BellaOnline Forums Relationships Married No Kids Your Kids Are Their Problem - Awesome & LONG piece

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I'd buy that woman a drink, That is one of the most intelligent articles I've seen written about CF for quite a while.

I liked her point about not realising you're assuming things, until you run into someone whose assumptions are different to yours. Very, very true, and certainly food for thought.

What a well written article! Thanks for the link.

Great article.

I don't often think about things from a CF point of view (ya know, being the baby name editor and all), but I can understand how certain situations/issues/policies must really infuriate those who've chosen to remain childless.

I thought this was an especially good point (made by Elinor Burkett):

Great article! I usually don't like reading long articles, but she had my attention from beginning to end.

There was a point early in the article when she asked why childfree people are so angry with parents. She proceeded to answer the question later on, but I'll throw in my opinion in my own words:

It's because children and parenting has become disproportionately important to our society. Instead of children being part of someone's life, they now ARE the person's life. I, in turn, am expected to pay a disproportionate amount of attention to children and parents, and I actually have zero interest in it.

It's like the women who have turned weddings into huge affairs with hundreds of people and designer/super expensive everything because it's 'her day' and the 'most important day in her life.' Yes, it is an important day, but it isn't the only one. It is part of life, not all of it.

I also think that pro-parenting groups are missing the point that we should be controlling our population, not encouraging people to expand it. It can get very hard to stand by quietly and watch society march itself right over a cliff.

I don't want eveyrone to stop having children.

I want them to think about it first, and think about the number of children and how that will affect their lives and the world around them. There are parents that do this, and they have my respect. Most parents do not.

Great points Tress, and I love this analogy. The "bridezilla" is now the momzilla, and it does start to get irritating.

do the biblical thing.. have one child for each person in the family and then one to add to the gene pool LOL

I always say.. let me have my 2.3 kids, white picket fence, house, and a dog in the yard ;0)

Great article.

And, here is the discussion I had with the clerk at the pharmacy when I went to pick up my prescriptions:

(Note that I am 64 and look like I'm 64.)

"Easy open caps, please."

"Are you SURE! Your children could get into your pills!"

"I don't have kids."

"Well don't you want your grandchildren to be safe when they visit?"

"I don't have grandchildren. No kids, no grandkids."

"But what if your neighbors kids come to visit and get into your pills?"

"My neighbor's kids are 45 and 49. If they got into my pills, I'd have to assume they were stealing them to sell on the street and I'd call the cops."

"But what about your friend's kids?"

(OK - this has to be the pharmacy clerk from Hell!)

"Look - if you insist that I have to have a safety cap, even though I have no need for one and can only ever manage to open bottles with safety caps with a hammer, and the law clearly states that I can have one on request, then give me a cap that is
guaranteed sheep proof. I have sheep and I want them to be safe."

I got my easy open cap. 10 people in line behind me were inconvienienced by having to wait through this pointless discussion.


As to finding child free places to live - the law says you can't refuse to rent to people with kids. Which is why we stopped renting out our house in town. The rental agent kept renting to people with kids (had to, it's the law) and our property kept on being destroyed by those kids. The last straw was a single mother with 2 brats from hell. One of these little monsters was playing in mommy's car one day and managed to drive it through the garage door, knocking the garage off the foundation and doping enough damage to the plumbing inside the back garage wall to cause it to leak which required tearing out and replacing the wall to fix the leak. Mommy then packed up and moved out without paying the repair bills. When we got the keys and went in, we found every single interior door had big holes kicked in it (all had to be replaced); crayon and pencil marks all over the walls (we had to paint); the kids had practiced their wood working skills by carving up the wood kitchen cabinets (we had to replace some of them); Nail polish had been spilled in the cabinets and never cleaned up; meat wrappers had been run through the garbage disposal killing it (replaced); window screens were not just torn, they were missing; and there were holes punched through the dry wall in several places. Mommy then got mad at us when we would not return her security deposit which didn't begin to cover the damage. And this was just our last experience with renting to people with kids - every rental to people with cost us more on repairs after they moved (often without bothering to pay the rent) than we ever made out of renting the place.

We would have liked to keep renting the place but we simply could not afford to take a chance on renting to people with kids again - and since it's illegal to discriminate on this basis, we simply took it off the rental market.

Urg, DH and I briefly discussed the idea of renting out our house, but we realized that the probability of the thing getting trashed is pretty high, and we'd rather sell it at a loss.

When we were looking to buy a house, we started by looking at older homes. They were really cheap, but that was because you had to put another 100K into them to fix them. In the long run, it made more sense to buy a new home.

can't you refuse to rent to couples? Its a way to attempt to be CF LOL

I think landlords should be able to not rent to people with children just like they can refuse pets.