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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 2, 2024

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It’s certainly true that many women in their forties and fifties wish they’d had another child (my mother had three and has said this, and many other older women I’ve known have said this too). But at the time they didn’t, even when they often could have. Often this is a kind of wistful feeling, because when your children are grown you miss the people they were when they were younger and you wish you were still in that phase of life - it’s tied up with a lot of things, and I don’t know that I’d say it tells us much.

A good point. When you put it that way it’s similar to the lament “I wish I’d worked harder at school” which always sounded to me like “now that it’s reaping time I wish I’d done more sowing”, privileging the wants of your current self over those of your past self.

Yes, another classic is “I wish my parents had been tougher on me”.

Pay it forward by being tough on your kids!

It does tell us a lot. How many people say "I wish I had 2 instead of 4 so I could have had more free time in my 30s or gone out more". Never heard that in my life. "I wish we had X more" I have heard several times.

Imagine "I wish I had more children" compared to "I wish I had more free time in my 30s." The former is so much more tragic than the latter.

To be fair... it's not really socially acceptable to say "I wish I didn't have kids, so that I could spend more time drinking/sleeping around." But that might be true! people are complicated.

Part of it is that most kids turn out fine enough and that as an adult in late middle age or old age your children are mostly nice people who love you and come over once in a while to hang out, whose lives you follow and cherish, who bear you grandchildren and who might help you out around the house and/or financially too. It’s kind of the inverse of the younger person overfocusing on diapers and vomit and screaming babies and sleepless nights.