[quote]countingbeans wrote:
[quote]Varqanir wrote:
Offspring do provide benefit for their parents, but for the first several years (or decades in the case of humans) that benefit is largely immaterial (emotional and spiritual benefits more than contributing to the survival of the family), aside from the obvious (and appropriate to your profession) tax advantages. [/quote]
I take exception to the emotional and spiritual benefits being termed immaterial here. I’ve just seen too much positive come from babies entering into people’s lives to call something that profound and life changing “immaterial”.
I’d also argue that a family with a pregnant female or infant/toddler will likely take more care in ensure its survival than a family of just a coupling of adults… As in the desire to see the child grow up healthily and happy will lead the parents to make choices and partake in activities that positively effect their survival and well being. Mommy might sell her street bike and by a safer care, daddy might not volunteer for the underwater welding job on the oil rig and take the safer job in the factory down the street, etc…
I think you discount the less obvious and less physical benefits children bring to their parents erroneously to favor simple observations like “mom breast feeds the child, so it is a parasite.”
[/quote]
If you don’t like the word “immaterial” then I will amend the statement to read “intangible”. They are practically synonyms, but perhaps carrying a less dismissive nuance.
Having literally helped bring three children into the world (home births with just me, my wife and a 90-year-old midwife: I boiled the water, wiped off the blood and the shit and the snot from my wife as it presented itself, assisted as the midwife extricated the umbilical cord from around my suffocating son’s throat, and then cut that cord), and then having helped raise and educate those children into the people they have become, I think I have a pretty good idea of the costs and benefits of parenthood, thank you very much.
Children are parasites. They are the best possible parasites that will ever come into one’s life, but parasites they are. We accept the relationship (which is frought with hazards both tangible and intangible) voluntarily, in most cases, in exchange for the joy that they bring us in the short term, and the very tangible benefits we expect they will bring in the long term.
And that, as Forrest Gump would say, is all I have to say about that.
