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Kids? A Growing Number of Americans Say, ‘No, Thanks.’
(www.nytimes.com)
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this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2024
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I have two kids. 7 and 3. Parenting is the hardest thing you will ever do.
I'm not unaccomplished, by any means, but I genuinely felt like I wasted my life before having a kid. We had our first at 36 and we're about to start trying for a 2nd at 38.
Which is to say, while it's hard, it's one of the only things worth doing in life. IMO, obviously.
(For the record, in our 20s we were the "no thanks" crowd, I changed in my 30s and my wife took an extra 6 years to come around)
Edit: lol love the downvotes for this benign comment. Lemmy is a dumpsterfire.
I decided at 30 to have kids. I wouldn't say I wasted my life before kids, I just wasn't ready yet. I still feel under prepared. I say that children is the hardest thing you will ever do, and I think that's the source of downvotes I'm getting. I'm not saying that there are not other things in life that are hard. If you choose not to have kids, you can still have hard things in your life.
However, if you do choose to have kids, that will be the hardest thing you do. Emotionally and physically hard. You lose any sort of regenerative sleep for 5 years. Fitness routine? Bye bye. Energy? Out the window. Oh, you enjoyed the relationship with your spouse? HAH! And then you take the emotional stuff into it, like mourning the loss of the human baby you grew to love and falling in love with the toddler the baby became. And then the cycle repeats again and again until one day they don't come back. It's a 20 year relationship that ends with a partial breakup.
Oh shit, do I have kids?
You might want to ask your doctor.
My kids are similar ages and I think non-parents assume we are insulting them we we state how difficult parenting is. It's an objective fact that having kids is hard, they make every activity at least twice as difficult.
For example. I had to travel for work recently. 12 hours of travelling total, including 4 hours in traffic. Because the kids weren't there, it was really easy.
Another example. My MS in engineering feels like it was nothing compared to the work I've put in for the almost 8 years our first has been alive.
Which seems like I'm making fun of people without kids for thinking normal life is easy. Nope, my perception is warped and everyone has their own perception of life's difficulties.
I'm gay and married. No kids, don't want them. I have nieces and nephews I can borrow for the day and then give them back.
Cool man. Not even close to the same thing.
That’s what he’s saying.
that in itself is a service to your family.
To raise a child with the correct moral characteristic takes time and input from many people. The saying “it takes a village to raise a child” is spot on.
Yeah and some of us are so far from families or even worst have unreliable off the rails families. Without proper support it will be a disaster.