Hacker News Reader

Comment by twmahna | Hacker News Reader

Thank you for posting your perspective. As someone who's contemplating having kids in the distant future, I'm wondering if there's a way to predict whether these chemical changes will occur for me or not. Do you have any insights here?

In particular, I'm curious about these questions pertaining to your life prior to having children:

- From 1 to 10, how much did you enjoy helping a friend out when it was a mild inconvenience to yourself?

- From 1 to 10, how positive of an emotional reaction do you get when you see a cute dog?

I have a completely unfounded hypothesis that the 'chemical' changes that PG describes are akin to how our brains react when we see cute pets.

View on HN

I think it depends on how much you want to have kids. If you feel very strongly about it, then go ahead and have kids. You will probably experience the chemical changes in your brain that will help you cope. But if you are unsure about having kids, then don’t have them. You don’t need to over analyze it. If you feel the need to analyze, overthink and research it, then it seems to me like you don’t have the kind of brain that will make it easy for you to be happy while dealing with all the parenting challenges.

I believe that if you need to carefully analyze whether to have kids, then you will also continue to analyze and think about your decision after you already have kids. And it will make you miserable.

Caveat emptor, it's not all fire and brimstone either. It's been a rough couple weeks on a few fronts so everything I've said is slanted by that. Still, everything stands.

Rather than divulge my psychological profile on a public forum, I'll say the following. Spend some time with kids. Volunteer and do activities involving kids. There's plenty of stuff out there. If you end up enjoying them, then you'll probably like your own kids. If you feel like what the hell am I doing here this is not my cup of tea, then my warning is that activities with your own kids is potentially not so different.

I dgaf at all about cute pets, like -1. But a lot of everyday experiences with our toddler are pretty magical feeling.

One thing I've found, if you're exhausted and just waiting to do something else, the whole thing just sucks. I've definitely done that/had days like that. But if you throw yourself into playing with them, and really try to engage, interact, trick them, tickle them when they don't expect it, etc, it becomes amazing, because he picks up on that and gets really into it too, and he appreciates it so much. Like beaming joy. And that's one of the greatest things I've ever witnessed.

Just a point of anecdata. But it really seems to be one of those things where you get more out when you put more in. I don't know that I got an obvious chemical lightswitch thing, it's been a relationship that's grown more and more over time.

Cuteness is not a good indicator. Both kids and dogs can fast grow out of being cute. Just think about how cute they are when you have to clean up their poop.

OTOH, in my experience, raising a dog is quite comparable to the first two years of raising a kid. Less so with cats, they are too independent whereas a dog relies heavily on you.

Another possible way of finding out if you have it in you being a parent, is to play "The Last Of Us". That might sound strange, but I've seen many people say that they felt very protective of Ellie and had parental feelings towards her.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com