A friend sent me this great link. It’s a TV panel where three women discuss the choice of remaining childless. The anthropologist from Rutgers University describes having large families as littering. To be fair, she relates how some people consider having lots of children as littering. Whether or not this is her belief is anyone’s guess. Is this view of motherhood increasingly prevalent, as many Catholic commenters suggest? I don’t know. I’m too busy tending to my litter to pay much attention to inanities of this type. I think that we will run out of affordable food and oil long before we make ourselves extinct, personally. Then only the resourceful – like children of large families who learned early how to do more with less – will survive. University professors, especially anthropologists, won’t. But I digress.
I will not be breaking any news to our readers with large families but if we were walking around with our environmental footprint hanging over our heads (à la Eeyore), each one of my six children would have a much smaller cloud than any of their friends. See, I have the dubious blessing of having friends who are significantly wealthier than I am. I say dubious because it is the root of much weeping and gnashing of teeth in the children gallery. We are asked questions like “Why don’t we have a house in Florida? Everybody has a house in Florida!” , “Why don’t we go to Europe every summer? Everybody goes to Europe every summer!” Everybody has a ski chalet, everybody goes to Hawaii for spring break, everybody gets a car at 16… you get the picture. And hopefully, by now, you will also understand that we may drive a full-size GMC Savana but we are burning nowhere as much fossil fuel as our friends who fly to Florida for a long weekend. And I’m not even getting near the relative size of our houses per inhabitant and the new clothes we’re not buying.
In the meantime, to all our readers with large families: happy littering! Don’t mind the academics: we outnumber them.
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As the oldest of 8 kids I completely agree with you and I well remember the how comes we gave my folks back then. Our how comes were much different than those you mentioned though. Back in the mid 1940s and on into the 50s affluence was much different than it is today.
I’m boggled that it’s acceptable to refer to people as garbage because of how many siblings they have.
I don’t think the reference is to garbage, but to animals that give birth to large number of offspring at one time. Still derogatory, for sure.
I wonder if these three women’s opinions will change as the years pass? It is one thing to say it when you are healthy, fit, etc. But when they are in a nursing home with hours to contemplate their lack of descendents or visitors?
Dr. Helen Fisher (said anthropologist) has been on my radar for the last six months or so. A good chunk of her work consists of researching the biochemistry of loving feelings–she is someone who claims that no-strings-attached sex is damn near impossible; that bonding happens during a sexual encounter whether you want it to or not. Reading up on her research has been on my to-do list for awhile.
And then she goes and says something like this! To be fair, I agree with Steve–I think she was referring to people who have multiple children conceived at the same time. But her cohorts sure ran with the littering concept, didn’t they? How ’bout the lady who said “I don’t have children, so I can drive a Hummer” (Translation: I don’t want to share the Earth’s resources.)
I generally ignore the “there’s just the right amount of people like me, but there are WAY too many of people like you” sort. I figure if they can’t recognize their own hypocrisy, then I’m not going to be the one to point it out to them.