Rich People: “Have kids so they can work for me”

I’ve recently entered my 30’s, so naturally everyone in my life has started asking me when I’m gonna have kids. I’m having to go around with a mental checklist of people I’ve had the tedious inevitable conversation with.

I’ve known for a fairly long time that I don’t want to have kids. I remember saying it in a class at school, around age 14 (I can’t remember the context) and everyone was shocked. I can’t really explain why. I just don’t want them. Its just a feeling. I’ve only ever considered having them when I’ve had blips in my mental health over the years and been experiencing an existential crisis, and solving a personal mental health problem isn’t exactly a good reason to have kids. I personally think you should only have kids if you really REALLY want them. Otherwise the kid is gonna grow up feeling unwanted, and that’s just not right in my opinion.

Okay, so everyone who’s an actual grownup would consider that matter settled, right? Well, not really, because something really weird has been happening in recent years in the way people talk about the act of procreation. Its no longer just a societal pressure to measure up to an expectation, it seems to have morphed into some kind of moral duty. There is a purpose in having kids. You have to have them in order to fill important roles.

I was made to think about this topic recently when one of the particularly unintelligent members of our government, Robert Jenrick, said this incredibly stupid thing on purpose, in public, while people could actually hear him:

This headline made me picture a son sat at a dinner table with his parents. The kid asks “dad, why was I born?” and the father says, “well son, you were born to clean my piss off the floor when I can’t remember who you are.”

Since Brexit happened, Britain’s facing a shortage of workers because we don’t have immigrants coming to Britain to fill certain jobs anymore. There’s been calls for an increase in immigration to fill job vacancies, but the government can’t do that because one of the key drivers for Brexit was that people wanted less immigration. So if we can’t have immigration, the other solution is: British people need to have more children to fill these roles.

I don’t know why I keep seeing the argument that instead of filling roles with migrants we should have more kids because any idiot could point out that these roles are vacant right now, and such an idea would take at the very least 18 years and 9 months to see any kind of improvement, and that assumes the childless adults among us all start having kids right this second. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to get a baby to deliver meals on wheels, but they’re useless at it. A toddler on a moped cut me up the other day and when I gave him the finger he just started crying. Kids today. Bloody snowflakes. Can’t handle the pressure.

Its also more than a bit presumptuous to expect say a 20% increase in birth rates to result in kids who want to become care workers. Not everyone’s going to want to, are they?

Additionally, the problem people always have with immigration is that “Britain is full. There aren’t enough resources”…

…but then if you have more kids, those kids grow up to be adults…who will also need houses and the NHS, just like the immigrants that we’re not taking because “Britain’s full”…

…its almost as if this entire argument doesn’t make a lick of sense. Even outside of the context of my finding the idea of having a kid being considered a political act to be actually revolting.

If you want to read the full context of what Jenrick said you can go here but what you’re not going to find is a mention of the economic realities of becoming a parent because typically people making the ‘have kids because there’s not enough people’ argument are completely oblivious of the day-to-day reality of living in a completely fucked economy.

I’m in a lucky enough position where with correct budgeting, I could probably JUST ABOUT afford to have one child. I don’t want to, but I probably could afford it. Lots of people can’t though. Recent reports suggest a million British kids experienced extreme poverty in the last year. The one thing that’s usually absent from this conversation is any kind of financial solution.

Earlier this year, Rishi Sunak made some promises about free childcare — but kids don’t JUST need childcare, do they? They also need…y’know…food…clothing…you seen the prices of those recently, Rishi? …You gonna do anything about that? Or are you just going to sit there and reiterate your five pledges and wish that things will get better soon?

All this talk about how people need to have more children so they can fill certain roles never seems to get backed by ACTION. Any kind of incentive to make having children either financially easier or just a more pleasant experience.

Elon Musk is famously pro-child because apparently “if people don’t have more children, civilisation is going to crumble”, which is a very weird thing to say, even in the context of wanting to convince people to have more children. There’s an air of fundamentalist Christianity about it where the childless such as myself are cast as the “destroyers of civilization”, and in case you haven’t noticed, those tactics tend to put people off, not convert them to the opposing point of view. Although “Stuart Hardy — Destroyer of Civilization” does sound like a nice line to put in profile descriptions.

Musk’s rhetoric is odd because he doesn’t seem to be that interested in the experience of parenting outside of just the creation of people. He expects all employees to work long hours. If you ask people whose parents worked long hours and they never saw them much while they were growing up whether they ended up having a good relationship with their parents as adults, the answer you’ll typically get is a firm ‘no’. Given Musk divides his time between Tesla, Twitter, SpaceX, a load of other companies and claims to be super involved with all of them and seems to spend a large chunk of his day replying to random far right accounts on Twitter, I highly doubt he’s much of a presence in his 10+ children’s lives because there just aren’t enough hours in the day.

Musk has said that while the kids are babies there’s “not much of a role for him until they get older”….good for him I guess. Given he’s the wealthiest man on the planet, he doesn’t exactly need both partners having a solid income so he can just leave all the work to the woman he’s had a kid with this week.

I do find it strange that the traditional conservative view of the nuclear family is that the mother stays at home and looks after the children, and yet our economy is in such a state where single-income households are basically impossible now unless you’re super wealthy. This need that these relentlessly pro-child reactionaries have for more people to be created to fill roles needs to be backed by action, but it never is. What’s Elon Musk’s solution to underpopulation? What’s Robert Jenrick’s? Do they want to expand the welfare state? Drive down prices of food and clothing so having a child is actually affordable to most people? Improve the state of our school system? Increase apprenticeships in fields where there are job shortages for when the kids get out of school? All they’re doing is SAYING we need more people. No one’s prepared to put their money where their mouth is.

The only product of this rhetoric is it acts as a disincentive for people like me.

As said, I don’t want kids, but you’re not going to change my mind by talking about the process of people-creation as either a political goal or a moral duty because that kind of talk makes my skin crawl. There’s no actual HUMANITY to people like Robert Jenrick calling for more babies to be born BECAUSE we need to people to care for an aging population. “Why was I born?” Not to enjoy life. To fulfil a function.

Tell you what: how about we start massive test tube baby farms? Factories full of sentient meat in tubes that will grow into worker drones who exist for the sole purpose of caring for the nation’s elderly. That seems to be capitalism’s final destination based on current rhetoric.