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Dom, I feel your pain, as someone here in the USA frequently says. When my son was the age I think your children and Janet Jackson's children are (very young), all I did was rush from home with kid to babysitter, then to work, then to babysitter to get kid, then home with kid, and repeat that pattern each workday.. . . . with the occasional homicidal urge that had pretty much everyone in its sights as a target. When my son was 11, I suddenly recognised that he was A Person. It was his lovely sense of humour that awakened me to his humanity. My decision not to have another child had been necessary, I thought, for maintaining a modicum of sanity in order to keep my job. An exemplary parent I was not. I was better at being a kid. And, sadly, I was monumentally ignorant at being a wife. I tend to agree with Ken's "pet" theory that USAmericans are not especially pleased with having kids and having to take care of them. I suspect that this is a very old, very global feeling. Children as necessities (for farm work, factory work, dynasty-enhancing) aren't news. The view of children as nonworking darlings by parents who must work to support themselves and their children does seem an odd chapter. But it's one in which we figure. Yet, sex aside, ------ ok, that's too tempting to quip to. I'll leave it alone. Let me just give you the URL for Iceland's practical (and apparently historical) treatment of moms, dads, and everybody's kids: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/may/18/iceland And here's a book my son recommended years ago: +Are Males Cost-Effective?+. This is the same son who, that semester at U of Illinois, signed up for a course in Women's Literature so that he'd be the lone male in a class of females. <sigh> Judy 2008/7/2 Dominic Fox <[log in to unmask]>: > I think the nuclear family is a nasty economic prison, and getting > nastier by the minute as exploitation deepens and the battle for free > time (time not consumed by either selling or reproducing one's labour > power) becomes redder in tooth and claw. I don't think sex is that > much of an issue in itself, although I understand that everyone gets > antsy now and then. People use adultery first as an escape valve and > later as a wrecking ball. But the real goal I think is not sexual but > economic freedom: getting out of an absurdly inefficient and > psychologically stressful domestic arrangement. For that matter, if > the pressures of paying the bills, raising the children and keeping > the place from turning into a complete pigsty were significantly > relieved, I think many people would be a lot more easy-going about the > occasional extra-marital sexual/emotional excursion - as the moneyed > classes in fact have always been. > > Dominic >