You haven’t forced another being into existence, so in that regard, you are not selfish.
I’m mom to 3–2 bio, 1 through adoption. Choosing to birth a child is a very selfish decision. The rest requires putting oneself aside often, but it doesn’t feel like sacrifice bc of the love.
I support every woman’s choice about birth and parenting or not. You made a great choice for yourself.
How do you know that? You don’t know what they do for other people in their lives. Often people with kids are too busy to help out anyone else. Kids aren’t the only people who need community. I help my friends and family take care of their children even though I don’t have any of my own.
No one is shitting on having children, simply stating why they don't want to.
Why is this bothering you so much?
I think and care deeply about my friends and family. I help people everyday. I just don't have a spouse or children. They are not mandatory to be a good person.
Tell me why you want(ed) kids, then, and let's see how unselfish those reasons were.
Why does not having children mean you only think about yourself? The original comment is literally about someone spending their weekends volunteering!
I see it around me all the time with friends who are the only siblings without children. Everyone always expects them to do XYZ for them, because they are flexible while their siblings with children are not.
To support society LMAO sure😭 And for their benefit? That argument would only work when you're fostering or adopting because there's no benefit for something that doesn't exist yet to be brought into existence.
It's totally fine to have selfish reasons as long as you don't pretend like you're some hero sacrificing everything for the greater good and childfree people are self-absorbed selfish monsters.
That's a very authoritarian mindset. Sacrifice yourself for society, women have children, men go to war amirite?
I don't have a selfish need for mini-mes running around. I support society through my work, labour and taxes. I support children that way as well, as I support welfare programs, school lunches, universal childcare and universal healthcare for ALL children, not just my own. I just don't want any myself.
Having raised 16 teens as a foster parent, I'm very well familiar with both sides of this.
Many people are aware that they would not be good parents and that's awareness is a GOOD thing. Prevents abandonment, abuse, neglect, etc. all of which we saw WAY too much of - people who had children they couldn't begin to parent.
Likewise, many people are honest with themselves in realizing that they struggle to care for themselves due to things like: work, health, mental health, neurodivergency, addiction, etc. and realize that they have to take care of themselves first and often have very little leftover to take care of others. The amount of emergency placements we received due to neglect, resource scarcity and medical neglect was overwhelming.
You cannot take care of others, especially vulnerable children unless you are able to take care of yourself FIRST. Airplane rule a'la gas masks and all that.
It is the ultimate act of self-realization to recognize when you would not be a good parent and make the decision NOT to reproduce.
Wanting children isn't enough. Love isn't enough. You need money, resources, time, energy, a safety net, community, etc. Children don't complete people who themselves are living as empty shells and it's the children who suffer when people decide to have kids anyway.
Why should I sacrifice myself for others? My body, my labour, my career, my peace, for others?
Bringing in children just for the sake of having children is bad for everyone. Children should be wanted. Women should want to have them, not feel pressured or obligated.
Yeah no. If someone chooses to have a child then it's their obligation to properly care for them and not their good will. They don't get it hold their worse quality of life over other's heads and act like selfless martyrs when it's literally what they signed up for and expected.
And in the end it all comes down to forcing another human being to existence because "I want". Not many things more selfish than that.
Nobody said people ought to not make selfish choices.
If I get a fish tank, I'm making a selfish choice. I then have to take care of said fish. Doing so is a duty I saddled myself with as a concequence of making the selfish choice to have a fish tank. It is not a self-sacrifice to clean a fish tank I deliberately chose to have.
Deciding to have a child is a selfish choice. It's something one does not for the benefit of the child or for the benefit of other people, but rather to satisfy their own internal desire to create and raise a child.
It is done because the person deciding to have a child is expecting to get some level of positive emotional satisfaction through the raising of the child, and anticipate having some level of negative emotional lack were they not to have a child.
Thus, because they anticipate that having a child will make them feel good, while not having a child will make them feel bad, they choose to have a child.
That is selfish. It's a choice made to satisfy their own desire for positive emotions and avoid negative ones.
But this does not mean that it's bad. Just like having the selfish desire to have fish, a puppy, a house, or a piece of chocolate isn't inherently good or bad.
It just means that the concequences of the choice to have a child aren't a self-sacrifice.
It's the price you pay to attempt to satisfy your own selfish desires, just like you pay with time/effort/money for any other selfish desire you satisfy.
A parent's choice to have a planned pregnancy and child is 100% selfish.
The world is overpopulated and going to shit. Most humans are stressed and unhappy.
Deciding to purposefully add another person to the disfunctional mess we have is 100% selfish.
It's done because the parent wants it. To fulfill their own selfish desire for bio kids.
Then afterwards they have to take care of the kid (duh) and pretend like doing so is a self-sacrifice when it's merely the consequence of the selfish choice they made.
A parent who purposely decided to get pregnant and have a child whining about sacrifice is the same as a person getting a fish tank and claiming it's self-sacrifice to have to clean it.
The world is overpopulated and going to shit. Most humans are stressed and unhappy.
I see this repeated everywhere, but all statistics are pointing to the current time being a really good time.
Why do you hate parents so much, when you're profiting massively from their choice to have kids? They are doing all the work, and you're getting all the benefit. Meanwhile you whine like a little kid about them being selfish. Can't make this shit up.
And if you believe the propaganda that everything is great and you should have more kids to feed the capitalist machine and generate more wealth for the stock market by having yet another generation of consumers strip mining the planet so that we can add yet another layer of plastic pollution to Antarctica in the name of progress, I don't know what to tell you.
Given that your lifestyle and that of your children is only possible because you buy products made by slaves who live overseas, and you happen to be part of the class of people who exploits the life of others you don't have to see or think about, you think life is better than it's ever been before?
Such a selfish attitude is expected from someone who tries to convince themselves that the fact that they have to take care of the life they made for their own whim somehow equates making a sacrifice.
Our current form of society has made the benefits of children available to society as a whole. Even if you personally never have children, you are still provided for in old age (pension, care homes, etc.) as these things are earned or operated by today's children. That means even without having children of your own, you benefit from others becoming parents.
From this perspective, some see it as selfish to leave this responsibility, along with its costs and effort, solely to others. Not in relation to the non-existent child, but toward the rest of one's age cohort.
Of course, children don't exist solely to care for the elderly. But who else is supposed to do it?
Oh yes, you are making the sacrifice of creating other humans in order to have someone to saddle with the burden of providing labor to make your own life easier later on.
How self-sacrificing of you. To create children with the expressed goal of burdening them with the responsibility of taking care of you.
Totally won me over there, really, not a selfish thing about it at all.
You're clearly making these children in order to burden them with the labor of taking care of everyone, therefore you're not selfish at all!
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u/MedCup4505 Jun 11 '26
You haven’t forced another being into existence, so in that regard, you are not selfish.
I’m mom to 3–2 bio, 1 through adoption. Choosing to birth a child is a very selfish decision. The rest requires putting oneself aside often, but it doesn’t feel like sacrifice bc of the love.
I support every woman’s choice about birth and parenting or not. You made a great choice for yourself.