This article makes a good point - a lot of times, women are much more realistic about the demands of parenthood. I know that in my circle of friends, it's the women who don't want to have kids yet, not the guys.

Mr RedRose and I have had this conversation before...like many guys with the "everything will be fine" attitude, I don't think he realizes the full impact that children have on your life, especially for the mother. I think women are much more aware, and are therefore sometimes more reluctant to go into parenthood.

I'm beginning to think this is the only way I would want to have kids. I just don't want to experience pregnancy. That and having to deal w/ children. :)

Being a parent, a good parent, is difficult enough when both members of the couple want to be parents. I can't even fathom how difficult it is when one of the couple is going along with it to please his/her spouse.

Mr. KR wants a third child sosososo badly, but I am, frankly, done with birthin' babies (knocks on wood). I'm tired, dammit! :) He knows that I do the brunt of work on the homefront, so he doesn't press the issue.

Jennifer Aniston knows her mind and isn't allowing herself to be pressured in to a life-altering deciosion. I say good for her!

Throw me in front of a fire squad for saying this, but I'm sorry...I never did think Brad Pitt was hot at all. I thought that way ever since I first laid eyes on him when he was on Dallas.

Clean shaven or scruffy looking, he's not that hot.

And I will fight to the death to defend your preference, because I just don't see it, either.

As KR said, raising kids is hard enough when both parents are involved. Add resentment to having the kids and losing possible jobs, and you could get a serious "Mommy Dearest" problem going here.

I hate to see people divorce, and I hope they end up working this out, but with all of their resources, I would think there would be a better solution than this.

Sad and pitiful! if you really didn't want kids when you married you really should have explored that further... instead of 4 yrs later and absolutely ruled it out.

They are saying another reason behnd the break up is pitt and jolie had a very interesting phone conversation and jennifer heard every bit....

there is another person who has not hid the fact of wanting kids.....angelina jolie


As far as the ones on here who dog parenthood and who do not have babies....your view and yours alone......

YES, parenthood is a FT time job...its 24/7...... I don't consider it a job i consider it a lifetime committment. YES it is frustrarting and overly exhausting and when those early morning baby wake up calls hit and your feeling sucidal as one put it.......at the end of the day you lay your head down and thank god for the blessings you have and the light of your life you craddle in your arms smiles or coos at you it is all worth it and somehwere in it you muster up the energy to do it all again the next day! BUT FOR THOSE OF US WHO HAVE KIDS and for those who are against having kids...... it may be frustrating and exasperating but worth every minute of it.

Okay, I may sound like the old man here, but no, it's not her choice. It's their choice -- a decision that they are supposed to make together.

Once you are married, decisions like this no longer belong to just the husband or the wife, they belong to the husband and the wife. Does that it mean it's easy to decide together on something as important as "to have kids or not have kids" when one spouse wants them and the other doesn't? Certainly not, but many, many couples have managed to do it and have stronger marriages because of it. That's because those couples have learned that in making a decision, they have to give just as much respect to their spouse's feelings as to their own.

Yes, because your spouse should never expect or even want you to do that. At the same time, having an attitude that something like this is "my" decision rather than "our" decision can ruin a marriage just as quickly.

All of that said, husband may want kids, but the kids aren't there yet. Wife, whom husband vowed to be a partner to for the rest of their lives, is there already. She gets precedence over kids that may or may not come.

I get what you're saying, but no, it's not their choice. She is still the one that has to carry the babies, and as the article pointed out, no matter how progressive her and Brad's relationship was or how much money she has, she will still end up doing more of the childcare than him. And so ultimately that is her choice.

Now, I perfectly support his right to divorce her if he thought kids were going to be a part of the marriage deal and later found out that they weren't. But you aren't guaranteed kids just 'cause you get married. Even if your wife originally said she wanted them, she isn't obligated to keep that opinion forever.

Personally, I think people are making a lot of jumps here:

1) That kids are even the reason for the breakup.
2) That they discussed the issue of children before marriage (if they didn't, the fault belongs to both of them, not just her).
3) That if they did, Brad has wanted kids all along. How do we know he didn't change his mind on the issue as well?
4) That Jennifer's wanted kids all along. I know she's said that to the press, but actions speak louder than words . . . plus I don't think that anyone thinks that a lot of the stuff spoken to the press about their marriage is anything more than propaganda so People magazine will report how idyllic and perfect the Pitt/Aniston marriage is blah blah blah.

Acting is a tough job to have if you decide to get pregnant. You can't just work through your pregnancy like with a normal job -- once you start showing, you're usually done. Plus you have to get back into shape before you can do any more work. And because your dollar value is based on requiring you to stay in the public eye, if you're not working, you have to push private details of your pregnancy and post-pregnancy into the media. Plus, if you don't want kids and say so straight out, that is looked at as unnatural and you lose some of your likeability, which is imperative to your job. So I don't blame her one bit if she doesn't want kids. Not to mention the fact that Brad kinda seems like he would be the kind of parent who is around for ten minutes every ten days to drop off some presents. Should she give him kids if she realizes that he won't be a good parent to them? There is a lot going on behind the scenes that we don't know about. I hardly think it's as simple as some of you are making it seem.

I think that their separation has brought out a lot of views that are pretty frightening to me. Plenty of people have insinuated that she should be subservient to him . . . . because he's HOT? How many steps away from "be subservient to him because he's the breadwinner" or "be subservient to him because he's male" are we? Or the idea that someone is obligated to have kids just because she once said she wanted them?

If Jennifer doesn't want to have kids, that's fully within her right. And if Brad wants them, there are millions of women out there who would be willing to help him out.

H - lots of respect, stud, but this thinking is just as backwards as thinking the woman should, by design, do most of the child-rearing. Do you see why? (and it's not the uber-feminist view on child birth and the woman - I actually don't disagree with that)

Lots of 'seems like..' and 'I feel..' in this thread, as well as "well, usually.." - not really my style guys.

I think the second sentence here is the true point - that's a pretty f-ed up world view (weltanshauung?), and pretty disturbing to see on such a mass level.

As for the last sentence - I don't think anyone's really claiming that since she said it once, she's locked into it, but along the same lines, the deal isn't the same as the one Brad was making, so he's out. I can feel for that, I guess - makes sense, doesn't it?

I have to agree. Jennifer, a "movie star"? She did her THING with "Friends." I don't think she's a movie maverick yet. Most of her films have "flopped" anyway. : confused:

I'm sure they are both happy with their decisions. Now, the question is, who will become Brad's "baby momma?" :D

One day, she may regret her decision, then again, maybe she won't.

Sorry, but she gave up the right for it to be her choice and hers alone when she got married, just as he gave up the right for the question of kids to his choice when he got married.

If they are going to act like married people, its their choice -- a decision they make together and where they each take into account how the other feels, what the other wants, how the decision will affect the other (especially the other who will bear the children) just as much as they take into account what they themselves want. It's something they work through together to come to a decision they can both live with.

And I agree with you that lots of people, including the writer of the article, are making lots of leaps about what's going on. Frankly, it's no body's business but theirs what happened.

My thought has always been that if one person wants kids and the other doesn't, that means they don't have kids. If you don't want kids, especially if you're a woman who has to carry them, I don't see it as an issue for compromise.

This point was discussed yesterday morning when I was watching CNN. The one guy that made that point was saying that he sees her as a very successful "small screen" actor, but doesn't see that transferring over to the large screen. He put it best when he said she's making a huge gamble on her movie career, and he doesn't think it's going to pay off.

No, I totally get this, which is why I've been saying in, say, abortion threads that people should not even have sex if they don't have similar views on the topic. I don't think a man should be forced to support a child that, if he were carrying it, he would have aborted, but the mother decided not to, etc. I think that many times we are too quick to say "oh, it's all her choice because it's her body." Now unless you failed sex ed, I think you understand that it takes two people to make a baby, so it's not entirely her choice. We need to have a better understanding of equality when it comes to pregnancy and so forth. But at the same time, men do not have an equal role to women when it comes to pregnancy, and until we can replicate "Junior" they won't. In this particular case I think that it's not just about sex. It's about respect for the other partner, which is how marriage differs from just sex in the above abortion example. It's her body that's going to get screwed up -- a body that (unlike most of the people who post on GC) is imperative to her career, and it is her career that is going to get put on hold when she gets knocked up. Not Brad's. To me, IF she doesn't want kids (which is still just an assumption at this point), and he is pushing for them despite what it will do to her body and career, it signifies a lack of respect for what she does.

Now, I know that's not exactly what I argued above, and I see what you're getting at, but I think accidental pregnancy and intentional pregnancy are kind of different animals. If it's just sex, more equality in choosing the outcome should be a given. But if it's tangled up in love and marriage and all that, I think that more weight should be placed on the intentions for pregnancy. And if what the article is claiming is true, it sounds like Brad just wants kids because he thinks they'd be fun, whereas Jennifer has some very good reasons for not wanting to be pregnant, which is why I'm inclined to say that this is HER choice. If he had a good reason for wanting to have children (like, I don't know, creating a small army of children to take over countries) and she was just saying no for the hell of it, then I would be more likely to say that she's not giving him enough choice in the matter. Clarified?


But then again, besides the whole army thing, I don't really think there are any "good" reasons to have children beyond the selfish ones, and as a woman I think there are plenty of reasons not to, so I'm probably biased in this respect.

Why would it? To me she is not someone I see fitting into too many different roles. I see her fitting into Rachel type roles. It's like Kramer from Seinfeld. I can't connect with him if he's playing in Schindler's List part II.

-Rudey