Irish birthrate slumps 22% in a decade

You were having a dig at the family unit, daring not to mention the fact that most families are not "suffering" but are very happy with their kids - even at the most difficult of times.

@Hamachi called you out, and rightly so.

Actually, no to both you and Hamachi.

He expressed a viewpoint common among many single males in their 30s and 40s.

As for the dig at the family unit, there's always been a US vs Them mentality between people in relationships with kids, and those who are single. We don't understand the lives each other lead, and typically, there is some ribbing involved. Any single person in their 30s/40s will have plenty of experience of judgments/observations being made about their lifestyles coming from people in relationships.

I struggle with Kids. (I was even a kindergarten teacher for a year way back in the day.) Honestly. Oh, they're cute at times, and some kids have been raised extremely well, but many more haven't. They're allowed to run wild, with the parents standing helplessly on the sidelines, or failing dramatically to rein them in. The noise, the tantrums, the crying, the emotional manipulation, etc all contribute to me not wanting to spend any real time with kids, unless I really have no other option. i.e related to me.

Oh, people always say it's different when they're your own kids, and perhaps that's true.. but when you don't have em... they're just plain annoying in most extended situations.

Also many women have told me that I would be a great father. I don't see it myself.. but.. yeah.

How noble of you. What's your real reason? Fear?

The reason for being so noble and not wanting to expose your children to looking after you in your old age. Most people who say that are only disguising a fear of something, but that fear varies from person to person.

It's like your line about your mother. My mother spared us the trouble of looking after her in her decline by getting cancer and dying in her mid-70s. Her body was fecked with the disease, but her mind was intact until the very end, and we never faced the awful choices of giving up because we couldn't do it and trusting her to the care of the State. We were probably lucky, even if it didn't feel that way.

Thanks for your words about my mam. She had a lot of living she wanted to do, and put simply when she knew her illness was terminal she was terrified. And as I get older something I've seen in a lot of people is that when children are really afraid they need their parents, and when older people are really afraid they need their kids. I'm not saying that's a universal thing, but I've observed it more and more as the years go by. In my mam's case I was a small help at that stage, but my younger sister was the person my mother really leaned on - as daughters often end up in such a role.

An old and now deceased aunt of mine was fond of the saying "old age doesn't come alone". And it doesn't. No matter how wealthy or how healthy you are, at some point the decline through old age and death will inevitably get ugly. In poorer societies and in more primitive times, older people couldn't count on the community or the State to take care of them when their minds and bodies started to collapse, so they relied on their children. And that, at its simplest, is why they had many kids. Some would die, some would move away, but if you had lots of kids some would hang around nearby and take some form of care of you as you went into decline. The next generation were socialised into the same way of thinking and behaving, and the cycle repeated itself.

As societies got richer and more modern, people didn't need to have so many kids, mainly because fewer of them would die young. It's one of the reasons why birth rates have fallen in all advanced economies. It's also one of the reasons why the loss of a child is seen by societies like ours as such a catastrophe compared to how it would have been viewed quite recently, even as recently as two generations ago. If you only have one or two children, the loss of one is much more stark and significant than if you have 9 or 10 - even if you only view it through the crude lens of DNA propagation.

Not very noble, indeed. But a lot of the underlying reasons behind our choices in life are less noble than the stories we might tell ourselves and each other.