"You don't become a real adult until you have children"

I agree that anyone who doesn’t understand that isn’t a “real adult”.

But if someone needs to have kids to have that realization, they seem to be the exception. I am perfectly happy with a 40 year old person having immense government or corporate responsibility even if they were never a parent. I would presume they still understand that their actions have real and maybe profound and enduring consequences.

I think it’s wonderful if people want to share about their own journey of self-discovery. When they generalize about parenthood this way, though, it’s part of a social program to promote the nuclear family and devalue and criticize as selfish or immature or not responsible or aware those who haven’t been parents. You might as well say that a certain socioeconomic class is underrepresented as senior leaders and therefore this class of people don’t understand what leadership is because they haven’t done it. That bigotry would be astounding. Yet with kids we are cool with it. It’s (perhaps inadvertently) arrogant and condescending, and pro-natalist propaganda.

Any personal story of what it meant to that person, or even careful scientific type or philosophical statement about the psychology of it, is of course welcome and socially positive. But “all you folks in general don’t know how to be virtuous humans in some respect because you didn’t have this gatekeeping experience” is so clearly wrong that it’s got to be the product of some ulterior agenda.