Friday, December 15, 2017

If You Want Children, Make Wise Choices

The common feminist advice given to women to live in the moment, travel the world, go drinking, hook up, and have fun in your 20's and even 30's and then settle down and be a mom when you've had your fill is absolutely terrible advice for many reasons.

1) A woman's fertility is not guaranteed. Waiting until the 30's or 40's to have children all too often means not being able to have them at all. Not naturally, anyway, and often reproductive technologies can't even help. Fertility, unlike travel or luxuries, won't wait. Use it while you have it.

2) Having children doesn't prevent women from having fun, as so many assume. Yes, children tie you down to some degree, but they're not little ball and chains. Your life isn't over when you have kids. In fact, having children helps us realize what really matters about life and have a far richer and more fulfilling experience than any party lifestyle will ever provide.

3) Being irresponsible, drinking, partying, and hooking up are terrible choices regardless of what age you are or whether or not you have kids. They're bad moral choices and also harmful in many other ways.

4) Being a party animal doesn't prepare a woman for being a wife and mother. Quite the opposite. It teaches her to live for her instant gratification and not consider others or the future. It teaches her to resent children as little burdens that stop her from doing what she wants to do. It teaches her to care only about herself. In short, it turns her inward rather than outward and fuels her natural selfishness, which is exactly the opposite of what is needed in a good mother.

5) Partying, drinking, and hooking up make a woman a bad wife, and bad wives are also, by definition, bad mothers. The kinds of habits that cause a woman to be a good wife, to knit her heart with her husband's, and to put others before herself also help to ensure that her children will grow up in the stable, married home they need. Premarital sex undermines marital stability. A habit of selfish indulgence doesn't magically end when the wedding is over. The habits we make follow us for a lifetime.

6) Selfish, irresponsible behaviors like drinking heavily and premarital sex cause disease and reduce a woman's chances of having healthy children. Alcohol kills brain and liver cells. Some STDs can be transmitted to a child, cause cancers of the reproductive organs, or cause sterility. Fertility isn't assured for any woman as she ages, but it's even less sure if she is engaging in behaviors that put her and her reproductive health at risk.

7) Smart, loyal men who want to settle down and have a family don't pick partying women for that role, and for good reason. The 30-something living weekend to weekend just to party or hooking up with a string of different men is not good wife material. So when she finally decides, in her mid-30's, after being all used up, that she wants a husband and children, she is very likely to find she has zero prospects. Men aren't going to marry her now. They're not stupid.

The bottom line is that women who want a husband and children need to plan in their teens and early-20's to pursue behaviors that help further that goal and prepare them to find a good man and make use of their fertile years. They need to be cultivating the kind of character that makes good wives and mothers. They need to be making wise and healthy choices. Those who do the opposite and think they can party like there's no tomorrow will likely find that their family goals never come true, and all because they made poor choices. For good or for ill, we reap what we sow.


13 comments:

  1. What I would really like to see is a conversation (or even a weekly podcast) married women who have children sit down and talk to young women about their life plans and life decisions. Maybe by listening, everyone could learn a lot more about how to be realistic about the decisions they are making today, and how that opens and closes doors tomorrow. I think young people today think that they can do anything now and that no doors will ever be closed to them later. Also, I'm not sure that they can count the costs of their future plans... mortgages, child care, health care, retirement, etc.

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    1. I think this sort of mentoring is best done one-on-one with older women teaching the younger women as the Bible tells them to do.

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    2. But listening to a podcast is like mentoring one on one. Well, I think it is.

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  2. Great post. It's very wise to make preparations prior to. The earlier the better. The unwise choices most of us make are because we haven't gone through the necessary preparations. A lot of men and women do not plan for their futures and as a result it ends chaos within the home.I believe the family is the heart of the society, and this is reflected by the behaviors adopted by the youths, young men and women inclusive.

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  3. This is very important stuff. I see the results of poor lifestyles in our county jail. 30-50 women inmates daily in our facility who didn't have a clue what the effects of their *lifestyle* would be on them and their families and friends. Their prayer requests indicate they need help. Bad relationships over and over. Life in the revolving door of sin. The Gospel can set people free.

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  4. This is wise instruction to women and our society needs this desperately. Godly women have the greatest positive impact on our culture/society than anything else.

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  5. Just because a woman is not married by her 20s or early 30s does not mean that she is some kind of drunk, fornicating hedonist as many of you assume. Sheesh!

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  6. What of if one chooses making money for herself so as to be not dependent on her future husband? She's not necessarily partying or living a hedonistic lifestyle but putting off marriage to make some money for herself. Does that count too?

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    1. I would not recommend to put off marriage in order to make money. The job of providing is given by God to the husband. If she doesn't have someone to marry yet and is making money to support herself and to save to assist her future husband, that is fine. But delaying marriage in order to make money is a poor choice.

      Seeking not to be dependent on her future husband is a poor choice. If you don't trust him to provide for you and protect you, don't marry him. A wife is supposed to be dependent on her husband. And a husband is supposed to depend on his wife for things too - not financially, but to meet his sexual needs, emotional support, being on his side, and so on. The whole point of marriage is to become one. That means you merge your lives together rather than living separate lives just in the same house. So the idea of making money so she can remain independent of her husband and not have to merge with him is just setting herself up for a bad marriage and possibly divorce unless she changes her outlook, assuming she even finds a husband one day.

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  7. Women are still fertile in their 30s. The whole fertility falls off a cliff at 35 is an outdated fact. Yes there is birth defects, but even in the 30s, the chances are still very small. https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhcHDx-61sxerYs3KgEEQ1Si9Vg1kd4FD

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    1. Of course women are still fertile in their 30's. But fertility does decline and complications rise. Plus, if you don't start having children until mid-30's, you probably won't be able to have very many. If you don't start looking to marry until mid-30's, you might not find someone suitable to marry or it might take a long time and leave little time for childbearing. The point is, if having children is important to you, it should be prioritized.

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