You remember B16's words about merely tolerating children? Well, the Times Online today ran an op-ed on the same subject. It might be the best opinion piece I've read all year. Perhaps I should cut-and-paste the entire thing, but I don't want to lose my blogging license, so I'm just giving you the first third:
In some parts of the animal kingdom, when times are harsh, adult creatures start having problems breeding. Mating patterns are interrupted and the animals either eat their young or spontaneously abort them or abandon them or don't have young at all. In the past few days it has begun to seem as if something like this is happening in the human species.
In one short week it has been reported that Britons are putting money and work ahead of having babies, that they are having them later. When they do have babies they don't know what to do with them: they cry out for subsidised childcare. It also emerged, to add to this general confusion, that a 63-year-old woman psychiatrist – a child psychiatrist of all things – is seven months pregnant with an IVF baby.
An ICM poll found that although people think it is best to have children while young, they feel forced by pressures of career and money and by the difficulties of finding a partner to postpone it – 49% of babies are born to mothers over 30. They would rather get rich and have fun, too: 64% of men and 51% of women think it is more important for women to enjoy themselves than to have children. Only 36% of women believe that people put children ahead of their careers, and only 32% of men believe that women should – a rapid change of perspective. The result is that Britain has an extremely low birth rate of about 1.77, though not as low as in many other European countries.
Those who do finally squeeze out 1.77 children find themselves unfit for purpose, in the current buzz phrase, and unfit for office. We parents are helpless, hopelessly indulgent of these late and inconvenient arrivals in our aspirational lives.
