A Surprising CF Ally

I was talking to one of my coworkers (a Chinese grad student who works for the same professor that I do) about attitudes towards family. When I told him that I didn't want children because of all the work involved his response was "child rearing sounds pretty boring and I cannot understand how women could stay home for that long without being bored out of their minds". He was also shocked by the number of women in the US who do not have careers and by the blatant pronatalism in our society. I was surprise since I expected that he would be breedertastic because of the one child policy in China, but it seems like the only thing that bothered him about it was that female children are not given a chance by their families. He gave lip service to the idea that the one child policy violated human rights but seemed convinced that having either no children or only one was the best way to go (he said he wants a child eventually).

Any one else have an experience similar to this?

I've noticed that many people from the third world don't romanticize children the way people in the U.S. do. The parents are expected to achieve something in their lives and they fit their kids into their lives. (The way it used to be.) Their wives aren't typically the lazy SAHMoo types either. (Unless they are fundy Muslim and they aren't allowed to leave the house. )

And if they do manage to get out of Third World crappers like India or China,Look the Hell Out. Not only are they not lazy asses, their kids aren't either. The kids are pushed to excel.

Rotwang, I'm curious about the demographics in your grad program. My BIL got his PHD in engineering about 25 years ago. He was the only American guy at his semi-Ivy school. The. only. one. Everyone else was Indian or Chinese or Third World. Is it like that now?

I am not a grad student (yet) but most of the people in the engineering program that I attend are either from third world countries, first or second generation Americans, or they are from relatively poor families and don't want to live in poverty anymore so education is the only/best way out. Come to think of it, I am a second generation American (my maternal grandfather was from Poland and my paternal grandmother was from Canada) so I grew up with the immigrant ideal that education is the way to be successful. However, most of the American grad students are completely bat shit crazy and they usually skip the Masters degree and go straight into their Ph.D.s.

There is a professor at my school who is from India who started a company and is now a multimillionaire and successful business man and he is the last person that I would want to cross. He is an amazing guy, but he can be scary as hell.