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Dear Carolyn: For years, my oldest son and his girlfriend said they would never get married; she was against it. Then, five years ago, she relented and they got married, by all accounts happily.
They are financially secure: well-paying jobs, no debt on their advanced degrees, a rental property they own outright, a manageable mortgage on their home, late-model cars.
Indeed, my son and his wife have worked hard, but we and the in-laws have also provided our ongoing support.
But there is a rub: Our daughter-in-law steadfastly refuses to consider having children — and our son stands by her decision.
Her reason — or the reason they are standing behind — is climate change. In her opinion, it would be the height of cruelty to bring a child into a world that faces such an apocalyptic and nihilistic future.
I will grant you that our country has this and other major problems. But there is an existential question here: What have my and my wife’s lives amounted to, if we have not inculcated a basic will to survive to the next generation?
To make matters more complicated, they channel all their time and energy into biking, hiking, rock-climbing, kayaking, etc. We despair that our younger children will make the same lifestyle choices — especially under the influence of their older sibling.
To many observers, it would seem our kids have been spoiled. And on some level, that is true. But the urge to face an uncertain future and procreate in the face of adversity is supposed to be part of the human condition.
Every generation faces some dire threat. My father’s generation was told to go shoot Hitler. My generation learned to “duck and cover” to avoid nuclear annihilation. How can climate change be worse? Any advice?
— Despairing
Despairing: Some might think it is a tremendous accomplishment to rear children who see a life for life’s sake as meaningful and complete.
“Some” being me. I think that.
I also think your expectations would be a Class A felony if there were such a thing as crimes against boundaries. The couple’s prosperity does not mean children are the required, expected or even logical next step. The prerequisite for kids is wanting them (when equipped for their care). Your wanting children from them does not count.
And oh, holy wow, your support obligates them to produce grandchildren for you not at all, not a bit, not even the fading memory of a bit written in sand.
If they nixed children because they wouldn’t fit in their kayaks, then I would support that just as fiercely. But being responsible for children is enough of a lift without multiple existential decentralized threats, meaning we can’t just go to war or to the bargaining table with them to make them stop.
Some would-be parents aren’t fazed by this, some are, and I stand fully behind both. Bullish procreation “is supposed to be part of the human condition” — according to whom? There’s a packing list?
The couple decide their condition. And people only “steadfastly” refuse when others repeatedly ask, no? So stop. Repeatedly. Asking.
That she “relented” (gah!) on marriage is not an invitation to put another of her principled stands in a vise.
So one more bit of advice: Back the ever-loving heck off this issue, this couple, this entitlement. Or else I’ll throw more metaphors at you.
If anything is going to talk your younger kids out of procreating under the dramatic orange skies of a planet on fire, it’s not going to be your daughter-in-law; it’ll be your unshaken certainty that people owe you kids.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2023/03/20/carolyn-hax-granparents-kids-climate-change/
They are financially secure: well-paying jobs, no debt on their advanced degrees, a rental property they own outright, a manageable mortgage on their home, late-model cars.
Indeed, my son and his wife have worked hard, but we and the in-laws have also provided our ongoing support.
But there is a rub: Our daughter-in-law steadfastly refuses to consider having children — and our son stands by her decision.
Her reason — or the reason they are standing behind — is climate change. In her opinion, it would be the height of cruelty to bring a child into a world that faces such an apocalyptic and nihilistic future.
I will grant you that our country has this and other major problems. But there is an existential question here: What have my and my wife’s lives amounted to, if we have not inculcated a basic will to survive to the next generation?
To make matters more complicated, they channel all their time and energy into biking, hiking, rock-climbing, kayaking, etc. We despair that our younger children will make the same lifestyle choices — especially under the influence of their older sibling.
To many observers, it would seem our kids have been spoiled. And on some level, that is true. But the urge to face an uncertain future and procreate in the face of adversity is supposed to be part of the human condition.
Every generation faces some dire threat. My father’s generation was told to go shoot Hitler. My generation learned to “duck and cover” to avoid nuclear annihilation. How can climate change be worse? Any advice?
— Despairing
Despairing: Some might think it is a tremendous accomplishment to rear children who see a life for life’s sake as meaningful and complete.
“Some” being me. I think that.
I also think your expectations would be a Class A felony if there were such a thing as crimes against boundaries. The couple’s prosperity does not mean children are the required, expected or even logical next step. The prerequisite for kids is wanting them (when equipped for their care). Your wanting children from them does not count.
And oh, holy wow, your support obligates them to produce grandchildren for you not at all, not a bit, not even the fading memory of a bit written in sand.
If they nixed children because they wouldn’t fit in their kayaks, then I would support that just as fiercely. But being responsible for children is enough of a lift without multiple existential decentralized threats, meaning we can’t just go to war or to the bargaining table with them to make them stop.
Some would-be parents aren’t fazed by this, some are, and I stand fully behind both. Bullish procreation “is supposed to be part of the human condition” — according to whom? There’s a packing list?
The couple decide their condition. And people only “steadfastly” refuse when others repeatedly ask, no? So stop. Repeatedly. Asking.
That she “relented” (gah!) on marriage is not an invitation to put another of her principled stands in a vise.
So one more bit of advice: Back the ever-loving heck off this issue, this couple, this entitlement. Or else I’ll throw more metaphors at you.
If anything is going to talk your younger kids out of procreating under the dramatic orange skies of a planet on fire, it’s not going to be your daughter-in-law; it’ll be your unshaken certainty that people owe you kids.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2023/03/20/carolyn-hax-granparents-kids-climate-change/
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My usual response to "do not have children because the world is on fire" is "my enslaved ancestors had children in the worst of circumstances or I wouldn't be here." But that's to someone telling me/everyone to not have children. (it's moot for me now anyway) An individual person or couple deciding for themselves not to have children is their absolute right and I would not only never gainsay them I'd bite the ankles of anyone who does. (I'm short)
Also the way LW blames the decision on the daughter in law, 1) as if LW's son has no ability to make decisions under the Thrall of his Evil Wife and 2) when she's the one who most likely would have to be pregnant -- come here, LW, I just sharpened my teeth.
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LW's son and daughter in law sound awesome: spending their time on things they enjoy and making the most of their lives. I also feel really strongly that people who don't want children shouldn't have them and definitely shouldn't be nagged to have them or told they'll "change their minds". I wanted and planned to have both my children, and for all the joy I have in them, it's been a heck of a life-changing experience and commitment.
(You are also an awesome person, and I fart in the general direction of anyone who tries to make you feel otherwise.)
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So anyone who doesn't have children is a useless waste of space, and so are their parents if they haven't raised any breeders?
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LW is an asshole, and he thinks he's smart, and he thinks he's cute,and I hope that he doesn't get his way even in things that are his business.
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2. Having kids is not anything like a promise that your blood line will go on forever. About 50% of humans have no living descendants after 150 years; this is true cross-culturally and through history. Chance are even if your kids have kids, there's only a 50% chance you'll get great-great-grands from them.
3. Also, you don't have kids because you want your bloodline to continue. You have kids because you want to bring a new human into the world, and see what they do. If that's not why you had kids, your kids can probably tell, which may also be related to why they don't want any of their own.
4. "my son and his wife have worked hard, but we and the in-laws have also provided our ongoing support," implies to me you are saying that, even with lots of support from wealthy parents, your son and daughter-in-law have had to struggle to maintain the standard of living their parents take for granted. This is pretty common these days! It's almost universally common, for example, among white American millennials, whose parents probably had one of the best standards of living of anyone in all history. The #1 reason for people not wanting to have kids (though they may phrase it different ways - including in terms of climate change) is a belief that their kids will have a worse standard of living than their parents did (and that raising kids well will be harder for them than it was for their parents.) Believing that your kids' lives will almost definitely be worse than yours were is materially different than something like nuclear war, where you can assume your kids will probably live better than you, unless everybody dies. What have you done in your life to work toward creating a world where the kids of your grandkids' generation have lives as secure and pleasant as yours were? What can you do now to work for that? There are a lot of reasons for that, not just climate-related ones.
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If this statistic includes all humans including the many who died before reproducing, I'll buy it; if you limit it to humans who actually had children, 50% sounds too high. Though my genealogy research could be biasing me since I'm mostly working on people who did have descendants into the present.
(And that said, I'm not expecting to have descendants in 150 years. Even if my kids do decide they want children, it's anyone's guess whether they'll be in a position to intentionally have them during my lifetime.)
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If you mean people who died in childhood, including people who died in childhood in your first generation - at least for 150 years ago - would probably drive the numbers way higher than 50%, given that childhood mortality by itself was often higher than that. TBF this is mostly based on my vague memory of college demographics class, but I did google up a study real quick to make sure my memory wasn't way off. That one, I believe, only included adults in its initial cohort, but didn't sort them for whether they had living kids or not, because that would have *super* biased the results.
My "Chance are even if your kids have kids, there's only a 50% chance you'll get great-great-grands from them." is a little bit misleading - there's a 50% chance *per kid*, not overall. The study did show that the farther down the chart it went the better your odds - so if your initial cohort only included the people who had recorded kids, it would be more than 50%, and if it only included the people who had grandkids, it would be even more, and by the time you were up to great-grands, adding farther generations didn't materially change the odds. But LW doesn't currently have any kids who have lived to reproduce, much less grandkids who have, so they're still probably only in the 50-75% range even with more than two kids.)
And yeah, genealogy is heavily biased toward finding people with descendants. Even if you make a special effort to include the childless great-aunts and great-great-uncles, they're a lot harder to track down than people who have their own descendants working on their own charts. And you're going to entirely miss many of the people who don't even have grand-nieces and great-grand-nephews. Sort of by the nature of the thing, genealogy is going to try to give you a world where most people have descendants, and even if you have a lateral row where half the people don't have kids, the ones that do will end up taking up most of the chart. (I've occasionally tried to play with doing some kind of inverse geneaology - that focuses most on the people without descendants - and it's interesting but hard to do.)
But doing just, like, seat-of-the-pants on my own family, my mom's parents' line is probably going to last a good long time. But they had ten kids, and of those ten kids, only six had kids and only four had grandkids (and one of those four produced grandkids who would not have been on the family tree in a world without genetic geneaology...) So that comes out to ballpark 50% of my mom's siblings having descendants. My dad's line has smaller families but going back to great-aunts and great-uncles on that side it comes out about the same.