Statistics say that there are more and more couples who decide not to become parents: 10% of women born in 1955 had no children, while if we look at those born in 1965 we go to 13-14%. This trend seems to be increasing, being the main causes infertility (a very low percentage of them), job insecurity and the desire to simply lead a life of economic and social independence without having to be aware of care and attention that one or more children require.
Thus, we find women and men with children, because they want, women and men without children, because they do not want, and a third group in which we would find women and men with children in which one of the two, or both, they come to repent, some to the point of making it public, as has happened these days in London, where a woman has explained that he feels that his children have ruined his marriage in some way.
All instincts can be controlled
In order to procreate and procreate, to perpetuate the species as if that were our only mission in life, nature endowed us with a series of instincts that made it possible. In animals it is clear, but not so much in us because our reasoning and social norms are sufficient to control these instincts. And all are controllable, either voluntarily, or involuntarily, as a result of past experiences.
Am I talking about the maternal instinct, or the paternal instinct, and the reproduction instinct, if they exist as instincts? Yes, I talk about them. Women (not all) do have times when they want to be mothers, see a baby and feel they need it, that they want to take care of it, that they want to hold it in their arms. If even my wife, who is three years old, sometimes tells me that she would like to have another baby, that the body asks for it ... men, well, what I say, there are those who want to be parents, who like children and who enjoy very much with them and they take care of them and treat them with a lot of love and affection, but from there to the body asking them for a baby there is a stretch, of course.
But hey, this is something we can talk about at another time because it is not today's topic to discuss who and who has no instinct to have children, but to make it clear that that instinct can be controlled or blocked, like all instincts, voluntarily and also involuntarily: a couple can decide not to have children because they want to prioritize their lives, their way of life, their work, their interpersonal relationships and a couple can decide not to have children because they feel they will not be able to take care of them or they feel that life still has a lot to offer them to stop receiving.
I speak, in the second case, of people whose shortcomings may be more or less accused, and may not feel prepared. Having a child is an act that requires a lot of dedication and that, in a way, cancels you (cancels the life you led). You can no longer be the same person enjoying the pleasures of life, worried about receiving from the outside to continue growing as a person or as a cure to lick your wounds (the constant search for something that quenches the thirst to be happy, to complete yourself as a person because they made you feel incomplete). That ends because suddenly there is a little person there who needs much more from the outside than you and suddenly changes your life from receiving, to giving. You have to give it your time, you have to give it your love, you have to fill its lacks and cover your needs and of course, when you are used to receiving, or when you are still waiting to receive something, giving can be very hard.
To understand it well, I usually talk about vital backpacks. The backpack of life. We all have our backpack that is filled with experiences and that is completed as we mature as people. The ideal is to be a father or mother when we feel that the backpack is already full enough to be able to close it for a while and devote to filling your baby's. If we still feel it empty, it may be our baby who fills it or it may not be him and we still want to continue with the life we led. Then there is a conflict, because It is difficult to be aware of your baby's backpack if you are also aware of yours. Those are the shortcomings of which I speak, which are worth knowing to be able to make a correct decision: "Ep, I am not prepared to be a father, yet. I still feel that I have much to do: or I will wait in case one day I see that it is time, or maybe later I decide not to have children. " And it's OK. It will be fine because not everyone has to like having children.
Feel that your children are ruining your marriage
Two days ago we could read in the Daily Mail the story of Kate Morris, a woman, mother of two children aged 14 and 11, who wanted to explain that she feels that having children has conditioned her life too much with her partner, and that she misses, too much, the life they both had when they were young. A life in which they traveled, lived adventures, enjoyed each other and savored what each new day offered them that took a 180º turn at the moment they had their son. From that moment they became parents and nothing more was known about that couple, because their conversation topics became about their son, and that when they talked about something, because most of the time they were limited to giving orders or explaining to each other what was left to do.
Kate Morris with her family And he said that he likes to have children and that he gives everything for them because they both had very hard childhoods, he orphaned from the age of 8 and she in a boarding school since the age of 11, and he does not want his children to feel those deficiencies. However, he adds that he is there, that they have already had their two children and that instead they seem to still need them, that they have taken over their lives And sometimes it feels like he counts the days waiting for them to grow and become independent. Since she also has no family support in this regard, she feels that a little help would have been good for her, from time to time, one day, to be able to leave the children with someone and she and her husband do something alone.
Something similar unveiled a few years ago Corinne Maier When he described in his book "No Kid. 40 good reasons not to have children" why would he rather not have had the two children he had:
If I did not have (children), right now I would be going around the world with all the money I have earned with my books ... I am under house arrest, forced to make meals, to get up at seven in the morning every day, to ask for lessons Stupid and put washing machines for some children who consider me their maid.
And it's a shame. It's a shame to regret having children because in reality it's not their fault. They have not changed. They are as they always have been, dependent to a greater or lesser extent according to age, and in a different way if they are already older. But I also don't want to say with it that the fault lies with the parents, and for that they have not had them, because they cannot be blamed for their feelings either (if anything, they can be blamed for making it public, for letting the whole world know that your children get in your way, because it can be very hard for a child to know that your parents are becoming known for not loving you).
If you don't want them, don't have them
Of course, this would be ideal, to be able to make decisions regarding your life without the social pressure of having to do what everyone expects you to do: study, take a career, find a job, a couple, go live together, have children, start a family and live.
If you do not do so, the pressures begin: "when are you going to work, what do you already play," "when are you going to take a boyfriend, are you old?" "When are you going to have children? pass the rice. " And if you say that you are not going to have children there are still those who say "How? Why not? If they are the most beautiful thing in the world!", And they call you selfish.
A few years ago I met an acquaintance. I was going with my first child in the stroller. We had not seen each other for a long time and she is older than me, so she was a little surprised to see me with a child, she congratulated me and of course, the subject seems to have focused a little on that when she explained that she had none and that he had decided with his partner not to have. I told him that "Well, if you both feel that way ...", because although it seemed like a sad story to me, the important thing was not what I thought, but what she thought, and in a way I felt bad because he insisted a little on the reasons for not having children, as if justifying himself. Most likely I was the nth person to whom I felt I had to explain his decision and neither I was anyone to judge it, nor was anyone really anyone to do it, but surely many did.
And then I thought of how many couples have had children without really being convinced of it, simply by pressure, in how many women had a life that was truncated because they had a baby that they did not really look for, in how many men have children simply because their women want, and they neither go nor come (I don't have the data, but I think the latter is the most frequent situation).
And that's where I want to get, that not everyone has to like being a father or being a mother and in such a situation, it is worth being honest, sincere with oneself and making the most pertinent decision. It may be worth not having children if your arrival is going to be a problem for everyone.
And this will not all come from a major social problem?
Probably, because there are more and more men and women who would rather not have children is something that does not concern us (everyone who does what he prefers) but whose motives we can try to understand. Why it happens? Well, I am not an anthropologist, just a person who looks a little at things, who meditates on them and who sometimes comes to the right conclusions and other times he puts his leg to the bottom. Maybe what comes next is one of those times that I succeed, but perhaps it is one of those times that I don't (so if someone has a better theory, explain it to me, I love trying to understand this strange world In which we live).
I think so. I firmly believe that everything responds to a major social problem, to a global operation so erratic, so capitalist, so individualistic, so selfish, that it has devastating side effects.
This gives many hours of conversation and many lines, so it will be difficult for me to synthesize it, but I will try: we have created, or created for us, a world in which people's success is no longer measured by human quality, but for how productive you can become or, rather, for the money you can get, or move. Those who have more are admired and not those who are worth more. The one who ascends in his work is admired. Men are admired in the high spheres and work at home, childcare, has been relegated to oblivion, denigrated, unimportant, to such an extent that it is delegated to third parties.
In that fierce struggle for success, women have been integrated into the male capitalist system so that now not only men compete with each other, but also with women to ascend, achieve notoriety, economic independence, success, and meanwhile , the things that fill us the most are an increasingly luxurious or powerful car, an increasingly large house and an increasingly distant journey. That is the leisure of today, so it is enjoyed: knowing distant sites, wearing expensive clothes, having dozens of shoes, the most expensive mobile, the most beautiful car, being independent, etc. The everyday things? They have almost been forgotten because it is the usual, what everyone can have, and that, of course, It doesn't make you special or different.
And in that differentiation, in that search for success, in that evolution of the way of life many have distanced themselves so much that they have stayed in that constant state of "half empty backpack", and far from the human warmth of a family or friends that, if necessary, they would help you with your children, but that they are not there either because they are probably also trying to fill their backpacks. We have run out of family to help us take care of our children because now the children are their parents and this is no longer like in those times when the children spent the day in the street and eventually educated themselves or educated them together: the elders, the cousins, their uncles, the grandmothers. The children went everywhere and their surroundings were as immense as their family network was. Now there is hardly any network, many times, because we move away from our parents to start our own lives and the environment of the children is their school and the activities to which we aim and take them. We are, in the end, slaves of their time and their agendas, and not all parents digest it well. The blame? Of all a little. To allow capitalism to have made it work that honors a person and not their human quality, and to believe that women have finally been released after a great struggle, for having managed to enter the labor market, that that, having been created by and for men, has no compassion and doesn't know about family reconciliation. The one that makes the children suffer, who run out of fathers, the one that makes the mothers suffer, although they have been "liberated" it turns out that they now have twice as much work, home and abroad as the one that makes them suffer to parents (to some), who want to be home too, but can't.
And everything revolves in a way and at a speed that is normal to have side effects: people who have a terrible time because they have their backpacks almost full and would prefer to take care of their children and people who have a terrible time because they have their backpacks almost empty, they would prefer to dedicate more time to work and try to fill them out, but they can't because they have children.
How do we solve it?
I don't know if there is a way, but about trying to lick our wounds and about attend to our vital backpack to fill it as soon as possible is a good solution. So we can close it and dedicate ourselves to helping our children fill theirs, with time, love, dialogue, games, etc. If we exclude them from our lives because we continue to worry (too much) about continuing to receive, we will only go beyond our shortcomings, because they will feel the same way, lacking in love, lacking reference, lacking someone to accompany them on the road and Make them feel loved and full. And if they do not feel that way (which is how we do not feel in our childhood either), if all this harms them in some way in their self-esteem and in their safety, they will grow with that constant feeling that there is always something missing that they will be happy with. And when they get it, they will realize that it was not that, that it is something else. And when they get it they will see that they are not yet happy, that they need something else. And they will enter that circle of the constant search for a happiness that will never come, because the problem is not outside, but in themselves, in that half-empty backpack that will always be, unless they change their way of seeing life or find what they really need to be happy. Only then can they, if they wish, have children and break with that chain, with that transmission of unhappiness that we have been infecting our children for so long, generation after generation and whose effects are increasingly magnified, as the ball gets bigger and bigger , the greater the offer of instantaneous leisure, the less the patience and the wait, the greater the possibilities of achieving a transient pseudo-happiness and of disconnecting ourselves, more and more, from our essence, from our humanity, from our way of being empathic, communicative and solidarity.
It is in our hands, but it doesn't look good at all. Meanwhile? I said it: let each person do what he feels he has to do. No one should have children if they feel they will be unhappy with them.
Photos | iStock
In Babies and more | It takes a tribe to educate a child and I am just a father, "Where is my tribe?": A little gem about parenting today, why is it so hard to have children?
