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Fr though your brain literally makes you forget how tough kids are and you internalize the good things so it could be worse overall. It’s actually pretty miraculous. The thing that scares me about kids is my most boring friends like it the most and my friends with the most passions and hobbies and such like it the least. That is real scary to me
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Jan 14, 2023 07:15
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These diatribes about having children are peak goon.
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Jan 14, 2023 07:22
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OP I have a very demanding inner child and that is enough ok?
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Jan 14, 2023 13:06
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CJacobs posted:Wouldn't it be awesome to be able to share your knowledge of what you enjoy, all of it, with someone who knows quite literally nothing about the world? I'm looking forward to the day when I try and share some cool old music or movies or something and my kid tells me it's lame as hell and they'd rather listen to King Triple Skeet the TikTok rapper
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Jan 14, 2023 13:28
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Smugworth posted:Have you ever looked at how expensive a newborn is per year? Babies are the ultimate Funko Pop you can dress them like a Star War and make them watch Star Wars until they say "papa, papa, I do love Star Wars and Marvel movies so!"
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Jan 14, 2023 13:29
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razamataza posted:A big part of it is probably having people to look after you when you're too old to look after yourself yeah, no. I will absolutely walk into the woods and not come back before I descend into dementia. life is not about the future and it's not about the past, it's happening right now, find your happy -- or don't. No one is going to do it for you. If kids fit into that, great. If kids make you miserable, hope you didn't have any, that's a big oops that you're stuck with for the rest of this time around the wheel. Taima posted:Fr though your brain literally makes you forget how tough kids are and you internalize the good things so it could be worse overall. It’s actually pretty miraculous. I don't know what either of these things mean; I am constantly aware of how difficult life is and how children feed into that. It's not a new awareness for me, but having kids certainly added new dimensions of difficulty and complexity. They don't get abstracted away. As to the second comment, my primary hobbies are skiing and dicking around with electronic music. I actually do a lot more of those things than I did 6 years ago. I probably play less video games but that's not much of a quality of life hit, and also it's going to change because as kids get bigger they will increasingly be able to play real games with me instead of asking me to put on loving CocoMelon (no, I won't, I will put on decent media for you, or go bug your mom, kid). Reevaluation of priorities causes me to realize I used to spend a lot of time watching TV and using junk internet. All TV time is with family now, junk internet somewhat reduced, sure. The stuff I care about that I look back on pictures of and think "gently caress YEA, I did that"? Having more of those moments than ever, tbqh. Part of that is b/c part of our "how we had kids" story involved moving tf out of the city into the middle of beautiful near-wilderness. Granted, my spouse does complain about how much time and money I put into my extracurriculars, but that's also unchanged from past behaviors. Trying to include her more, we just both got fat tire e-bikes and if we like 'em and the 6 year old figures out a pedal bike for real this summer, i think it's time for a Razer electric dirtbike for her (they're only a few hundred bucks, they're also goverened out at 15mph which seems entirely reasonable to me, having ridden a heavier into the gravel at ~40mph) I don't think having kids has meaningfully changed us very much. There's just more people living here now so money has to be spread further and I have more people to not laugh at my lame jokes. again, life is what you make of it, and it's happening right now. Cabbages and VHS fucked around with this message at 14:07 on Jan 14, 2023 |
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Jan 14, 2023 13:58
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Being a parent is very obviously a cool and good thing (for certain people who would be good parents). Some, but very few, of these pro-parenting posts justify being a biological parent in an ethically compelling way though. If the argument is a utilitarian one, that bringing a new life into being is on average more likely to bring net pleasure/good in the world rather than net pain/bad, I guess one could hold that view in a sincere way. But then I’d assume a parent likely to do that would probably improve an otherwise parentless child’s life to a similar degree if they decided to adopt/foster. It’s fine to just say: “Evolutionary biology hardwired me to want this, and the current capitalist system kind of needs this (before it implodes), but yeah it’s a pretty dubious moral/ethical decision vs. adopting. Oh well, I hadn’t thought of that at the time, or I did and biology trumped ethics for us. Now let me get back to caring about the little guy/gal.”
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Jan 14, 2023 14:07
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Halisnacks posted:Being a parent is very obviously a cool and good thing (for certain people who would be good parents). Some, but very few, of these pro-parenting posts justify being a biological parent in an ethically compelling way though. I'm going to respond to this honestly even if it gets me flamed b/c I don't give a poo poo: before we'd had kids, we discussed a lot the idea of maybe having a kid and also adopting one. Pre kids, there was no thought of a "difference" between a biological kid and an adopted kid, but there was I guess interest in the biological process of going through it (easier from my side, I didn't carry a basketball full of meat around my torso for months). Now that we've had kids? I believe some people are fantastic adoptive parents, the world needs more of them, and I personally would never think of an adopted kid the same way I think of my biological offspring. There has been a hardwiring for me, I have seen myself thoughtlessly throw myself into grave danger to protect my kids, in a way that would require thought if I was intervening in the same situation for my spouse or one of my cousins' kids. This wasn't expected or done willfully, but I fully believe I would just jump in front of a bullet for my kids without a thought other than "I need to take that bullet" in a way I would not for any other living creature, including the kids of close relatives. So, I don't see that happening for me with an adopted kid, and also I think that tendency to be willing to do something drastic like die also meaningfully makes me less of a lovely parent than I would be otherwise. So I think I'd be a shitter dad to an adopted kid, and I don't want to put someone through that. Recognition of that makes me sound like a bag of dicks, I believe, and I'd much rather own being a bag of dicks than make a kid needlessly miserable for ~18 years. I don't think I'm doing that to our biological kids but the jury is still out. I don't think I'm remotely the greatest parent in the world but I think I'd be a worse one to an adopted kid. I don't think I'd tolerate the 2am wakeups and getting covered with body fluid and finding $500 pieces of electronics taken apart with the same sigh and half-grin that I do with my biological kids. I'm not defending this as rational, ethical, moral, etc. It is the reality of how I feel though, and in the end I think if one of us had become sterile or something and it had come down to adoption vs not having a second child, we would not have had a second child. I don't think this reflects on me especially well; the flipside is the plethora of stories of people who adopted kids and absolutely loving should not have. e: also I don't think my wife feels this way nearly this strongly and I think she might be capable of being a real good adoptive parent. I don't think I am and that seems like a pretty foolish self-understanding to try to overcome by creating a material challenge to it! Cabbages and VHS fucked around with this message at 14:19 on Jan 14, 2023 |
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Jan 14, 2023 14:13
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Cabbages and Kings posted:I personally would never think of an adopted kid the same way I think of my biological offspring. There has been a hardwiring for me, I have seen myself thoughtlessly throw myself into grave danger to protect my kids, in a way that would require thought if I was intervening in the same situation for my spouse or one of my cousins' kids. This wasn't expected or done willfully, but I fully believe I would just jump in front of a bullet for my kids without a thought other than "I need to take that bullet" in a way I would not for any other living creature, including the kids of close relatives. So, I don't see that happening for me with an adopted kid, and also I think that tendency to be willing to do something drastic like die also meaningfully makes me less of a lovely parent than I would be otherwise. So I think I'd be a shitter dad to an adopted kid, and I don't want to put someone through that. So basically your ethical argument, at least in utilitarian terms, is that by being a biological parent you are creating more net utility than you would by being an adoptive parent. I hadn’t thought of it that way before. Whether it’s in fact true or not, I can get on board with it being someone’s reasoning. (Although I’d guess part of the reason I hadn’t thought of it this way before is because most biological parents hadn’t either.)
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Jan 14, 2023 14:30
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CJacobs posted:imo expressing that you haven't got a desire to have kids just means you know you wouldn't be an appropriate parent, even subconsciously. It's not a bad thing nor a bad or intrusive thought to have. Back when I was a kid/teenager -- you know, because all female people want or eventually want children -- I would tell whoever asked that I was born to someone who wanted me 100% and if I wanted a kid aaaaany less, even 99%, I wouldn't risk it. They didn't have to know I wanted them 0%.
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Jan 14, 2023 15:03
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Halisnacks posted:So basically your ethical argument, at least in utilitarian terms, is that by being a biological parent you are creating more net utility than you would by being an adoptive parent. I hadn’t thought of it that way before. Whether it’s in fact true or not, I can get on board with it being someone’s reasoning. unsure if trolling, bit, no, I am not trying to make an argument about ethics or the utility value of anything; the overall ethics of children are too complex for my simian brain and had no bearing on decision making, and I think the utility value of any kid is a crap shoot in the range of [ -1 .... 1] and also is completely detached from the decision making most parents use. I'd agree with you that most biological parents don't think about any of this poo poo before they have kids. Or after. It was simply a statement that I believe I would be a shittier parent to an adopted kid than I already am to my own, therefore I think questions about biological vs nonbiological kids have levels of complexity to them which may be strongly impacted by people's personal beliefs, whether those were culturally instilled, a result of life experience, or some other thing. People aren't robots and we're talking about the second most fundamental unconscious drive that animals have. "Stay alive now, breed. Stay alive now, breed". Humans dress these things up in words and arguments but the basic behaviors are mostly the same so I think all the intellectualizing is kind of a hedonistic exercise in processing our cognitive alignments or dissonance after we've already taken an action or committed to a course. Some people having less children during a time of perceived overpopulation also doesn't need a deeply textured primate brain, animal populations do it: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2000/11/001128070536.htm I know a lot of not-very-online parents and basically none of them thought of any of this poo poo in the terms being discussed in this thread. Ditto the not-very-online non-parents in the same age cohorts. I think it's fun to understand other people's viewpoints just like it's fun to see what other people find amusing from MidJourney, but no amount of civil discussion will change behaviors or population trends. That poo poo is pre-linguistic, it's like trying to talk someone out of taking a poo poo. edit: The thread title here is literally "why have kids" but then it's just pages of intellectualization (which I am certainly guilty of). This doesn't answer the question. People have kids because they gently caress without birth control, and the reasons for that are myriad, people "accidentally" get pregnant or get someone pregnant after fanaticizing about being a parent all the time. It's mostly not an intellectual action, and outside of certain circles I doubt people sit down and do a nuts and bolts material analysis of "what will this mean for the rest of my life", they just gently caress without birth control. I over-intellectualize everything and we had a lot of conversations about "what does this mean for the rest of our lives" but ultimately the reason we had kids was we decided to gently caress without birth control. Cabbages and VHS fucked around with this message at 15:21 on Jan 14, 2023 |
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Jan 14, 2023 15:07
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Smugworth posted:I'm looking forward to the day when I try and share some cool old music or movies or something and my kid tells me it's lame as hell and they'd rather listen to King Triple Skeet the TikTok rapper Conversely, when you sit down with your son and watch CB4 or Don’t Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood and he loves it just as much as you do it’s fantastic. His rap does suck though.
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Jan 14, 2023 16:11
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Cabbages and Kings posted:edit: The thread title here is literally "why have kids" but then it's just pages of intellectualization (which I am certainly guilty of). This doesn't answer the question. People have kids because they gently caress without birth control, and the reasons for that are myriad, people "accidentally" get pregnant or get someone pregnant after fanaticizing about being a parent all the time. It's mostly not an intellectual action, and outside of certain circles I doubt people sit down and do a nuts and bolts material analysis of "what will this mean for the rest of my life", they just gently caress without birth control. Just because it's obvious doesn't make it wrong. It's not like nature isn't giving an individual absolutely every incentive it can to reproduce: attraction, sex, good feels, tribe inclusion/acceptance, massive hits of endorphin, etc. The luxury of not having kids is a modern invention and by-product of the sanctity of individualism. Just a few centuries ago, kids/family was the only safety net you had. It was in your best interest 99% of the time to have more kids than less, to keep them close, and grow your own support system. There's a reason barrenness was considered a curse for most of human history. To answer the question less literally: my kids are cool and good. I simultaneously love them being around and love the thought of them leaving the house and being their own person. They are not my possessions. I'm just stewarding them until they can take possession of themselves and my role as parent is to help them do so to the best of my ability while looking out for their well-being. Where I think parents go tragically wrong is the other two extremes. They either selfishly fuse with their kids and have no identity without them or they selfishly neglect their kids for their (the parent's) own interests. Of course, their parents probably did that so that's where they got the model.
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Jan 14, 2023 16:19
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Cabbages and Kings posted:unsure if trolling, bit, no, I am not trying to make an argument about ethics or the utility value of anything; the overall ethics of children are too complex for my simian brain and had no bearing on decision making, and I think the utility value of any kid is a crap shoot in the range of [ -1 .... 1] and also is completely detached from the decision making most parents use. No, I wasn’t trolling. I’ve felt for a while that (1) being a parent was (or could be) a good thing but (2) being a biological parent when being an adoptive parent was a possibility was less normatively good. Your explanation made me reconsider (2). Having said that, I shouldn’t have implied that your reasoning and the ethical implications I drew from it meant that your reasoning originated with those same implications. quote:People aren't robots and we're talking about the second most fundamental unconscious drive that animals have. "Stay alive now, breed. Stay alive now, breed". Humans dress these things up in words and arguments but the basic behaviors are mostly the same so I think all the intellectualizing is kind of a hedonistic exercise in processing our cognitive alignments or dissonance after we've already taken an action or committed to a course. Ehhh, you’re not wrong that we can explain why people have kids in terms of evolutionary biological impulses. That doesn’t mean it’s bad (or “hedonistic”?) to intellectualise these things. Moral and ethical progress is in principle possible, and usually comes about as a result of “intellectualising” things. Like, we can explain rape with “stay alive, breed” tendencies, but fortunately we spend time thinking, conversing, and updating our moral (and then legal) frameworks to arrive somewhere better.
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Jan 14, 2023 17:30
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why have kids? like fuggin, hate condoms. next question OP
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Jan 14, 2023 17:35
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Nooner posted:why have kids? Hard agree (with pulling out being even worse), which is why I give a solid five-star review to vasectomies.
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Jan 14, 2023 18:06
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Dr. Gojo Shioji posted:Hard agree (with pulling out being even worse), which is why I give a solid five-star review to pegging. Ftfy
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Jan 14, 2023 18:32
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Cabbages and Kings posted:I don't know what either of these things mean; I am constantly aware of how difficult life is and how children feed into that. It's not a new awareness for me, but having kids certainly added new dimensions of difficulty and complexity. They don't get abstracted away. As far as we can discern, humans forget the hard parts of parenting. It's not a bad thing; it's a necessary thing. It's common for women to forget exactly how hard childbirth was, for example. This is broadly true of everything though, our brains are just wired that way. Something that is true of most parents is they will say something along the lines of "My life was poo poo all week and my kid was a mess but then he called me daddy and hugged me and it was all worth it" That's a great thing, and necessary for our survival as a species, but you don't have to be a brain genius to understand that the brain is ordering these feelings in a way that makes you view things these as intrinsically worth it. The juice is never worth the squeeze objectively; however it is made so in post processing basically through arrangement of brain chemicals that have been wired since our inception as a species to give, for example endorphins (endogenous morphine) in reward for undertaking these often intrinsically unpleasant activities that propagate the species. Let's forget about the context of parenting for a second. You don't have to bring children into the equation to understand how that mechanism works; For example, I've had the privilege to travel around the world. But if you asked me what the best trips were, they absolutely were not the trips where everything went perfect. On the contrary, the best trips in hindsight were the ones where I was totally loving miserable. The human brain has this incredibly ability to turn objective hardship into, essentially, deep meaning. It's probably a defense mechanism but that doesn't mean it's not miraculous and necessary for our survival. And of course people are wired differently and this applies to a majority of people, not all. While my wife and I do not want children (or more concisely, do not feel like we can guarantee their happiness in the world we are entering) we love children and derive great joy from nurturing our friend's kids. They are basically our kids in the sense that we would likely die for them, and they can come to us for the rest of our natural lives for help, support, and love. So please don't take this as some kind of indictment of having children. It's just an important facet of the process that goes a little unnoticed. By taking care of our friend's kids instead of having our own, we can have a positive impact on the future environment. At the end of the day, if we brought kids into this world and they were unhappy, hurt, or in any way weren't doing great, it would hurt us too much, so we don't, but do our best to help others. And given how things are going, it feels like the odds are too high of said children having negative outcomes. Taima fucked around with this message at 19:10 on Jan 14, 2023 |
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Jan 14, 2023 19:01
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Wendigee posted:So tell me about your air stewardess wife OP She rocks, best friend and beard back when I thought I was gay, somehow even better now. Absolute unit. Probably quite literally saved my life. Little slugs yelling and pissing themselves who happen to look like a perfect combo of us was the icing on the cake. The only people I love more are our twins!
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Jan 14, 2023 19:05
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i can poo poo my own pants i don't need kids to do it
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Jan 14, 2023 19:08
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My kid was not planned. I wanted an abortion. My ex had stopped taking the birth control I had been in the habit of taking her to planned parenthood to get. She didnt work or have a car. She stopped taking the birth control without telling me. I guess she knew I was going to break up with her and wanted to make a reason for me to stay. Everyone knows adding a kid into the mix is never a good idea. I tried to stick it and just suck it up. It really sucked being with someone that cheated and was emotionally abusive. I wasn't a good guy. I was pretty checked out of the relationship by that point and I justdevoted my time between my two jobs to my son. When I finally had enough and I was kicking her out she called the cops on me. I had to leave the house for the night. She took my kid because she knew I wanted my son. She took my kid in the middle of the night with her mom. Lied about me in court. Couldn't get time off work to make all court dates. Fell off hard. Ten years later I finally got back in my sons life and made amends with my ex Now I get my son over the summer and christmas and birthdays and whatnot. Its what I look forward. We talk all the time. Being a dad is the best thing I have ever been. I guess what I am trying to say is I never wanted kids before because I was an addict and I knew I wasnt ready...but being a dad softened my heart and helped me heal from some of the really difficult things I saw, did, and and had done to me while I was a junkie. It is the best thing that ever happened in my life.
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Jan 14, 2023 20:21
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Another thing that is occasionally looked over is that lovely parents can create kids who are happy with their lives and amazing parents can create lives that might not be worth living (as difficult/impossible a question as that may be). A life of flourishing might begin, but certainly doesn’t end, with parenting. One of my close friends has a load of trauma related to his parents, but managed to find joy, peace, and meaning in other friendships (including adult mentors), hobbies/interests, and career. Despite harrowing memories of his parents and upbringing he would say he is very glad to be alive. Conversely, family friends of mine who are some of the nicest, most intelligent and emotionally stable people I’ve ever met gave birth to a child who ended up terminally ill and in chronic pain from a young age. His life was chronic pain and, as I understand it, once he was old enough to comprehend his situation, lots of mental anguish, fear, and sadness before he passed away. It’s possible his life wasn’t “worth living”. Not sure where I’m going with this. I don’t think I’d be a particularly great parent, but even if I was, the thought of bringing a child into the world who then had a life of pain/suffering despite my best efforts would be a source of a lot of dread before I made the decision. Short of cases of involving contemplated abortion, do most biological parents consider the risk of creating a “bad” life and roll the dice any way? Or is it mentally discounted/ignored (again maybe for evolutionary biology reasons).
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Jan 15, 2023 14:35
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ManBoyChef posted:My kid was not planned. I wanted an abortion. My.wife is a junkie and won't stop lying, cheating and stealing and i still love her and try to get her to go to rehab but I'm also getting pretty close to divorcing her. What really pushes me over the edge towards divorce is knowing we dont have kids yet and knowing how little I trust her to handle a child well long term.
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Jan 15, 2023 15:22
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It fixes every single one of your mental health problems for a limited period of time.
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Jan 15, 2023 15:24
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Taima posted:As far as we can discern, humans forget the hard parts of parenting. It's not a bad thing; it's a necessary thing. It's common for women to forget exactly how hard childbirth was, for example. This is broadly true of everything though, our brains are just wired that way. I appreciate the thoughtful response and I think that you and I experience the world in related, and overlapping, but also very different ways. Going into her second childbirth IIRC my wife said something like "well at least I know how much this is likely to insanely loving suck this time!!" quote:Something that is true of most parents is they will say something along the lines of "My life was poo poo all week and my kid was a mess but then he called me daddy and hugged me and it was all worth it" I never say poo poo like this and it's the most  poo poo to me when I hear it. If my life is poo poo all week and my kid is a mess, then that sucks and means I had a lovely week. My kids basically always hug me and call me daddy. It feels nice, sure. It feels a lot nicer on a day when "my life has been awesome, and kids and us are really getting along!" -- so, being hugged by a kid who loves me is universally nice but also does absolutely jack poo poo to mentally "compensate" for whatever the drudgery of the time is.Existing in any other way would force me to compromise the barely-existent self-awareness that I so desperately claw to maintain, gently caress that, personally. quote:Let's forget about the context of parenting for a second. You don't have to bring children into the equation to understand how that mechanism works; For example, I've had the privilege to travel around the world. But if you asked me what the best trips were, they absolutely were not the trips where everything went perfect. On the contrary, the best trips in hindsight were the ones where I was totally loving miserable. quote:And of course people are wired differently and this applies to a majority of people, not all. While my wife and I do not want children (or more concisely, do not feel like we can guarantee their happiness in the world we are entering We absolutely didn't think we could guarantee even our kids basic survival for the first 2 weeks of life, because we're not gods. That's an impossible standard. At no point in history could anyone possibly have honestly thought they could guarantee the happiness or survival of their offspring, and, even though the thermodynmic dice are pretty strongly loaded against us and poo poo seems certain to slide over the next 10-50 years, in fact, from the sheer perspective of "how likely is my child to survive past adolescence", "how likely is my child to have regular access to food until they are an adult", etc, we're actually still beating out most historical norms. (Again, for the moment. I do not expect the same to be true for our kids, should they end up in a position to parse that decision tree). Halisnacks posted:Short of cases of involving contemplated abortion, do most biological parents consider the risk of creating a “bad” life and roll the dice any way? Or is it mentally discounted/ignored (again maybe for evolutionary biology reasons). I think you have to be dumb or clueless not to. I know my wife and I both had "something horribly wrong with baby!" nightmares before and after the births of both of our kids and also you're never really off the hook because your kid can start to exhibit schizophrenia or get hit by a car any loving day. Interact with enough parents and you will hear some awful stories of personal tragedy. That loving "kid hit by car driven by amphetamine junkie" scene in Twin Peaks: The Return haunts me. For me, this gets back to my basic premise: people discuss and consider these things but actually those conversations seem to me to have little to do with whether or not people have kids. We wanted to, so, we had those conversations, accepted those risks, and moved forward. Suspect people who don't want to have kids will parse the same data sets and see it as supporting their decisions. Ultimately it's a tremendously strongly biological drive for some people, the percentage of the population that feels that way at any given moment may well shift based on perceived resource availability etc, as we've seen in animal models. Put differently, I my own belief is that many people who are really hand-wringing over "uncertainty" or any other thing as a reason not to have children, on some level do not want to and are trying to reconcile that against the crushing cultural pressure in some demographics / families to "come on, have kids, be normal, normal people have kids, don't you wanna be normal?" I still have no opinions on if a person should have a kid, but, another person should definitely not be exerting that kind of pressure, it's hosed up. Ape Fist posted:It fixes every single one of your mental health problems for a limited period of time. Really? I just got another diagnosis and stronger tinnitus meds almost instantly after having the first one  I guess there was a 4 week honeymoon of being too amazed at tiny creature / hallucinating from sleep dep to notice my own existential pain but that's not really a fix or even duct tape it's just being distracte Cabbages and VHS fucked around with this message at 15:43 on Jan 15, 2023 |
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Jan 15, 2023 15:38
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Ask p much any parent if they'd have kids again if they were forced to go back and do it all over again knowing that they definitely wouldn't get the same kids as last time. Out of all the people I've asked I've only gotten a single yes. Edit: that's not counting super religious weirdos.
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Jan 15, 2023 15:56
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Cabbages and Kings posted:I appreciate the thoughtful response and I think that you and I experience the world in related, and overlapping, but also very different ways. Going into her second childbirth IIRC my wife said something like "well at least I know how much this is likely to insanely loving suck this time!!" My kid rules tho
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Jan 15, 2023 16:16
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I got tired of making up guys to get mad at on the internet and decided to make a guy to get mad at irl.
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Jan 15, 2023 16:17
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thunderdome winner
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Jan 15, 2023 16:44
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Ape Fist posted:It fixes every single one of your mental health problems for a limited period of time. I know it didn't for my mom, made it worse in fact
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Jan 15, 2023 16:53
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The other thing about kids that astonishes me regarding my parents is that they had me and my brother when they were about 30 (that's not the astonishing part). I was a triplet! We were 2 and a half months premature. I weighed 2 pounds, 3 ounces. My third brother died after 9 days. There were simply too many things going on with him. My second brother had a BRAIN BLEED and so they installed a shunt to redirect the blood flow. Because of this, he developed cerebral palsy. Some might know that cerebral palsy is a sliding scale - someone could have it and you wouldn't know. In my brother's case, it profoundly affected his legs and his right arm is curled up and weakened. It also affected him mentally. And so I think about my parents in their 30s having a child with special needs. I certainly thought about it when *I* was in my early 30s. Having a kid with special needs would have completely rerouted my entire life (or having a kid in general, even). Also, my mom was an active alcoholic at the time. The doctors said my brother would never walk without the assistance of a walker (the thing with the two tennis balls on front). My parents went to a different therapist and my brother was soon walking without assistance. My mom got sober when we were 6 and started a camp for kids with special needs and their families, and it's still going strong. My brother lives by himself, happily, with minor assistance. I say all of this because it really humanized my parents. That's incredibly impressive. What did I do in my early 30s? Drank, mostly. I wasn't ready for kids then. I don't even know if I am now. But I think of my folks having that whole situation happen to them and it's astonishing. But my posts in here feel to me like an almost out-loud grieving process and made me realize maybe how much I do want kids... and how scary it is that that ship simply might have sailed.
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Jan 15, 2023 17:14
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Big Scary Owl posted:I know it didn't for my mom, made it worse in fact Understand the limited period of time is during usage. In the long run it obviously does the exact opposite.
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Jan 15, 2023 18:00
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Ape Fist posted:Understand the limited period of time is during usage. In the long run it obviously does the exact opposite. Yeah I meant right after birth up until I was a teenager, she's better nowadays but only thanks to copious amounts of therapy and medication.
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Jan 15, 2023 18:16
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having kids is good. But you really gotta mean it
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Jan 15, 2023 18:19
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Having kids in the US kinda sucks bc you get very little support from the state. It would be sweet if one parent could stay home and manage the household but instead both have to work full time+ and you have to pay for daycare/nannies/babysitters. it's super expensive too. Plus its daunting to consider the constant downward trajectory in QOL since like 20-30 years now it's still very rewarding but goddamn they dont make it easy for us
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Jan 15, 2023 18:19
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For some reason I thought I was posting in the heroin thread. I now realise this is the children thread. I am Father of 3. Having children has massively ruined my mental health, which by extension has probably not helped my physical health. If given the choice to have kids again I absolutely would not. None of this is worth it. None of it. I appreciate some people enjoy their kids. I love mine, but I do not enjoy them and I literally never have. Luckily I can provide them a relative middle class lifestyle because I make a lot of money, but yeah. Don't have kids.
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Jan 15, 2023 18:35
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Ape Fist posted:For some reason I thought I was posting in the heroin thread. big LOL 
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Jan 15, 2023 18:39
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Two experiences I assume could not be more opposed.
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Jan 15, 2023 18:41
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wilfredmerriweathr posted:My.wife is a junkie and won't stop lying, cheating and stealing and i still love her and try to get her to go to rehab but I'm also getting pretty close to divorcing her. Dude sever. you cannot get someone clean...they will ruin you before they ever do. Maybe if she gets clean on her own then you might end up in a better situation. Check out codependency. a good PDF is this. https://wakeuprecovery.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/the-truth-about-codependency.pdf the salient point is that the relationship becomes a caregiver/taker situation. in order to keep the ship righted and ensure life continues the caregiver is constantly giving of themselves. I hope it gets better for you. PM if you want to talk.
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Jan 15, 2023 18:54
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BIG-DICK-BUTT-gently caress posted:Having kids in the US kinda sucks bc you get very little support from the state. It would be sweet if one parent could stay home and manage the household but instead both have to work full time+ and you have to pay for daycare/nannies/babysitters. it's super expensive too. Plus its daunting to consider the constant downward trajectory in QOL since like 20-30 years now this is absolutely true. I didnt have health insurance and having a kid at a hospital is so freaking expensive in the states. FML. It took me forever to pay it off. Then I got sick.
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Jan 15, 2023 19:02
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