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Saw people commenting the other day on a thread about women expressing their regrets at having children. While I agree that, abstractly, people shouldn't resent their kids, there's an overlooked dynamic in the mothers' posts:
They talked about what a radical change having children was; how much it impacted their lives. Now, I think you're an idiot if you didn't think having to get up every two hours of the night for months on end would impact your life, but some people are idiots; so be it.
But the deeper truth is that our society is deeply bifurcated into "people with kids" and "people without kids" or "events with kids" and "events without kids." Our society is only capable of doing this because we already have a large population of childless people.
This would be impossible to maintain in a society with no birth control. You can't imagine an Amish woman in her 30s feeling sad because her childless friends are off having cocktails while she's nursing a baby. Since all of the adult Amish women (baring infertility)
have children, naturally all social events for women in their 30s assume, a priori, that those women have children and the needs of mothers with young children are baked into the system. That doesn't mean that toddlers go literally everywhere in Amishland--they'd get trampled--
Just that the society is built with the default assumption that the adults have children, UNLIKE OURS. Our society is built on the default assumption that many people *don't* have children. If you are the first/only person in your friend group who has children, then you will
most likely find yourself cut off from all of the activities you used to do with your friends, because none of them do baby-friendly things. Men have an easier time getting away for a few hours to do pre-children things, but women often have to get a whole new group of friends.
We also find ourselves simply cut off from many activities, because they simply are not set up in our society to accommodate children. America is, in my opinion, a deeply anti-child society. Many people are actively hostile to children and childrearing. Our streets are
laid out to accommodate cars, not to accommodate small children. Society encourages women not to have children so they can spend more of their lives working at corporations. And (due to cars and wealth) we are physically separated from each other in a way that our
ancestors weren't, which is a subtle but real contributor to loneliness once you have something like an infant / toddler's nap schedule that makes it difficult to leave the house.
In short, society has some issues.
In short, society has some issues.
