plains:
im not sure we can completely discount another creature’s ability to desire.
and yes, there are some who do not wish to bear children. but as a whole, and from an ecological standpoint i think its safe to say that living things like to make babies… otherwise they wouldnt be here
Thanks everyone for your comments on this issue.
I have struggled tremendously with this very question. In time, I’ll try to articulate why. For now, I plan to read all 5 pages of comments (some of them rather lengthy) before fashioning my own response. It’ll take a number of days before I come up for air. Wish me luck…
I don’t see how you can really rewild without children (not that you can’t, it just doesn’t fit so nicely into my view). Or like, tribal or community type living, because I usually notice a great love for (the) children at the core, and I think that’s one of the greatest things. That doesn’t mean you gotta have 13 kids or everyone has to y’know.
Its always a matter of choice. Leave the shoulds to civilisation. Oh here’s my take on what civilisation tells me
Age 5 to 8 - How many kids do you want when you grow up?
11 Kids, and I’ll never get married
Age 16 - Don’t get pregnant, you won’t finish school, or get a good job, and will be a complete failure, embarrasing us, like you always do.
Fear of being disowned. Wanting to run away
Age 18 - Don’t get married, you’re too young. He might not be right for you.
What the fuck do you know? He doesn’t judge me, you do. So is it right to be judged all the time?
Age 21 - Don’t get married, if you can’t hold a job, you won’t be able to get security payments (not that I could get them then anyway)
Oh great, so everything is about money, and what happens if I haven’t got any. No pressure or anything. Thanks for interfering.
Age 25 onwards - when are you getting married? you should get married! When are you having kids?
Never. Registration is authoritarian, our relationship doesn’t need someone else’s permission. No I shouldn’t, ‘living in sin’ is working fine for us. Why are you asking me? Am I a baby factory now? When we damn well feel like it, bozo
I feel pretty torn on the issue of kids. I was never one of those people who really really wanted kids, but I always thought that if I were in the right circumstance, in a living situation where I would want to raise a child, then I would like to have one, or adopt one. As I get older the thought has started to cross my mind that I will never find that kind of circumstance, and I think that makes me more sad than anything.
I also share Prissy’s affinity for picking names, in fact was known to have come up with some pretty “creative” names when under certain influences in college…
Id love to have children one day and im sure i will have children all over the world even though they might not directly be mine.
So I finally read this whole thread. Thank you to everyone who has contributed. The issue of having/not having children in the future has tormented me for a number of years. Sometimes (actually, a lot of the time) I think it would give me peace of mind just to take the option away entirely, to get sterilized, just so that I didn’t have to think about it anymore. There are always other people’s kids that I can help with, right? Or if I find I’ve been mistaken, I can adopt. And there’s this…
You guys, I’m worried. Really worried. I have so much anxiety about the future. Sometimes I imagine what it would be like to move beyond civilization with my hypothetical children. It would be nice to relearn our place as people of the earth alongside other families. But then I consider that I am merely hoping, in vain, that I will always be able to live the way I wish and raise a child the way I wish. When I remove hope from the equation, I realize that there are some things I can’t control in life. The way things are going, I worry that the future will be absolutely miserable in my lifetime, and not in a way that I can really do anything about…after an ecological collapse perhaps, or nuclear war. I have no doubt that the planet can heal eventually once this parasite of civilization eats itself, but in the short term, while I’m alive? Maybe it is just my imagination running away, but I have visions of the future that compel me to develop a suicide plan if it comes to that, if I find myself in enough pain or deprivation, or if I am captured and imprisoned by a neo-civ band of mauraders. I am serious about this and I do not believe that it would be ignoble or wrong to do so under certain circumstances. So far it looks like I might be able to reach dry land and lasting freedom if civ falls, but I know that I cannot control some truly menacing possibilities that can happen along the way, preventing me from carrying out my intentions. And I know that survival (or even bearable circumstances) in a crash scenario is by no means guaranteed.
I do not know if I am willing to take the risk of having children, of bringing them into a world where either civilization straggles onward with an ever-more-violent will to dominate the innocent (entrapping my family), or where civ’s end also spells an almost total obliteration of the matrix of life. I do not want to see any innocent person, any child, and especially any child of mine, suffer under the rubric of civilization or the calamities in its wake. If I have an emergency suicide plan developed, then how can I truly say I’m OK with bringing kids into the world?
I spoke with a doctor last week about sterilization, tubal ligation. After telling him that I have been considering this for years, and after telling him how I felt about the future (although not so drawn-out and emotionally as I just did above), he told me that if I scheduled the surgery, he would take that action as a sign that I’m serious, and that he would not question my decision. (Believe it or not, there are lots of doctors who will refuse to sterilize a 26-year-old woman who hasn’t ever been pregnant or had children… as if it is their decision to make!)
I believe that if I ever find myself in a situation where I no longer have any fear of civilization wrenching the hearts and minds and bodies of my family, that would be the ONLY situation where I would consider trying to get pregnant. But if I went ahead now and got sterilized, and if I miraculously found myself in such a situation later, I think I would be able to forgive myself and accept my infertility, and get around it by adopting (in an informal sense, because this hypothetical future situation would be absent of red tape or bureaucracy ;)) or taking on some child-raising responsibilities for my friends and neighbors.
So after that is all said and done, I am almost sure that I want this surgery. It would be very easy to do right now. My health insurance covers everything except one $20 fee. It is tempting. In the doctor’s office as he was explaining the procedure it felt so liberating.
Apologies to those who have children, if that sounds harsh. I like children generally, and in the past I’ve felt a maternal kind of love for a few particular kids that I have had responsibility for (in some way, shape or form). (Which is why I can consider adoption as an option that is just as fulfilling.) I just don’t want to worry about pregnancy in my lifetime in this precarious place in history…
If anyone can supply a perspective or suggest another decision-making tool, I’ll take it. I know it’s ultimately about how I feel… but…
PS. Also, lately I have seen the act of getting sterilized as a strong statement… a big “F*** you, Civ! You’ll never have my children!” But that’s not my main reason for doing it. It’s more of a side effect.
Well, I respect your choice and all the experiences behind it! I do have a story, I don’t know how much it will help, but what the hell.
I have a friend who basically felt exactly the same way. In her early twenties, she got a tubal ligation. The doctor also, at first, wouldn’t consent to the surgery. She said too often younger women, who haven’t had children yet, come back ten years later regretting it. This pissed my friend off to no end. She pushed the doctor to do the surgery. Not only did the doctor snip the tubes, but my friend had them cauterize them too. Whew!
Ten years later…she regretted it. Felt really sad. Wanted to have children after all. Starting tracking down any chance of “spontaneous healing” stories for women who had undergone the surgery. Etc., etc. I felt really sad about her situation. It almost seemed like her biological clock woke up at some point, and all the fears became irrelevant. Her body hurt when she saw babies - she wanted one herself!
I don’t know how she feels now - this happened about 6 or 7 years ago.
[quote=“Urban Scout, post:10, topic:97”]There is really only one thing I have found that really makes kids hate their parents, or reject themselves against their families, and (aside from abusive families) it is SCHOOL.
Keep him home and safe and tied to the family as the emotional reality (not schooling) and I have doubts that he’ll ever end up anything near a republican. “Peer pressure” doesn’t really exist outside of school (aside from TV, so don’t have one in the house). “Family Pressure” is the natural form that takes the place of schoolings peer pressure… but that’s what you want, no?[/quote]
Yep. Yepyep. YepyepyepyepYEP. QFT (quoted for truth).
Someone actually wrote a book about this, something like Hold On To Your Kids (I think the title was longer but that should give you a start). The author put it like this: Children have an orienting instinct to help them learn their culture. And they will orient to whatever seems to have the strongest authority (in a knowledge-and-wisdom sense, usually, I don’t mean to imply force, tho’ sometimes that happens instead), and it doesn’t matter how old that person is. In our culture, they will either orient to an adult or they will orient to other kids. In school they usually orient to other kids. It’s almost like the way birds imprint on the first thing they see when hatching, only not so abrupt.
He knows of some examples of communities in which the adults figured out ways to keep the kids mostly adult-oriented and parent-oriented, but it takes a level of interaction between teachers/kids and parents/kids that we usually don’t see here in the States. They don’t happen most places that school happens, actually.
yep yep yeppers, awesome book, by Gordon Neufeld.
folks cluck their tongue about out of whack student/teacher (child/adult) ratios at schools, then shrug their shoulders and send their kids anyway. the blind leading the blind.
Taker scum! Betraying their own children!
I just needed to say that. ;D
[u]Taker scum![/u] Betraying their own children!
New favorite phrase? 
Well. I wouldn’t call it new…
I decided awhile back that i’m only going to have children if and when civilization is gone and when i am producing enough food for another human.
And only then if i can find someone worth breeding with.
So probably no kids for me.
I’m pretty much on the same page as you, noahpants. I will not have children until I’m in a context/environment that I can feel good about. And I doubt that will happen before I’m too old to get preggers.
I accept helping to raise kids as a happy compromise!
[quote=“noahpants, post:75, topic:97”]I decided awhile back that i’m only going to have children if and when civilization is gone and when i am producing enough food for another human.
And only then if i can find someone worth breeding with.
So probably no kids for me.[/quote]
This^^
[quote=“noahpants, post:75, topic:97”]I decided awhile back that i’m only going to have children if and when civilization is gone and when i am producing enough food for another human.
And only then if i can find someone worth breeding with.
So probably no kids for me.[/quote]
My partner and I decided to be a bit less extreme about when we will start a family. We’ve decided that we’ll only have a kid or two when we’ve managed to get a strong, tribal-like community. Raising kids outside of a tribe just sounds too hard for parents and children.
While I don’t want to have children now, I have no idea what the future may hold.
Right now I’m just getting a handle on taking care of myself and my girlfriend. Well, I don’t really take care of her, but we take care of eachother. It seems to be a rare point in my life where I have some stability. I am in college, with 3 years left to go.
I have considered the moral implications of having children. I feel like I don’t want to bring another person into this fucked up world. I want the world the be good and right so that they may enjoy a “good life.” Conversly, I realize this world is going to be in termoil for a good long while, certainly longer than my lifetime. If I don’t have children, raised with love, respect, and freedom, then who is going to be left to carry the torch? (Obviously there are many who raise thier kids in a loving, healthy enviroment, but it would seem to me that this sort of upbringing is the exception.) I feel like I have alot to give back to the earth and my community. I feel that nothing I could do would have more of an impact than raising happy healthy children to be a part of the next generation.
In the future I would like to have children. I would like to raise them to experiance all the joys I have. I would like to give to them all the wisdom that I know. I would like for them to be able to grow in an enviroment that fosters freedom. I will do my best to provide all of these things for them.
In the end, that’s all there really is to do: The best one can.
Dan, I agree with you 100%. Also, in a true community (where people actually share their lives with one another), I could totally take part in raising kids, spending time with them & taking care of them, without actually giving birth to my own.
I also feel that before too long, many many children will end up in need of “parents” to take care of them (even more than now). Post collapse, when life gets harder for many civilized folks (harder to feed the kids), it will take a lot more adults to raise a child than the current one or two.
Another example of this culture’s craziness: simultaneously having countless parents isolated and stressed out trying to care for their children with no help, while at the same time having so many people who would love to have kids but can’t for one reason or another (usually financial and time restraints). In a healthy community, these two groups would live together and help each other out! :
Jessica