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.
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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.
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"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.
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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.
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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."
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3. Statistically, women are higher in Agreeableness than men. (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3149680/ …) 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.
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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.
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*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.
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https://medium.com/migration-issues/how-big-is-the-fertility-gap-in-america-fd205e9d1a35 … 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.)
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(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.)
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End of conversation
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