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Comment by w0utert | Hacker News Reader

>> It's way off. If not wanting kids was the norm, we'd die out pretty quickly (feel free to disagree if you have stats, author!).

If 60% of women don't want kids, but the remaining 40% all have at least three each, population would still grow.

Anyway, I think you're discussing semantics here. Saying something is 'normal' does not necessarily imply the converse is 'abnormal'. In general 'normal' does not mean 'the norm' or 'according to what the majority of people think', just that it's not completely crazy to think in a certain way.

I definitely consider not wanting to have kids to be normal, no less than wanting to have them. There are very good reasons for deciding you don't want to have kids, maybe even more so that the opposite. In fact, most reasons for wanting to have kids are pretty egocentric if you ask me, and the number of kids growing up under terrible circumstances kind of seems to confirm that.

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I think your math is off.

Imagine that you have a population of 200 humans (100 male, 100 female). Only 40% of the women want kids, which, in this case, means that 40 women want kids. They each have three kids, for a total of 120 kids produced by the population of 200 adults. I don't think that this would lead to population growth.

You're right, unless you would somehow ensure that of the 3 kids every mother has, 2.5 are female ;-)

Anyway, looking at the worlds' population right now, I don't think we have to be afraid mankind will go extinct anytime soon because not enough children are born.

The problem with the article is it lumps together a whole bunch of different reasons for not wanting kids as if they're all equally reasonable reasons. It also doesn't address "normal" within any objective framework.

It's an interesting question in evolutionary theory whether there is an advantage to have a split of "breeders" and "non-breeders". Non-breeders, people who don't mind being e.g. soldiers and mine-technicians, seem pretty useful to society (actually a necessity once a large enough population of violent "non-breeders" evolve to threaten the breeders).

However they don't really contribute much genetically unless perhaps the "breeder" vs. "non-breeder" flag is entirely random and therefore allows for certain individuals to randomly specialize without negatively affecting the genetic potential of a family of mutations.

Intuitively, the value of "non-breeders" would seem to be very... expendable. I doubt people who are against having kids would enjoy that label, though. I wonder what other evolutionary value non-breeders bring to a species.

Perhaps having non-breeders who divert all their energy towards science and progress produce such an important species advantage that even if they don't necessarily contribute to the genetic pool they do contribute to the overall preservation and extension of the underlying genetic code.

You're leaving out the most important factor. Since females are the limiting factor in animal reproduction (for most species, but importantly including humans), there is tremendous selective pressure, both biologically and culturally, for males to be the expendable ones. The specialization of individuals into breeding and non-breeding roles is the entire purpose of gender.

I'm familiar with the theory that men are more expendable [1], but I don't think you can take that to imply that men don't have a breeding role. Men are critical to the family unit. Beside that, I'm suggesting that even on top of gender roles there is a breeder/non-breeder split. Otherwise all women AND men would have an urge to raise families, which is clearly not the case.

[1] www.psy.fsu.edu/~baumeistertice/goodaboutmen.htm

You're right. Unmarried and childless men are more expendable than married men with children. But not even unmarried or childless women are expendable. Even married men with children are more expendable than unmarried or childless women.

The article is specifically talking about constructed normality for women in regards to motherhood. Certainly it is totally OK to want or not want children, but mass media messaging and cultural assumptions about women and how they interact with children (their own and others) are a factor in how people make decisions for having children, hence the section in the article about rates of unplanned pregnancy and attitudes of mothers in an unplanned pregnancy.

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