PS: The point here is NOT that poor people shouldn’t have kids, it’s that no one should be having kids without having the basics of childcare covered, which necessitates widespread systemic, societal, and economic change so that no parent needs to worry about those basics, and kids can grow up in secure, healthy environments. I completely forgot to mention this when I originally posted it, and that’s my bad.
This is far too much “breeding is a privilege for the rich” for my tastes. Touch too much Eugenics.
“Just don’t have kids” is a horrible solution.
“fix the system so people can make their own choices about having kids” is the actual solution.
Fix the system sure, but parenthood in poverty is absolutely selfish.
Thats the point of the post. The user calling out “selfish is doing too much work” is saying that its not the individual who is to blame, its society.
if you look at destructdisc’s post history that is definitely not the point. they are a childfree instagram edgelord hot take monger.
lol ‘don’t have kids you can’t afford’
what a hot take
It isn’t, my wife and I regularly say “have the kids you can afford”.
I don’t own a boat I can’t fix, a house I can fix, a car I can’t fix. Why then would it be okay to have a baby I can’t feed.
Point fingers at the system, sure. But that still doesn’t fix the issue that it’s a bad faith decision to “figure it out”.
I know what that means, cheap Walmart food and childhood obesity. Setting young people up for failure. Meanwhile parents not contributing to their retirements for 10+ years with the plan being my kid will take care of me! Lmao no.
Yes, it is a hot take. At best, it’s capitalist victim blaming, and at worst it’s social darwinism.
You are blaming poor people for wanting a family when it should be a basic right for those who want it. We as a society should be ensuring our children are taken care of with healthcare, nutrition, education, etc.
To be clear, I am 100% child free myself, but I acknowledge that we collectively need kids from all backgrounds for a healthy society to persist.
I mean, yes but… at the same time the people that already have kids that are insufficiently fed /housed mayyyybe shouldn’t be shooting for #5 and #6 etc.
sure, you can cherrypick extreme examples of any human behvavior to get angry at.
It’s not that extreme, and I mainly just it as an example because it’s something I’ve seen often enough for a variety of reasons (religion, Gov’t cheques, etc).
That said, stuff like Elon and his quest to artificially impregnate at many women as possible with his progeny is just as messed up.
For those of us that aren’t crazy rich arseholes, having one’s first kid is often a trade off between an age when financial security is more likely, of prime birth/parenting years when one has a lower chance of complications/defects/etc, and then the issue of age gap between offspring after.
Yes, it is a hot take. At best, it’s capitalist victim blaming, and at worst it’s social darwinism
it’s not a hot take to admit we physically cannot support the current human population much less continue to grow
You are blaming poor people for wanting a family when it should be a basic right for those who want it. We as a society should be ensuring our children are taken care of with healthcare, nutrition, education, etc.
don’t put words in my mouth
my personal stance is in agreement with you and an actual first world community that valued children would help those willing to have them afford to do so
i just don’t think parenthood should be winged otherwise, it only harms the child
To be clear, I am 100% child free myself, but I acknowledge that we collectively need kids from all backgrounds for a healthy society to persist.
sure but until we put money into that all we do is create suffering
I mean, yeah, I agree. A kid should be one of the most serious choices a human can make. And the ability to safely make that choice (especially the choice to skip it) should be our civilization’s clearest priority. The fact that it’s treated with such utilitarian callousness by the billionaire class is unequivocally sociopathic.
Like… fuck, being a parent is hard work. The right to take a step back and give it some thought and prep is just a no-brainer.
It’s not a “hot take” in a world violently controlled by the disgustingly privileged.
Not the lemmy user, the actual image they posted. That phrase is in the graphic. Seems like the lemmy user didnt actually understand the image they posted then, but i dont follow users like that, im just looking at this one post
unfortunately they post like 90% of the content here so it’s hard not to notice.
You can tell who is from the USA and who isn’t in here.
The USA ain’t fixing shit anytime soon. People here are still trying to figure who gets to pee in which bathroom and if teaching is a real job.
Where does that mean I’m from? 🤔
idk the wealthy seem to be plenty pissed about the poors not breeding enough. Seems like good leverage.
What’s simpler
-
Just don’t have kids and cope with the face that it’s not the best solution
-
fix the system
That depends on how much someone wants kids.
Either one could be very complicated.
The real solution is acrually this:
- Dont have kids because you must cope with the fact that the majority of humanity is OK with this stupid , inhuman system THATS why most humans have not risen up substantially to change the system.
Youre welcome 😁
-
The rich want poor to have kids so they have more chattel. I don’t think it’s eugenics at all, the rich wouldn’t know what to do with fewer wage slaves.
Skip having kids, even if you want to, just to own the rich? 🤔
well ya.
If I told you that I was gonna hire a politican or group of politicans to ‘Epstein’ and rob your child every day that they worked for me(YES even after theyve become an adult) … why in the fuck would you have that child?!
THATS literally the world we live in today.
AND also better yet , after Ive ‘Epsteined’ them and robbed them…I can just blow them up instead if I feel like it! We see thst happening with abandon all over Colombia , The Congo, Sudan, PAlestine , Lebanon, Iram, Yemen, Syria, etc… (theblist is almost endless)
AND better yet, after Ive done all those horrible tjings to them , how about I also destroy their life and livelihoods with climate change. Ill be fine in my multipurpose military yacht or my spaceship or my militarized mansion on the mountains . The IPCC has already confirmed that even if we stop using GHGs as I type tjis we shall live im an nearly. apocalyptic world for the next 50-200 years!
Okay… But there’s so much more to life than that.
People work jobs they enjoy, have relationships, have experiences and generally love living.
To arbitrarily deny someone existence because of a shadow focused view of the world or an imagined joyless experience is at best pessimistic and at worst a projection of the parents fears onto the imaginary child.
I shouldn’t exist. Due to medical complications during pregnancy my mother was advised to abort me. She gave birth to me and instead raised me badly 🤣
I’m glad that’s the way it happened. Life is hard sometimes but it’s also wonderful a lot of the time.
The issues you name are real, as real as the joys and pleasures of existence.
There’s a reason even mad Max fights to survive. Because even that world is better than not existing. If he wasn’t born, he doesn’t get to make that choice.
OK it was JOYFUL for YOU
YOU can go on with your life and be joyful with YOUR joyful life. Have fun buddy I guess 🤷🏿♂️
As for me? Ive been robbed, shot at, socially isolated due to the color of my skin and my poorness , left broke even after working long hours, and other awful things that have made me very bitter , and very VERY deranged. A person like me cannot be happy in a world like what we have created today and bbecause Im not happy I feel that my child will also be as unhappy as I am(and seeing as how I am actually surprisingly poorer than my parents ? Im pretty fucking sure that Im fucking right)
Also knowing how idiotic I am? I cannot guarantee that child will be alive by the time theyre an adult . I have done many stupid things that havve almost granted me a Darwin Award… So what would happen to my child if they accompanied me on those things?
And there are people all over the planet just like me … And youre tellling us tto put a child under our care?..
So YES I am clearly justified in denying my aethereal child from suffering all the BS I have suffered or that they could suffer under my care. And also denying my aethereal children from suffering of all the awful shit I have read of on the news.
Also its been shown that unhappy people like me tend to not have children anyways : https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5505668/
…Also …mad max is a fucking movie…it doesnt apply to real life…wot?!
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Well I am in therapy.
Stfu and log off instead of spreading your ignorant privilege all over the Internet.
To inflict the pain, anxiety, and suffering a childhood in poverty brings on a person because you wanted unprotected sex is pretty fuckin selfish. You are who the meme is talking about.
Gonna be honest, I had hoped there would have been a revolution by now lmao. In this current society? Yeah, I’m not having kids just so they can grow up and have to work for assholes.
long as you fix the system before having the kids i ageee
And now we’re back to eugenics.
population control is a must, the only question will be how messy it will be and how fucked up things will be when we finally are forced to do what we should have long ago
Kinda wild to go on a childfree forum and be surprised people primarily talk about not having kids for various reasons.
And yes, being unable to afford them is a good reason to not have kids. Yes, eugenics also targets the poor. A broken clock is right twice a day.
It’s not “surprise” so much as disgust.
So…poor people should have kids they can’t afford? And this is something other than stupid in your mind?
Would you advise people to buy cars they can’t afford, or houses they can’t afford?
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This discussion is hard and society is still not ready for it.
There are absolutely a lot of people that should not be bringing children into this world.
If as a society we’re going to say “it’s a fundamental right to breed”, then we need to fucking fix society so that every child brought into this world is guaranteed the opportunity for success. That means universal public healthcare, universal public education through college, universal access to nutrition…just to start.
Our current system is nothing like that. Once a kid is born today, if their parents suck then they’re just fucked, and maybe that kid should have tried being born to better parents.
In a system designed to opress, and only function on oppression, is it really the parents fault for being trapped in said oppression? And I wouldn’t even fault them for choosing to have a child atm, because that’s mostly been removed as a choice.
I would.
If you willingly make someone suffer through a system you know will oppress them, that’s abuse.
I dunno. I’m sure there’s a tall building nearby they could fall from.
Or is that too bleak, do you think? Is it nicer to imagine they never wanted to live in the first place?
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I mean because abortion is being restricted and denied. There’s no option, in that case.
Which is why child welfare is so important
Im never having kids because I cant afford them, sure, but that doesn’t mean you ought to have to pay to live, if the world were different I’d have children in a heartbeat
the op argument is a pathway to eugenics, child removal, and punishing people for living
also the doctor who did my vasectomy literally said if you have kids, you tend to figure it out as he completed the procedure lol
I can barely take care of my cats. And I have a paid off house and cars. No thank you.
Yep families have figured it out since the beginning of time. Unlike the younger people today who think anyone born before them had life handed to them. Throughout history most people have lived subsistence lives.
The issue here is that in a proper society, child care is a societal burden and not just a personal one. Meaning that in a proper society, both the rich and the poor can raise children properly and not let the child suffer.
Imagine a society where only the rich reproduce… That is arguably just as fucked up just in a different way.
“in a proper society”.
Well there’s your problem…
“It is no measure of health to be seen as ‘healthy’ or ‘well-adjusted’ in societies so profoundly sick”
Ah yes blaming victims is the correct course. \s
We, all of us, are society.
We did this, either by action or inaction.
We are the perpetrators and not the victims.
Ever notice these conversations always center around the poor. Articles and comments never scold the rich for not providing loving or mentally and emotionally healthy environments for their children. They can produce little affluent sociopaths all day every day and it’s cool because they have money. As long as they aren’t actively and visibly abusive to their children they’ll never lose custody (and sometimes not even then). But the poor regularly have their kids taken for not having enough resources while we tisk tisk them for the crime of not being born privileged.
There’s a reason why wild animals frequently don’t reproduce in captivity.
Humans don’t tend to do it very well either.
It seems like the actual problem is the captivity. Maybe that’s where the real selfishness lies. The privileged who profit from deprivation and violent control.
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Breeding is one of the most core aspects of every animal.
Sure. But choice and logic also exist in human beings, and those more than anything else are what set us apart from other life forms. “We’ll figure it out” is not a plan, it’s an almost surefire way to fuck up your kid one way or another.
Yeah, my parents didn’t “just figure it out,” they put a ton of planning, care, and money into raising me. I’m grateful and my life has been pretty awesome. But, since I make so much less money than they do, don’t own a house like they do, etc, it would be difficult-to-impossible to repeat. So I don’t.
If my parents didn’t say “we’ll figure it out” I probably wouldn’t have existed for very long and neither would have my mum. They did however try and succeed in figuring it out and we’re all doing fairly great these days.
Being financially well off should never be a qualification for having a child. That’s incredibly elitist.
What’s much more important are parents that love their children and want them to have it better than they did. And there are probably just as many of those among people barely making rent than there are among millionaires, if not more.What we don’t need are people having children than don’t want or don’t care about them. Because that’s a surefire way to fuck up kids, no matter their financial and social background.
and want them to have it better than they did.
This is the crux. I’m reasonably well adjusted, I like to think I would love my theoretical kid. But it’s hard to overcome the fact that the whole society is getting way harsher and so many people are poorer than their parents were. My life has been a lot more difficult than my parents’ life was, and it seems like if I had kids, their lives would be even more difficult than mine has been.
Well by that “logic” no one should have kids, because you can’t control everything. You can’t control if your country goes to war, or if your spouse dies (or if you both die), you can’t control if you get bankrupted by surprise medical bills or if your community is devastated by a natural disaster. When I was already pregnant my husband’s company (and others in his field) had mass layoffs. He ended up moving out of tech and into a trade when there were no positions open. It’s been some awfully tight years while he’s been apprenticing, but our kids are thriving. We’ll figured it out mentality is actually the most important thing when having kids.
It’s people who don’t plan to figure it out who shouldn’t have them.
Hardships and challenges can also build character, drive innovation, and lead to many unpredictable things.
The previous gen of my family grew up in public housing and in poverty but are now multi-millionaires (8 digit networth).
The previous gen of my family grew up in public housing and in poverty but are now multi-millionaires (8 digit networth).
That’s great and all, but you need to acknowledge that isn’t normal or achievable for most people in that situation.
Go back to LinkedIn. Nobody cares about your greedy little family.
Hardships and challenges can also lead to addiction, abuse, violence and death.
Anyone who succeeds in an environment like that would have succeeded even more in a more positive environment. Hardships are never a good thing. Some people flourish anyway, in the same way that some folks don’t let chronic illness or disability stop them. It doesn’t mean we have to celebrate the chronic illness or disability (or poverty). We celebrate the people who achieved greatness in spite of it.
I spent years of my life in hard situations. I got out of them eventually, but it just made me want to do better by other folks. There is no magic “shitty situation makes you a better person,” lots of my peers became deeply selfish & bitter.
Grow up. There is no meaningful “choice” or “logic” under capitalism. People serve capital or they starve.
And sadly a lot of people breed exactly like animals. They don’t really care about their kids, breeding is just the default setting for them.
I don’t think that’s true. I work in k-12 education in a rural largely poor area, I don’t see any parents just not caring about their kids.
I do. I see parents smoking right next to their kids, I see kids that are 2-3 years old and already severely overweight, I see toddlers glued to phones watching some shit YT content while parents ignore them. It’s great that this doesn’t happen where you live. I see it every day.
Sure, but caring about the little ones too. It may not be responsible to bring new children in, but it’s benevolent to care about those who were already brought here.
EXACTLY!
Why do breeders always care so little about the children that are HERE NOW?
Rheres millions of them that you can adopt.
Also I read an article that talked about the current problems with international adoption . But my problem is if we cared so much about kids why have we not risen up and created our own , third-party, publicly funded. , publicly directed adoption certification body?
If the government wants to fuck up an industry that is crucial to life , likw the adoption industry, then it is up to Us The People to fix it ourselves or to kick out the govrernment.
I wouldn’t call it “breeding”. “Breeding” is what we do to plants and animals. I think the word you’re looking for is “procreation”.
We are animals and we most certainly do breed.
English isn’t my native language but if I were to refer to procreational sex of humans as the equivalent of “breeding” in my native tongue, I would be punched in the throat by somebody. Maybe English is just weird like that.
So the most selfish thing that people can do… is only available to the impoverished?
The most selfish thing that the system can do is let children live in poverty.
Fuck this billionaire bootlicking bullshit.
Stating that it’s fucked up to bring a child into this world that you cannot materially provide for is not billionaire boot licking bullshit. I’m guessing you’re one of the poor people that’s having kids that you can’t materially provide for or you wouldn’t be taking it so personally. If you cannot materially provide for your children you’re an unfit parent. Why are you advocating for unfit parents to have children? Why do you want children to suffer?
You specifically need to pay higher taxes.
Yeah and fund social services.
Having children is biologically safest for parents and children at younger ages. Having children young isn’t the issue. Having a system that hoards wealth for a master class at the expense of society is. We need to abort the billionaire class - it shouldn’t exist. Resource hoarding creates poverty.
PS: The point here is NOT that poor people shouldn’t have kids,
You may not think that’s the point, but that is the ultimate effect of your words.
Civilised countries have solved this problem. If you’re in a position to think this way then your government is actively oppressing the poor.
I wish it was that simple. Could you give some example of these civilised countries that have solved it?
You described most countries.
If you can’t have children without enough financial support from a simple job or your government, then you’re in a shit society that needs to get its workers rights and public wellfare up up up until you can have at least three children without thinking about if you can financially support them.
Having children if you want them is not selfish, it’s a prerequisite to continue society.
Exactly!
We have created a society that is created by humans but that is also hostile to humans too! THATS exactly why so many developed nations(and even some Global South nations too) have experienced decreases in sex rates and birth rates. Why give birth in a hostile society that is actually trying to kill you?..Why have we chosen to do this and continue doing this?
2 children max imo. Until we get shit figured out across the globe. Hell, speed it up, 1 max until we get it figured out. Once we’ve established we can give everyone a safe and healthy quality of life without destroying the planet, then we can see how many more people we bring into it. Once everyone is working together we should have no problem scaling things down and up as needed.*
*I don’t believe this will ever happen.
I mean… I don’t have or need children and I’m okay with people who actually want them to keep the population level going steady in my stead. I don’t think this would bring a rising population in the countries that implement it. And, for the record, I would be against increasing population.
Well the main reason you shouldn’t have kids is because this world is going down to shit at an accelerating pace.
Between climate collapse, life extinction, resources exhaustion and AI dystopia, where do you see your kids in 20, 30, 40 years? Dead from starvation? Enslaved by oligarchs? Can you see a good life fort them in the horizon?
My kid is a teenager and I already feel like she’s living the best of their life already. From their adult life, I can only see it go down.
From their adult life, I can only see it go down.
Gotta keep the whimsy going
Personally, I think future generations are fine as long as they apply themselves and hobby hop and as long as we reinforce and appreciate the tenacity behind their hobby hopping.
When I was growing up there was no 3D printing, you weren’t able to just make a dropshipping hobby and advertise on youtube like it was fucking nothing, I think twitch was just becoming a thing but the amount of money and influencers wasn’t like it is now, hell influencers weren’t a thing. It also looks like people adapt easily in today’s world. I’m not worried about anything, they all have their adaptations and ways of doing their lives and that’s fine.
I think it’s good to leave a door of hope open for the next generations.
But as I’ve always said: What could get worse, can always get better. 😀
your kids
Classism sucks. Fuck this poster. This is literally enabling eugenics against people who are unlucky in capitalism. Even animals have the freedom to reproduce(not domestic tho thanks human cruelty)
You say fuck classism and fuck capitalism and yet you wont do a thing to destroy either classism or capitalism so that a poor person will never again have to worry about having as many children as they like.
If you , and well most of the people around you, cant or dont want to destroy a system that limits your abilities to have sex and have children ? Work within its limits based on your life and your material conditions . DOne and done. There are no third options. Destroy the syystem or work within the limits it has placed upon you and your fellow peoples or your class.
If you have the time to and can afford to havve more children than mitt romney and nba youngboy combined ? Then have fun popping them out of you like youre a clown car.
If you cant? Then Toughen The Fuck UP ButterCup. Either destroy the system that prevents you from having a trillion kids OR adult the fuck up and dont have any. There is no third options and there will NEVER be a third option.
You cant continue to lay down and accept a system thatt makes it so that ONLY the very wealthy and very politically connected are ones who can realistically raise a healthy , wealthy cchild BUT THEN ALSO get mad at the poor people, poor as you, who choose to ALSO lay down and accept this capitalistic system that has prevented thrm from having childten and they choose to not have any children.
Either or. There are no third options and there will never be any. Eithher destroy the system or work within the limits it has placed upon you if you want to lay down and take it.
you wont do a thing to destroy either classism or capitalism s
You first lmao. The gestapo is literally putting people in concentration camps and cages for zines.
It is abuse to have children you cannot materially provide for. Like why are you so cool with child neglect?
This poster is economic slavery prevention.
