Posted on 01/14/2005 9:56:03 PM PST by neverdem
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Over the past 30 years, the fraction of women over 40 who have no children has nearly doubled, to about a fifth. According to the Gallup Organization, 70 percent of these women regret that they have no kids.
It's possible that some of these women regret not having children in the way they regret not taking more time off after college. But for others, this longing for the kids they did not have is a profound, soul-encompassing sadness.
And it is part of a large pattern. Most American still tell pollsters that the ideal family has two or three children. But fewer and fewer Americans get to live in that kind of family.
Why?
For some, it's a question of never finding the right person to have kids with. Others thought they'd found the right mates, but the relationships didn't work out. Others became occupied with careers, and the child-rearing part of their lives never got put together.
But there is also one big problem that stretches across these possibilities: Women now have more choices over what kind of lives they want to lead, but they do not have more choices over how they want to sequence their lives.
For example, consider a common life sequence for an educated woman. She grows up and goes to college. Perhaps she goes to graduate school. Then, during her most fertile years, when she has the most energy for child-rearing, she gets a job. Then, sometime after age 30, she marries. Then, in her mid-30's, when she has acquired the maturity and character to make intelligent career choices, she takes time off to raise her kids.
Several years hence, she seeks to re-enter the labor force. She may or may not be still interested in the field she was trained for (two decades earlier). Nonetheless, she finds a job, works for 15 years or so, then spends her final 20 years in retirement.
This is not necessarily the sequence she would choose if she were starting from scratch. For example, it might make more sense to go to college, make a greater effort to marry early and have children. Then, if she, rather than her spouse, wants to stay home, she could raise children from age 25 to 35. Then at 35 (now that she knows herself better) she could select a flexible graduate program specifically designed for parents. Then she could work in one uninterrupted stint from, say, 40 to 70.
This option would allow her to raise kids during her most fertile years and work during her mature ones, and the trade-off between family and career might be less onerous.
But the fact is that right now, there are few social institutions that are friendly to this way of living. Social custom flows in the opposite direction.
Neil Gilbert observes in the current issue of The Public Interest that as women have entered the work force, they have adopted the male model, jumping directly into careers. Instead, he suggests, it would be better to make decisions based on what he calls the "life-course perspective." It's possible that women should sequence their lives differently from men, and that women may need a broader diversity of sequence options.
Gilbert, who is a professor of social welfare at Berkeley, points out that right now our social policies are friendly toward this straight-to-work sequence and discourage other options. Programs like day care and flexible leave help parents work and raise kids simultaneously. That's fine for some, but others may prefer policies that help them do these things sequentially.
It might make sense, for example, to give means-tested tax credits or tuition credits to stay-at-home parents. That would subsidize child-rearing, but in a way that leaves it up to families to figure out how to use it. The government spends trillions on retirees, but very little on young families.
I suspect that if more people had the chance to focus exclusively on child-rearing before training for and launching a career, fertility rates would rise. That would be good for the country, for as Phillip Longman, author of "The Empty Cradle," has argued, we are consuming more human capital than we are producing - or to put it another way, we don't have enough young people to support our old people. (That's what the current Social Security debate and the coming Medicare debate are all about.)
It would also be good for those many millions of Americans who hit their mid-40's and regret not having kids, or not having as many as they would like. As it says somewhere, to everything, there is a season.
Women's liberation, in many ways, has been a cruel joke for the women.
That statement is scary within itself. Be afraid, very afraid.
Sure, let's short-change the kids by giving them the immature mom who'd rather be elsewhere than sitting home with babies, whose judgment leaves something to be desired. And what makes you think that she'll be free to pursue a career at 35 or 40? Her teenagers won't miss her? Better take this plan back to the drawing board!
How very cannibalistic. Let's make more babies to support our elderly. Why settle for embryo stem cells when we can make whole slaves?
>And what makes you think that she'll be free to pursue a >career at 35 or 40? Her teenagers won't miss her?
Actually that is when I intend to be home. I have worked since they were babies and have had them in daycare (a very good rural daycare with teachers who have been there since they started 7 years ago) and I plan on scaling back to be home when they get home. I need to be home when they are old enough to get into trouble and need the most guidance.
If you want marriage and children, this is a modern necessity.
BTTT
By the time they figure it out - oops - too late.
Then, as holidays come around and "families" are busy celebrating together, the childless home echoes loudly, and forever empty. Then they get an inkling that life is about family - family is forever...family is a the most important, hardest and most rewarding career. Jobs and outside careers evaporate, associates drift off - and they are left with the choices they made.
I'm the mother of 5 and have 15 grandkids. What a glorious 2 weeks I had for Christmas and New Years. That was the career I chose first - and it's been a resounding success...
Sadly, many who are responsible and not desperate to have children at any cost will not have any at all.
from = form
Biology follows its own natural course unconcerned with human desires.
If college educated women decide to neglect their child-bearing years and follow men into the workplace then they have no one to blame but themselves for their lack of children.
White collar women, unlike blue collar women, generally (but not always) have the option to take a few years off from work to raise children - some just don't do it.
Biology follows its own natural course unconcerned with human desires.
If college educated women decide to neglect their child-bearing years and follow men into the workplace then they have no one to blame but themselves for their lack of children.
White collar women, unlike blue collar women, generally (but not always) have the option to take a few years off from work to raise children - some just don't do it.
Oh, come on, David. Just say it.
These women have been sold a bill of goods by feminism. I will bet you that most of them know it, too.
Indeed! But it's been a cruel joke for men and society at large as well.
It isn't earth-shattering, but the ideas are not bad. To stretch a point, it is as usual today a conservative type who is injecting fresh ideas. Liberal thought is very much constrained by one trillion political-correct rules.
Some women are biologically incapable of having children and want them and tried. They are the ones who adopt. It has something to do with genetic structure in a chromasome. I believe it is an adenosine skip. Sheesh. How did I get this deep? I ordered myself to relax and I am not.
Why bother commenting on anything the NYT ever says? They have forfieted their credibility.
Sadly, these days any 22-year-old girl who graduates from college (a) has a boatload of college-loan debt she has to pay off, and (b) will find that most young men her age react with horror if she says she just wants to stay at home and be a mother. Too many men have been indoctrinated to regard the non-career spouse as a parasite--yes, even those who want children. So a girl today can't do as her great-grandmother did, and sit at home embroidering while waiting for the right young man to pay court to her; she has to get out in the world of work and develop a career. Because, as the article notes, sometimes nobody comes along to marry and support a girl.
I kind of have to disagree with you about that. Can you really blame someone for being deceived? The woman's liberation movement was not just a cruel joke on women (and men), it was a cruel deception. Like you said, biology follows its own course. Truer words, brother, truer words.
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