israelis are amazing and on a mission. Everyone is highly motivated to make the best of their new Country. The buzz in the market place on Friday afternoon just before Shabbat was incredible. I just sat back, watch and absorbed it all. Meeting IDF soldiers on the street was such a joy. They are so brave and fierce. Our tour guide was an IDF officer so I was able to learn a lot about how they think and how Israeli culture operates. It was fascinating.
Our Christian church took a trip to Israel. Birthright trip describes our experience also. The people: Spirited. No nonsense. Focused. Optimistic. Clear eyed and realistic. In a real sense, we had come back home. The Israeli people could not have been more friendly, kind, and supportive. As the Irish say, Erin go bragh, Ireland forever. Israel go bragh.
Love this post you summed up Israel, her people and her sprit in a few lines .Israel go Bragh! Israelis are strong they know who they are, know what they want and know where they are going. 🇮🇱🇮🇱🇮🇱❤️
Yes Israel has the top fertility rate in the developed world, at 3.0. Even secular, non-practicing Jews in Israel have pretty large families.
Replacement rate is 2.1, and countries like the U.S. and Sweden are 1.8, Germany is 1.6, Japan is 1.4, and South Korea is a staggering 1.1.
Most African countries have fertility rates of 4.0 and up, with a few like Somalia, Chad, Angola, Nigeria over 5.0, but fertility in Africa is starting to decline.
This post made me smile. We have three kids, now 34,32, and 28. Expecting our first grandchild in the next four weeks.
I love the espirit de corps of your family. There is nothing sweeter to a parent than seeing their children care for one another and maintain close and caring relationships when they are adults.
I believe that is something that parents can certainly influence, and I'm sure you and your husband will reap that parental reward.
But don't be discourages by fierce inter-sibling adolescent conflict. Some of that is inevitable and it passes!
I am so thankful for a positive article on raising a larger family. I am the youngest of 7 and had 5 myself. My siblings are such a support to each other. We chose to homeschool and my two married daughters voluntarily come back weekly for family dinner with their spouses. It wasn’t all a bed of roses, I did cry about the amount of laundry, mess or fighting. But now that my youngest is 12, I get sad thinking about my childrearing years coming to an end. I’ll be so happy when the grandkids start coming!
“But those arguing for protecting the Earth by not making babies are just existing on Earth, not living in it.”
This is so true on so many levels--many of those spouting proscriptions for everyone else have no idea how superficial and one-dimensional those kind of solutions are. It’s why I never joined any conservation groups--they sentimentalize “nature” to the point of treating it like the “nice” room at my grandma’s house--something to visit, use on occasion, but not really to live in. It’s why people in the WWF tasked with guarding national park forests in Africa think it’s okay to beat the indigenous people who’ve always lived there and burn down their settlements in order to “protect” the environment.
There seems to be a similar mode of thinking when it comes to kids. People I know and love who say they don’t want kids are the ones that need a change in perspective the most, the ones to whom I want to say “grow up and stop thinking of yourself all the time,” and the ones who are the most scared of solitude and self-reflection.
I don’t ever come out and tell them to have kids--it’s on them. And I don’t gush about how great having kids is, but wow. It really is.
Yes, speaking to many young adults these days leaves me with the impression that many of them do not intend to have children because of the perceived pressure it puts on the planet. That’s a really sad outcome brought on by the toxic culture in our society today. How sad.
Brian, you might enjoy the new book SUPERABUNDANCE. It is a tour de force showing that more people bring about more wealth and LESS damage to the environment.
":People I know and love who say they don’t want kids are the ones that need a change in perspective the most."
No, actually, we don't. Our perspective about not wanting children is as valid as your perspective about wanting them. As long as the decision continues to make you happy, having or not having is the right one for you.
Not quite. A world of aging humans with no younger generation to support them is dystopia defined.
The biggest problem with most stupid homo sapiens is the fact that they can't imagine a world in which they get old and enfeebled and need help from progeny. The smart ones know better.
On a family to family level, having children does not guarantee being taken care of, or even getting help in, old age. Plunking maw and paw in the nursing home and never visiting? That's more common than we like to think.
On a societal level, of course you're correct: younger generations are needed to carry the banner when the old ones fall. But for the most part, supply takes care of itself---most people on the planet have children, and the poorer you are, the more you have.
I agree with Pete, and you, about that. But you don't need to have children to love someone more than yourself. I have no issue with people having kids; as long as they can support them and don't abuse them, hey, the more the merrier. But it's not everyone's cup of tea, and those that don't want, shouldn't.
Articles and posted comments on Substack, the disconnect between living human empathy and the consequences be damned behind the scenes machinations of criminal finance makes me believe that part of the grift destroying our civilization is the capture of legitimate national social concern by well paid political ideologues who serve international criminal finance. The IMF/WEF/CCP assault on Dutch farmers (the second most productive in the world) is getting no real MSM coverage and is being done in the name of a for personal gain capture of a distorted economic break a few eggs to make an omelet "environmentalism". In reality it is the same give me cheap throwaway labor and access to all natural resources without consequence grift greedy thugs have been running throughout history.
It is necessary to destroy the family, the child, "..we the people...", human worth and dignity across the board for their ultimate success. Not only will you "own nothing and be happy" but you will exist in a sterile and monitored world (just as the Chinese people do now), your property and money seized and your life destroyed (just as Trudeau did to the Canadian truckers) and you will be arrested for your political speech and thoughts (happening in Great Britain every day).
The child and family is under assault by venal and avaricious thugs. It's not something else.
It reminds me of something I read years ago - I could swear it was in something of William James. He was talking about the notion even back then of Malthus and their version of the Club of Rome - living in some pinched miserly way to preserve something for future generations. He had nothing against the future generations but had a lot against living life that way and a lot of faith in human ingenuity. He used a line I've failed to find since to the effect that it would be better to "bring the curtain down and wind up the whole show early" than to live lives in such a cowardly, stilted fashion. I can't recall the exact lines and I wish I could, because it profoundly impressed me at the time. I've spent whole evenings poring through books looking for it (and Googled since then).
What a wonderful article to wake up to! Thanks to Bethany for writing, and Bari for publishing. I needed this antidote today, in the shadow of “Armageddon.”
Congratulations Bethany, you are a better person than all those childless, self-indulgent women seeking fulfillment on the corporate ladder and with men who can’t commit. And bless your husband too.
You remind me of a time I was on an airplane and a mother boarded with seven well behaved young kids. Some had yamakas. Not a peep of whining the whole flight.
I am one of those “childish, self indulgent“ women. I’ve always adored kids and loved it when my sisters had them. I just didn’t have it in me to want to be pregnant, give birth, and have kids of my own. Whether due to my love for work and intellectual stimulation, my loveless mother, my anxiety problem, or my need for quiet, it was the only way for me. It’s cruel of you to judge this choice so harshly.
Well, when a woman tells another why they made their choice then at least one person knows. That person, having the capacity for free thought is certainly entitled to judge that reason. Perhaps they'll think it a good choice perhaps not. Now, politeness would of course dictate that we avoid being unnecessarily rude or cruel. But no person is precluded from making a value judgment simply because you are worried some one's feelings might get hurt.
edit: besides, I was in no way being critical with the comment you replied to. And, oddly enough your response was a judgment. A critical judgment ordering not simply silence but denying the autonomy to decide for myself whether I believe some one's choice was a good one or not. You don't get to do that. Ever.
I did not have kids because I didn’t have the skills necessary to be a good parent. My work involves helping others and takes a lot of emotional energy. I hope I can make a difference in that way. I’m happy for anyone who finds joy and self fulfillment through parenthood. That just wasn’t the path my life took. It’s always a bummer to see women putting each other down for their different choices, so I understand how you feel.
Aimee- you have the right to live your life as you see fit. Your self-discipline in responding to the disgusting judgemental comment is perhaps admirable. But I would have offered harsher words. How dare they judge you without knowing you!
Think about it: She mentioned “childish, self-indulgent women,” but didn’t say that all childless women fit that description or deserve to be judged for being childless. Rather, you seem to have applied that “harsh” victimhood to yourself.
I don’t feel like a victim at all. I’m simply setting forth another perspective, hoping to enlighten others as to why people don’t all fall into a neat little box, and shouldn’t be judged for it. We all have different life experiences and no two of us (other than identical twins) are alike. Not all women want to mother children, just as not all men want to play contact sports. These are stereotypes and exhibit only a failure (or refusal) to understand the differences in people.
And yes- she did judge. She said that women who have children are better people. Doesn’t get more “judgy” than that.
“Sorry you missed out…” is a judgment in itself. Just because one person enjoyed an “experience” doesn’t mean others would. My husband loves roller coasters. I hate (and fear) them. If he came off a ride on one saying “sorry you missed out on this experience”, could anything be more insensitive and obtuse? Perhaps it’s “natural” for people to think in that way, but it’s certainly not considerate or kind.
I don’t see it as either. It’s simply a path- a different one than the one chosen by the writer. We all take our own. And I’m not defensive in the least. Just speaking the truth and showing a different perspective, hopefully to enlighten others.
Some people are not cut out to be parents, and I applaud the ones who know it. Sadly, too many who shouldn’t have kids have them. I’m sorry for your experience with your mother. There are many reasons for not having children. Enjoy your nieces and nephews!
Mentorship and stewardship of the child can often make the difference the "can't see the forest for the trees" parent cannot. (I mean that in a good way.)
And then there are those who 'think' they're not parent material, protesting they would NEVER have children. Then viola, a child comes and bliss and suddenly, the best parent ever is born!
The surprise for me was the number of men I knew who started second families in mid life and experienced unbelievable happiness and fulfillment finding parenting joyful and filled with meaning.
Agree! It’s wrong to judge all those who don’t have kids as misguided and selfish. I chose not to have kids for multiple reasons and don’t regret it. I also love my god daughter and would do anything for her. Kids are awesome, I admire parents. There are plenty of couples that made a good choice not having kids for their personal reasons. When I was young I wanted kids. By the time I got married I was pretty sure I did not but reserved the right to change my mind. My life is different but I’m happy and don’t feel like I’ve missed out.
Whether to have children and how many is a deeply personal choice. People who choose not to (or whose life path doesn't lead them there) are not childless, self-indulgent women. Don't judge.
Because you said Bethany was a better person than childless self-indulgent women. I didn't conclude you were talking about me. I have kids. You were being judgemental.
Seriously? "You are a better person than all those childless, self-indulgent women seeking fulfillment on the corporate ladder and with men who can’t commit." Why on earth would you condemn people for making choices different than your own?
Bethany is not better and she is not worse. She and her husband are doing what's right for them, and people who choose not to have children are doing what's best for them. As long as each is happy with the decision they made, mazel tov to all of them.
I am surprised at you MC, making a cruel, judgmental statement. Everybody is different. Not wanting to have children doesn't make you a bad person. It just means your priorities are different or you physically can't have children.
Don't get you bowels in an uproar. I read your post and what I posted was based on how I interpreted it. "All those" sure seemed to mean all women. What else could it mean?
There is no obligation (moral or otherwise..) that I know of, NC, for women to have children. We do not live in an authoritarian society where roles are selected for people and said people are expected to follow them.
Your version of the word 'better' is arbitrary, biased, and in a way, consistent with religious orthodoxy, in my opinion.
With modern birth control, women are free to do what they want in life. Don't take this wrong. The threat of pregnancy is gone. In fact, that is what birth control pills are all about, to have sex without the threat of pregnancy.
The feminist whine that women do not have an equal chance in the workplace. That is becoming less and less true. The feminist say that men dominate the upper echelons of business which is true but a woman who drops out of the workplace to raise children and then comes back to work now 20 to 30 years later, now at age 45 to 50, less experience than a man who has never left.
The women in that example rarely if ever catch up. It may not be right but it is a fact of life.
To me a woman who stays at home to raise children, is doing the most important job in the world but you can see why that penalizes them in the workplace.
Some women choose to forego children to pursue a career. They aren't selfish any more than a man who doesn't stay home to raise children.
My best friend from college has a daughter who is an executive in a Fortune 500 Company. I doubt she will ever have children. I say more power to her.
Yes to all of this. The goal of genuine feminism was to tell society to let women make the choices that work best for them and their own lives. Stay home and have babies? Fine. Work 100 hours a week to make CEO? Fine? Raise a family while working? No kids? Also fine.
Most women will have children, and that's good for society---we need children to keep us going. But what applies to the macro does not apply to the micro, and every woman needs to be free to make that choice for herself. Having children is important, but it's not the ONLY important thing in a woman's life. Other things compete.
To call women who choose not to have kids irresponsible slackers, etc., is terrible.
or the person who boarded the flight next to me with three children on in a paid for seat. the others on the parents lap ( each were about 1 years old and plenty big enough for a set of their own..) the mother pulled down the food tray and proceeded to change a diaper on the FOOD tray. then had the nerve to hand it to the flight attendant for disposal.. The FA told me that was not the worst she had seen ..what does a yamaka have to do with this?
Maybe the commenter was suggesting a Jewish family because Bethany's family is Jewish.
As to your point about the children on the lap, you better believe that if I could save $$$ and followed the law by having my 1 year old sit on my lap, I would. I would, however, never, ever, ever change their diaper outside of the plane bathroom.
so then why do people with lots of kids think they should "go to the head of the line" or get an up front parking space or be allowed to break the rule of ( as th poster said) only groups of 5 or less.. I would like my dog to sit on my lap on the plane but no. I have to pay a fortune for him to even be under my seat. 150 each way.
What? Who said they should go to the head of the line? Bethany said she parked where they were adjacent to multiple venues. It was really a throw away line more to discuss the larger van she would need.
You're a dog owner and planes have different rules for humans than they do dogs. Dogs don't breastfeed, for example. They don't need a diaper change, for example.
Reread your comments--they are so vacant it's actually startling. Your envy is glaring.
I can't like this article enough. I hang with a lot of devout Catholics with 6+ children but we normally don't hear about the upsides of large families. May God continually bless you and your family. What a beautiful article!
I love this! I did not have as many children as you but as life continues I realize that family is everything! And ‘a secret’ you won’t know for a while.......grandkids are the true reward and may you be blessed with many!
Quoting Roxanna Robinson here on grandchildren…” my retirement gift, the platinum gold watch for being a mother” and …”it’s like being told you no longer have to eat vegetables, only dessert-and really only the icing”!
Never thought I’d have kids either. Was too good for it. Too good to believe in God as well. Thought I should be the end of the whole line that had led up to me and the whole culture around me was there to reinforce how intelligent I was being by choosing those options.
My son just turned nine months old and my wife and I are discussing when to start trying for number two.
To quote Cormac McCarthy: If the child is not the word of God then God never spoke.
Cormac! The David Lynch of novelists and master of written reality. (Read him lately? Thanks for the reminder.)
A handful of political grifters distorted feminism and capitalized on the throw away labor dreams of financial charlatans by selling a sterile anti-human philosophy disguised as science and human progress. Their land of the living dead manufacture of the paint all men with hatred, family is slavery, remove fathers N.O.W., good little robots, scream over the top of human reason insanity went hand in glove with the aims of criminal finance and morphed easily into the destruction of higher education, the creation of the white man bad, my feelings are hurt D.E.I. commissariat and the in your face butchery of the minds and bodies of the young.
They have served, enabled and supported (at personal profit and gain) the ascent of the IMF/WEF/CCP Juggernaut now attempting to overthrow Western Civilization. Love of the child, human connection, life itself, is their greatest enemy.
Stay strong. Stay clear.
Yeah a version of this is what I believe replaced religion. If you follow the through lines the outcome is: it’s a better world if it has no people in it.
I've seen reports claiming Bill Gate's back ground included a lot of quasi-eugenicists. At some point our psychology must shift away from the belief that acquiring massive wealth qualifies one for political leadership.
Yes. Massive wealth is, in my opinion, a negative for political leadership. Rich people are used to saying "jump" and everyone replying "how high?" Their word is law and they do not have to take anyone else's views into account. That attitude makes it hard to be a good and effective politician, a job that requires finesse, getting along, compromise, and dealing with those who don't like you but that you don't have the power to fire.
I also would like to require that those running for Congress or the Presidency have served at least one term as a lower-level elected official. Four years on a school board or city council--even trustee of a mosquito abatement district--is excellent training for dealing with the public and with those who disagree with your decisions.
it won't let me like your comment but i do.
Too good to have children? My what weird thinking. I was a regular and popular kid who loved school and sports and did well in both. I was looking forward to having children when I was 14.
I had all kinds of tangled knots to justify it before arriving at “Okay asshole, someone probably had to punch a saber tooth tiger in the face so you be born one day so how about you get over yourself and find the bare minimum courage needed to take responsibility for you own life.”
LOL
Some anthropologists concluded that the healed fractures in the bones of pre-historic stone age peoples were so similar to those of rodeo cowboys that they may have been physically assaulting prey and predator. So yeah--somebody somewhere probably did punch a saber toothed cat in the jaw.
It’s something I remind myself of whenever I start to allow myself the luxury of being stressed out by emails and conference calls.
And Teams!
I think our ancestors would understand the dread of a ping storm.
I know quite a few people with that attitude. Kudos to Some Guy for growing past that.
I thankfully don’t know anyone who expresses such bizarre thoughts.
Was expressed from a place of having seen the error for whatever that is worth to you. To Terry’s point I do also think it’s widespread across my generation and feeds from a sentiment where everyone wants to be famous, everyone is encouraged to follow childish pursuits and simple pleasures, and there’s a lot of people telling you that humans are a virus who are killing the Earth so having children is selfish. You can end up in a place from those pressures where you think having children is absolutely selfish and God is for children.
Again, I now understand those things are foolish. But those are the whispers that, to my mind, encourage people to not have kids.
My neighbors have three sons; two married, one single all in their mid to late 30s. No grandchildren. It's really kind of incredible to me.
I know many people with adult children who are totally uninterested in having kids of their own. It's kind of sad. And before Terence blows another gasket, I'm not trying to be judgmental here. I'm just expressing a feeling.
Adding---and no thoughts about having children.
You must not live in a city or be exposed to millenials much. Many of them are full fledged members of The Cult of Self and use things like climate change to justify their desire to not mess up future weekends full of sleeping in and late morning brunches. The higher they land on the socio-economic ladder the more roadblocks they create for themselves. Must have perfect career, perfect house, perfect car in place before even contemplating kids. They'll get a dog and pretend it's a starter kid instead.
Many of them treat their cats and dogs as their children, calling them their "fur babies".
To the contrary few to no children is the norm for those in the baby making age cohort. So, you knew some rare birds who are the one's with bizarre thoughts. But bless them, and Some Guy, for seeing the beauty in having children.
Could be a generational thing and of course this all varies by where you are born plus all kinds of other stuff. Hard to know which piece of the elephant you’re holding or what the whole elephant looks like, to mangle an old saying.
What he wrote was not at all bizarre. It was his feeling at the time, and he changed his mind. I find that admirable. So why are you kicking him like a rented mule? "I was a regular and popular kid who loved school and sports and did well in both. I was looking forward to having children when I was 14." Well, some don't have your surety and need time to assess what they want out of life, children being one of those things. Do you want a cookie for your glory?
Terence, Some Guy obviously changed his mind. 😉
What a horrible, twisted comment. Do you judge others in this world with you as the perfect example of human being and human behavior? Did you ever change your mind and ideas? When I was 14, unlike you, but along with the super majority of people my age, the last thing on my mind was having children. Did you have a troubled childhood like the author?
Shame on your judgemental attitude.
Appreciate the defense but I promise I wasn’t offended by it and maybe we both read each other weird. We probably all have lots of reasons to be friends here.
ahhh, civilisation.
Relax Bruce. He said he "looked forward" to having children when he was 14. Not that he wanted to have them right then and there. I can relate to this myself. As young as 13 I felt the same, but in no way, shape or form did I think I was ready or want to have them at that time.
Take a deep breath.
Shame on his attitude? hmmmm.
Only one of my 10 siblings (a brother) has decided NOT to have children - no one (including him) ever thought it was because he was too good for children. As it turns out he's an anti-social, ignorant, incessantly argumentative POS and he in fact has done himself, society (and any potential kids) a HUGE favor by not procreating...
You're one of 11; I'm one of 9. I had one sibling die by suicide and one sibling who is gay and choosing not to be married or have a family. The remaining 7 have brought 22 grandchildren and now 11 great grandchildren and 2 more on the way. Our mom is almost 90! God bless her and my deceased dad for giving us such a fabulous life together!
Sorry to hear about your sibling but glad about the rest. No chance he can be brought back or convinced? It’s a hard thing to hate yourself that much.
Sadly no chance. I was his last contact with the family and pretty much the only one he'd talk to but he decided (about 11 years ago) to just disappear somewhere around Eli Nevada...
But tell us how you really feel! :-o
Good one! I hadn't seen that McCarthy uote before.
From the Road and a bit of a rephrase but it stuck with me for years even before my son was born.
I think You're mixing things up. Children are real. God is not. Loving their kids is what good parents do, not just for the kids' sake but also for the sake of those who will have to live with them down the road. Loving god makes You delusional. Loving an imagined fantasy figure is not healthy, at least not for adults. It's something children do. Loving their children is what healthy adults do.
Happy to have the discussion if you can sincerely promise me you won’t take everything I say to be the dumbest possible thing you can imagine and I’ll promise to do the same for you. Deal?
Deal. But I still might not agree with You.
My experience is anyway that being delusional and believing in an imaginary figure doesn't necessary come with low intelligence. I know a lot of highly intelligent people who have these kind of believes.
Even extreme cases of religious delusions can still be highly intelligent. You remember this Haven's Gate sect who believed a UFO behind an incoming comet would pick them up if they commit suicide? Sounds pretty dumb. Doesn't it? But before they did that they were running a very successful software company. I couldn't do that. I'm to dumb to do that. Only people smarter people than me can do that.
So don't expect this ignorant arrogance of mistaking religious believes for lack of intelligence when talking to me. I'm too smart to be like that.
As a quick acknowledgement, I haven’t ever really seen an internet comment thread where someone changed their faith by the end of it and if that happened I think it would have to be called “The Miracle of the Internet Comment Thread” even if it was a religious person being converted to atheism. So most of what I’ll write here is just stuff to chew on that helped me to see it.
So here’s a couple of things.
-immaterial reality exists. Or there’s more to the universe than just all the stuff you can pick up and move around.
I’ll state this in the most boring way I know how. Say you have seven matches. You strike them. After a bit you have seven burnt matches and seven lit candles. You wait a bit and you have seven burned wicks. Material was used up at each stage of that. Sulfur changed compounds. Heat was exchanged. And if you put everything in a perfect box all matter and energy was conserved. There’s a whole rigorous system to account for the material components of the system.
But the thing we don’t even think about is immaterial stuff like the “sevenishness” in that system. Seven existed at multiple point when the matches were present, when the burnt matches were present, when the candles were present, and when the wicks were present. Sevenishness is outside of space and time. It just gets instantiated whenever there’s seven things and it doesn’t matter how many things there are that need sevenishness, or how far apart they are, there’s always enough sevenishness to go around and it gets there exactly when it needs to. Concepts like that are completely orthogonal to space and time, for some value of orthogonal because concepts like that don’t even make sense when you talk about things like that.
Ideas have a reality we don’t think of very much.
You can say that’s all anthropic labels made in a model that humans run in their heads but that just pushes the question back. You know you are thinking. You know you experience those things. Doesn’t really matter how you do it the same way that you don’t have to know how every part of your car works to drive. You can just do it.
Without talking a whole bunch about qualia there I don’t know how much more I can say, or monads, or forms, or whatever you want to call them. Joscha Bach is a great person to discuss this although he doesn’t believe in God, or at least not the same way that most people would describe it.
Part two will have to wait because I need to go feed the kiddo dinner and he woke up early from the nap and don’t want to lose the comment.
Just to give You an idea, where I'm coming from...
I'm a trained natural scientist. I studied biology and graduated with a diploma at a German university.
I believe that everything that exists can be explained without leaving the realm of the laws of physics. I do not believe there is such thing as the supernatural. Things we can't explain we only can't explain yet, but they are explainable by science, the science of the future.
As far as this imaginary figure some call "god" is concerned I have a rather radical view that would have easily got me burned at the stakes in other centuries:
"God did not create man! Man created god!"
That's all what god is. Just an imaginary figure invented by man and without humans pretending there is a god no god would exist. I even found an explanation why humans invented god(s). It's very strange that most if not all human societies that ever formed from the very beginning of humanity believed in something supernatural, in a single god or a whole bunch of them. Some theologians use that fact in order to prove that some kind of god must exist if so many societies independently believe in something of that sort. I strongly disagree with that, because that fact can also be explained by a common purpose this kind of believe can serve. It must somehow satisfy a need all humans have in common and that's why humans all over our planet invented such ideas independently.
I believe the key to understand why humans are inventing gods and other supernatural beings lies within a very unique aspect of human nature. Humans are very curious and they wanna find an explanation for everything around them. That curiosity is the engine that drives technological progress from the invention of the wheel to the construction of modern computers. So it's a very important feature of humanity, because it enables us to shape the world around us to serve our needs better and better.
But it comes with a serious downside. Our curiosity can really consume us. Have You ever made the experience that You found something in the world around You and no matter how hard You tried You were not able to find an explanation for it? But You also couldn't stop thinking about it?
Well, some phenomena turn out to be really beyond explanation, at least for now, and if You keep trying to find one nevertheless You're simply wasting Your time, which could be put to better use, thinking about problems, You actually can solve. It can even become such an obsession, that it renders You completely dysfunctional.
But how to make Your curiosity shut up, which is still trying and trying to figure out the stuff, that's out of reach for You? Well, here comes religion into play. This guy thousands of years ago who failed with trying to figure out where lightnings and thunder come from, invented a god, who made lightnings and thunder, thus could explain the unexplainable and made his curiosity shut up about this problem.
That means gods are some kind of valves for our restless minds to keep them from overloading and since all humans share this feature of human nature all societies had that need to invent gods and the supernatural. First there were specialized gods, for thunder, hunting, the wheather and so on. With scientific progress more and more of these specialized gods became obsolet. Who needs a thunder god when there is a scientific explanation for how thunderstorms work? In the end the menagerie of specialized gods was replaced by just one god responsible for everything we don't understand yet. And that's where we are now.
This also explains why believing in god(s) has nothing to do with lack of intelligence. It's more the opposite since smarter people are usually more curious and more prone to torture themselves with trying to find explanations for everything, thus they need this valve more than the dummies need it.
As far as Your concept of "sevenishness" is concerned, that's just an abstraction. Nothing supernatural about it. It's the kind of abstraction our brain uses to bring order into the chaos around us. This ability of the human brain is inseparably linked to the biology and evolution of our brain. I don't really see the need for the supernatural to explain this.
I believe there is one God, who emanates love for us all, and in whom we exist together and connected. I believe it in a way that is consistent with science and physics and the further you climb up either school of thought, the more the two merge into one, science and God.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply.
To address a few things: from a certain perspective, yes, nothing is supernatural. Everything fits together as a piece just under some rules we do not yet understand. I do not, however, believe this was the thrust of my argument about immaterial reality. Ideas exist irrespective of a host substrate and cannot be described merely in physical terms. That’s been bothering people since Socrates. We never philosophically resolved this, we just stopped talking about it. There are a lot of great physicists who believe the universe is made of matter, energy, and information. A lot of them may disagree over what constitutes information but I think it’s hard to argue information itself has reliance on materiality.
That’s not an argument for God, by the way. I think it is the first step though to believing we understand much less of the universe than we suppose and that we live on the skin of something stranger than we learn about in school.
No arguments on the historical perspective other than I think man discovered God rather than created him. Won’t even argue on some of the particular absurdities. But if you look across cultures and across times some of those things match in striking, almost jarring ways. My main takeaway from this is: we are not the makers of morality anymore than we are the makers of thought itself. We think and we are moral but those things exist outside of ourselves in the universe itself. Perhaps as an emergent property, perhaps as more, but as Moses said “We are not free to break the law, we are only free to break ourselves against the law.”
Agreed that God economizes thought by breaking endless search loops you can otherwise get stuck in but I don’t think that means God (the idea of a being which exists outside of material reality) can’t exist. It’s a utility argument only.
As a bit of an aside before diving back into sevenishness I do think we live in an age where a guiding heuristic is “This is hard for me/most people to accept emotionally, so it must be true.” That seems to show up in everything from arguments about God to trans kids, etc. We have learned painful lessons about our limitations in the last hundred years as a species and I think it has made us overly cynical. I think that drives an immediate dismissal of otherwise pretty good arguments.
On the sevenishness stuff, I’m not sure if you have ever heard of the idea of a mathematical vs a computation universe but there’s a whole body of philosophy/literature out there on it and it’s a bit of a mind pretzel. The basic idea is that you can get stuck in a real loop on the question of “Is math real or is there only computation” which isn’t quite the same thing in some very important ways. It gets to what I mentioned above. You can imagine most material things in material form but some stuff isn’t like that. Math is the most obvious, rigorous example. I can’t imagine sevenishness. There are some cheat things people do to imagine it like thinking about the numeral of seven of a particular object but that doesn’t meet the standard. It’s completely amorphous and conceptual, just like addition and subtraction, etc. Yet I think you’d agree that when I use those concepts on physical things they seem to make valid predictions. There mere fact that I can make abstractions in my head that have predictive power is deeply, deeply odd and implies something about the nature of the world that we live in and I am not alone in that belief.
God is REAL. I'm sorry the dimensionality and transcendence of the dynamic escapes you. You might try removing the "word" and just attempt the experience.
There are a lot of things we experience as "real", but in reality are only delusions of our minds. So I don't need to "attempt the experience" I already made "the experience" many times and learned there's always a logical, natural explanation for what I might have perceived as somewhat "supernatural" when it actually happened. No matter how "real" it felt at the time.
As a matter of fact, that is one of the first things You learn when You're getting trained to be a scientist: Never trust Your senses completely. They fool You way too often. Something feeling real doesn't mean it is real. Better prove or disprove it's reality in a way that bypasses Your imperfect human senses with devices that only measure what's really there and aren't compromised by the neurological shortcuts in Your brain and Your biases and imaginations.
Have it your way.
Curious what changed your mind about god and children. I mean just having a child did that?
Had a weird religious experience in my mid twenties. (I know that is a really big thing to just drop into a comment) Somehow even literally seeing God wasn’t enough but it did get me to go to therapy. Then that got me to go to a support group for survivors of childhood sexual assault (another big thing to drop) and the person who led it was a Christian. Best man I ever knew. Wanted nothing from us but to help and as he was a survivor as well it helped him deal with his own demons. Mostly it was his demeanor and his caring. You could just tell the thing that had crushed me for most of my life was a moveable burden to him. First time I believed in goodness itself. Started to firm up when I met my wife and we got pregnant and a bunch of job stuff fell out in front of me and I looked back and realized how much of my suffering was me getting in my own way. I was finally able to look back at my own life and see goodness and purpose to it.
Wow, Some Guy, how wonderful! God bless you and your mentor.
I had a very similar "conversion." For me, it happened the weekend I met my wife. I didn't just fall in love immediately. My mind filled up with imperatives and goals I'd never had before and many that I'd specifically rejected. Greatest thing that ever happened in my life; until the babies came anyway.
You go from “Hey, MacGyver’s on!” to “Maybe I should run for city council?”
One of the best lines ever, Some Guy.
LOL. Very good.
This is the most heartwarming article I have read in ages. Hugs to all of you.
The best times of my life, the most fulfilling, and the ones with deepest meaning are the ones I spent with my children. I started late and only had 2 although I would have loved to have had 3 or 4.
My son and daughter in law are expecting #3 and I am deeply glad about it. They are excellent parents and the world needs more children from excellent parents.
It's nice to read something uplifting now and again.
Mom! Is that you?
My son tells me it's not him. If you want to claim me as your Mom I can always use another son. Do you rake leaves or mow?
Ha! I need a leaf raker too!
If you can find a "son" maybe you would share. I notice Mike R has not answered me. He sort of faded out of the picture once I mentioned work.
Is this my son? I didn't know you had a subscription to Common Sense.
We were going to have condos all over the country. One for skiing, one at the beach for surfing, a hiking one. Instead, we have three kids and I have MS and mobility issues. I choose my current life and my family 100x over our planned jet setting childless life. It’s the folly of youth to think it’s all about you. It’s actually all about them. I absolutely loved this article.
Look up Dr. Saray Stancic who overcame MS; perhaps her experience could help you too? Blessings on you for choosing the real good life.
I’m sorry you not well please may you and your only be well and enjoy your family they all sound great
What a beautiful uplifting story. Thank you Bethany.
I agree, it was such a pleasure to read!
People like you and your family still exist ? There's more like us? I've never had such a tsunami of relief to know that we are not a renegade group of aliens set on this earth that shames us for having large home-schooled families . Even more so now, than in the late 80s to early 2000s.
I grew up in a large but dysfunctional family. My husband and I wanted to create a nest of love, care and enjoyment of children as unique human beings with. Which included (for us) having more than two children . Announcing a new addition coming brought "You're pregnant again? Do you know what causes that? (No, I don't. Please explain it to me), the scowls as you walk through a grocery store with your little ones The disgust as you show up with all your children for the $1 movies (yes, they did exist back them) , the loathing as your family rides the metro in DC, the condescending looks and 'sophisticated' 'you're a bane to society' type of comments.
Then you tell them you're homeschooling all of them. After they recover from their horror, comes the 'you're not qualified', you're a quack, your kids will suffer, they'll won't fit into society (good), it's child abuse, you're sheltering them, and you'll scrape up roadkill for biology dissections. Blah, Blah, Blah. Nobody took us seriously.
Then comes Bethany Mandel who brings fresh and insightful understanding, wisdom, and affirmation to the table. You explain it as no other can. Thank you for such an outstanding article. I was uplifted and thoroughly enjoyed reading it.
The destruction of public education by utopian ideologues and its reduction to an indoctrination center by whacked out political operatives is perhaps THE greatest American sorrow. The child, the only human future that exists becomes prey. It is monstrous and the people doing it are not our friends.
You sound great and your family sound even better, don’t worry about the stares and remarks if you delve into their lives they probably meaningless.
As a 62 year old mother of 4 this is by far my favorite Common Sense article and favorite comment so far. Having kids in the 80’s and 90’s I heard every single one of those remarks (and yes, once, we did use road kill for a home school dissection). All grown, with 4 grandchildren and counting, my adult children are all well adjusted, employed and productive contributors to their communities. Despite the snark we received I wouldn’t change a thing.
R C as a mother of four this is the best reply on CS today, and like you I wouldn’t change a thing. My kids are great my grandchildren (7 of them)are fantastic, thank God all employed and thru Covid to, with some having to help each other which they all did willingly + productive people within their communities. I’m not saying it’s been plain sailing but we are fortunate to live in a really great country, but remember we have to keep it great,its going to take a lot of hard work but we can all do it together!🇺🇸🇺🇸
How sick that you get stares and rude comments for doing what used to be normal and expected only two generations ago. Let me guess, you're white? Because if you were black or brown with a brood of kids (which I see all the time), I guarantee you those people would not dare cast a look in your direction or tsk-tsk you. Because that would be racist!
I've been driving a 15-passenger van since 2001. Parking garages are the worst. I've had a number of roof-scrapes and several panic attacks over the years. I'm convinced the roofs get lower as you go higher.
Best wishes to your family. "No lost limbs, no felony records!" is my motto.
"We do at least one load of laundry a day ..."
That's because, when your children are small, their clothes are small, especially in summer. When they are all teen-and-up size, you will probably do an average of five loads per day.
"You know you have a large family when you dream about living in a laundromat."
"You know you have a large family when there's a line for the bathroom - at midnight."
As a mom of 7 (born within 10 years), by the time my kids' clothes got bigger, they were doing their own laundry. Kids are capable.
The one and only way in which my parents failed me was not making me do chores. They made sure I knew HOW to do them, but since I was an only child, my mom found it easier to just do things like laundry herself. So I had to learn as an adult the self-discipline to do unpleasant chores that I should have learned as a child.
My (three) kids had to wash their own clothes as soon as they were old enough to safely operate the washing machine. If they complained when it was their turn to load and run the dishwasher, I offered the option of doing all the dishes by hand (they didn't take me up on that one).
Our children got similar types of options, Celia!
Same with dinner, too. I never made "special" food for the kids for dinner. Once they were old enough to eat regular food, they ate what we ate. Once they were old enough to make themselves a sandwich, if they didn't like what was on the table (they had to take at least one bite if it was something they had never tasted), they could go make something for themselves (interestingly, they rarely took that option; not much fun being alone in the kitchen when everyone else is already eating at the table).
When we got our expensive new Speedqueen washer, our teenager suddenly became a lot more enthusiastic about doing the laundry.
Best machine ever the Speed Queen top loader. Every time it finishes a load I hug my machine, because without him/her/it I would be dead in the water. A washing machine is a must have next to a house and then a car.
It was a lot of money, but reportedly will last longer than any other machine on the market.
Yip it will mine is 38 years old and still going she is a GOM like the GOP only the M stands for machine 🤣🤣I love her!
Even if the youngsters are doing the laundry themselves, the household (and its washer) are still doing 5-ish loads per day.
True, but it isn't a full-time job for mom.
or dad
I don’t know about that. I’d have to tell my kids, wearing something for 1/2 an hour doesn’t make it dirty.
Yes, that one drives me crazy, wear pants for half a day, still clean but they toss in the basket. Working to break that habit
that is because they can toss in but never have to take out
Laundromats...
Just the other day I asked a friend, "Do you know anybody who wishes they'd spent more time in laundromats? I don't."
But now I stand corrected, C.W. :-)
I love laundromats. Absolutely love them.
Hopefully yours are not as expensive as they are around here. $6.75 for a load, all in quarters. At least they're big front loaders so you can get a lot done in one go.
Gosh that is expensive
When I was single and living in an apartment, it was $0.50 a load. A different era.
That sounds about right for the giant one. Maybe a little less here. I usually go to the laundromat after campouts, when I have ten loads to do all at once.
15 passengers, eh? May I ask how many children? I'll show you mine first: A mere eight.
Ten, but only 5 still at home.
Well good for you! May you all have a good new year.
Baruch HaShem May we all have a good year and a happy Succot!
Thank you, and I hope you have a great year as well.
Enjoy them soon the house will be empty
I do enjoy them, but no, it won't. Probably never. I'm hoping to move out to a nice tent in the back yard. Son D, "Fang," is going to build a platform for me. He's good with tools.
I use my dad's motto all the time, "if you're going to do something stupid, be smart about it."
Our motto was "Straggles will be eaten by wolves..."
Bless you and your family Bethany. I agree that giving birth is one of the most optimistic acts people can do and growing decent humans is the finest.
also the most selfless acts.
Childless people claiming that having a baby is "selfish"... so misguided.
I don’t have children and I admire people who do. Anyone who feels different is seriously confused.
Having children is not remotely selfish. But not having children isn't, either. People need to do what's best for them. Since the majority of people do have kids, I'm not worried about society running out of young'uns.
That was enjoyable, thanks. Here in Israel we didn't get strange looks with our eight kids. It's above average in our community, but only just.
You sound like very thoughtful parents. My approach was more Zen -- parenting is what happens while you're thinking about something else. Another word for it is "lazy". My wife, a woman of iron, was much more deliberate (and worked a lot harder), but she too never overestimated the good or harm any specific act of parenting would do.
Why am I going on about this? I guess you got me thinking about when our kids were younger. Today they range from 24 to 40 and we're watching them raise their own children.
All the best to you and your family in the new year. 𝘎𝘮𝘢𝘳 𝘵𝘰𝘷.
Israel is one of the only countries on the planet that is procreating above replacement rate. And that’s a great mitzvah. I visited Israel this past April and enjoyed it so much. My youngest daughter is planning to take a Birthright trip to Israel over her winter semester break at college.
Your daughter is the luckiest person on the planet to be doing the Birthright trip. Its Gan Adan there Brian we just came back from a two week break we had the best time ever with the no nonsense nation, amazing people the Israelis. Wishing you a good Yomtov and a happy succot!
Yes, it is still very difficult to put into words my experience in Israel. My reaction, similar to yours, is that Israelis are amazing and on a mission. Everyone is highly motivated to make the best of their new Country. The buzz in the market place on Friday afternoon just before Shabbat was incredible. I just sat back, watch and absorbed it all. Meeting IDF soldiers on the street was such a joy. They are so brave and fierce. Our tour guide was an IDF officer so I was able to learn a lot about how they think and how Israeli culture operates. It was fascinating.
Am Yisrael Chai.
Our Christian church took a trip to Israel. Birthright trip describes our experience also. The people: Spirited. No nonsense. Focused. Optimistic. Clear eyed and realistic. In a real sense, we had come back home. The Israeli people could not have been more friendly, kind, and supportive. As the Irish say, Erin go bragh, Ireland forever. Israel go bragh.
Love this post you summed up Israel, her people and her sprit in a few lines .Israel go Bragh! Israelis are strong they know who they are, know what they want and know where they are going. 🇮🇱🇮🇱🇮🇱❤️
Our experiences sound the same it’s a unique country. Am Yisrael Chai!
Yes Israel has the top fertility rate in the developed world, at 3.0. Even secular, non-practicing Jews in Israel have pretty large families.
Replacement rate is 2.1, and countries like the U.S. and Sweden are 1.8, Germany is 1.6, Japan is 1.4, and South Korea is a staggering 1.1.
Most African countries have fertility rates of 4.0 and up, with a few like Somalia, Chad, Angola, Nigeria over 5.0, but fertility in Africa is starting to decline.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_dependencies_by_total_fertility_rate
Be fertile and multiply.
This post made me smile. We have three kids, now 34,32, and 28. Expecting our first grandchild in the next four weeks.
I love the espirit de corps of your family. There is nothing sweeter to a parent than seeing their children care for one another and maintain close and caring relationships when they are adults.
I believe that is something that parents can certainly influence, and I'm sure you and your husband will reap that parental reward.
But don't be discourages by fierce inter-sibling adolescent conflict. Some of that is inevitable and it passes!
I am so thankful for a positive article on raising a larger family. I am the youngest of 7 and had 5 myself. My siblings are such a support to each other. We chose to homeschool and my two married daughters voluntarily come back weekly for family dinner with their spouses. It wasn’t all a bed of roses, I did cry about the amount of laundry, mess or fighting. But now that my youngest is 12, I get sad thinking about my childrearing years coming to an end. I’ll be so happy when the grandkids start coming!
“But those arguing for protecting the Earth by not making babies are just existing on Earth, not living in it.”
This is so true on so many levels--many of those spouting proscriptions for everyone else have no idea how superficial and one-dimensional those kind of solutions are. It’s why I never joined any conservation groups--they sentimentalize “nature” to the point of treating it like the “nice” room at my grandma’s house--something to visit, use on occasion, but not really to live in. It’s why people in the WWF tasked with guarding national park forests in Africa think it’s okay to beat the indigenous people who’ve always lived there and burn down their settlements in order to “protect” the environment.
There seems to be a similar mode of thinking when it comes to kids. People I know and love who say they don’t want kids are the ones that need a change in perspective the most, the ones to whom I want to say “grow up and stop thinking of yourself all the time,” and the ones who are the most scared of solitude and self-reflection.
I don’t ever come out and tell them to have kids--it’s on them. And I don’t gush about how great having kids is, but wow. It really is.
Yes, speaking to many young adults these days leaves me with the impression that many of them do not intend to have children because of the perceived pressure it puts on the planet. That’s a really sad outcome brought on by the toxic culture in our society today. How sad.
I believe the Earth exists primarily for humans. It's our job to respect, preserve and use her. Go forth and multiply.
Yes 😁.
Brian, you might enjoy the new book SUPERABUNDANCE. It is a tour de force showing that more people bring about more wealth and LESS damage to the environment.
here we can agree.. more people is a good thing..in the most part
Thank you, I’ll give it a look.
":People I know and love who say they don’t want kids are the ones that need a change in perspective the most."
No, actually, we don't. Our perspective about not wanting children is as valid as your perspective about wanting them. As long as the decision continues to make you happy, having or not having is the right one for you.
Not quite. A world of aging humans with no younger generation to support them is dystopia defined.
The biggest problem with most stupid homo sapiens is the fact that they can't imagine a world in which they get old and enfeebled and need help from progeny. The smart ones know better.
On a family to family level, having children does not guarantee being taken care of, or even getting help in, old age. Plunking maw and paw in the nursing home and never visiting? That's more common than we like to think.
On a societal level, of course you're correct: younger generations are needed to carry the banner when the old ones fall. But for the most part, supply takes care of itself---most people on the planet have children, and the poorer you are, the more you have.
Pete Butigeig, of all people said it best a few months ago. I forget how he phrased it, something about: when you love someone more than yourself.
But I think that until you've loved someone more than you love yourself, you probably don't really know love.
I agree with Pete, and you, about that. But you don't need to have children to love someone more than yourself. I have no issue with people having kids; as long as they can support them and don't abuse them, hey, the more the merrier. But it's not everyone's cup of tea, and those that don't want, shouldn't.
Articles and posted comments on Substack, the disconnect between living human empathy and the consequences be damned behind the scenes machinations of criminal finance makes me believe that part of the grift destroying our civilization is the capture of legitimate national social concern by well paid political ideologues who serve international criminal finance. The IMF/WEF/CCP assault on Dutch farmers (the second most productive in the world) is getting no real MSM coverage and is being done in the name of a for personal gain capture of a distorted economic break a few eggs to make an omelet "environmentalism". In reality it is the same give me cheap throwaway labor and access to all natural resources without consequence grift greedy thugs have been running throughout history.
It is necessary to destroy the family, the child, "..we the people...", human worth and dignity across the board for their ultimate success. Not only will you "own nothing and be happy" but you will exist in a sterile and monitored world (just as the Chinese people do now), your property and money seized and your life destroyed (just as Trudeau did to the Canadian truckers) and you will be arrested for your political speech and thoughts (happening in Great Britain every day).
The child and family is under assault by venal and avaricious thugs. It's not something else.
It reminds me of something I read years ago - I could swear it was in something of William James. He was talking about the notion even back then of Malthus and their version of the Club of Rome - living in some pinched miserly way to preserve something for future generations. He had nothing against the future generations but had a lot against living life that way and a lot of faith in human ingenuity. He used a line I've failed to find since to the effect that it would be better to "bring the curtain down and wind up the whole show early" than to live lives in such a cowardly, stilted fashion. I can't recall the exact lines and I wish I could, because it profoundly impressed me at the time. I've spent whole evenings poring through books looking for it (and Googled since then).
Preserves in Africa are the modern colonialism. Including using Black people to abuse other Black people.
What a wonderful article to wake up to! Thanks to Bethany for writing, and Bari for publishing. I needed this antidote today, in the shadow of “Armageddon.”
Excalibur.
Congratulations Bethany, you are a better person than all those childless, self-indulgent women seeking fulfillment on the corporate ladder and with men who can’t commit. And bless your husband too.
You remind me of a time I was on an airplane and a mother boarded with seven well behaved young kids. Some had yamakas. Not a peep of whining the whole flight.
I am one of those “childish, self indulgent“ women. I’ve always adored kids and loved it when my sisters had them. I just didn’t have it in me to want to be pregnant, give birth, and have kids of my own. Whether due to my love for work and intellectual stimulation, my loveless mother, my anxiety problem, or my need for quiet, it was the only way for me. It’s cruel of you to judge this choice so harshly.
Aimee,
Thank you for your transparency. Having children is a personal choice that needs to be respected.
❤️
I think the criticism was making the choice for vapid, selfish, and nonsensical reasons. Nothing in your comment suggested any of those apply to you.
No one knows why women make their choices and there is never a reason for judging a woman for not having children. Ever.
Well, when a woman tells another why they made their choice then at least one person knows. That person, having the capacity for free thought is certainly entitled to judge that reason. Perhaps they'll think it a good choice perhaps not. Now, politeness would of course dictate that we avoid being unnecessarily rude or cruel. But no person is precluded from making a value judgment simply because you are worried some one's feelings might get hurt.
edit: besides, I was in no way being critical with the comment you replied to. And, oddly enough your response was a judgment. A critical judgment ordering not simply silence but denying the autonomy to decide for myself whether I believe some one's choice was a good one or not. You don't get to do that. Ever.
I did not have kids because I didn’t have the skills necessary to be a good parent. My work involves helping others and takes a lot of emotional energy. I hope I can make a difference in that way. I’m happy for anyone who finds joy and self fulfillment through parenthood. That just wasn’t the path my life took. It’s always a bummer to see women putting each other down for their different choices, so I understand how you feel.
Aimee- you have the right to live your life as you see fit. Your self-discipline in responding to the disgusting judgemental comment is perhaps admirable. But I would have offered harsher words. How dare they judge you without knowing you!
❤️
Think about it: She mentioned “childish, self-indulgent women,” but didn’t say that all childless women fit that description or deserve to be judged for being childless. Rather, you seem to have applied that “harsh” victimhood to yourself.
I don’t feel like a victim at all. I’m simply setting forth another perspective, hoping to enlighten others as to why people don’t all fall into a neat little box, and shouldn’t be judged for it. We all have different life experiences and no two of us (other than identical twins) are alike. Not all women want to mother children, just as not all men want to play contact sports. These are stereotypes and exhibit only a failure (or refusal) to understand the differences in people.
And yes- she did judge. She said that women who have children are better people. Doesn’t get more “judgy” than that.
Mark- you are rude. Just stop. Attacking women online and trying to make as if you're clever for it is disgusting. Please slither back into your hole.
It's your choice. But it's also natural for those with children to say "Sorry you missed out on this experience".
“Sorry you missed out…” is a judgment in itself. Just because one person enjoyed an “experience” doesn’t mean others would. My husband loves roller coasters. I hate (and fear) them. If he came off a ride on one saying “sorry you missed out on this experience”, could anything be more insensitive and obtuse? Perhaps it’s “natural” for people to think in that way, but it’s certainly not considerate or kind.
Take a deep breath. Relax. You're not being attacked. There's a million positive ways to contribute to the future. You're not the problem.
Seems like you're overreacting a bit.
Be proud of being selfish and self indulgent. There is nothing wrong with it. No need to be defensive.
I don’t see it as either. It’s simply a path- a different one than the one chosen by the writer. We all take our own. And I’m not defensive in the least. Just speaking the truth and showing a different perspective, hopefully to enlighten others.
Some people are not cut out to be parents, and I applaud the ones who know it. Sadly, too many who shouldn’t have kids have them. I’m sorry for your experience with your mother. There are many reasons for not having children. Enjoy your nieces and nephews!
Mentorship and stewardship of the child can often make the difference the "can't see the forest for the trees" parent cannot. (I mean that in a good way.)
❤️
And then there are those who 'think' they're not parent material, protesting they would NEVER have children. Then viola, a child comes and bliss and suddenly, the best parent ever is born!
The surprise for me was the number of men I knew who started second families in mid life and experienced unbelievable happiness and fulfillment finding parenting joyful and filled with meaning.
Who are you to call her selfish and self indulgent? Her decision to not have children is as valid as yours to have them.
Agree! It’s wrong to judge all those who don’t have kids as misguided and selfish. I chose not to have kids for multiple reasons and don’t regret it. I also love my god daughter and would do anything for her. Kids are awesome, I admire parents. There are plenty of couples that made a good choice not having kids for their personal reasons. When I was young I wanted kids. By the time I got married I was pretty sure I did not but reserved the right to change my mind. My life is different but I’m happy and don’t feel like I’ve missed out.
Thank you.
Whether to have children and how many is a deeply personal choice. People who choose not to (or whose life path doesn't lead them there) are not childless, self-indulgent women. Don't judge.
I agree with you both - as long as the judgment isn't a one-way street.
Why would you take my comment personally?
If people call people from NC hicks, I don’t conclude they are talking about me. There are other people in NC who are hicks.
It seemed to me you were pretty specific.
Because you said Bethany was a better person than childless self-indulgent women. I didn't conclude you were talking about me. I have kids. You were being judgemental.
Seriously? "You are a better person than all those childless, self-indulgent women seeking fulfillment on the corporate ladder and with men who can’t commit." Why on earth would you condemn people for making choices different than your own?
Bethany is not better and she is not worse. She and her husband are doing what's right for them, and people who choose not to have children are doing what's best for them. As long as each is happy with the decision they made, mazel tov to all of them.
Well said Shane.
I am surprised at you MC, making a cruel, judgmental statement. Everybody is different. Not wanting to have children doesn't make you a bad person. It just means your priorities are different or you physically can't have children.
I disagree. I was specific about a group of women —“all those” does not mean all women who don’t or can’t have kids.
Stop looking to be offended by things.
We all see things differently, NC. What I read meant all women. How could "all those" mean anything else?
Don't get you bowels in an uproar. I read your post and what I posted was based on how I interpreted it. "All those" sure seemed to mean all women. What else could it mean?
It seemed pretty cruel to me.
There is no obligation (moral or otherwise..) that I know of, NC, for women to have children. We do not live in an authoritarian society where roles are selected for people and said people are expected to follow them.
Your version of the word 'better' is arbitrary, biased, and in a way, consistent with religious orthodoxy, in my opinion.
With modern birth control, women are free to do what they want in life. Don't take this wrong. The threat of pregnancy is gone. In fact, that is what birth control pills are all about, to have sex without the threat of pregnancy.
The feminist whine that women do not have an equal chance in the workplace. That is becoming less and less true. The feminist say that men dominate the upper echelons of business which is true but a woman who drops out of the workplace to raise children and then comes back to work now 20 to 30 years later, now at age 45 to 50, less experience than a man who has never left.
The women in that example rarely if ever catch up. It may not be right but it is a fact of life.
To me a woman who stays at home to raise children, is doing the most important job in the world but you can see why that penalizes them in the workplace.
Some women choose to forego children to pursue a career. They aren't selfish any more than a man who doesn't stay home to raise children.
My best friend from college has a daughter who is an executive in a Fortune 500 Company. I doubt she will ever have children. I say more power to her.
Yes to all of this. The goal of genuine feminism was to tell society to let women make the choices that work best for them and their own lives. Stay home and have babies? Fine. Work 100 hours a week to make CEO? Fine? Raise a family while working? No kids? Also fine.
Most women will have children, and that's good for society---we need children to keep us going. But what applies to the macro does not apply to the micro, and every woman needs to be free to make that choice for herself. Having children is important, but it's not the ONLY important thing in a woman's life. Other things compete.
To call women who choose not to have kids irresponsible slackers, etc., is terrible.
Well put!
What a beautiful post!
or the person who boarded the flight next to me with three children on in a paid for seat. the others on the parents lap ( each were about 1 years old and plenty big enough for a set of their own..) the mother pulled down the food tray and proceeded to change a diaper on the FOOD tray. then had the nerve to hand it to the flight attendant for disposal.. The FA told me that was not the worst she had seen ..what does a yamaka have to do with this?
Maybe the commenter was suggesting a Jewish family because Bethany's family is Jewish.
As to your point about the children on the lap, you better believe that if I could save $$$ and followed the law by having my 1 year old sit on my lap, I would. I would, however, never, ever, ever change their diaper outside of the plane bathroom.
so then why do people with lots of kids think they should "go to the head of the line" or get an up front parking space or be allowed to break the rule of ( as th poster said) only groups of 5 or less.. I would like my dog to sit on my lap on the plane but no. I have to pay a fortune for him to even be under my seat. 150 each way.
What? Who said they should go to the head of the line? Bethany said she parked where they were adjacent to multiple venues. It was really a throw away line more to discuss the larger van she would need.
You're a dog owner and planes have different rules for humans than they do dogs. Dogs don't breastfeed, for example. They don't need a diaper change, for example.
Reread your comments--they are so vacant it's actually startling. Your envy is glaring.
I can't like this article enough. I hang with a lot of devout Catholics with 6+ children but we normally don't hear about the upsides of large families. May God continually bless you and your family. What a beautiful article!
I love this! I did not have as many children as you but as life continues I realize that family is everything! And ‘a secret’ you won’t know for a while.......grandkids are the true reward and may you be blessed with many!
Quoting Roxanna Robinson here on grandchildren…” my retirement gift, the platinum gold watch for being a mother” and …”it’s like being told you no longer have to eat vegetables, only dessert-and really only the icing”!
God bless, and may we have more families like yours.