Pendragons Princess

Good Reasons Not to Have Children

http://www.geocities.com/zpg1957/Whynokids.htm

Contrary to the popular belief that children are “blessings”, the following facts say otherwise:

3. Your child will contribute nothing of value.

a. There are so many people already that any discovery or improvement that can be made will be.

b. Opportunities for making contributions are decreasing because of the demands placed on the social system by increasing population. Tax money goes to build infrastructure and provide support for new people, not for research or philanthropy.

c. The chances of your child making any kind of major positive contribution to society are extremely slim - near to zero. Their chances of their making a major negative contribution are much greater. Three American-born scientists won 2003 Nobel prizes. That year around 100,000 Americans were sentenced to prison or probation.

d. When you have children, you breed your own competition for your job and increase the downward pressure on your own wages.

e. Opportunities for making contributions are decreasing because of the demands placed on rapidly vanishing energy and material resources by the exploding human population.

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The most important one of all:

7. You are unprepared for the task of having and raising children.

a. There is no way to know if you will be able to do a good job of raising children until it is too late to back out of it.

b. It is common for people to be unequal to the task. News reports and the experiences of people around you demonstrate that it is extremely difficult to have enough emotional, physical and financial resources to raise children well.

c. You will be consistently and constantly lied to by everyone about the demands and rewards of having children: The demands will be minimized and the rewards greatly exaggerated. Even if your situation clearly contraindicates children, most people will deny or minimize your problems and urge you to reproduce anyway. As a result, you will have no good information on what the task requires.

d. People who complain of their own parents’ failures almost always repeat them themselves, simply because they have no other model of parenting. Unless your own parents were perfect, you don’t have the tools to do a good job yourself.
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One of my friends put it succintly years ago: “People have children in order to see if they are going to be good parents or not. More than 95% of the time, they are not good parents.” Having children exhausts you, gives you no real incentive for having them, and can suck up your very life sources - not just financially but emotionally and mentally, too. More:

8. Having and raising children is emotionally debilitating.

a. Bearing children may activate mental illnesses in the mother, or may severely worsen an existing mild mental illness. Mothers of young children have worse mental health than any other demographic group. Newsweek magazine reports that 30% of mothers of young children suffer from depression. NBC says: Compared to women with no children, new mothers were four times more likely to be hospitalized with mental problems, researchers found…Mental problems included postpartum depression, but also bipolar disorder, with altering periods of depression and mania; schizophrenia and similar disorders; and adjustment disorders, which can include debilitating anxiety.

b. Otherwise mentally healthy people will suffer ongoing worry about their children.

c. Mothers, particularly will suffer from a constant sense of guilt and inadequacy, compounded by social blame. They will feel ghastly about everything that happens to their children, whether it was within their power to control or not.

d. Sleep deprivation can place parents in a state where they no longer feel sane, where they have tremendous fits of rage, and where they may harm their children, their partners or themselves.

e. Women with children often become neurotically fearful, worrying about every little thing and emotionally smothering their children because of their endless anxiety.

f. 70% of women suffer from post-partum depression, which may merely make the first two weeks of a child’s life utter hell for the mother, or may result in permanent psychotic impairment. At best this is a miserable start to what is, peculiarly, universally presented as a glorious experience. At worst it can destroy lives in the ugliest possible way.

g. Women who have had a baby often become incapable of thinking through the consequences of having more babies. They’ll deliberately get pregnant when they are unemployed, when their houses are in foreclosure or when they’re facing bankruptcy. Nothing matters to them anymore except breeding. Similarly they’ll breed repeatedly with men who are irresponsible, drug-addicted, mentally ill and violent, then disclaim any responsibility for the horrendous consequences because nothing mattered any more except their irrational drive to breed. Like all mental diseases, this baby-rabidity leaves its sufferer in a terrible position where her irrational choices have ruined her life.

h. Parents in any stage of life have more symptoms of depression than the childless. “Unlike other major adult social roles in the United States, parenthood does not appear to present a mental health advantage for individuals, find sociologists Ranae J. Evenson, Vanderbilt University, and Robin W. Simon, Florida State University. Their article, “Clarifying the Relationship Between Parenthood and Depression,” appears in the December issue of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, published by the 100-year-old American Sociological Association.” Even “empty nesters” have been found to have more symptoms of depression than the childless, contradicting conventional wisdom that the years of grandchildren and travel are the happiest and that your kids “take care of you in your old age”. Perhaps they are too often the years of emotional upheaval for their children and kids returning home, grandchildren in tow?
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I’m not really sure who started the “But a child will take care of you in your old age” myth but chances are that person’s child did no such thing. Americans buy into the “It’s necessary to have children” myth hook, line, and sinker, finally being sunk at the end with having a child to care for. Children constantly demand 24 hour, 7 days a week, 365 days a year care from the time they are born until they reach the age of 18 and sometimes even beyond that. Once an adult becomes a
parent, that parent has next to no time for himself or herself. Well, it’s harder on the mother of course since the father does not play an important role in the rearing of a child - that is primarily the mother’s job. Most parents are unwilling to live their childhood all over again, having to eat the same grub a child does, watch the same kiddie tv their kids do, and play with the same toys and games their kids do. That is not normal behavior for any true mature adult. Romance between a married couple immediately dissolves, forget about a sex life, since most pregnant women don’t even want to have sex during pregnancy or after the child is born, and the relationship quickly deteriorates. Lastly:

18. Those who encourage you to have children are not people you should listen to.

a. Those who encourage you to have children will always lie to you about it. It’s never a good idea to do what liars tell you to do.

b. The media drenches you with unrealistically positive images of child-bearing and rearing and consistently negative images of childlessness. It is never a good idea to do what the media wants you to do.

c. If you say you don’t want children, people will tell you that you don’t know what you want or that you’ll change your mind. It’s never a good idea to obey those who condescend to you and patronize you.

d. These same people will become hysterically upset and angry if you get sterilized without first having children. It is never a good idea to obey those who hate the idea that you can control your own fate.

e. These same people will push you to have children even if it is obvious that your and your child’s lives would be miserable as a result. It is never a good idea to obey anyone monstrous enough to sacrifice your life and another’s life to satisfy their own need for validation.

f. The same men who pressure their unwilling wives to have babies quickly manage to be somewhere else when the baby cries. It is never a good idea to get into a project with someone who is guaranteed to leave you in the lurch.

g. Parents always seem to “understand” why other parents abuse and kill their children. Apparently there is no difference between the emotions of abusive and non-abusive parents: they’re both sick. It’s never a good idea to do something that comes with built-in sickness.

19. Observations of the lives of people with children show how unrewarding the job of child-raising is.

a. Historically men have almost never done childcare. Since good jobs have always been allocated to men, caring for children is obviously not “the most important job in the world”.

b. Despite better job opportunities for women and despite the growing numbers of men who describe themselves as “feminists”, very few men stay at home with children or do significant childcare. A feminist writer described her “feminist” husband’s attitude toward the care of his own children as “time-wasting, faintly demeaning and better left to babysitters.”

c. The tones of voice used by people talking to children can almost always be classified as: threatening, condescending, cajoling or bored. Nothing about this kind of communication indicates that the company of children is pleasant.

d. People who have children frequently say things to their children like “I can’t wait until you grow up and leave home” that indicate how little they enjoy child-raising. These same people will suddenly forget how much they wanted their children gone when it comes to pressuring the childfree to have children. Then children are an unending source of enjoyment and fun.

e. Those desperate enough to have children that they endure the horrors of fertility treatments are fixated on one bodily function at the expense of jobs, relationships and health. This is obviously not mentally healthy.

f. One out of eight 42-year old women says she regrets having had her children. This isn’t a measure of those who would not have had children if they had it to do over. These are women who specifically regret having the children they have.

g. Parents claim they have “The most important job in the world,” but when they employ others to do that job, they hire people without education and pay them minimum wage.

h. The words most consistently used to describe the experience of mothering - even by women who claim to love their children passionately - are “sadness” and “anger”. Indeed one British woman cited in the Guardian says of her feelings about her role in the family:”about twice a year, I get so angry, I can’t sleep. I’m churned up. It seems so unfair.”

i. Women who work with children, such as teachers and pediatricians, are less likely to have children of their own because they have a more realistic understanding of what it requires.

k. People who had a lot of responsibility for younger siblings are much less likely to have children of their own, because they know what childcare entails. Eldest children are most likely to be childfree because eldest children end up babysitting.

l. Mothers, and to a lesser extent fathers, believe they should be extolled for doing the tasks of child-raising, even though they made the decision to have children, sometimes against all advice. That sense of martyrdom clearly indicates how horrible a task child-raising is.

m. Parents complain about their children constantly, particularly to other parents. They say things like “How did I get myself into this” and “I love my kids but…” “I was going insane staying at home with them” and “I need a vacation from my kids.” (All of these are direct quotes).

n. Women who had little education and had children at an early age without any experience of work adjust far better to having children than do women who have lived as independent adults. Obviously child rearing suffers by comparison with child-free adult life.

o. The more education people have, the fewer children they have, if they choose to have them at all.
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The education part is very, very important and doesn’t just end with education about birth control, either. Studies have shown that the more intellectually developed person becomes, the base desires to reproduce tend to diminish and fast. Continued:

24. Having children traps women in sexist roles and expectations

a. When a baby arrives, the woman almost always ends up with all the responsibility.

b. That responsibility fractures the focus of women so their productivity disappears. It is easy to tell when a woman author has had her first baby. Her books become confused and unreadable. The only woman Nobel laureate in science of the modern age (of six) who has children is Rosalind Yalow. She notes in her autobiography that she had live-in help with her household until her younger child was 9 years old, and has said in interviews that she was able to do Nobel-prize winning research and keep up with her household only because she requires just four hours of sleep a night.

c. Even though a woman may be holding down a full time job AND shouldering the responsibility for child care, it is almost certain that her husband will claim that he does “half,” thus depriving her of the credit for her work.

d. Once a woman has children, she becomes disempowered, tolerating being relegated to the role of household help, avoiding confrontation and “giving in” on her feminist principles rather than risk negatively affecting the children. Susan Maushart says “motherhood profoundly increases a woman’s conservatism … The presence of children almost invariably raises the stakes, making compromise more acceptable and inequities easier to rationalise.”

e. It is almost always the woman’s career that is allowed to suffer in order to provide child care – almost never the man’s.

f. Women who declared they would never put their fate in a man’s hands will become stay-at-home moms, taking a terrible risk, and putting themselves in the role of chattel to their husbands because it is the only way their children can be provided with adequate care.

g. Women who end up divorced after staying home with children are relentlessly shortchanged economically in almost every possible way. Their lifetime earning power has been eroded by their time out, their retirement savings have been severely affected, and they may not be able to go back to their former work if they are no longer current.

h. Women who end up doing all the childcare and household tasks model powerlessness and subservience to their daughters.

i. Women will have to watch their husbands enjoying hobbies and free time while they slave at the household tasks.

j. Women who were once activist will find themselves unwilling to challenge the status quo any more, because they have become dependent on it.
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Sadly, it is sexist for women to become mothers first and foremost, sacrificing their own needs for those around them, especially children. They are the property of their husband’s with no social rights to have their needs met first. Indeed, once women do have children, they usually go hungry since that precious little baby takes food right out of her mouth. That is not something I exactly envy, and it is nothing to be envied.