1. You will still want to be spending overwhelming majority of your time on children in 1, 2, 5, 10 years at least and will be enjoying it.
2. You are in a position to be consistently spending enough time and effort and other resources on them.
3. You are very confident you will be able to be a good parent, and that you are bringing new life into a good environment that both you and them will enjoy.
You need to be in a very good, stable place both physically and mentally for sure before you even consider it.
There are definitely bad times. But many of the things you mention contradict each other?
Can I afford children? Get a well paying job. Well paying jobs require more hours. That means you have less time to dedicate to your kids.
Realistically, unless you have at least $500,000 saved up, you’re taking a financial gamble having kids.
If they have serious medical issues, any amount of money could be wiped out.
I’d argue there are probably too many people who should be having kids not having kids, than people who shouldn’t be having kids having kids.
Both are obviously happening. And in probably biased because I know so many childless software engineers who make six figures.
But there really, really never is a good time.
Now, there is a difference between just getting cold feet and it actually never being a good time. For example, if you had a choice to sit an exam when ready, you could be tempted to always postpone it another week, because there is always more studying you could do. But realistically, at some point you are actually, objectively ready and should go for it.
So of course you need to consider that one of you will have to become a stay at home parent, or you will need to hire someone to do so instead. That may mean you would need to significantly cut your other expenses, have a much longer commute, live in much worse/smaller accommodation etc. Of course you need to consider if your neighborhood is child-friendly, so that your child can play outside and socialize with other children. If you are planning to involve your relatives, of course you need to first get their informed consent.
Having children is a decision and a choice. You are not forced into it. And it is a choice that must be made responsibly.
I would also argue that plenty of people that go for children who are not ready for it don't make it just fine. More importantly, their children, that didn't ask for any of it, end up suffering because of their mistakes. Plenty of people have psychological issues of various degrees because of poor parenting. 15% of families in the UK are lone parent families! By age 12 a staggering 40% (!) of children are not living with both birth parents! [1] And these figures are almost twice as bad for low-income families. And out of the children that do live with both birth parents, 11-28% of the parents report an unhappy relationship. That is the catastrophe.
Humans have this strange blindspot where they tend to be irrational and irresponsible about the decision to procreate. Previous generations did not have much of a choice because of lack of available contraception, lack of knowledge. Our generation has no excuse.
[1] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
Secondly, I don’t think your data on single parent families really disproves anything, specifically because that data is highly confounded by drug addicts, high school dropouts, unwed couples, accidental pregnancies, and dozens of other factors. If we’re to reason in good faith, the advice I and others are advocating for is that you don’t need to be a homeowner with a 200k+ salary, although of course you should be a reasonably mature, employed adult with a mature partner.
I think it’s in poor faith as well to reduce this to “if you feel a need to have children, you’re irrational and still stuck in go-forth-and-multiply mode”. But, again, this is not an issue anyone can find common ground over with reason or data (which you can find to support any conclusion), and I expect the HN crowd falls on a particular side of this on average, so I won’t argue further.
The problem is the transition to this lower population. You’d have a period of 40/50 years where older people severely outnumber those who are relatively young, leading to massive increase in per capita healthcare expenditures coupled with a decrease in productivity. So no, at least bot in our lifetimes.
I mentioned it off-hand to an ex-girlfriend and was called a sexist (not in an angry/confrontational way, but pretty much dismissed equally off-hand).
This information is the first result when you Google "fertility by age" [0].
This should be mentioned more often, not to be sexist, but so everyone has the complete information, it's way more cruel to allow people to be deluded until their forties just for them to realize one day they can't have children.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_and_female_fertility
> While many sources suggest a more dramatic drop at around 35, this is unclear since few studies have been conducted since the nineteenth century. One 2004 study of European women found fertility of the 27–34 and the 35–39 groups had only a four-percent difference.
From the article:
> Women who become pregnant after age 35 are at increased risk for complications that affect the parent and fetus.
Having 50% less people would reduce the overall hunger numbers, but not the ratio.
This argument is flawed because of the we're consuming significantly more resources then our planet could provide sustainably.
Increasing the quantity of consumers will always be detrimental for as long as resources are finite.
That is not true of everyone. Billions live on/with very little, sustainably.
Generally speaking, logistics have huge economies of scale (see Amazon) so an increase in market size will reduce the logistics cost per each item of food. Especially, for cold perishable dairy foodstuffs like dairy the cold chain costs may well dominate the costs of cows.
And don’t forget minimizing waste - which is another major part of the picture.
I spent a lot of time wanting things to be perfect, but realized that there's never a perfect time. Other parents and prospective parents I know have said similar things.
Having kids is always a gamble, whether you've got a perfect life or not. You do have to decide if you're ready to shoulder the challenge, and don't force it if you're not, but if you're waiting for external factors to be just right you're probably wasting your time.
"Do not have children" probably isn't going to resonate with anyone. If someone wants that experience for their life it's going to be hard to dissuade, and who are you to make that decision? Should only the rich have children? only the fit? only the wise?
There are other ways to experience the joys of parenthood, especially given that most parents seem to look for any way they can find to offload such joys for some reason. Offer to look after your nieces and nephews for a time, for example. Run a volunteer daycare.
If you are not willing or able to be a good driver, you should not drive. If you are not willing or able to be a good parent, do not have children. Do think about the decision very, very carefully - the stakes are very high. If you don't end up having children - well, at least you didn't end up causing others any harm.
But I understand what you are saying - you should also recognize the situation where you are, in fact, ready. It's like being able to choose when to sit an exam - there is always another week you can spend studying, and at some point you have to decide you are ready once you are in fact reasonably prepared.
Kids from much older parents (40+) are also almost completely weird.
My experience is that kids from older parents are wise beyond their years, and tend to be far more well-adjusted adults.
They are, in every quantitative and qualitative measure, far more well-adjusted than the poor children, like yours, who had no choice but to grow up with literal children as parents.
(Or maybe we shouldn’t generalize like this…?)
The weirdness comes from the social disparity and disconnectedness from peers their own age due to different social attitudes from parents.
The generalisation comes from the observation that older parents tend to lead to less progressive attitudes.
The weirdness is in your head, mate. (Although the generalization is your responsibility.)
I mean, people like you, i.e. people who become parents at a relatively young age, literally have their brain chemistry altered to protect their offspring, WAY before you have actually experienced life as an adult.
I could make grand speculative declarations about your children based on this, but I actually realize it’s meaningless, so I won’t.
Do you have any links or terms to Google to support this? On one hand it sounds reasonable. But on the other hand for the entirety of human history up until the last several decades what you think of as "relatively young" would have been completely normal or even unusally old. So it wouldn't make sense evolutionarily for that to be disadvantageous.
Disclaimer: had kids young and I think people that want kids and are emotionally mature enough to handle the challenge with a similarly minded partner should not wait and do it young. What is a definition of "ready for kids" that wouldn't cause 99% of people in the world to never have the opportunity to have kids.
1) What demographics are these older parents in? Are they basically baby boomers or Gen X having kids late? Milennials are approaching 40 years old, so they could potentially be more chill as first time parents perhaps or not.
2) If both parents are old, then I could see the mother potentially feeling overprotective, feeling like all her eggs are in one basket so to speak. I'd kind of think that an older father would probably be more chill.
In 2006 I worked with a software developer that was 50 years old and was equally new to Ruby on Rails and also had his first baby on the way. He was chill and young at heart.
By what measure? I was 42 and my wife was 40 when we had our daughter who is now 13 and headed off to full time pre conservatory program in violin next year. Well adjusted, sensitive and empathic, I can’t think of any way in which she’s ‘weird’ Certainly not by any conventional definitions of the word.
I'd say that's an unfortunately rare outcome.
Perhaps even a "weird" one.
Yeah, I love you too.
If you want kids, just have the kids. You're not going to care that you were being responsible and waiting when you find out waiting means you never get to have them.