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Dec. 2, 2012 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
39:21
2271 Parenting Suuuucks!
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Hello everybody, it's Stefan Maloney from Free Domain Radio.
Hope you're doing well.
So, the birth rate is down in the United States again.
And that's quite interesting.
And not terrifically surprising.
There is such a delicate balancing act when it comes to helping people that's really hard to For people to fathom, process, and understand.
And when you get the big, giant, Thor-swinging cudgel of the state, grinding its way, smashing its way through all the delicate social fabric of charity, care, concern, responsibility, and so on, you end up with all of this horribly detrimental and messy situations that we have now.
So, why is the birthrate plummeting so much?
I mean, in Europe, it's ridiculous.
I mean, it's completely ridiculous.
1.2, 1.3, 1.5.
In the US, it's been sort of 2.1, 2.2, but it's dipping dangerously below what is needed to even sustain the population, which again, of course, brings a massive desire on the part of the tax farm owners for immigration to maintain all of the tax revenues and so on.
But why is the birth rate plummeting so much?
Well, it's all to do with the state, I believe.
I mean, with a few minor exceptions which we'll talk about.
So, first and foremost, parenting sucks these days.
I don't mean for stay-at-home podcasters.
I mean for the general population.
Parenting sucks!
And it doesn't mysteriously suck.
It obviously sucks.
And that's really, really important to understand.
Human beings make pretty rational calculations, and...
Having a kid or having children is a rational calculation like every other, and it just is a bad, raw, sucky deal, in particular for men.
I don't believe that there's any innate conflict between the genders.
In fact, I think that men and women are extremely complementary, as you would expect, with evolution, tweaking them to fit together, not just physically in the naughty nice bits, but Emotionally, psychologically, and so on.
I think it's a great fit.
But, man, parenting has begun to truly suck over the past generation or two.
Now, I hope you understand, this is just a rant.
I don't claim, prove anything.
This is just a rant, so take it for what it's worth.
So, what does parenting look like these days?
Well, both people have to work to maintain even a vaguely middle-class lifestyle.
And even if one person stays home, the problem is that most people have to work.
So you end up with what are called bedroom communities where everybody kind of vanishes during the day.
And this is sort of like in my neighborhood.
Everybody vanishes during the day.
Husbands and wives all go off to work.
They drop the kids off at daycare and they pick them up at 7 o'clock in the morning or 8 o'clock in the morning and they pick them up at 6 o'clock at night.
And everybody goes, so the community is kind of toasted.
It's a neutron bomb neighborhood.
During the day, because everybody's at work.
So, even if you do happen to stay home, you don't have a whole lot of company around.
You'll see a few gardeners coming by, I suppose.
A couple of delivery trucks, but that's about it.
So, what does parenting look like these days?
Well, it kind of looks like this.
So, you're pregnant, you have a kid, and...
Then you, you know, in a lot of places, in the US, I think, you know, like six weeks or something.
Some places is longer.
In Canada, I think it's about a year.
That you get paid a pittance.
And people have to hold on to your job and so on while you're home with your kid, with your baby.
But let's say you take this sort of six months or a year or whatever, then you go back to work.
Well, what does that mean?
Your baby's a freaking year old.
They're tiny.
They're helpless.
They're still incredibly dependent on and attached to parents.
They don't need or want...
Any particular external new people.
I mean, they don't like it.
Familiarity is the key thing at that age.
So, your job as a parent is to get up at some god-awful farmer teat-pulling hour in the morning to drag your infant or infants or children out of bed When they're tired and complaining and whiny and hostile.
And what you have to do is you have to get them to a daycare.
That's your job.
Which means you've got to get them dressed and washed and fed and all that.
And particularly in the colder climates, get them into 19 layers of neoprene and half a volcano's worth of duck butter just to get them outside without them freezing to death.
I'll get them in the car and drive like crazy to get to the daycare and drop them off at the daycare which you know has probably been the first hour and a half maybe with more kids maybe two hours of your morning and then you've got to go and drive to get yourself to work and your kids are bawling and you're leaving them at the daycare and ah it's a mess and then they're all day at the daycare you're off driving getting to work And
after you go to work, you go do your thing, and then you have to leave work, you know, bang on the nose, because you've got to go pick up your kids at daycare.
You know, there was a daycare recently that began charging parents for being late.
You know, so it's like, I don't know, a buck every 10 minutes or whatever.
Five minutes or whatever.
And the parents were incredibly relieved.
They were like, oh, thank goodness.
Now I can be late and just pay for it without feeling bad or guilty or whatever.
So they ended up having to abandon that practice because it was just, okay, here's some money.
Then I don't have to worry about being late.
So the thing is, too, if you're any kind of executive, the job, don't finish at 5.
But you've got to leave at 5.
So you've got to peel out of there and all of that while everyone...
And you've got to feel like you're letting other people down because they're staying later and you're heading home and all that kind of crap while you're heading to get to the daycare.
So you pick up your kids from daycare.
You jam them in the car.
You're probably late, tense, getting to daycare on time.
And then you go to drive home, which is another, what, half hour, 45 minutes?
Who knows, right?
Or it's probably not, because your daycare would be closer to home.
But it's a long way to go, a long way to get to.
And then you get home at 6.30 o'clock, 7 o'clock.
And you've now been up for 13 hours and your entire interaction with your children has been rushing and hurrying and getting them moving and being frustrated and being tense because of your time constraints.
Your kids got up 6.30 in the morning, 7 o'clock in the morning, whatever.
And it's now 6.30, 7 o'clock at night.
And for 12 hours...
You've either not seen your kids or you've been trying to herd them with the ever-increasing semi-hysterical cattle prods of parental disaffection.
And then you've got to cook.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no time with the kids yet.
No, don't be silly.
You've got to make some food.
So maybe you order something in.
Maybe you pick something up.
Or maybe you make some food.
And you kind of try to engage your children in conversation, but they haven't spoken to you all day.
Or maybe they can't even speak yet and they're infants.
So if they're really young, you can't get anything about what they did that day.
Maybe see a couple of crafts.
If they're older, then you've got to try and re-engage them while trying to cook food.
A partner comes home.
And then you've got to eat.
And when you've got kids, man, eating is a slow boat to China.
And you've got to try and get them to eat the right food.
Get them to eat good food.
And kids, you know, they're resource maximizers.
They sense weakness and strive for advantage.
So what do they do?
Well, they know that you're stressed and you don't want to have any conflict.
So what they do is they try and get food that They want to eat rather than food that they need to eat.
So they'll try and get, you know, chocolate or candy or cake or, you know, some stuff like that or whatever.
Because they know you don't want to conflict because you don't want to spend your only time with them fighting.
So then you have your meal and you sit down and, of course, a lot of meals get interrupted a lot with kids because they need this, that and the other.
So you don't get much of a conversation during dinner and you can't really talk to your partner.
Because your husband and your wife, because your kids are always interrupting.
That's what they do.
Trust me.
We were just talking about this the other night, my wife and I, just how we used to have these just wonderful great three-hour conversations, and now it's like we get caught up at 9.30 at night when we're kind of tired.
It's just the nature of the beast, and there's nothing wrong with it, but that's the way it is.
So then maybe it's bath time.
Or maybe, so you sort of finish dinner around 7.30, clean up, tidy up, 8, 8.30...
And then you've got to start getting your kids ready for bed.
Well, this has been a whole lot of fun, hasn't it?
You're rushing through everything.
You're not connected with your kids.
You're not connected to your partner.
You're not enjoying yourself at work.
You miss your kids when you're not with them and you have a tough time connecting with them when you are with them.
I mean, it sucks!
I mean, a lot about parenting sucks.
There's nothing wrong with it.
It just is the way it is.
But parenting is redeemed by quality time.
Parenting is unsucked by all of the little details of the day, of the everyday.
Seeing the little advances.
Playing the goofy games for an hour.
Having the unscheduled time.
Teaching your kids how to do new things.
Teaching Isabella how to mop the floor the other day.
It was a great deal of fun.
Chasing her around with the mop.
It was so much fun.
But that requires unstructured time.
That requires uninvested in other things time.
And you just don't get a whole lot of that when you're a parent and you are working during the day.
So, let's say you get your kids, say, bath time or whatever, you get your kids to bed by 9, maybe 9.30.
And, hey, guess what?
You've got to get up again in eight and a half hours.
So what are you going to do?
You've done nothing.
You've not tidied the house.
You've not gotten any groceries.
You've not paid your bills.
You've not done your taxes.
You've not done all the other funsy-onesy stuff of the 21st century paper-driven household.
So what do you do?
Well, you do your chores.
You do that kind of stuff, right?
Maybe you can chat with your partner doing that.
Try and get caught up about the day.
But there's this claustrophobic sense of rush and like you're tumbling down an icy staircase with no way to arrest your momentum.
And then you kind of slither into bed at 11 o'clock and now your clock is ticking because you know you've got to get up at 6, you've got 7 hours sleep.
Are you going to make love?
Are you not going to make love?
What's happening, right?
Right.
And if you have any trouble getting to sleep, you look up the clock, oh man, it's midnight.
I've got to get up in six hours.
I've got to get some sleep.
I'm tired, stressed.
Oh man.
And this doesn't count even things like business trips.
Things like your kid is sick.
I mean, man, that's as good a day as you're going to get as a parent in the modern West.
So you don't get quality time with your kids.
You have all the responsibility, all the rush, all the expense of all of that.
And two people are working and you eat more out.
You spend more on gas, on cars, and insurance, and clothes, and lunches, and daycare, and all that kind of mess.
So how does that sound like...
Fun to you.
Does that sound like fun to you?
It doesn't sound like fun to me.
I've seen it up close.
It's really not pretty at all.
And this is what parenting has become.
And so you have an extended family, and what does that mean?
Well, an extended family means that you have...
Birthday presents, anniversary gifts, bar mitzvahs, bat mitzvahs, all of this kind of stuff to shop for and to go to.
And you've got Christmas, you've got Thanksgiving.
I mean, it is a non-stop conveyor belt.
It is an ever-increasing treadmill of greased-legged, slippery speed to try and keep up with things.
And this doesn't count a relative who's sick, a mother who falls down.
This doesn't count when you get sick.
This doesn't count when your house needs repairs.
This doesn't count when you have to go shop for a new car.
This doesn't count when your internet goes down.
All of the stuff that's just the general detritus and impediments of modern life.
So you get the weekends.
Now, you have a problem on the weekends because...
If you let your kids sleep in on the weekends, then your kids will go to bed much later.
It's like pushing a row of books and push one end in, the other end goes forward.
So if you let your kids sleep in on the weekend, then your kids are up very late, Saturday, Sunday night, as are you, which means that everybody starts the week completely exhausted.
So the best thing to do is to continue to get your kids up at the same time.
But dear God, if you haven't had much sleep, then that is not what you want to be catching up.
But catching up on sleep on the weekend is not really the very best thing in the world.
So, people kind of get this.
I saw, gosh, many years ago, there was a Canadian comedy group called Kids in the Hall.
And they had a skit where a suburban couple called a news conference, and I'm really paraphrasing, this is like 20 years ago or more.
And they said, you know, we'd like to apologize to everyone.
You know, when we had kids, we told everyone it was the most wonderful thing, it was the best thing, that everyone should have kids.
And now that we're older and we've been parents for a while, we realize that it's really not what we want.
It wasn't good.
It's not the right thing.
So we'd just like to apologize to everyone when we talked about how great it was, because it really, really wasn't.
And that really struck me.
I had no desire, no fundamental desire to have children.
Because at the same time as the quality of parenting has gone down, the quality of non-parenting has gone up.
Aha!
You see, there's the double whammy.
That's diminishing the birth rate.
As the quality of parenting has significantly declined, the quality of not being a parent has significantly increased.
What do I mean by that?
Well, your home entertainment system is truly spectacular.
You have the internet, you have porn, you have video games, and travel is cheap and easy relative to, you know, 30 or 50 years ago.
And you have fantastic coffee shops.
You have great malls.
You have rock climbing, parachuting.
You can do just about every athletic hobby known to man relatively cheaply.
There's incredible restaurants with an almost infinite variety of native and ethnic fare to choose from.
There's...
You can get pretty cheap opera, classical music, rock concerts, and all this kind of stuff.
So not being a parent is way better than it used to be.
I mean, you know, in 1950, if you didn't want to be a parent, and everyone else was a parent, what are you going to do at night?
You've got one TV station.
I guess you can read, but right now, I mean, the...
You know, the fruit flyer-eyed disco ball of infinite shiny entertainment, distraction, and exercise is so omnipresent that you really don't miss out on a lot.
You don't have to be very bored if you don't have children.
Plus, of course, when the birth rate dips below a certain amount...
A certain ratio, then more and more of your friends aren't having children, which means that you're not...
Like, you know, you have this idea, oh, you know, I'm going to be unemployed for a month or two, and then it's like, well, all my friends have a job, and so that kind of sucks to be unemployed.
But if you have a bunch of other friends who don't have anything to do during the day, then it's a whole lot more fun.
You need to socialize and do all that kind of fun stuff.
So, because not a lot of people do have kids, then the people who don't Have a lot of company.
Because, oh, I'm telling you, man, when you go over that horizon of having kids, man, your time, your day.
I mean, my friendships are somewhat neglected.
I haven't written a book since Isabella, since before Isabella was born.
Four years since I wrote a book.
I mean, that's just the nature of the beast.
That's what happens.
Your life is parenting.
Like today, I had four hours straight to work on FDR. Ah, it was fantastic.
It was wonderful.
I mean, the endless list goes on and on in your head.
I got to actually strike a few things off.
Tasty-pasty.
So, non-parenting is great.
I mean, sexual availability is, of course, up from what it was in 1950 and all that kind of stuff.
So, you know, not to mention there are great discos where even if you go and you're not the youngest guy on the block, you can still have a great deal of fun.
The nightlife is very cool and there is easy access to recreational drugs if that's your thing.
There are courses to get involved in that are prolific and engaging and, I assume, good socializing if they're the kind of thing that floats your boat.
I mean, you can learn Mandarin, for God's sakes.
You can learn how to sail a boat.
You can pick up scuba dive.
I mean, there's so many things that you can do now that would have been really tough, if not impossible, to do in the past.
That it's not just that parenting sucks, but non-parenting rocks.
Non-parenting is super fantabulous.
And so that's something that is quite important.
Now, of course, there are a couple of other things that have come together to produce a scintillatingly barren reproductive environment.
And it's really, I mean, it's truly astounding just how long childhood and adolescence goes on these days.
Dear God, it's like the Bataan Death March getting through to adulthood, or to any sort of reasonably independent, responsible, and competent adulthood.
We reach sexual maturity at puberty.
Being a teen parent is not bad in terms of energy and your capacity to get by on little sleep.
I don't recommend it for anything else, but I can certainly see the advantage being a dad at 46.
I can certainly see that being a dad at 17.
Would be, yeah, I'd be bouncing back a little bit more from the sleeplessness than from, you know, when my daughter asked me to jump from the top of the couch onto that, I wouldn't be like, oh, I don't know, honey, I'd be able to do that once.
Oh, my knees!
Must get cyborg legs.
But now, I mean, so many women in particular are waiting to their mid-30s to have kids.
Like, this is something you just kind of fit in, right?
And that's because, I mean, you can't have them when you're a teenager because it's welfare or living under a bridge or living with your parents.
You can't have them in your 20s because you've got to go to college.
At least that's what so many people feel.
And you can't do it in your 30s because, man, you just graduated from college.
You got your career started.
So, you don't want to do it right after you graduate from college because then what the hell was the point of that?
What the hell was the point of going to college if you then graduate, get married, and have kids in your mid-20s?
Because that was kind of useless.
Hey, look, I got a degree in biology, so I could change nappies.
So you feel like you've got to go and get your traction, get your resume fodder on, get your toehold in the workplace when you've graduated from college, when you've raised the whole thing.
Plus, you may be in debt.
You don't want to start a family when you're in debt, right?
You probably are in debt if you live in America, right?
So then you go out and you get a job, and then your job, you're paying off your debt, it's probably a pretty, like, 25-35k, it's a low-rent job to start, you know, and this is if you're lucky these days.
And you're getting your work on.
Now, of course, if you don't meet someone you're going to marry in college, it gets kind of hard to meet people later on, right?
And, I mean, I made new friends through FDR, but, man, before that, I hadn't made a new friend in years.
So where are you going to go meet people when you're working?
Well, maybe you'll find them in the workplace, but probably not, especially given the technical side of most people who listen to the show.
A lot of people do.
So then you're in your late 20s, and then women, of course, they start doing the math, right?
Which is sensible, perhaps a little bit late, but you start doing the math, which is...
And I wrote about this in my novel, The God of Atheists.
But you do the math, right?
And you say, okay, well, I'm 30, right?
So I'm 30.
Okay, so let's say I meet someone this year.
Okay, so we meet them when I'm 30 or 31.
We've got a date for at least a year or two or three before we get engaged.
And then we might be engaged for 6 to 12 months.
And then we might want to be married for a year or two before we have kids.
So we're talking 5, 6, 7 years.
So when you're 30, you've got to really start actively looking for someone.
If you're a woman, if you want to have a kid, like now, today, immediately.
But, you know, that does take a little bit of the relaxed air off the romance if you've got that egg timer ticking and so on.
So...
And that's kind of stressful.
And dating in your 30s has a lot to do with, are you going to have kids or not?
And if you are, well, you better get moving.
You can't just sort of date and see.
And I don't think date and see is a really good approach anyway.
But if that's what you're used to, you really have to change that approach.
And the other thing too, of course, is that...
The more eligible...
Like, so, guys in their 30s, right, I mean, who are single, they're either very eligible and being picky, or they're not so eligible, right?
In other words, maybe they have kids from a previous marriage, maybe they're unemployed, maybe they're an artist, but I repeat myself.
But all of this is kind of problematic, because...
If you're a woman in your 30s and you're looking for a guy to be the father of your children, then if you're looking for a guy who's roughly in the same age group, then you're looking for a guy who's either super eligible or super not eligible.
And the super-eligible guys would probably want to date somebody younger because they won't have the time pressure.
And of course, if they're still eligible, which means they're sort of single, attractive, reasonable income, and all that, no baggage, well, it's because they have avoided entanglement, so to speak.
And so, you're really hoping to turn that around pretty quickly.
If you want, and that's pretty risky.
And if a man does want to settle down and he's super eligible, then the likelihood is, unless he's very mature, that he's going to choose a younger woman for a variety of reasons.
And if he's not very eligible, then you have a big problem because do you want to have kids with somebody who doesn't have a job or who works as a security guard?
No offense to security guards, but if you're some sort of college-educated professional woman, that might be kind of a mismatch.
So, that's a big problem.
And this is one of the reasons why, you know, fertility treatments, IVF, infertility, all that funky stuff, egg donors, I mean, this is all cooking along because the reproductive window closes pretty hard in your 30s and risk of problems goes up.
And...
And yet this is when women really feel, I mean some, not all, but this is when a lot of women really feel like they've just got to have a kid.
It's like being hungry all the time or like feeling like you've got to pee all the time.
Like the baby hunger is intense.
And, I mean, that's nature's last throw at getting an egg out that can walk around.
And that's pretty hard.
I mean, I feel just very sorry for, in a very, I mean, genuinely empathetic way, I mean, very sorry for women who are in that situation.
It's really tragic.
I mean, it's not that great for men either.
I mean, let's say you're in your 40s and you want to have kids.
Well, what are you going to do?
You're going to try and find some younger woman, but you're going to have less in common with that person, just less life experience and all that.
So, I mean, all of that is just a big mess.
So, all of this stuff is one of the reasons why fertility is down, because people just go on this extended adolescence, where you're in high school, then college, then starting a career, then building your career, and your career can be kind of consuming, and then you start looking around in your early 30s, and it's really tough, and a lot of people, by then, it's kind of too late.
Or they've developed the wrong habits or they don't know how to meet people or they take a gamble on the wrong person.
Like if you gamble on the wrong person when you're 22 and you spend a year or two in the wrong relationship, well, that's fine.
You can still have kids, right?
But if you do that when you're 35, well, that's really not...
It's really not so likely that you're going to be able to, you can't, I hate to put it this way, but you can't dick around in your 30s if you want to have kids.
You can't have exploratory, let's see, relationships.
I mean, it's either got to work or it's not going to work.
And it's one of the things I really respected about my wife, Christina.
She said, first or second date, you know, I'm not looking for a player.
You're looking at one, baby.
I want to settle down.
That's what you need to do in your 30s.
Be very clear about these things.
It's all very tragic.
If you can have kids and be able to spend quality time with them, Which is really, there is no such thing as quality time except time.
Kids aren't an accordion.
You can press together and squeeze out quality like a half an old lemon.
I mean, quality time is quantity time.
I don't think there's any shortcut or any bypassing that basic reality.
You just have to be around.
Kind of sort of sit down and say, I mean, then it's kind of using them, right?
I need quality time.
We need quality time.
Sit down.
You owe me quality time.
Or we must have quality time now or something like that.
So that, I think, is not a very fair way to deal with kids.
And the idea of quality time is something that's just invented because you don't have time.
I don't know.
It's like saying that sex without foreplay is quality sex.
No, it really isn't.
It really, really isn't.
So, I mean, this is the way in which the state, through taxation, through the subsidization of higher education, which has only resulted in a higher cost of higher education, all this kind of stuff, the state has really jammed itself up in between our reproductive organs, the state has really jammed itself up in between our reproductive organs, so A state is the ultimate condom.
And because, I mean, I know I talked a lot about entertainment.
Entertainment comes from the free market, of course, and I have no problem with entertainment.
I try to be entertaining.
But it's important to understand the effect that this has all had, right?
So because people have this extended adolescence, because they have disposable income, because they have jobs without families, that has driven the development of entertainment far beyond what it would have been otherwise, right?
And I think that's really, really important.
The entire economy has shifted around the 18 to 34 demographic of the people who don't have money.
Sorry, they do have money, but they don't have kids.
We used to call them in the 80s, dinks, double income, no kids.
So the extended adolescence economy, the wrapping around the excess income and diminished responsibilities of people in their 20s and early 30s, has made it more attractive to be in that demographic.
So whatever demographic there is, the economy will wrap itself around that demographic to make it as attractive and as fun as possible to be in that demographic.
And so because there is an excess, so to speak, An artificial excess, right?
State-driven excess of people who are, you know, single or double-income and no kids in their 20s and early 30s.
Well, that's got to be fun.
Nobody likes boredom, however productive it may be.
And so, the economy has the resources that...
The remnants of the free market are able to muster together, do all this fun stuff to make that demographic as enjoyable as possible, which is an effect.
It's a shadow cast by statism.
And so that is something that, you know, the media comes from, the entertainment, the options of travel and all that.
That comes from the free market, but it's provoked by statism, by this eternal childhood and adolescence that we have to fight our way through being part of a late empire pre-collapse statist mess.
And so that's really changed the incentives.
So as the incentives for parenting become more negative, the incentives for non-parenting become more positive naturally because people are doing less parenting and more of other things.
So the free market is going to adapt itself to that.
And that tends to widen.
As parenting becomes less enjoyable, more people want to do things other than parenting, and the free market is happy to supply all of the things that make that more fun and more enjoyable, which makes parenting less enjoyable and blah, blah, blah, right?
Now, I mean, there are sort of two other factors, I think, that are important to mention, which is that...
Well, first and foremost, you know, parenting and marriage for men, I mean, this has just become, I mean, bad.
I mean, just a bad, risky venture, right?
So, I've heard 70 to 90% of divorces are initiated by women.
The number one cause for divorce is dissatisfaction.
I'm just not that happy.
Just not really that happy.
And if you have kids with a woman, and particularly if she makes less than you do, and you get divorced, well, you're done.
I mean, you're toast.
You're going to get, you know, ripped apart in the court system.
You are going to have to pay child support and alimony for the next 20 years of your life.
And that's going to cripple your ability, unless you're super rich, to have another family.
And so you get even more of a sucky parenting experience through divorce.
50% of marriages, of course, end in divorce.
It's not like all the remainders are really happy.
And the court system favors the women and favors the children.
I agree with favoring the children.
I don't know so much about the women.
But it's a big problem.
And so when you look at that...
Okay, not being a parent is a whole lot of fun.
Market forces have really worked to make that as enjoyable as possible.
Being a parent sucks.
Really kind of sucks.
And the risk of getting married and becoming a parent and ending up with my life lashed to someone I loathe And have it a smile and have all of the unbelievable emotional complications that comes from co-parenting with someone you can't even live with anymore, that you've broken up and smashed up a family with.
I mean, that's just a complete mess.
So, I mean, this is, you know, one of the big problems as a whole with things like the welfare state and the bias towards moms to some degree in the court system.
I mean, I can understand it in the short run, like, so welfare, so some teenager gets pregnant, and it's like, well, the kids shouldn't suffer, so we should get money to the whatever.
By whatever means necessary, we should get money to the teenage mom without the dad or without the father around or whatever.
But the problem is that that messes things up completely, because changes, incentives, and all this, that, and the other, right?
People who make bad decisions, there's the moral hazard and all that kind of stuff.
You know, we oppose bank bailouts, but we want money and programs for single moms, right?
Or single dads, for that matter.
But that whole mess has made becoming a dad in a sort of...
And most places, it doesn't matter if you're married or not.
So here in Canada, I think it's like after two years, your accountant is married.
You have the same obligations and so on.
So, for men in particular, what is the upside of getting married and having kids?
I mean, it used to be you'd get married to have regular sex, but you had regular sex as a single guy, that's no big deal.
So, it's not the sex, it's not the joy of being a parent, because that's kind of been largely stripped away through savage taxation and regulation.
It's...
You know, you can say, well, you know, but you have the joy of launching kids into the world and so on.
But, you know, the first couple of years of parenting can be a little bit dull.
You know, it's...
Now I'm having great conversations with my daughter.
But for the first couple of years, it was Ooga Booga.
And, you know, same cartoons a lot.
And same songs and same stories and all that kind of stuff.
And, you know, not, you know, a wild glee fest of intellectual stimulation.
So...
If you're looking for the sort of quality, relational, interactional aspects of parenting, then you're looking at, you know, kind of a couple of years down the road, right?
You know, kind of at best.
And so that doesn't really make much sense.
So why would you make those kinds of sacrifices?
It doesn't really work.
So, you know, do you want to get involved in a marriage that has a significant chance of failure, it's going to wreck your life for decades, in order to have kids and get up an hour or two earlier, have really stressful mornings,
be late for everything all the time, and then have really stressful evenings, and then spend your weekends doing chores and buying groceries, and never really sort of relax and peacefully enjoy your children's Interactions and time with them.
To never have the intimacy and the real pride in helping kids develop.
The pride in having kids is helping them develop.
It's in the input that you can have with them or for them so that they develop well.
But if you're farming your kids off to strangers for 10, 11, 12 hours a day, you can't take pride in your kids' development.
You can be happy that they are developing, but it ain't you that's doing it.
You're not teaching them Smack, really.
Other than being a parent sucks.
And I don't think it's any accident that...
People who are like younger people who are grown up now who had this kind of parenting are just not interested in it.
It's just like no thanks like why would I want that?
Why would I want that?
I'm not here to be some blind ass photocopier for my genes.
I'm here to you know have a good time and and happiness is that's I'm not gonna argue with that I think that's that's kind of what it's all about and if they've seen this kind of stuff going on in this kind of way then why would they uh why would they want it?
Well, they wouldn't.
And they haven't.
So, I think all of these kinds of things...
I mean, it takes a long time to dig yourself in a hole.
It takes a long time to fill it back in.
And this stuff has been a long time.
It's been at least two generations.
Probably two and a half in coming, this mess.
And it's not going to end anytime soon.
There are so many people who have got themselves entrenched in this mess that, you know, it just...
I don't think it can be fixed anytime soon.
But...
I mean, I certainly love being a parent.
I love being a husband.
But man, you've got to pick the right person and start looking early.
That's my suggestion.
These are my thoughts.
Look forward to your donations.
Freedomainradio.com forward slash donate.
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
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