Regarding opting out, I get it, but I don't agree personally. Not having kids, can enable some pretty great lifestyles. But I do feel like you don't get a chance to understand what being a parent is all about. No amount of being a great aunt / uncle / whatever, gives you that feeling of needing to nurture or protect your child.
It forces you to change, maintain a good relationship w/ your partner, be a good role model, etc.
If I was do it again, I'd try to do it earlier.
Get a therapist for therapy, not a child.
> But I do feel like you don't get a chance to understand what being a parent is all about.
That's 100% accurate.
There's a pretty much infinite number of possible life experiences I'm not going to get to experience personally and will not have the time/money/ability to fit into my lifespan. The wishlist of things I'd love to do or experience someday continually grows longer - no matter how much I try to fit more of them into my life.
Taking on what amounts to a lifetime commitment and a massive investment of time and money for an experience that I have zero interest in and think I would actively dislike, seems like a terrible use of my finite resources.
> It forces you to change, maintain a good relationship w/ your partner, be a good role model, etc.
Perhaps it inspired you to do that. But the divorce rate and number of parents out there are terrible role models, suggest that it's not exactly the case for everyone.
I'll also suggest that people who don't have much interest in becoming parents are probably a whole lot more likely to wind up on the negative side of those possibilities should they wind up having children anyway.
If you consider maximizing your experience the best use of your resources, I suppose not.
This is a naive way to think about it. In the grand scheme of things, as TFA hints at, kids don't take up a significant portion of your life. If you're goal is to focus on striking off entries on a wishlist, there are many, many things that can be sacrificed to make room that don't involve children.
It's not as bad as you make it seem.
Lastly, I don't really care about experiences the way I did when I was younger. Going on a trip to an exotic locale doesn't really excite me as much as, say, taking a good picture of a friend or family member and sharing it. Or hearing a good story or joke.
Kids expand to fill the space in your life you make for them. I have more fun with my kids than possibly anyone else. I want to share experiences with them, not for myself.
Have you ever been excited when telling a friend about a cool spot they've never been to, and subsequently taking them there? Kids are like a revolving door of those opportunities. They start from scratch.
I’ve experienced what you described with my pup, but that’s because she is exactly the bond and the responsibility that fits my life. It revolves around her, every day, all the time. No amount of parenting a human would ever change that.
No, it doesn’t actually, as any kind of even approximately universal effect, force any of that, and even a casual look around at society would demonstrate that pretty clearly. It may or may not have motivated that in you – but plenty of people who would describe themselves as having those traits in their own relationships / parenting objectively don’t, so self-assessment is pretty clearly not a reliable gauge here. I would agree that there are people whose combination of innate personality, life experiences, etc., will lead them to actually be nudged in those directions by having children, but there are plenty who won’t be. And there are plenty of people who will be nudged in much more negative directions by the experience.
As a parent myself, it amazes me how many people who are parents are drawn into a bizarre evangelization of parenting as some kind of universally ideal vocation, with stories about the effect it will have that are trivially refutable by looking outside of one’s own internal narrative of their own experience with their own kids at the rest of the world around them.
As you say, the commitment is forever, whether we are present or not. For the movie Interstellar, one of the themes Nolan developed was that at some point we become our children’s memories. It probably happens around the 12 year old mark.
For all parents out there, be present, however you can.
For me, unconditional love was a youthful thing.
My parents are much less admirable now, as I have grown older.
My reasons are legion.
I don't wish them harm, but they are nothing like me.
>(From me toward my child)
Unfortunately, if you decide after all of this reflection that you don't want to have kids there is no need to worry, at least, about perpetuating the human race... because for every couple who conscientiously decides not to have kids it's, there are a half dozen more who don't give any thought to any of this whatsoever and proceed to have (often multiple) kids anyway.
You might have to update this [1]. People do care. People have an iphone now. People can read. The "tons of kids poppin" arguments don't hold. We will see a global wide population decrease soon.
https://econofact.org/the-mystery-of-the-declining-u-s-birth...
Because their lives are already overburdoned by the several other - somehow always toddler-age - children in tow with them. Lives frequently complicated by various degrees of substance abuse, leading to the NICU births. You would not be as comfortable googling some factoid response here.
Whatever the macro trend may be in terms of total birthrate, its the constitution of those births, in terms of quality of life, my post was referring to.
of course, i also have it easier since men can just remarry at 50 and still have kids. i have time. but it really makes me wonder if i ever want children. my parents think it's a great thing and i shouldn't be quite so worried but they have quite the case of survivorship bias, all their kids turned out well and so it is easy from their perspective on the other side.
the annoying part is all the girls i meet either know they want kids or know they don't. nobody my age should be quite that certain yet in either direction. makes dating a bitch beyond casual relationships ngl.
I could never understand how people are so easy to punish someone with life. Especially someone who they'll love unconditionally. I didn't like my life from the start despite it being fairly decent in objective terms.
When kids get older, they get a lot more "fun" and a lot less immediate work. I can take my eldest two out pretty much anywhere without a ton of effort, they are fun to hang out with, they can be trusted to be kind and respectful in adult spaces, and they'll invite me into kids spaces, etc.
But also, anything can happen. Anything can happen. Your kids could be born with lifelong conditions or issues. They could be healthy at young ages, but develop special conditions as they hit early childhood or late adolescence. They could struggle with lifestyle issues (violence, drugs, alcohol, crime, etc). You may just end up not liking them very much (you may end up wishing they were more like you, when they aren't), they may have hobbies that differ from you, they may choose careers you'd prefer not, they may choose religious views you disagree with, they may end up being LGBTQIA+ even if you aren't, and so on. We have one child who is at high risk of never developing cognitively enough to safely live on their own as an adult -- anything can happen.
Having a child is a literal forever commitment -- even more so than any marriage is -- to love and care for a person that might not even exist yet, no matter who they end up being. Be absolutely ready to make a literal lifetime commitment to love and care for this child as a fellow human, before deciding to have one.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with opting out of all of that, and spending your 20's, 30's or lifetime doing something else -- having a child is a huge responsibility, and not something anyone should ever get pressured into, or jump into capriciously.