Too Many Children?

By Edgar A, Guest

'Whenever the mothers’ club holds a session on our front porch I get a chuckle. To hear some of them talk you’d think they were doing the Lord a favor to have a child or two instead of the Lord favoring them mightily to let them have ‘em. The responsibilities of parenthood have been magnified so much and dwelt upon so long by the experts that they’ve actually frightened off countless couples who would have had happier lives if they hadn’t heard about the difficulty of bringing up children.

“Oh,” said one woman in a session at our house, “we haven’t dared to have a baby. Children tie you down so; the responsibility is so great.”

I was about to say to that dame: “It’s too bad your mother didn’t have the same idea.” But Nellie, who reads me at a glance, kicked me on the shin as a signal to me to keep still.

I’ve yet to hear of a man going bankrupt because he had four children to support; I’ve yet to hear a man getting rich because he had no child to feed or clothe; my observation ids that the man who thinks he’ll get his fortune first and a family after usually winds up with neither. It seems to me to be not a question of whether you can afford to have children but can you afford to do without them.

We had hard times when I was young, harder even than these have been, and our family was large and we lived them through. The little dining-rooms in those days were literally cluttered with youngsters; mothers were kept busy patching little breeches and feeding hungry little stomachs. The responsibilities my mother faced would frighten to death some of these modern conversationalists, yet she met them all as a matter of course and thought nothing about them. I’m sure that my father never once thought that he’d have more of his salary to spend on himself if some of us hadn’t been born. So long as we were fed and clothed and housed he was content. I was for us he was working, not himself.'