I'm fine with people having kids, but don't even dare tell me I have to have them too. I also don't understand why others get offended that I don't want kids of my own.
this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2025
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Looks accurate, especially in the modern age where both parents are usually running 2 jobs BEFORE kids.
If we didn't need to work 8 hours daily, having a kid would be a less of a problem.
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 only have one biological kid, he is 29 now. The other 3 are step kids. What I realized is that, for reasons probably too long to go on here, is:
- I am terrible with small kids, the younger, the worse time.
- Teenagers are easier for me to deal with
- I don't get that "it's worth it" or "this is the most rewarding thing" feeling. I feel like I should have never had any kids.when I am doing things with kids I am generally thinking "I want to do something else" not involving kids.
- While I am much better about it these days, there was a 10 year period where i dispised kids, with my spouse, at the time, not making the situation better. I don't hate children, in general, anymore, I am still pretty ambivalent about anyone else kids.
That being said I love my kids, none of the above is their fault whatsoever. However,I totally get why people do not want kids.
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Happy baby egg.
At work, I was recently on one of the coffee-fetching breaks. Well, I actually fetched my trusty herbal tea. Then we met another guy at the coffee machine and they all started talking about how much coffee they drank. Eventually, they came to the conclusion that they were all addicted, because they had kids. And I just stood there with my trusty herbal tea, like yep, I don't have kids.
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.
I assure you, many of us were drinking copious amounts of coffee before kids, too.
Married 18 years, no kids. I think I drink something like 36+ ounces of coffee a day. Myth disproven, I guess.
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I think we need to have a tough talk about why it’s so much harder to have kids these days, but that would involve talking about wealth inequality and the death of the community.
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.
A former coworker used to take leave when her kid was out of school. Kid was 10. I was a 10 year old "latchkey" kid in the 80’s, we'd get home, I'd make a snack for me and my 8 yr old brother. Then we'd ride our bikes until the streetlights came on, and we'd go home.
I'm not a parent. I don't really think either her or my parents were "right" or "wrong", but I don't understand why that changed.
I don't understand why that changed.
It's easy to point at social media, and that's part of it, but I think it's probably the ubiquity of photos and videos, easily transmitted to others. Even those of us who aren't on social media still send photos and videos of our kids to the grandparents, to cousins, to other friends and family. We're constantly exposed to parenting highlights, which subtly shifts the expectations on what the non-highlight portions look like.
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