You fly with them too!

I have flown with said airline approx 100 times (for convenience really) & I was more worried on one of the flights when the pilot started talking & it was a women!

Really, it hadn't occurred to you that by doing it that way, the families can get guaranteed seats next to each other and the singletons and couples can fill in the gaps later on.

Perfectly sensible, IMO

There are very few airlines that don't allocate seats before boarding so the issue of families being together is already taken care of. The only ones who don't are the low cost airlines who tend to make you pay for priority boarding anyway.

The reason for boarding them first is that they take more time and need more help than the rest of us. So the cabin crew can get them seated before everyone else gets on.

In answer to original question most certainly not.

The people at work who think they can have prime summer leave off and all of christmas off every year just because they have kids really pisses me off. Its a lifestyle choice after all.

I may not have kids but i have family and i as entitled to spend time with my family as you are with your kids.

Oh come on, no one bit last time you used that in this thread.

No, indeed not, but we're already struggling to cope with the ageing of that huge population spurt. We're not, as you say, going to run out of people, but none of those people are getting any younger, and most of them are going to live to be far older than ever used to be the case.

Not all that long ago, people taking a lifestyle choice not to have children would've been unheard of. Back when there was no state pension, no welfare state, no NHS; no organised society, in effect, families worked on a simple protocol of one generation caring for the next whilst they are too young to care for themselves, and then that generation in turn caring for the previous generation when it's their turn to be too old to care for themselves. Anyone deciding not to have children would've been pretty much stuffed when they became too old to work, because there wouldn't have been anyone else around to pick up the care, unless they'd been fortunate enough to save enough to employ servants.

Of course, for a long time this was also pretty academic, as on average people only survived maybe 5 years or so in retirement anyway. Move forward to the 21st century, however, and we're living 10, 20, even 30 years in retirement. My maternal Grandfather retired at the age of 60, and didn't die until he was 97! If he'd made it to the ton, he would've been retired for as long as he'd worked.

Take another look at your graph, and look at when the peak started to build, and how quickly it did so. Couple that with huge increases in life expectancy, which have not been matched with any real increase in worklife expectancy, and regardless of how many people there currently are in this country, there aren't going to be enough people of working age in 10 - 20 years to cope with the retired population.

When we really reach breaking point, what is going to happen? Unless massive changes are made very quickly - which will be hugely unpopular, so knowing our spineless politicians means it won't happen - then there will come a time when the state simply cannot tax enough to support the elderly. At that point, support systems will break down, and there's a good chance we'll find ourselves reverting to that point where each family supported their own, because we've lost the notion of society being able to do it on a macro-economic scale.

So, who is making the lifestyle choice?

Is it the people who choose to have children, thus following in the pattern which drives every species on the face of the planet at their most fundamental level, or is it the people who've decided not to have children, who, for the last few decades only, have been able to do this as the state has used the burden of taxation to remove the burden of care?

Time will tell, but personally I'm not convinced the burden of taxation is going to be bearable for very much longer.

The trouble is we don't have enough jobs for the people who have been produced so far, just look at the unemployment statistics. So you have the double whammy of paying unemployment benefit to an excess of people who can't get a job along with paying for care for the older generation. I don't see the benefif of producing somone who will be a burden to the state from birth to death.

If less people are produced now there could be adequate jobs for them in the future. We gain a big chunk of money not paying unemployment benefit that could be channeled into looking after the aged.

The more people are produced the more they will need looking after when they are older. Don't produce so many people and you negate that problem in the future.

A very nieve view seen from the bottom of a glass

I gave up stoking the fire when I realised surely the poster must have been trying to wind people up