Letters to the Editor
-
A Little Late to the Party, but Oh Well
As much as I admire the optimism of people who have kids in their 40s, I have a little bit of a hard time believing that their 40s just snuck up on them. Might be true, but I have known many people, myself included, who didn't mull every little detail of their futures, but still were very aware that the optimum time for children was fast approaching.
Maybe it was because we had lousy insurance, or had children before sonograms became standard office procedure. I had my kids in the mid 80's and my HMO only gave sonograms or amnio to mothers over 35 or those with possibly inherited genetic markers such as Huntington's.
I really think there has been a false sense of security sold to both men and women, hyped by the media, that having a baby after forty is not that big a deal. Now there seems to be a swing back a bit in that attitude. It CAN be a big deal, and expensive to boot, to even conceive that baby. On the other hand, teenage mothers have just as great a chance of having a baby with any number of problems as a woman in her 40s, but this info doesn't seem to get as big a play in the media.
As far as the children vs. non-children, get a grip people! I agree that children are well worth the experience, but keep in mind that the average person lives about 80 years, and harcore child raising lasts for only about 20 years, so one still needs to find non-child fulfillment for 60 years of their life if they have 1 child or 30 to 40 years depending on how they are spread out. And although I know people whose very DNA seemed to change for the better after having children, I have also known people who were still self-centered, tempermental jerks after having kids. (Refer to the Cary Tennis archives.)
But I'm not letting the "don't have children" crowd off the hook either. Although one poster already pointed this out, and it was basically ignored, single folks are not particularly helping the environment with their singlehood. Right now, single person households outnumber family households in this country. A family of four, say, use one house, one heating bill, one water source, one fridge, one freezer and one set of lights. Four single households use four times that. Does that mean that we should round up the singles and force them to live in communes? Of course not! But I swear that it sounds like some of the non-children posters are one petition away from outlawing or restricting children altogether. Welcome to China! Get off your high horse with your "I'm saving the environment because I'm single and childless." You're going to have to do a lot more than that to make a difference. We all do.
And Brightstar? Thanks for that yuck about "Idiocracy" being a documentary in Texas. I laughed my ass off when I read that.
-
@ Lola
Yours is the least snarky letter in the thread :)...I know you weren't saying 'childless people suck.' I'm a little touchy on the subject lately. :)
I do think the whole consumerism thing re: kids is a red herring. There are childless people who drive hummers and people with six kids who live in communes.... There are people with kids who have tvs in each room, a new outfit a week, and forty seven activity drop offs a month with their attendant stops for gasoline.
I am low-impact childless... I have lived on less than 10K a year for the past 15 years.
Still, I do no self-back patting because we are ALL complicit in the cycle of greed and american consumerism which is helping to destroy the world (not to mention nearly every american child's self-esteem)
Make no mistake. EVERY AMERICAN is complicit in the greed/war machine. Anyone who owns a computer and has the juice to post to Salon is definitely complicit.
The way to solve this is not by pointing fingers at other people's choice to have or not have children, but to change the system. Yours is a good idea... educate against consumerism and the low self-esteem it fosters.
-
Be Nice, Sparky
to be fair, the US expends so much energy because we are the world's number one manufacturing nation, mostly in defense (for one thing, we-- I say 'we'-- our criminal government spends as much $$ on weaponry as the rest of the world PUT TOGETHER).
if our house is bigger, we spend more on cooling and heating. we lack extensive transport infrastructure so we drive further.
but mostly, Americans' lives are not much more energy expending than most in the first world.
-
Back to the original topic
People who want children in their forties should have them, as they always have.
It's NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS.
Repeat. It's NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS if a woman wishes to have a child at 20, 30, 40 or 50.
-
You will laugh. You will cry.
Mike Judge, BLESS his heart, is a genius.
And Brightstar? Thanks for that yuck about "Idiocracy" being a documentary in Texas. I laughed my ass off when I read that.
Dilapidated urban infrastructure? Towering mountains of waste? Toxins in the soil? Impersonal corporations firing millions? Costcos the size of Arondissements? Dumbasses in positions of power? Spanglish speaking illegals in the streets? Orgies, family style? Hand job franchises? Mismanaged prisons? Cops shooting up cars? Pimpin, Upgrayedd style? White trash White Houses? Megatruck madness?
You got all that and more. In TEXAS.
Seriously, for anyone who adores biting, unforgiving social satire, Idiocracy fits the bill better than anything I can think of.
-
The occasional comments in these letters about people with disabilities
are very depressing. Oh, how sad that if someone has a disabled child, a minute fraction of your tax dollars might go to warehouse that child in some "mainstreamed" classroom where he/she can be ignored by teachers and bullied by classmates. What a horrible burden! Mandatory testing and abortions for the defective!
I really don't think most of the consumption problems we face in the US now are caused by the disabled. Plus, most American tax dollars certainly do not go toward care for the disabled. So get over it. Anyone can have a child with a disability, even those of us who've done everything "right". Anyone's child can, through accident or illness, develop a disability during the course of life. And guess what else? Anyone can become a person with a disability, in need of assistance and (gasp) even public funds, even the green-living childless. Maybe a little compassion, and logic, is in order. People with disabilities are not the problem, and envisioning them as a "burden on society", when there are far greater burdens on society (Bush, for example, or those flashy money-managers that authored the subprime loan crisis) out there sucking up dough and resources, is mean and ugly.
If there were a prenatal test for people who might become overconsuming materialistic assholes or captains of soulless, destructive, multinational conglomerates, there might be an argument here. But when you're talking about things like Down's syndrome and autism, you're talking about some of the few American kids who probably will grow up to NOT care what kind of car they drive or how big their house is or how they shape up, status-wise, in any number of materialistic ways. Maybe the rest of us could learn something from them.