Chasing your toddler for an hour is fun. Chasing your toddler day after day, hour after hour because you have no one else to help you might not be so fun.

There is distinct difference in the fun of raising children in a village where there are tons of other kids with low risk of cars so they can play outside freely, and raising children 24/7 because they cannot be left without supervision and there are few other kids on the street and the adults do not trust each other enough.

Just having functional grandparents or aunts/uncles to take them off your hands once in a while would probably make a big difference.

Exactly. It seems that most of the "childfree" arguments are based on this terrible modern, industrial, low-trust worldview that assumes that parents are solely responsible for their kids.

Unless both parents come from a really dysfunctional family, this should never be the case.

>Unless both parents come from a really dysfunctional family, this should never be the case.

Why? Many people immigrate away from their families for a variety of reasons other than them being “dysfunctional”. For example, economic opportunities.

I know a quite a few couples that moved from places with low economic opportunities to places with better opportunities, and one of the downsides is that they have to navigate parenting by themselves. It is a cost they are incurring to give their kids a higher probability of success when they grow up.

I'm from Brazil, my wife is from Greece. We are both living in Germany. So I'm well aware of what you are talking about.

Yet:

> one of the downsides is that they have to navigate parenting by themselves.

That's not true. Our families may be away most of the time, but we have a constant rotation of our parents (and my wife's Giagia) and coming to stay with us. When our second kid was born, I don't think we were by ourselves for the first six months. Even today, we get someone visiting us at least every other month.

> kids a higher probability of success when they grow up.

This is increasingly becoming something we are asking ourselves. I think our kids would benefit more from being able to grow up close to their families than in a place with a culture and values that we don't really share. For us (and me specially) living in Germany has been more of a "tolerable" than a "desirable" situation. With remote work becoming a reality, I think we can have our cake and eat it too.

>That's not true. Our families may be away most of the time, but we have a constant rotation of our parents (and my wife's Giagia) coming to stay with us. When our second kid was born, I don't think we were by ourselves for the first six months. Even today, we get someone visiting us at least every other month.

That is not possible for many others.

Then the question is why? What is dysfunctional about their lives that makes it impossible?

I would guess money is a frequent issue, plus visa and other family obligations such as other siblings great grandparents. Health issues too since grandparents are older than in previous times.

None of those qualify as dysfunction in my book.

Apologies in the advance for the (slight) moving of the goal posts, but to me the problems you mention do point out to very dysfunctional aspects of modern life and the common family structures:

- "Older grandparents" is a sign that people are waiting too much to have their own kids.

- "Other family obligations", like what... Work? Perhaps we should rethink our globalized, modern economy that makes dual-income families a necessity. I really hope that by the time my kids get to have their kids, my wife and I are in condition to dedicate ourselves to help them as much as our own parents helped us.

- "Visa issues" is mostly an American thing, which unfortunately I also I am very familiar with (lived in the US before coming to Germany). The US is only going to solve the Milton Friedman dilemma: it can be either a country of Open Borders, or it can be a Welfare State. Until it tries to be both, it is doomed to these catastrophic policies.

Yeah Brazil at least has Mercosur. It's pretty crazy North America doesn't have something similar considering capital can mostly freely flow between NAFTA countries.

Why do you assume "dysfunctional"? Flying costs money. Having apartment big enough to accommodate 3 adults plus one or two kids costs money. Family members have to work too. There is no black and white here.

- The grandparents have jobs of their own with limited vacation time (maybe a US-specific problem, you say you are from Brazil)

- Does either side of the family have enough money to fund cross-country travel more than once a year for a week at a time?

You can fly from Greece to Germany for less than 50€ (Ryanair, Easyjet)

My parents are retired/semi-retired. When they come, it's usually during the summer (here)

The bit of advice I got from another parent before I had kids was golden: parents need time off the clock. Sometimes you need to hear your kid screeching about something and know it's someone else's problem. We don't have family around, so we give each other breaks on the weekend, usually one day where my spouse and I give each other half-day breaks. Idk what it's going to be like when he's older, but for now it works.

Same here. My wife likes to sleep in, I like to wake up early.

Our typical Saturday involves me and my son spending 7A-nap time together outside the house while my wife sleeps in, lounges around and does her hobbies.

When we get home, she’s totally refreshed.

Another thing we do sometimes is drop him at daycare and we take an afternoon off to do something together.

Works great for us. We don’t have any family within 3000 miles of us, so solutions were needed.

I’ve put in some effort to identify things my toddler and I can do together that we both enjoy. Here’s some in random order:

- go to beach, play in sand & swim in ocean, find other kids to play with

- go to woods, walk around and spot wildlife

- go to farmer’s market, try various foods/drinks, play with other kids

- go out for ice cream

- go to playground, play with other kids

- go out for some (light) off-roading, he loves the bumps

My son will be 3 next week.

Great list! For mine (2.5YO) I'll add:

- go to the library and pick out books

- go grocery shopping, discuss what foods we like/don't like, practice remembering something I'm supposed to get

- play with model trains and make up Thomas stories

- go to the aquarium store and talk about the fish

- go to the park (One time we stopped on the way for fast food and ate it at the park, which was fun, but it created an expectation for a while that there would always be chicken and fries at the park.)

There's just a lot of variation between people and families.

I would prefer hanging out with my children over doing most anything else. That comes down to who I am and who my children are, and probably other circumstances.

It's also worth recognizing that the early childhood years (0-3) can be difficult and super isolating. We had fun during that time, but it got way more fun as they got out of that age and became fully interactive.

Once toddler phase passes it does get better, I promise!

Until middle school (if you have a girl) then it’s hell for 3 years.

I would trade the young tween/teenage phase for the toddler phase every day.

As the downvotes for your comment shows, it isn't acceptable to express dislike for having children. With this in mind we ought to take all positive things people say with a grain of salt, since a lot of those things will be said to get social points and many people avoid complaining since it isn't acceptable.

Its like in discussions about exercise, if you just read discussions online you'd think that everyone loves to exercise, but most people really hate it or at least don't like it.

This entire post is people talking about not wanting children. Not wanting and not having children has been a way to signal group membership in the PMC class for decades now. Social media is full of people complaining about kids on airplanes, in restaurants etc.

I'm over it, and I'm over the PMC signaling in general. The happiest people I know enjoy things without irony, love their kids, and aren't afraid to look stupid. The most miserable detest children and only care about trends.

Well, if you grow up with abusive parents who were miserable and constantly depressed, you likely don't want kids to avoid going down the same route. But that sort of upbringing likely means you are miserable as well.

Happy people ought to have kids, since likely they will have happy kids. Unhappy kids ought to not have kids, since they will likely have unhappy kids, and would make themselves unhappier for it. How is this strange? Do you think that miserable people shouldn't be able to express their misery? do you think that hating those miserable people will help in any way?

>it isn't acceptable to express dislike for having children.

I've had childless friends who say the attitude is different because of the audience. They've indicated parents will openly admit to them their unhappiness when those same parents would never do so to another parent.