My daughter is now 7 and now my mom has been nagging me for the past 3 years to have another. There is truly no pleasing her, apparently.

Luckily, I don’t have any regrets whatsoever about having a child. But I agree with the above poster that I DO resent all the unspoken and vague social expectations on me as a mother.

When I was younger and very anti-my-having-kids, my mom always told me she felt the same at my age but changed her mind. She’s chilled a bunch in recent years (though: she has always been an incredible and very chill mom, that something so small as that was one of my pet peeves about her, I think, speaks volumes of her mothering skills) (also: I’m only eighteen now, so she chilled pretty quick), and a few days ago she said to me:

“I don’t care if you have children or not, but I’ll kill you if you’re a bad parent.”

She was, obviously, mostly kidding (another sarcastic New Yorker here!), but she was serious about the fact that to her, parenting is something that is hard and should only be undertaken by people who think they can do it right. Ironically, nowadays I’m a little more “whatever” about the kids question (sort of like I used to be mostly atheist and now I’m a hardcore agnostic), and part of that is do to seeing how my mother and I are actually friends, something that I think can happen only if a parent is a really good parent, but that is really wonderful when it does.

To celticfeminist, #11:
I have never in my life heard adoption called a selfish choice. I have no idea what he was even trying to say to you. How ridiculous.

To Peshna, #9:
Oh, I definitely know folks who had kids b/c they had plans for them. Funny how kids are their own entities and can completely flummox one’s grand scheme. Do they regret it now? I’m pretty sure they do. The whole family is miserable, at any rate.

To Raging Moderate, #35:
I think you’re right, but the reason men may nag is different. Women get static from men and other women b/c they’re seen as resisting the one thing that is supposed to fulfill their life’s purpose. Men nag other men b/c spreading one’s genes is a supposedly easy thing to do and it’s hard to understand why a guy just doesn’t go and do it. “What, you haven’t had a kid yet? Come on, what are you waiting for?”

To Nick Kittle, #37:
Are you my mom?

To Erin M., #43:
Oh, no doubt. Cisgendered women often have a hard time finding a doctor who will do a regular breast reduction if they’re young, unmarried, or childless, and not completely unproportionally gargantuan-sized in the boob area. It could argued that breasts have a social and pleasureable sexual function that the lower bits don’t have, but most of these women don’t want to be flat. So what’s the excuse? That they won’t be able to breastfeed. Except that experience has shown that having big knockers means it is usually difficult to breastfeed anyway, what with the boobs getting in the way of holding the kid, and the difficulty kids have with latching onto a breast that weighs more than they do, and the reality that the weight of large breasts can stress the milk ducts and cause them to produce less milk than they would if they were otherwise unencumbered.

As someone who is very much in the middle genderwise and with absolutely no desire to reproduce, most surgeons would nevertheless reject my request for top surgery simply b/c my visible gender is woman; thus, there must be something very wrong with me if I not only didn’t want the Baybee, but also wanted get rid of the milk factories completely. I played the game and got The Letter, but it is absolutely outrageous that body parts that are essentially cosmetic in the absence of reproduction require more than informed consent to alter. Gender is complicated! If I were more binary-identified, I might be able to explain more adequately why I don’t want tits. But should I have to explain? We don’t require psychological diagnosis to qualify to reproduce, and that decision affects the child and everyone else. Me having a flat chest affects me and any partners I may have. There is, of course, the argument that not following the SOC can allow a person who is not completely sure to take steps they’ll later regret. I say this is rather like choosing to drive a car without a seatbelt. It may affect only you, but it’s still a grave decision. Failing to think it through carries the possibility that you’ll fuck up your life severely, and there’ll be no one to blame but you.

Of course, reproduction worship isn’t the only part of it. Breast implants screw with breastfeeding too, but implant patients don’t need to be diagnosed with Small Breast Dysphoria to qualify for their procedure.

Totally agree here. If I were making any judgments about who is “selfish,” I think I’d make them more on how people (childless or parents) are willing to contribute to the “village” than on whether they have kids or not.

But do you find it acutely painful to give up having kids for the sake of the environment? Or do you simply enjoy kids, but feel you can live without personally being a parent, given that the environment would benefit from having fewer people? No, you don’t have to answer that – it’s not my business, and it’s mainly a rhetorical question.

My point is that I’ve spent a lot of time around groups for infertile people, people who really, really want kids, to the point of getting depressed every month when the pregnancy doesn’t come. Maybe that skews my perception a bit, and I’m ignoring some large part of the population who feel sort of moderately about the question. But to me it seems that having children or not is something many people feel very strongly about, to the point that they’ll profoundly regret not being able to make the choice they prefer. That’s why I feel so strongly that couples should be matched on this matter to start with, and be ready to cut each other loose and not marry if they’re deeply divided.

I have my ethical limits on how far I’m willing to use medical resources to bring another person into the world. But not doing that was one of the hardest choices I’ve had to make in my life. I can’t make myself the sort of person who doesn’t long for children. And I can’t think of a harder choice to make, purely on environmental grounds, if I had the normal sort of life where being childless takes years of vigilance, rather than the life I actually have, where becoming a parent (whether by birth or adoption) would take exhorbitant amounts of money and stress and uncertainty of success.

It’s hard for me to think of a more difficult choice to ask people to make on behalf of the world at large, rather than from their own gut feelings. In either direction – whether it’s choosing for parenthood to benefit others, or choosing against parenthood to benefit others. The effect on your own life is so huge, compared to the effect on all those other people who may be interested in your decision.

(Choosing between adoption and giving birth might be a bit more susceptible to influence, though I’m not sure about this, since some infertile people seem to feel a lot more strongly than I do about the giving birth part of the deal.)

But I think the environmental argument for not having kids is pretty weak, in that most people who really want kids aren’t going to choose not to have any at all based on whatever marginal effect on the environment their own individual kids would have, any more than most people would choose not to have sex, or to try to switch their sexual orientation, based on some marginal effect of their choices on the world at large.

Shrug. Count me as evidence against that idea.

As we have gotten older, we’ve generally gotten less diplomatic about it. This is who we are, take it or lump it. Of course, our true friends and the family members whose opinions we care about have always been cool about it.

When I get this reaction: “You don’t ever want to have kids? Why? Don’t you like children?” My response is often: “I like elephants, too, but that doesn’t mean I want one!”

My wife, who has gotten more static about it than I have (because she’s a woman and therefore supposed to want kids? Ha!), will sometimes come back with: “I like children. Fried!” That usually elicits nervous laughter and a change of subject. (Our thanks to W.C. Fields.)

Come to think of it, both my mother and my mother-in-law do the same thing. I’ve been open and honest with them about it to try to prevent misunderstandings, but I might as well be talking to a wall. My MIL doesn’t bother me about it, but she’s hoping. My mother drives me nuts about it and just keeps assuming it’s some stage I’ll outgrow. Her method of “helping” me outgrow it is to just assume I’m not serious and I don’t really mean it, and make endless comments like “oh, you’ll have to move out of your city apartment and into the suburbs when you have kids.” Oi.

Even one of my best friends, who’s actively supportive of our decision, asked me the other day: “What if you change your mind?” When I replied that we could always adopt, she seemed far more concerned about her following question, “what if your husband changes his mind?”, than any opinion I might even have about it.

In fact, that’s one of the most common reactions I receive about the whole thing: that no matter what I want, surely my husband wants (or will want) kids, and surely I wouldn’t stand in his way!

* My husband doesn’t have any desire for children either and is pondering a vasectomy, since his option for getting fixed is much less invasive and painful than mine.

Amazing that the two columns bear the same date and everything.

(Take a lesson, Prudie.)