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Today I read an article in The Times suggesting that there are many young couples now writing extensively on social media about why they wish they’d never had children.
On read it there are many feeds around that subject and there is a Facebook group called ‘I wish I never had children’ which now has 54,000 members in the UK.
I was sad when I read that because it demonstrates a real lack of hope in future generations.
While it’s really difficult to have children and many people struggle with many aspects of parenting, it also feels a little bit selfish (at least to me).
On another subject from The Times that I wrote about earlier in the month about #thelastgeneration and why young people in China are refusing to have children because they don’t want to bring them into that society.
A video went viral on Chinese social media of a couple refusing to go to a covid isolation centre and when threatened with repercussions for their children and their grandchildren they replied that we are the last generation.
After I read that article, I walked the dog and thought about it a little bit and as I was getting ready for work and realising that I had a day of back-to-back-to-back-to-back meetings with no break for lunch and then football training with my son in the evening coaching a group of lads in the rain who probably don’t want to be there, I wondered whether my life was difficult and then I remembered my Grandmother.
Elsie Campbell was the most beautiful of people and I remember her fondly and often.
She died in 1995 when I was a house officer at Glasgow dental hospital and school.
She lived an extremely hard life and was extremely poor.
Her husband worked on the shipyards for not much money and he had an unrepaired cleft palate with a very badly repaired cleft lip. He wore a denture as an obturator (plug) to seal up the hole in his palate to his nose.
He was a hard man to look after, he was bitter (at least at the end as I remember).
Elsie was a shining light, but her life was hard.
She was a catholic who had married a protestant for love but in the west of Scotland that was not a good thing.
She had terribly bowed legs due to the rickets that she suffered from early in life and she would regularly have to pawn their bed sheets on a Monday or a Tuesday to pay for food until wages day.
They had no money and my Mum and Dad used to take them up a hot savoury mince pie every Thursday night in the 1970’s to make sure they had a hot meal once a week.
They had no central heating and no appliances and one of Elsie’s older twin boys (my Dad’s older brother) died of a heart attack when he was 30.
Elsie was born in the 1920’s in an extremely poor part of Greenock in the west of Scotland and so I guess, for her, the prospect of bringing children into a dark world was as dark as it is for anybody else.
This is not a blog about whether you should or shouldn’t have children or any criticism of anybody who does.
We just need a society where people have the hope and the trust that they want to have children to try to make it better for generations to come.
Hope and trust are two of the most important things that we can build our societies on.
By society I mean country or business or football team or family etc etc etc.
Blog Post Number - 3250