First of all, I am a heterosexual male, 57 years old, and due to various reasons and circumstances, including especially some problems I had when I was young, I have so far in my life not had any serious relationship with a woman. Even though my not having had a relationship has been also due to some choices that I have made as an adult, it is still one of the biggest disappointments of my life that I have not had a relationship with a woman.

However I would say that I am not disappointed that I have not had any children.

I do remember when I was a kid I had the normal fantasies about being a daddy and having children. However as I was in college and approaching adulthood I came to be disenchanted with the idea of having children.

In particular I came to learn, in 1970, about the threat that overpopulation poses to our world and to our world’s resources, and that people in America consume more than their fair share of the world’s resources. So I had a little bit of a bad feeling about bringing a child or children into the world if this were true.

I definitely had problems and was not mature when I was in my 20’s, and not ready for the responsibilities of raising children or even of being married. It would take a number of years for me to work on my issues and develop some maturity.

I had a very unhappy childhood, and as an adolescent and as a young adult I struggled with unhappiness, and trying to be happy.

Actually one of my main problems as a young man was my relationship with my father. He was a very dominating person, and while he did do many very good things, he was often very judgmental, and very poor at understanding my issues from my point of view.

He was a very hard worker, and an excellent provider for his family. I myself could never measure up to his standards of working hard. If something I was supposed to do did not quite measure up to the standards he expected, or if I honestly forgot something, or if I made an honest mistake, he would sometimes treat it as if it was a crime, or an affront to him. My dad often seemed to regard and treat his children as if they were his personal property.

I came to fully realize, about a year after my dad died when I was in my mid-30’s, how angry I still was at my dad, and how much of his behavior had actually sometimes bordered on being abusive. I.e. it was not just something wrong with me that I had problems with him. I have been in much therapy to deal with my issues with my dad.

So feeling the way I do about my dad, I have had and still have a strong distaste about being a father myself.

If I were to be a dad myself, I would want to be as good a provider in a material sense as my dad was, and I don’t think I would be able to. For one thing I could never work as hard as he did, and I have had some problems at some of my jobs (even though I did have a very good job during the late 80’s and most of the 90’s). Also the time when I was growing up was during the Golden Age of the middle class, as Thom Hartman describes it. A single wage earner could support a family of several children (I was one of five children).

I would also want to be much more sensitive than my dad was. However I was not able to get across the hurdle of dealing with the problems I had when I was young until my late 30’s and early 40’s.

Given what we know now about global warming and the threat to our planet’s sustainability, as well as what the shrub administration has done to ruin our country and to pile on debt to the next generation, I am now glad that I do not have children who are going to have to deal with all this. And being 57, it is past the time anyway when I or most people would want to have children. I don’t like the idea of being in my 70’s when my children would be teenagers.

If people really want children and are able to raise them, there is no reason they should not have them (though not arbitrarily many). However nobody who does not want children should be made to feel that they are obligated to have them.

I really don’t think that anybody should feel that they ought to have children for any reason other than that they really love children and want to bring their own children into the world, and want to and are able to pass on joy to their children.

In particular nobody should feel that they have to have children to please anybody else, such as relatives, or out of any sense of duty or obligation, religious or otherwise.

I myself have not had pressure from family to either get married or to have children. However sometimes I have been a little offended when somebody I am conversing with in casual conversation asks how many children I have. And one time at a buffet restaurant, the day after Halloween one year, the woman behind the counter asked if I went trick-or-treating with my children. I reminded her that there are people who don’t have children. She said she thought that I had looked like a daddy. I did find her question to be offensive, with the assumption that a man like me “should” have children.