conditioned decision

What a great site! I hope there's much more posting.

"Raising a child is sooo hard!!!" "I didn't know how hard it was..."

I think that most people would agree that raising kids is hard. But it's not something that breeders and breeders in waiting really grasp ON AN INTELLECTUAL LEVEL. Why I think a lot of people have kids results from a response that comes from a lot of conditioning. Plus it's based in emotion; it's romanticized. The decision generally ain't made from a practical standpoint. People aren't thinking.
THINKING. What happened to it?
This conditioning is happening all over the world. DeBeers (the huge diamond company, the company responsible for the craze over "the right hand ring") is advertising heavily in Asia with fab. results. It's devoted millions of dollars convincing poor Asians to buy their jewelry, not the jade and gold that has been traditionally bought for engagements. One recent Asian TV commercial showed a couple getting engaged with a diamond then it fast-forwarded a few years and the couple was walking hand-in-hand on a beach with a small child in tow. Audiences panned it, noting that the addition of a child was not romantic! DeBeers promptly got rid of the sprog is what it did. Hell yeah, it did. A child is about as romantic as eating a cockroach.
Perhaps if cultures revered their older folks instead of shuttering them away, maybe there would be less mooother and duhddie thinking. My old man said "don't have a baby if you don't want to. Live your life."
There's that little story that Joseph Campbell told about seeing a couple and the dad told this kid to drink his tomato juice. The kid said he didn't like it. The dad said. "Drink that tomato juice. You have to do things you don't want to do. I've never done anything I wanted to do my whole life."

This is similar to my "inevitability" theory. I see allot of young people who beleive that they can do whatever they want for a while, but will have to reproduce eventually. They simply aren't aware that there is an alternative.

I don't want to do the parenting job, but I still say it isn't truly hard. Tedious, time-consuming, boring, mind-numbing are adjectives that come to mind but not really hard. (only get close to hard when parents go out of their way to teach good manners, morals, self-discipline etc.--must most don't, they just try to keep sprog alive from point A to point B by the end of the day)

On Memorial Day, I saw my moo friend walking her two sprogs in some lame parade in the neighborhood streets. I went back to hubby (who tends to be a wavering CF and not as militant as I can be), and said, see, you and I get to enjoy our day off and do what we want etc. Moo has to wake up early and shuffle around in some dumb meaningless fake kiddie parade. She might say she enjoys it but let's face it, I think she could do w/o it. Now, the parade shuffling isn't something I would like to do, she will put up w/ for her sprogs, it may be annoying and boring, but this is one example of a parents day that is certainly not hard.

Most parents I know just become schedulers and chauffeurs these days. Not really hard jobs--just busy work actually.

Very true, Dogsledder and CF uter.

Because I always have to tell stories, here is one:

I was a teenager when the book Kramer v. Kramer came out. I sneaked the book from my parents. It was a light read novel that was later made into a sappy movie starring Dustin Hoffman.

Short version: Unhappily married woman leaves husband + small child and gets a divorce, then wants the kid later.

Of course, the movie demonized the woman because she left her husband and kid. The book went into much more detail about how much her life sucked after she had a kid. She had been working outside the home, but her husband wouldn't hear of it after the kid was born. He stopped listening to her, and she was bored, lonely and frustrated.

But most of all, the book described the mind-numbingly boring tasks of her day. Raising a child requires a lot of repetition: changing diapers over and over; reading the same story 100 times; cheering every time the kid poops in the potty; listening to the kid say, "Lookitme!" and acting excited THOUSANDS of times over the course of your life when your kid does something that is really no big deal.

Even at a young age, the book made a huge impression on me. I read it and thought, shit, that sounds fucking horrible.

I believe there are people who love parenting...they love going through all the stages and doing three year old things again, but it would have been a total disaster for me. And there are parts that are boring and mind-numbing....I have a few friends IRL who admit this.