At the risk of wading into deeply controversal territory, I'll add some personal observations. One of the harsh realities I have seen is that it's very difficult for women to "have it all" meaning a fulfilling personal, family, and professional life, especially in the most competitive fields. Yet for many years this idea has persisted in a mythical sense as broadly achievable. I am now in my late 30s. I've watched my female friends and classmates have productive and inspiring careers, but often at the cost of their personal lives. The writing is on the wall that many of these women will likely never end up having biological children due to declining fertility. It makes me sad because while they are awesome entrepreneurs, physicians, lawyers and so on, they would have been awesome mothers as well. And at the societal level, from a selection standpoint, these are the type of genes we should want to pass on. I'm not sure what the answer is, but we should at least be honest about discussing the reality of what people wrestle with and why and how.
> It makes me sad because while they have awesome professional accomplishments, they would have been awesome mothers and parents as well.
I just wanted to point out politely how strange this language reads to me. It's ultimately the decision of each person whether to have kids or not. This being "sad" for them is an overreach, morally, IMO--and part of the fight feminism led was to carve out a space for women in society not to be mothers, if that is their choice.
I have many female friends in their mid-30s and early 40s, and the ones without kids are almost always sad/regretful about it themselves. Some won't admit it, but some will, especially in more intimate settings. I've had one cry on my shoulder - she is very successful professionally, but feels she missed out on the opportunity for motherhood.
Whether it was her "choice" is hard to say. Very few people get the chance to engineer their lives the way they want. Most people instead play the cards they are dealt. And now that there are many more different types of possible cards in the deck for women, they are coming to the understanding that it is possible to be dealt a bad hand, and not realize it until it is too late.
The issue is that there's no objectivity here. Are these women actually sad because they truly wanted to experience motherhood, or is it more because of pressure (even unconscious pressure) from family and friends to have kids? Or just the built-in feelings due to upbringing that having kids is "just what you're supposed to do".
I wonder, though, if these same women did have kids, and sacrificed their career for it, would they look back and have regrets in that regard, too.
So maybe it's just... given a multitude of options where we can't choose them all, perhaps humans will just naturally have some regrets around the path(s) not taken?
As counterpoint, I know women in their 40s and older who are very pleased with their decision to not have kids.
I didn't reference sadness as a moral projection but rather out of empathy as some of these friends will share fears, doubts, and regrets from time to time. If a woman (or man) doesn't want to be a parent, then more power to them and we should all support that.
I think the idea of sadness is that choice were not made with relatively few externally imposed restrictions from a place of independence. Rather the decisions were taken from a set of choices made in a context of a society that imposes restrictions than necessary based on somewhat arbitrary traditions, or genderism, or biased, or at least questionable economic restrictions.
Making a choice properly requires having knowledge about the particular options. Fertility education particularly in regard to age is not part of the sexual education curriculum in the UK [1] nor in international guidance documents [2,3] (just Ctrl-F "fertility"). And a recent poll in the US showed that 77% of women did not properly understand the relationship between age and fertility [4]. At some point this stops being choices made with appropriate knowledge and starts being a massive and tragic policy failure.
The statement you reference is "77% of women do not know that when a woman is 35+, her age is a better indicator of her fertility than her overall health." As a women in her 30s, I'll say that every damn woman in America has heard of a biological clock by her 20s, and is quite aware, and many are getting calls from Auntie every two weeks about whether she's getting on it yet.
>At the risk of wading into deeply controversal territory, I'll add some personal observations. One of the harsh realities I have seen is that it's very difficult for women to "have it all" meaning a fulfilling personal, family, and professional life, especially in the most competitive fields.
This is perfectly possible. Imagine your stereotypical 1950s head of household. Fulfilling job, family is provided for, hangs out with friends on the weekend, etc. Now imagine them being female.
The fact of the matter is that this life doesn't exist for just about anyone anymore. It just never existed at all for women because back when it was possible for large numbers of people to do this they weren't part of the well paid workforce. (It didn't exist for non-whites for similar reasons but I digress)
Part of the problem is that our definition of "having it all" comes from times when circumstances were different. Now, I don't think just giving up and saying we'll never have it that good again and people have to choose between family, work and friends is a good solution but it sure seems more tractable in the short term than recreating that level of prosperity.
I have a serious question for you, curious on your answer.
Can men “have it all”? Is “having it all” different for men than women?
My experience is that men are able to “have it all” often at the cost of their spouse making sacrifices to stay at home, with the implicit idea that this is the way things are meant to be.
If both people in a relationship try to “have it all”, some sacrifices do have to be made (speaking from experience), but I am not sad about these choices since trade offs are an inevitable part of life :)
I mentioned women since I was replying to a specific observation in the parent comment. It's difficult for men to "have it all" also. An advantage men generally have is more time to reproduce. They can spend a couple decades checking off the "professional career" box and then settle down in their 40s and have a family, and scale back work (or leverage prior accomplishments and position for forward autonomy and flexibility) at the same time to accommodate this new life. Although society is much more supportive of male parents than female parents in the workforce, when it comes down to it a man is no more capable of working (some obscene number of) hours/week professionally and "having it all" than a woman is. Workaholic men with stay at home spouses may appear to have more than they do, when in reality they may be guests in their own homes. You always have to sacrifice something.
Not the parent, and I don't have sources handy, but just from some things I've read:
When hiring decisions are made, hiring managers will often prefer men with families, because they will generally stick with the company longer because it's riskier to change jobs with a family to support. This doesn't work for women; hiring managers will be less likely to want to hire a woman of child-bearing age because they're afraid she'll get pregnant and suffer productivity losses as well as take maternity leave. They also assume that a woman with children will be less attentive to work due to child care duties. They assume that men will be less affected by this because, while things are indeed changing, the default assumption is that men will prioritize career over child-rearing, while women will choose the opposite.
I guess, as a man, I feel the expectation is quite the opposite. Namely, that a female in my position would be excused more often to take care of child duties, while my employer would think I'm just being lazy if I told them I wanted to take extra time to care for my child.
In my mental model (note: this is not what I would do, but what I imagine others would do), a woman saying she needs to go home because her baby needs her would be seen as a responsible woman, because a baby needs breastmilk and its mother provides that, whereas, if a man said he needed to go home consistently, the boss would think he's irresponsible, because -- as a man -- his baby doesn't strictly need him, and thus he is better serving his family at work.
But I understand your viewpoint; it just didn't occur to me. It seemed obvious to me that men, due to male biology, were more likely to be forced to work longer hours in order to be seen as being as responsible as an otherwise equivalent woman. Although, I guess today, formula is quite popular. Well regardless, I'm not always the best at understanding how others would react to things.
Why do people want so much? I love minimalism, owning hardly nothing, saving, having no friends or acquaintances. After reading this thread I feel like everybody else is greedy.
I sometimes wonder, too. I'm not quite in your boat: I have quite a few close friends, and many acquaintances, and find they all enrich my life in many ways. But I never understood the "keeping up the joneses" mentality. I have my well-worn furniture, a practical amount of kitchen stuff, some plants, a small amount of art, some tech gadgets, and a 15 year old car, and I just don't feel the need to own more than that, or to constantly "upgrade" all my existing stuff to things that are more expensive but don't actually make me any happier.
I wasn't criticizing feminism in my comment; I also wasn't saying there was anything expressly wrong with the status quo (men trading off on work so women could have more family time)--I'm sure it works well for many families. I was only pointing out that there's nothing inherently female about "not having it all" with the exception of the notion that women should be able to have it all--there has never been a broad movement that lamented that men can't have it all, after all.
I don’t see a reason to be sad because I think it’s a wonderful thing more people have a choice now. Whether I end up making perfect decisions or not I wouldn’t trade anything for that.
What a condescending comment... My wife and I are childfree. Should I tell her that her accomplishments in the workplace or even getting a good education and graduating from university mean nothing because having kids should be her top priority?
This is the problem with people who think they know better.
You think people should have more kids, what do you propose? Are you going to pay for the diapers, the education, the bigger house, the bigger car, the childcare? Do you want to become our live-in nanny?
After all, you seem so eager for people to have kids, surely you must be volunteering every night to help kids from low socio-economic areas get better grades and break the cycle of poverty or maybe you have adopted 5 unwanted kids already?
My wife and I don't need your sadness and your condescension. Thank you.
1. If you're a working mother, you're currently assumed to either be a bad worker, or a bad mother. (Sad corollary: If you're a working father, most people don't assume this about you.)
2. If you're a professional man, and you want children, your wife is expected to compromise her career, to raise them.
I like to look at this from the perspective of "how are we going to organize society given further technological advancement in the far future" and how do we get there.
Ignoring the endgames that come after the cessation of traditional human existence - either robotics replacing organics completely or mastery of genetics leading to the engineering of super-intelligent custom lifeforms to replace us - we are almost always either going to go extinct or refine our genetics to optimized templates. Eventually, we will be manufacturing humans with mathematically weighed balances between genetic diversity for disease resistance and optimized traits and features to make people live longer, stronger, and smarter. Probably going to be codified to be obedient to authority and not deviate from the social order as well, because that just honestly seems borderline unavoidable.
These humans will eventually be manufactured in artificial wombs in automated facilities meant to produce the population because in practice its severely debilitating and economically inefficient to take the females out of operation for so long to reproduce with such high biological risks associated. Cloned gametes from engineered templates grown in factories. The children would probably be mentally implanted with knowledge via brain-computer interfaces and taught everything virtually. Their biology would accelerate their development as much as is possible within our genetic profile. Years of research would have gone into optimizing their environments, interactions (if necessary, organic ones), and development to yield the most potential.
When you start stepping back from there, the closest bridge to that reality is going to be the institutionalization of child rearing. Before we have automated facilities breeding engineered templates we will almost certainly have public institutions dedicated to population replacement - in the optimistic scenario, women would simply "major" in parenting and live their careers as mothers. We will probably already be using engineered gametes by then because the technology is already mostly available, so these women would just have children and raise them as their full time career. Given current understanding of developmental psychology there would probably also be men assigned to play paternal roles in upbringing in full employment at such facilities as well.
I don't think at all this evolution in child rearing would ever happen overnight and its very likely in the same way you can still ride a horse today over owning a car or in the future how some will still drive manual cars in the age of autonomous vehicles some couples will do it "the old fashioned way" because they can. But it will probably, almost certainly, happen a lot less often.
And honestly from my perspective its for the best. Historically raising children is an absolutely full time job. Living on a farm, despite "working" in the fields at all hours of the day, still lets you keep the children at hand and raise them. You are never separated and the family is always together. That seems to be, barring abusive relationships, the optimal way human children develop. We have constructed employment institutions that make that impossible and try to both put pressure on laborers to reproduce but then also to somehow "do the job" of parenting at their own expense and economic disadvantage. It costs tremendous amounts of time to raise children, even more to actually do it well, and its never priced into the economy.
For now, this isn't a problem, and it likely won't be for a long time. We just get the collateral damage of mentally and physically harmed children from parental negligence that society pushes them towards. Eventually the economic pressure not to reproduce drives enough people not to that replacement becomes impossible and then such professional parenting institutions need to start being taken seriously. When it happens, its likely to be a very good thing - children raised by people paid to raise them, whose job is to be the best parent possible, and who will have comprehensive education in the hugely complex fields surrounding human development will be a substantial boon to the first children raised under it. Its just the cost of basically privatizing reproduction has to justify the investment, both culturally and economically, to make it happen.
For now the best thing to do would be to reduce the economic burden of life on adults to let them be more recreational and social and thus less lonely. Trying to force people back into a mold that was already broken to begin with is a violation of liberty with no real corresponding benefit - we aren't going to go back that way ever again, because truthfully we can do much better. We just have to choose to.
