Choice. It’s all “choice.” I know the fashionable excuse is that taxation makes it “too expensive” to have children, but get real. Ask your grandparents or great-parents about how they supported their families. It involved a lot more work than I put in, and I have everyone’s nightmare, ten children.
You choose to do the work of bearing and rearing the next generation (hint: it’s more fun than you think) or you don’t. If you don’t, someone else will. Europe will not be vacant real estate. The United States has a lot of vacancy now, so who’s to say how demographics will shake out.
This is the paragraph that stuck out to me:
“Many Germans do not consider having a child an enriching experience, the study showed. Not even half of the childless women between 18 and 50-years-old thought that having a child within the next three years would improve their lives.”
Alright. My husband and I raised two kids to adulthood. It was expensive. It was incredibly hard work. I homeschooled and my son was chronically ill. I went without sleep for years. We killed ourselves for our kids.
On paper, having children was a horrible decision. It cost us unbelievable amounts of money, postponed our retirement, and killed my health.
But did it ‘improve our lives’?
YES!!
We are both better, stronger happier people for having those kids. The difficulties we encountered with raising them actually made our accomplishment more meaningful. They were worth every penny, every minute, every hour of lost sleep and worry.
And that’s what’s impossible to explain. Yes, it’s going to be hard and expensive, but YOU will have an enriched existence for doing the work. YOU will be a better person. YOU will be more content with your life, less worried about the little things and there is nothing that can rob you of that. There are benefits to going through parenthood that cannot be measured in dollars.
I’m looking forward to grandkids!