Friends who have babies

Yeah. Not having retired family in hood health nearby is an issue. Someone had to move for their career. Or died. Or is too fragile. Or still working.

Nearly need polygamy for the economic certainty.

It's really straightforward to understand, there's no "third places" for kids and kids are generally undesired in US society. It used to be, even if you weren't religious, you had community because everyone in the neighborhood looked out for each other's kids.

It's a lot easier when you're not outnumbered by kids and can swap with other adults, even if it's 30 minutes to get a shower. Everyone is so isolated these days, it's much more difficult to build support like that unless you are religious or have family involvement.

I'm definitely not having kids for this reason, and many more. I'm doing I'd say okay right now. I'm stable ish. Why would I want to change that at all? I see my peers having kids and immediately they can't afford to even go out to eat, and don't have time to get a beer once every 4 months. They chose that, I don't hold them against it, but why would I risk where I am for that?

One big one is that today's parents put too much pressure on themselves (both individually and as a group) to always be supervising. Some parents don't feel that they can leave their child alone for 30 minutes while they shower or clean, or watch TV, because we've built up expectations that everything is structured and that we're supposed to sacrifice our individuality for the kid. Some recent research has shown that millennial parents are spending a lot more "hands on" time with their kids than any previous generation, rather than passive supervision like when kids are playing in the house while the adults do something else.

Plus there is a significant line of people who feel compelled to do high effort, high visibility shows of parenting effort: Instagram worthy birthday parties, more structured play and learning, high effort cooking of things from scratch rather than convenience foods, etc.

Finances (and working hours) are definitely a big part of it, but a bigger part is the shift in norms and expectations that we're expected to be much more for our kids than prior generations.

I have twins.

Can confirm. totally accurate

While they are <5 years old yea

But let me tell you, once you cross that magical school threshold things get significantly easier. Though you'll have to deal with more and more social type problems, but those are easy IMO as it's mostly just talking with them

Each year after that is easier...at least until the teen years, but again that's more social/attitude type problems, at least you can just leave a 15 year old at home by themselves and go socialize by yourself and stuff

It definitely can. It took me 5 years after my kids were born to feel relatively normal again. 5 years is a long time to feel like you're essentially trapped in your home. Granted, covid certainly didn't help with that, but the pressure to act like everything is amazing all the time never made sense to me.

Kids are hard. There's good moments too but as a percentage of your time they are more rare than the bad. Your brain does a good job of filtering out the bad when you look back on those times but that doesn't make it easier to deal with in the moment.

It's not that easy. Things change.

I am happy to have made the decision. However, I might have decided totally differently if I had known back then:

How badly the environment is going south (for humans) How bad my health would be (most critical things came up suddenly)

Among other things.

The urge to cum inside is the siren song of many

Sounds like a kind of crazy blanket statement for actual researchers to make but then again sociology research.. well..

According to this study, after adjusting for income, having children is actually associated with higher happiness and well-being.

From a Psychology Today article that summarizes it:

However, household income may not be a good indicator of financial stress. A family with low income that lives in an area with a low cost of living might experience less financial stress than a family with a higher income that lives in an area with a much higher cost of living. Therefore, the researchers conducted an additional analysis in which they included a direct measure of whether or not the family experienced difficulties in paying bills in the last year. This analysis showed that difficulties in paying bills represented a central influence factor for the relation of having children and parental well-being. When the researchers statistically controlled for financial difficulties, having children was actually related to greater well-being in parents.

The study also said that people with children felt more fulfilled over all 🤷‍♀️

They measured basically immediate happiness and long term happiness. In immediate happiness, the child free group won. In longterm happiness, the parents won. Did a lot of research into that before deciding to have a baby.

Just gotta decide what works best for you and your life style

You can add 1 more to their sample size that confirms this to be true.

They didn't poll occupants of nursing homes?

It is because people are different.

Not living in the USA most definitely helps. The age of your kids makes a difference. My youngest is 16 months old and in his phase where he has no awareness of danger and sleeps like shit still and my gas tank is empty 24/7 by the shitty quality of sleep with the constant mental energy spent making sure he doesn't kill himself. And that is when everyone is healthy.

I would litterally kill for them, but it is easy to understand why people feel like they do, especially with the current economic and societal context.

Do you work more than 12 hours to make a basic income? I think that'd be a large difference between wherever you are and the US.

Same. Of course there are sacrifices but I still enjoy my life and can do things. Work is what saps me the most and I love my job.

Do you still get to go places? I think the person in the comic used to travel a lot

There are sacrifices, but I don't feel like I've given up my life.

Yeah, I think one has to think about carefully first before having kids, and be prepared what they have to sacrifice. Raising a child is not easy.

I think what this post is portraying is regret that they haven't expected on what sacrifices they have to make to take care of a child. A lot of people want to get married and/or have kids just for the sake of it, because that is what society expect them to do.

It's definitely partly not being in the US. Economically... it's just really rough. Childcare for our one kid is nearly as much as our monthly mortgage. We make decent money but still have only enough savings to survive 2, maybe 3 months without income.

I still have plenty of hobbies, but like, because finances are tight, we only have one car in a very very car dependent area. There's simply no public transit where I live. So all of my hobbies have to be at home, or after when my kid goes to bed, which is usually close to 9:30pm, leaving an hour, maybe two, for time to myself during the week.

Really depends on your support network, and that's not USA specific. If you have help and your kid is easy going, then life can be a lot easier than if you have no help and your kid is challenging. Help can takeany forms, so yes childcare in USA is expensive and hard to come by, but involved family can help a lot regardless of where you live.

curious if you have somewhere/someone you can trust the toddler with while you do those hobbies.

I found that having a support network (either personal through friends family, or socialized through the government) has a big effect on how miserable parents are early on.

My kid didn't sleep through more than a few hours until she was around 2yo but I'd already had my 2nd when she was 20 months and he didn't sleep through until he was around 2 also. Plus I had 2 c-sections to get over and we moved country. I don't care about sacrificing an old social life but my health and fitness took a massive hit.

I don't live in the USA either, good benefits here.

Same here. Some of the things that have helped make our situation easier:

1. Where we live, by law my wife got a year per kid off of work for childcare. I don't know how people do this without a full-time parent.
2. Since I work remotely, if my wife had a rough night, she could sleep during the day without worrying the kid was going to kill themselves because I would be around.
3. Our kids were definitely on the easier side, especially our first. They almost never cried for zero reason (90% of crying was quickly remediated with the "diapers, hungry, sleepy" checklist), they quickly started sleeping well, etc. Some people have complete devil kids, colic, etc.

What we gave up was doing things together as a couple (romantic dinners etc), as we always had to either bring the kids or stay home with them, but we could still do things on our own when we wanted to. We have family nearby, but they deemed themselves "too old" to look over the kids when they were still babies. Now that our kids are in elementary school age they've been able to sleep over once or twice a year when we get to do a parents getaway for our anniversary etc.

Its nice that you enjoy bein a dad. Do you and your other partner do equal parenting? Only One day in the work week with the kid sounds a bit odd. Maybe I am getting it wrong.

I am picking up more hobbies as my kids get older. I get into what they're into.

Oh that's easy. When you have kids, you stop having time for those hobbies. So you don't have to worry about spending money on them anymore.

Simple: the moment you have a child, you stop being the person who had hobbies and interests and become a parent, a single-minded organism that exists solely to make sure your children make it to maturity in good shape. Your Spotify Wrapped becomes Baby Shark, your guitar or mountain bike or whatever gets ebayed to make room for a nursery, and travel plans become fiction, written around a character who is no longer you, a stolid lump of responsibility.

It's not like those things are gone forever, infants are the most time intensive but as they get older that intensity fades.

By the time they reach elementary around 5 your energy and time should have returned to a decent chunk, about 10/11 you can start (ultimately based on their maturity/responsibility levels, every child is different) leaving them at home, they can make their own snacks, use the microwave and actually have some independence from you

Married 18 years, no kids. I think I drink something like 36+ ounces of coffee a day. Myth disproven, I guess.

I assure you, many of us were drinking copious amounts of coffee before kids, too.

Uh...great story?

That's a really small sample group. For another really small sample group, all the people I know that are addicted to coffee got there because they needed to stay awake at the wee hours of the night. Just in case someone decided taking shots at the Infantry in a combat zone was a good idea.

It's such a natural human function. In our super advanced society, it really ought to take as much sacrifice as daily bathroom breaks do.

Actually, I held a baby once. It wasn't hard at all. It was actually super squishy.

My two year old has been two for the past 5 years...

Only a few years, eh 😅

We have twins, currently 11 months old. Even we haven't been this degraded after the first 3 months. The first three were more surviving that anything else and to this day are the most challenging period of time I had to get trough in my life. After that it startet getting better. I even shower sometimes now.

I mean… in a way… that’s a win for equality

To anyone wondering, this is the most honest review you're going to get. It's just as bad as everyone says and then some. It's absolutely worth every bit of it. The fact that people are telling you it's that rough and still recommending it should tell you something.

"10/10 would blend my balls again" Should be all you need to hear.

Yeah. I loved it when my kid got down to trying to kill itself (through sheer mind-bogglig stupidity, not intent) less than weekly. It really saves on energy, and makes bigger family adventures possible.

and aren’t trying to kill themselves

well…

My wife and I have one kid, who's in daycare 5 days a week so that we can work. We're snowed in today, but since I'm a remote worker I'm in the home office and my wife is handling child care.

My wife has nowhere else to be and nothing that particularly needs doing. I fully expect she's going to be touched out, frazzled, and on a short fuse by the end of the day because being stuck in the same four rooms for hours with a needy three-year old whose only major interests are (1) monster truck (2) excavator and (3) monster truck excavator is a lot for anybody.

It bears emphasis that the isolated nuclear family is a historical anomaly, and before the mid 20th-century it was extremely common to live in a multi-generational household. Being able to hand off kids to a grandparent or sibling or aunt/uncle in order to accomplish something or even just get a moment to oneself is a tremendous liberty that few (American) parents have these days.

Even without working, believe me : it's hard.

I'm getting downvoted for being happy? I never said others should become parents but okay.

The only primal call I have is to fuck. I could not care less about actually having a kid as a result. If anything seeing how having kids has affected my friends ability to do so has made me want them even less.

it’s not easy to escape millions of years of evolution

It's insane that we're tied down to instincts when we believe ourselves so rational and sophisticated.

But funnily enough, I don't have that instinct? I'm more than happy to be an uncle and that's as far as the train goes for me. I can't see myself waking up with a child on my mind. So mad respect for those who commit and become wonderful parents. I think it takes a special kind of resilience that needs to be awakened when you're expecting. Props for those who embrace it.

As a parent to a little one right now... I can say that I rarely felt the "drive" to have kids. My SO was really let down that my initial reaction was anxiety over finances, for example.

That said, I don't know if anything else could ever give me the kind of joy and happiness that just being able to love on my kid has brought me. If something happened to her I would be devastated.

But I also recognize that I've had to sacrifice a lot of personal freedom to be a good dad. I would never downplay that to "trick" people into wanting to be parents. It's definitely a tradeoff, and especially difficult financially these days.

You could say this about literally anything though? All of the best rushes in life are just your brain drugging itself.

That's like saying you're the authority on what an acid trip feels like because you watched someone take one. Also step parents and adoptive parents love their kids without "having" them

Unless you're one of those unlucky ones whose hormones go out of whack and you end up drowning them in the tub.

Hmmm I wonder if those hormones could be synthesized and taken as a drug? I'd give it a try just to see what it did to me as a childfree person.

See, you are missing that cocktail. You have to take one with the other.
Or do as my boss said, get grandchildren and skip children.

Acid is probably cheaper too

Instructions unclear. Charged with arson and no lawyer will take the case since I punched one of them.

It's definitely harder but my wife and I still manage to take trips and go out places.

You can't always go to super nice restaurants but you can still go places.

and when they get old enough they come with you. Maybe some people are like in the comic but honestly I’m not sure that’s even a majority of parents.

And when they hit the pre-teen/teen years you can leave them at home sans-babysitter

I think people just see the absolute shit show the infant stage is and thinks that's just how it is till they turn 18

if you can keep your lifestyle minimal and active, then this is something you can aspire to do. Good job

You look forward to your child's immense suffering under a collapsing society?

I don't think I will ever understand this mindset.

You decided to force a child to live through societal collapse because "it's something to look forward to".

Yikes.