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Matt writes:
Ron Bailey's article on how being childless doesn't make people unhappy seemed to me to be a bit wide of the mark insofar as it didn't take into account the perspective of old people at all.Whatever else raising children may be, it's also an expensive and time consuming pain in the ass that sharply limits your flexibility to do a variety of things for a large number of years. One can easily imagine the joys of parenthood being roughly offset by the burdens. But later in life, having a solid relationship with grownup kids and their children seems low-cost and hard-to-replace. Loneliness is very hard on people.That seems right. As a general point, loneliness among the elderly is actually a pretty significant social problem, with all sorts of associated health costs and productivity drags. It's obviously not something that public policy can simply fix, but it's the sort of problem that I really wish there was more public discussion about.
