“ People don’t want to be around the know-it-all, the person who is always loud no matter how much you shush them, or the person who never shuts up.”

Wow! I had no idea you’d met my brother! (Can we talk, later?) Fortunately, no offspring from this center-of-all-creation, and both they and the world are far better off. Taught by our emotionally non-responsive father, and to this day his insecurity-driven bullying behavior has only become increasingly worse. (He’s 63, so expectations for change are low. His “inside voice” is an “inside the stadium” voice.) As a parent? I can only shudder.

Yes, these descriptions you provide are of very real people.

One reason for having children has hopefully fallen by the wayside, at least in developed nations. My father is from the plains of Montana, and it was not at all uncommon to have as many as a dozen children, specifically for the purpose of maintaining vast wheat farms with the primitive equipment available at the time. (RELATED: I have an item that, as a former South Carolinian, you may be interested in. It’s what I call a “field crib”; a full-size folding crib made of boards and chicken wire (“for light weight and easy cleaning”), home-made to accommodate children from newborns all the way to toddlers (newborns on the top level, older babies on the lower, more crib-like level), and was placed near where the parents would be working in the field. At end of day it would be folded, and carried off under one arm. The assumption to be drawn was that no one was left at home to look after any tiny ones; everyone was at the field, even those too small to be working yet. (I use mine to display antique dolls.)

Thank you.