I feel like this cartoon was drawn by someone who doesn't have kids. Or didn't want them but got them.
Be fulfilled without kids or with them. Don't be fulfilled by judging those who have chosen different from you.
The best birth control is other people's children.
I gotta say, it's been the exact opposite for me.
One couple has kids, and everyone passes around the baby making cooing faces. Six months later, half the block is pregnant.
Add in that there's this reflexive desire in a big community of like-aged friends/family for our kids to be friends, too. My wife has eight or nine different cousins who are all her age. And we all had kids within a year or two of one another.
I used to agree but my hormones tell me otherwise.
when I see a cute baby smile at me, its like a sims moodlet. "I need one of those. Why dont I have one of those". After 24 ish hours I remember babysitting and caring for my sibling and cousin, and quickly go back to normal. 30 and childless.
Real talk. I said the exact same thing and didn't plan to have kids. My wife and I didn't have kids until she was 36.
Babysitting a cousin is not the same as parenting your own kin. It's completely different.
Depends heavily on how indepth that "babysitting is". When that Abby sitting involves cooking two meals a day for them, taking them two and from school, changing their diapers at 3am and taking them to the doctor.
All because their parents are too drunk and at the bar instead of home... Well
I fucking babysat my cousins and it was more raising them then anything their parents did
Honestly as a father I agree that being a parent is the hardest thing I've done in my life but, I'm also so fucking tired of the "it's hell" joke.
My older dughter is now a teenager with all the trouble that entails and the selfishness she has but still there are no words to describe how much she helps when needed, how hard of a pilar she is to me, how caring and loving she is....
Oh wait there is one...
Family
Humans were never meant to take care of babies as couples or alone.
Research suggests that given the tradeoffs of our evolutionary path, we had to shift towards a collective parenting (call it tribe, clan, extended family, etc.)
The modern "individualization" of the person is what has convinced us that such parenting form is "normal" and bearable, and that if you feel overwhelmed, there is something wrong with you.
Parent of 1.5y here.
Without grandparents in picture I would go crazy.
I only sacrificed sleep a bit in the first 3 years until both my kids were sleeping through the night. In no time they are school age, then off to university. The people I often see represented by the women in the comic are those who are married to their jobs, not parents. If you don't want kids, fine, don't have them but many parents think their kids are one of the best parts of their lives. Things that are the most worthwhile in your life often take a bit of work or challenge.
Father for 12 years here, never have I ever said anything even remotely close of this sort to any my non kids / single friends, is it an American thing?
It's a self-marketing/preservation thing.
When the kids are infants, the parents are sleep deprived and miserable at times, we they get such a seretonin boost from the baby factor so they don't kill them (yay evolution). They advocate for others to have kids because it feels so great.
When they hit their slightly difficult years, that seretonin boost starts to drop, work/life balance becomes harder, financial hardship starts to hit as they need to feed them more and provide them outside activities. They still take pride in their kids, but need to tell everyone how awesome it is, but they especially need to tell themselves.
When they hit their teens, they're now providing adult prices for things. Cars, Insurance. There's little money left and little disillusion. If they had the kids late in life, their earning potential will end up dropping just as the kids leave home making bucket list plans harder to reach.
It's worse in the US because we have shitty work/life balance and almost total lack of public transportation / affordable heathcare.
The childless fare better and live more comfortably.
And we wonder why populations are in decline.
American father here. Not as far as I know. I tell folks don't have kids unless you're 100% sure. Even then, get a pet first. I love my kid. But boy, do I sure believe folks should get all sorts of tests before they decide now.
Kids are hard man, especially if you didn't have a good example growing up.
it helps to be enslaved to a system that forces you to spend an average of 8 hours a day working only to be classified as part time while getting no health benefits whatsoever despite there being essentially no government healthcare
*I'm including excessive commute and non-paid work as "working"
Maybe it's cause they don't get as much time off work to care for their kids as Europeans do?
I’ve heard similar from people, usually the “you’ll change your mind when you find the right person”. I am from the US.
The worst was a conversation I had with coworkers. I mentioned I didn’t want kids because it would be really hard on my body to be pregnant after a near fatal car crash (back broken and lost a major organ). One gal said she thinks all women should have a baby. So I said, if I change my mind I can always adopt. She said “I think all women should have their own baby, it makes you a real woman. Adopting isn’t the same as having your own, there is not the same level of love there”. Worst part, she said this in front of another coworker who was adopted from a not great situation into a very loving and supportive family.
She was a misogynistic asshat about other things too.
Wow, that's just messed up, never really understood why people don't just mind their own business, even if you 100% in great health and decided to not have kids, it's absolutely still your own decision...why should you or anyone if that matters be judged for it.
As a parent of two I really enjoy talking about this. It's such a complex, nuanced topic. Yeah you sacrifice a lot, sleep, time, sanity, but you kinda unlock a whole new level of your life, in your mind. I wouldn't want to change it back, ever.
Just yesterday I read about cultural neoteny. Our society is so safe, that people don't have to mentally mature to full grown adults anymore. No famine, no war, no oppression, no violence to deal with (yet). We can stay teenagers forever, being unable to deal with criticism, lacking resilience, unwilling to take responsibilities, cultivating out sensitivities that then clash with other peoples sensitivity.
Again, this is not the place for a long conversations, but I can't help but feel that the constant joke "look at those stupid parents giving up their lifes" may be a part of that. There is some truth to it though. I am a little burned out, I may have dropped some life goals along the way. But then again, what's the purpose of being alive?
I don't have kids but I still like to wonder about where planes are going
where planes are going
Another one that's not corporate, and doesn't remove planes when someone pays a fee.
ADSB exchange is the go-to
Now is my chance to share a useless fun fact! If there is a V-22 Osprey on the map the icon will change from helicopter mode to plane mode depending on airspeed
Some people get easy babys.
And then there are the people who get to be parents of ever-screaming high energy high need children.
Then there are the ones who have an easy baby, wonder what all the fuss is about, and then have a second which is a nightmare. Actual quote from friends of ours who had it that way round - "I understand what you were on about now."
I knew a couple that had four super easy babies in a row. Just delightful, sleeping through the night within a month of birth, no colic, easy like Sunday morning girls. So they went for one more. Had a boy that was the hardest baby in the world. Didn’t sleep through the night till 5, colic, had a nuclear reactors worth of energy in him. They said if that had been their first they never would have had a second.
You never know what you’re going to get. My daughter was ROUGH the first 9 months, hardest thing I’ve ever been through. But then it got a lot easier and every day was better. She’s 15 now and the coolest kid. We had planned to have a second but by the time we could even wrap our heads around it she could talk, so we asked her if she wanted a sibling. She thought about her two best friends, who are brother and sister and fought like mad, and said nah. I didn’t want to go through that first 9 months again so that was that. Really glad we did that, we’ve got such a great bond with the three of us.
Crazy to think someone would actually go "4 isn't enough, let's go for 5".
This was my mom. I luckily had my easy babies after the more screamy one, but my mom had 3 kids, said she was always so judgemental of parents with kids throwing tantrums in the store, she knew she was doing something right because we didn't do that, and in her words:
"For my hubris, God sent me Janet "
And she figured out that there are kids who scream in the store no matter what you do.
I know Lemmy is aggressively anti-child for some reason, but parenting was by far the best work I have ever done. Kids are work but such delightful little people.
Also my mom - I didn't remember her being affectionate with us, she did a good job of clothing, feeding, educating us but wasn't ever really, I dunno, Mom - like? I asked her about it once and she said "I don't like little kids " and I was like WTF you had so many kids! And she said "well I like you all NOW, I knew you would grow up and become people."
About to be 43 and more grateful every year that my partner and I are childfree. I like hanging out with my friend's kids occasionally, they can be funny tiny humans, but I hit a limit quickly and we invariably share a sigh of relief once we're in the car on our way home.
I'm also grateful that there are folks who love kids and are great, involved parents to them. I'm in awe of my friend's ability to be the mom she is and I appreciate her efforts to better the collective group of humanity by two. Even more grateful that I was free to make a different choice. It takes all kinds, ya know? And kids benefit from unofficial "aunties", I think.
I would be absolutely destroyed if I had dumb little copy of me that I was required to take care of.
I understand now why my dad was so distant and eventually went away.
Having an insane mother helps, too.
No shit. Raising kids is an act of love and sacrifice.
If you aren't willing to do this, do NOT have kids!
At least kids eventually leave, with pets you get to watch them slowly waste away and die in the most expensive ways possible.
One must understand that the hormones which motivate breeding instinct in social mammals override all other considerations on a neurochemical level when someone has a baby--if those hormones and emotional systems are working correctly.
(Sometimes they aren't, after all; everyone knows those statistical outlier individuals who stick out like a sore thumb for having no parental instincts.)
If a common-sense-overriding mechanism were not in place to drive reproduction, a species will go extinct.
Being a parent is the best. You wouldn't understand.
Offtopic, but after reading these comments, I'm so glad I first opened Lemmy today rather than Reddit. Thoughtful, varied discussion, instead of sifting through a ton of samey "joke" comments to maybe (if ever) find some nugget of humanistic or original thought, or get bored, doomscrolling and lose hope in humanity.
I just love this community, thank you all for being here.
"I had no children. I haven’t transmitted the legacy of our misery to any creature"— Machado de Assis (1881)
Having a kid will fill that void inside you of "wtf am I doing with my life". At least for me it did, purpose and responsibility made me happy.
I didn't really want kids, but my wife did, so we compromised and had 6.
Jokes aside I found it super fulfilling, I had struggled a lot with depression and feeling like everything was pointless, but raising kids gives me a purpose and makes mudane stuff like work feel meaningful. I definitely get what the comic is talking about, it's rough a lot of the time, but it was what I unexpectedly needed in my life.
I would recommend reading the Baby decision to people. It's a very open minded examination, despite what the title might implicate also very open and supportive for childless/childfree mindset. Even touches topics like, just because you like kids, doesn't mean you have to have them, you can teach, volunteer for after school activities, etc.
I think the single most important take away from it is that whether you decide to have kid(s) or not, you give something up.
You also have to go into it responsibly and it's also okay to reevaluate as you go along, e.g. just because you wanted 3 kids before getting married, doesn't mean you can't take a moment to reevaluate after the first if you still want that.
Doesn't Ruth know you can reuse the same glass instead of getting a new glass every time you want more wine
Yeah, but that makes it much more difficult for the artist to show you shes drunk.
Nuclear families are intentionally isolating because it makes women and children more vulnerable.
Meh, there’s enough of a biological drive to have children there’s no need to pressure people into it socially. It’s condescending to assume someone else will follow your same “growth” trajectory.
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