One thing really annoying that I’ve noticed working in the white collar industry is that some people get a free pass all the time on important things, just because they have kids. For example, in a different team who often has to step away during business hours and becomes unreachable, simply because they have kids. There’s always some sort of excuse with them. Have to go pick him up from the bus stop, have to go pick him up from school because they got in trouble, dance recital during the middle of the day, always something. But when it comes to ordinary normal people who don’t have kids, it feels like there’s a lot more scrutiny. Why do you need a doctor’s appointment in the middle of the day? Why do you need to go pick up a prescription at lunch time, like why can’t you work through lunch?
But also, when it comes to employment, it feels like there’s a lot of preferential treatment for people with children. Oh that person has kids / children! They need the job a lot more. They have a little girl! Clearly they need it more than the the person who has a disabled spouse, because kids are way more important than an adult dependent! We can’t fire this person, they have kids! Let’s choose someone who doesn’t have a family. Like, stuff like this. Why is there so much preferential treatment to people who have children? Is this some sort of utilitarian thing? The least number of people affected?
As someone without children:
They should, yes. Children are extremely important for our future so especially people who earn well and can provide their children with a good life (likely leading to a successful carrier later on) should be encouraged to have them.
Additionally this kind of culture is needed if we want women to have same chances as men (since childcare still is majorly done by women, and likely always will be (progressive families split it evenly, conservative families don’t or at least don’t split it evenly, for every families where the father does more there’s at least one where the mother does more))
As someone with kids: they should not. This kind of basic flexibility should be the bar for all employees, regardless of family status.
So they should get this kind of treatment, it just shouldn’t be special.
This is a well thought out reply that made me change my original stance. Well done and thank you.
We are approaching 10 billion people on this Earth.
At some point people should realize that the important thing for our future is having less children, not more.
Population is shrinking in developed countries, looks like that issue will erase itself as more and more countries are developed.
Population is rising in developed countries.
You may want to say that new borns by native population are shrinking.
But the growth in inmigration greatly overcomes that fact.
Check population charts of the US, the UK, France, Germany, Sweden… Not one points down, all point up.
Problem is not solving by itself.
I meant it’s shrinking without immigration, yes. As more and more countries are developed, less and less countries have population growth, so there’s also no population growth through immigration anymore (when one time the people from the few countries that still have population growth are distributed among so many countries without population growth).
It is solving itself if we keep working on helping countries to become developed.
Idk, there’s a point of view over this that seams very reasonable, and it’s being proven (imho).
People who emigrate tend to be the “best”, aka: the educate youth, the working class, people running from other people causing trouble. This means that the country of origin gets a way harder time developing, sometimes even become worse the most people go away.
I think there’s an example of this on a great part of Latin America. 10 years ago it used to be a better place to be. But as more and more people run away from those troubles to USA and Spain the people causing troubles are the ones left back there. And in most Latin American countries it can be said that the developing process has not only halted, but in some places have even start regressing.
I’m a little pessimistic on this regard. I don’t believe that the whole world will develop on this country. Quite the contrary, I think we’ll began seeing more and more countries becoming worse over time. Other instance of this is the Arab World, many countries that started developing on the last century have fallen nowadays in islamic fundamentalism and basically a middle ages revival.
You concatenate this issues with climate change and I think humanity are in for a very bad time over the next centuries. Many people (more than ten billions in the next century) living in poorer and poorer conditions.