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I'm pro-natalist, pro-homeschooling, pro-free-range-parenting, and I think it's deeply unhealthy when elites don't have kids or exhaust themselves trying to get their kids into fancy preschools or whatever. But I find myself butting heads with many who feel the same way.
Bottom line is, WOMEN bear children. If you want to encourage a more child-friendly, parent-friendly culture, you cannot do it without women on board. And many women will be! We like kids! But if you're a pro-natalist man, be mindful of our concerns.
1. Pregnancy is physically difficult. If you're lucky, it's a challenge; if you're unlucky, it's more like a long illness whose effects can be lifelong. It seriously cuts your productivity. Respect that this is actually a major thing to take on.
2. Women often want to be "more" than "just" a wife and mother. Please, take that seriously, even if you believe, as I do, that raising children is important. Women have historically been confined to the domestic sphere. We're protective of our newfound rights to go beyond it.
"I want to pursue my ambitious career while my future wife handles all the kid stuff, meanwhile I haven't found any woman who actually wants to do that, so I blame Society" is not a good look.
Our society *does* undervalue parenting, so we need to find creative reframes. It's culture-building. It's education. Raising children doesn't play well with traditional career paths, but do you really *want* that path, or do you want something freer? Etc.
But nobody, male or female, is going to feel respected if you seem to be saying "I expect YOU to do a bunch of dreary scut work that I am too important to do."
3. Statistically, women are higher in Agreeableness than men. (ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…) We high-Agreeableness folks find it *much* more appealing to hear about your love of children and commitment to family than about how you think Society is brainwashing us to be sterile.
4. Make it clear that you believe in bodily autonomy. Fascist pronatalism believed that it was a woman's duty to the State to bear children. That's terrifyingly immoral. Make it explicit that you *don't* think our wombs are collective property.
*Individualist* pronatalism acknowledges that most people genuinely *want* children, or would if they could afford them, but that the minority who aren't cut out to be parents shouldn't have to have kids.
medium.com/migration-issu… American women want more children than they end up having. (And we'd probably want more kids than we currently say we do, if positional goods like housing + education were cheaper.)
(I do think having kids is prosocial, but not every person has a duty to do every prosocial thing. What contribution you make to the world depends on your talents and situation and priorities.)
