People who try to talk CFers into having children usually use the argument "But it's so rewarding!" The thing they fail or refuse to understand is that a childfree person does not feel that they're missing any "reward" from their life. The detractor is proposing a solution to a problem, but the CFer doesn't feel that there is a problem.
In other words, imagine if someone tells you "I have the solution to your problem. However, it entails:
- permanently and irrevocably changing your and your partner's lives, with which you are already satisfied
- permanently and irrevocably affecting every aspect of the life of an innocent third party
- making the potential consequences of every decision you and your partner make from now on far more serious
- decreasing the likelihood that you will be financially self-sufficient, and increasing the likelihood that you will require social assistance (in the broadest, generic sense of the term)
- increasing the size of your environmental footprint
- reducing your ability to be there for the people in your life who sometimes need you to be there
- quite possibly permanently and irrevocably affecting the lives of your families
- at least temporarily inconveniencing your and your partner's employers and co-workers, which may result in some bitterness or make you a less valued employee, thus decreasing your job security, which is now far more serious than it was before (see item 3)
- permanently and irrevocably accepting a new person as one of your intimates without first knowing who they are or what they're like"
...and you don't even feel that you have a problem in the first place.
You don't go to all the trouble and smell of repainting your home when you're happy with the current paint job, just because some random person likes some other colour better. You don't go to all the trouble of moving house when you're perfectly satisfied with your current home, just because some random person is more happy in a different home. So why on earth do people think a CFer would have a child when they're perfectly satisfied without?
2 comments:
I don't think people who go on and on about how they like the color of their house or how their new home is the greatest place to live ever really expect the other person to repaint or to move to the same neighborhood.
I think it's just the idea that if you really like something and are really satisfied with it, you think everyone else should have one, too.
I have to disagree with Fran. I think its more along the lines of "misery loves company" that makes the cult of parenting so voracious to assimilate everyone around them. Those who are happy and enjoying things other than children in a satisfying lifestyle are a "threat" to parents' decision to make the life altering (in often times NOT so wonderful ways) of having children.
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