ethan_sg wrote:Let's not forget the old saying 'it takes a village/community to bring up a kid.'
Even older societies recognized the effort and commitment required in bringing up a kid, but unlike us they had the bonds of close community, neighbors, fellow villagers, relatives etc. to help in the process. In the fragmented, alienating state of modern society, where people are generally bereft of any genuine community, and where most men are not in control of their own livelihood (subject to the vagaries of the economy, markets, and the tyranny of office hierarchy) bringing up a kid becomes a whole new different prospect altogether - a much tougher ask. This difficulty is compounded by the high costs of living (even middle class families are enslaved to lifelong household debt to simply afford a house) which often require both parents to be working - who's going to bring up the kid?
No doubt there are benefits to having kids such as carrying on your legacy, a sense of family belonging, someone to take care of you when you're old etc. but the conditions of society are far from ideal for having kids. Purchasing power of average families has eroded severely over the last few decades due to astronomically high real inflation (just look at housing prices in developed countries in Asia for instance), while the means to survival and means of production are largely in the hands of large hierarchical multinational organizations that enslave us, and having kids only cements that slavery because we wouldn't be able afford to suddenly just quit the job and go abroad, for instance, when your sense of adventure comes calling.
I won't go as far as to say that having kids is slavery. But the conditions of modern society such as a lack of community, the lack of control over one's livelihood, wage slavery, high costs of living (partially due to an already overpopulated planet and also due to widespread large scale money printing by central banks around the world) are such that the financial responsibilities that come with bringing up a kid enslave you to an oppressive system.
For those who are fortunate enough to be independently wealthy, then perhaps having kids is more feasible. But this does not represent the majority who live in quiet desperation, and who are looking for a way out of the rat race in a place away from it all, and that represents a lot of us here in this forum, for which modern society has made kids a an overwhelming emotional commitment and financial luxury that many cannot afford.
Very true. We live in a world that puts less and less emphasis on the community and public institutions as essential contributors to a child's upbringing. I will never forget my primary school teacher: she was much more than a teacher, she would teach us in class but also tell us off when we did something wrong, sometimes even down to (light) physical punishment. My parents and those of my classmates' would never even dream of criticising her paedagogical methods, as it was quite understood that she was, by "institutional" right, part and parcel or our upbringing. Nowadays a teacher has to be careful even smiling at a young pupil, let alone touch her, for fear of being sued for inappropriate contact, or worse. And even the actual teaching has gone down a lot in quality and depth.
What's ironical, modern middle class families all over the world have voluntarily traded the safety of a local community composed of one's own parents and grandparents, plus a number of families known and trusted for one or two generations, for the higher financial status of a metropolitan job and the aseptic, "contactless" social life than comes with it. Italy has never shined for child welfare and well-financed childminding institutions, yet our reliance on the extended family (grandparents and mature siblings, and the occasional family friend) for our children's upbringing has been a massive support net for decades. Things are unfortunately goin down the drain here, too, due to the same kind of "desertification" of local job pools in favour of large cities that we see everywhere in the world.
Pushed by the inflation of modern life, we have asked for disgregation and obtained it. Our friendly neighbours are all weirdos and potential child abusers, the local school an overpriced source of learning or mediocre quality. We have compensated this general lack of trust with the immense arrogance of thinking that we, the 30-something parents
at their first bout of parenthood, "know best" about our kids and are the sole entitled to anything related to their intellectual, moral, human, and social development. And when we can't or won't have the material time to take care of them, we always have surrogates to keep them busy and sooth our sense of guilt: toys, TV, videogames, solitary indoor activities, etc.
Compare and contrast with a child's life of 30, 50, maybe 100 years ago. The wealthy and middle class were much thinner slices of society as they are now, and the typical child would be left to fend for themselves in a "survive or succumb" environment. Yes, the community played a greater role, but the world wasn't a safer place tout-court for them. Only, this environment was precisely what gave those kids a chance to develop defenses, "antibodies" so to speak, and learn how to face life maturely and effectively at a much earlier age. Paedos existed back then too, yet nobody had been taught to fear them. My dad once told me there was a man who used to lure boys to a back seat of the local cinemas and trade pop-corns and small change for sexual favours. One of his friends got hold of one of those old spring-action mousetraps from his farmer uncle and...you can imagine what happened afterwards.
All in all, if you perform the (algebraic) sum of all positive and negative factors existing in our modern society, I believe there is no ground to say it's better to give up the idea of having children. A wise, mature and loving couple will always find a way to bring up an equally wise, smart and affectionate offspring. Outwest's kids are a good example. The same couple will know how to create a protective net of trusted individuals around their children. If they really feel adventurous, they might even go as far as changing their work or social environment to afford their kids a safer, more authentic environment. If anybody cares, my wife and I have talked about kids a few times already, and my idea is that I will start my own company as early as next year, so as to be able to stay at home with the kids as much as possible, since her job requires physical presence at a manucfaturing plant and cannot be that flexible.
