TIME magazine chose an image of a couple lying on a beach for its latest promotion of childlessness by Lauren Sandler. Imagine if the magazine had chosen an image of old people languishing in a nursing home instead. But then the publication would have offended the delicate sensibilities of its readership. If it had also portrayed the intentionally childless as the selfish people they often are, that might have caused someone, somewhere to think.

— Comments —

Nick writes:

This is why my wife and I have decided that we want kids. My wife in particular is terrified of being in a foreign country with no family.

Laura writes:

Please don’t be offended, but you should not express this thought even if you privately think it. It’s contrary to, well, the spirit of paternal devotion. Basically, you are talking about your future children’s use to you. I realize I pointed to the negative consequences of a childless old age, so perhaps it’s hypocritical for me to say this. But I would say, though we may think this way, I don’t think we should express it. We should let these thoughts be at all time overshadowed by our desire to act from love — or the desire to know love.

Nick responds:

Good advice. I’m not easily offended.

I would add that it’s less about having someone to take care of us in a physical sense than it is about having someone. Marriage has changed me a lot in six months, not least of all because I’m able to recognize that being an 80-year-old man with a bunch of cool stuff and no one in his life would be a pretty miserable existence.

I’d imagine that the “spirit of paternal devotion” is a literally unfathomable thing until one is able to experience it first hand.

Daniel S. writes:

The picture you posted is most appropriate for the future of Western childlessness. But it is lacking one element, the various Third World peoples who will inherit what is left of Western civilization. While these childless whites, likely bitter and alone, are locked away in sterile nursing homes, their previous home will be the residence of those Third World immigrants who saw fit to have children and to have a future.

The celebration of childlessness, like abortion, the hookup culture, and homosexual “marriage” before it, is nothing but the last gasps of a dying, decadent civilization. As Mark Steyn has pointed out, all of this has civilization-killing consequences (speaking here of abortion, but his observation could easily apply to self-desired childlessness):

“Why does anyone think Europe needs huge numbers of Muslim immigrants?” Steyn replied, “Supposedly to keep their welfare state in business, because they are the children that Europeans couldn’t be bothered to have themselves. One third of German women are childless. If you just take your average, dopey Western feminist at a university campus in North America today, and she’s concerned about patriarchy, [she thinks that by] forming a pro-life club you’re forcing your backwards, patriarchal views on her. If she thinks you’re the big, stern, dominating patriarch, she ought to wait twenty or thirty years in the average Canadian city. She’ll be figuring out what the people in Amsterdam and Brussels and Malmo and Paris are beginning to figure out right now—that there’s a whole, far more motivated breed of patriarch that’s going to be walking around those cities. That’s what the dopey, clap-trapped, cobwebbed 1960’s feminist doesn’t get—that abortion is an indulgence and the indulgence only works for a generation or two before a bunch of other people take over and rebuild the future you weren’t interested in building for yourselves.”

Is the fate of the West to be some horrid combination of Children of Men meets Jean Raspail’s Camp of the Saints?

James P. writes:

You chided Nick for “talking about your future children’s use to you.” That attitude was one of the things that turned me off about Kate Spicer’s lament in the Daily Mail. Towards the end, she writes that she dreads the time when her parents are no longer around, because then nobody will love her “unconditionally” any more. Thus, the purpose of having children, as far as she is concerned, is to fulfill her future emotional needs.

As for Nick’s concern that he may be an 80-year-old man with a bunch of cool stuff and no-one in his life — take a close look at the picture. They are all women. If you make it to 80, Nick, you won’t lack for female attention. -:)

Forta Leza writes:

I disagree with you about selfishness and parental devotion. There is good selfishness and bad selfishness. It’s usually bad to seek to benefit your own situation if the cost is harm to others.

But it’s reasonable and natural to try to improve your own situation if doing so is also helpful to others. For example a man who wants to become a great doctor so that he can heal other people and make a lot of money doing so.

Having children can be like this and there’s no shame in it.

Laura writes:

But my point to Nick was that one shouldn’t openly express this selfishness, even though we may think that way. And the reason why we shouldn’t express it is because other people are involved and no child wants to think that he came about for strictly utilitarian reasons. (Nick wasn’t actually saying that, as he later clarified.) And parenthood always is more complex than that. Of course, it does involve self-interest and that’s not wrong.

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