I have a daughter (soon she'll be 14) from my marriage - I have 50/50 custody. I love my time with her, and as she's going thru her puberty and teenage angst mode now - still she's pretty cool kid, albeit little too introverted like myself. I have been pretty lucky to land steady career and have been living comfortably so far - I often worry about future when I cannot take care of her anymore physically & financially.
Sometimes I just wish, that she would turn back to baby-toddler days, when she was cute as a button... just for one day.
It's one of those early parenthood memories makes me love my child even more - as even though she's quickly growing up to be a young lady, in my mind she's still a baby/toddler. But if I want to do it all over again at this point - no thank you, I'm done. My parents are still asking me to marry another girl and have 3 kids at least - but I'm just too jaded and tired to even date a woman to begin with.
With falling birthrates in many developed countries - and population decrease actually happening in places like South Korea - I thought about why many people don't want kids anymore.
Parental love asides, having a child in modern day is an investment with very little or no return. Unlike old days when children were primary caretaker of elders - but these days you'd be lucky if your kids call you once in a while to check upon you. Past generations - children were considered to be assets to the family's fiscal well being too - as in farms they helped out, at home they helped domestic chores, and during industrial era - they worked in factories and all. Baby boomer generation, really is the first real generation when kids became pure liability, not an asset. Not that I'm advocating child labor or whatnot - it's just something I heard on NPR a few years back... and I think it does have some point. In the past, they needed to have children to survive, especially in old age - but in this day and era, society have become easier to live without children tagging along, just like how marriage rate is going down in young folks these days.
My plumber once told me while taking a look at unbalanced water flow in my home heating pipes... that water flows to the path of least resistance (in common cases, as physics does prove that it's not always the case) - and I think that's what's happening. People are choosing easier path, even though our primal instinct tell us to mate and ultimately have children - but we just pretend to do so by using various ways of contraception, and move on with life. The love you feel for your child is indeed great & priceless, but it's something that can only be truly felt when you already committed to the cause - and that's the big catch and the hurdle - as modern society values have changed.
