What things you learned after having kids that you wish would have known before having kids and would have made you to change decision of having kids?
My perspective: always had a gut feel that I wanted kids. Now have 3 young ones. Is it hard? Yes. Would my life be "easier" without them? In some ways (practically) and likely less so in others (emotionally, spiritually). Are there moments where I wish I was childless? Absolutely. Do those moments last and would I rather have a life without kids? No, not by a longshot. It's cliche, but I can't imagine a life as full and changing without them. Keep in mind I'm talking about me and my life here, not generalizing. A childless life can be just as fulfilling, if not more, for someone else.
I would say that plenty of people have kids by accident or because it’s expected of them then biology takes over.
I would say people that know they want kids 100% from the get go are probably in the minority it doesn’t mean that those who don’t love their kids any less or aren’t as good of a parent.
It also doesn’t mean that you can’t feel that you want kids and then regret it once reality sinks in.
As for the gut feeling, the problem is that it's hard to be exposed to what make children amazing because some if these things are obviously reserved to parents.
Letting your child fall asleep on your lap, because it trusts you completely is always a fantastic feeling.
Just get ready to forego a good chunk of your freedom for a few years, but be aware that it happens gradually. At 3 months you still have a somewhat decent life. At 2 years you need to be mostly dedicated to them.
You'll have less time for selfish things.
Your self control will be challenged as you try to maintain composure in many challenging situations. Some that involve diaper blowouts at 3am, the night before a big presentation.
You'll be forced to adapt as your lifestyle changes. Old friends without kids will invite you out less. You'll find new friends with kids. The practicality of things like minivans will become alluring.
You'll become more persuasive. If you can convince a 3 year old to eat broccoli, you can sell ice to eskimos.
If it’s just going to be you, the spouse, and the toddler stuck in a suburban house, I hope you genuinely enjoy playing with them a lot because they need constant attention.
Even after having kids, I think I’d be just as happy if I didn’t have them. I certainly wouldn’t want them if it was just going to be me and spouse, but luckily I can diffuse the responsibilities between daycare/grandparents/etc.
I also would lean towards not having them if I wasn’t completely financially secure and could afford them a home in a good neighborhood and colleges, but that’s due to me believing the income/wealth gap will continue to increase.
My best analysis is that humans are terrible at long-term planning: hence our (at least American) level of personal retirement planning. And children never "pay off". If you expect gratefulness, you are likely to be dissapointed.
So nature doesn't leave it to that. Instead it pushes some powerful, deep-seated buttons in our psyche. Hard. I was shocked to realize on day, after about 6 months, I would kill and die for my son, and looking around realizing most parents out there feel the same. It's this weird, unspoken understanding in our society. And some scary, intense anger at his birth mom. Nature doesn't leave this to chance, instead, it hard-codes the stuff essential to survival.
For a small percentage of people, this button-pushing never happens, and they wonder what the Hell is wrong with them. To them I say, Nothing is wrong with you.
Lastly, all the talk about more fulfilling lives etc. How would you know anyway? It’s not like you took both paths and then compared.
Something along the lines of “a man is complaining!? hahaha look everyone, a man feels a tiny bit of oppression!”
and never addressing the complaint
It's worth asking yourself whether you /want/ to like your kids. Would your life be better if you liked them? If you don't want to like them, why not? If you do want to, how might you go about that?
I hope this doesn't come across the wrong way, but a therapist can be a really good platform for talking through and exploring things like this, which might be hard to discuss with friends/family/etc.
If somehow an internet stranger can change your perspective, I happen to find kids (actually, I view almost everyone as fundamentally) insanely intelligent and interesting. It's probably because I don't have kids that I am able to be in a less stressed position, but I find that watching kids grow is fascinating and frankly.. fucking incredible.
(for me) It's similar to learning about how insanely complex soil life is. Mind blown.
I know for a fact if I had not begun to come to terms with my own self and all of the things I don't like about myself over the past two years, I probably would be extremely critical of my kids as well. But I have learned to allow my critical-ness to manifest thoughts (as it always will) and then to let those thoughts go.
You will find out things about your spouse and yourself that you never knew about, but your kid will have inherited them. Some of these things are attractive features, others are not. You might have to figure out how to deal with a feature of your kid that is not attractive. Some of these things can be fixed in post, others, not so much. Some of these possibilities include genetic diseases, which absolutely no one deserves, but do happen.
Having a kid is an enormously brave and risky decision. You roll the dice and you get what you get. There's no going back.
Edit: All that said, I do not regret my decision, even though I've been exhausted for coming up on two years and so has my wife. When it's bad, it's the worst. When it's good, it's the best. You will find yourself capable of more patience and resilience than you ever thought possible.
Excellent turn of phrase. Some of the bugs will have to be fixed in production but some technical debt you'll just be stuck with.
Obviously this doesn't help out older people, but for younger people debating to have kids earlier or later in life, the answer is have them earlier. I regret not spending my 20s filtering relationships by "do I want to have kids with this woman?" and breaking up immediately once I realized the answer was no.
All our friends had had kids, so there was this unlimited supply of free baby stuff available. Not that we needed free stuff because we had a whole lifetime of savings and high paying jobs to cover any expenses that might have come up. I also don't need anywhere near as much sleep anymore as I did in my 20s, so when it turned out that I had to stay up all night every night, it wasn't all that hard to make the switch.
I can't imagine how I could have pulled it off if I also had to work the crappy entry level office job I had in my 20s, living in my dingy studio apartment and eating ramen to try to squirrel away some savings.
Waiting until you're 40 is doing it on easy mode.
And you hopefully have a better idea of yourself and some more humility.
It’s cost me a ton of money, and my health dealing with her after the fact. Kid is 11 now, and doing pretty well all things considered, but it’s been a long road to get here. At least I have legal custody and get to make decisions vs letting conspiracy theories inform all decisions.
With the 2nd kid, I chose wisely, and no issues with my wife, and she’s a great step mom to my 2nd kid.
We had our first and second child in the foreign country with no support net you usually have when living near your family. And first birth was very difficult for my spouse, pretty much making her unable to do anything but feed our newborn for the first 6 months. This period in my life was very tough. And mostly because I discovered things about myself I would not want to discover, how weak human being I am and how much do I have to work on myself to improve. And how hard it is to improve, even a little bit. Things I learned about myself are those things that make me think that maybe it would be better if I never got married, but in the same time if I never had kids I would not realize how much work I have to put to become a better person. It's twisted situation.
This is not a therapist session but sometimes I wonder about errors my parents made - but errors I could see only after having my own children.
My friend took this to mean I regret having and kid and wish I hadn’t; that isn’t the case, my point was it’s just hard and different in ways you can’t convey to somebody without kids and also there is no way to prepare you for it. There is a feeling in society in general that having a baby is beautiful and affirming etc and either you want to have kids and it’ll be great or you don’t want to have kids and it’ll be hard, it’s just not that simple.
We wanted to have kids, we also would have been ok not having kids too if that’s how the cookie crumbled, we tried and had one and he’s awesome. I think my point here is don’t overthink it, you can’t think yourself through this one :)
My advice would be lean on your support network early and often, we felt we had to be strong and shoulder through it ourselves and I do regret that.
Then best age is around 2 - 4, when they sleep through the night, are almost toilet trained, can communicate and eat mostly anything. At this age they are beautiful and are your world and you are theirs. Just before they get tainted by the realworld and become shits.. Then from that point, its a constant learning curve.
I learnt as much about myself as a man and person from my 19 yr as I do from my 7yr and as much from my 10 yr son. I am forever learning and sometime they are painful lessons, ones where you have to pull up your big boy pants and firm it, type of pain.
The best advise I wish I was told earlier is, just because they are your kids it doesnt mean you can expect them to be how you want them to be. We as parents are there to simply guide provide some guide rails, then step the f*k back and leave them on their journey. If you try to do anything other than step back and wait till they need you, your in for a world of heart ache and pain!!!
p.s. GOOD LUCK!!
The key thing I learned is a new perspective, I understand my parents and other parents a lot more now.
One advice I can offer is that, unless you want to be one of those fathers that never sees their kids and leaves the parenting to “other people”, your career velocity will suffer. So make sure you’re at a good spot in your career before having kids. You don’t want to compete with a young person with no kids who can put in more hours and more focus. Work smarter, not harder. You should be at a point in your career where you have more team/org/company level impact than direct IC impact. It’s more efficient when your work is multiplied by other people. Delegate. Delegate. Delegate.
That said, I can understand this isn’t for everyone. I wanted to have kids, and understood the pace of my life would change because of it. Having kids absolutely does take sacrifice, commitment, sleeplessness, stress, money, and a lot of things one might not want to give up.
But! I’ve learned a lot about love and sacrifice and empathize at a deeper level of understanding for other parents. Any child with a health condition becomes heart breaking in a way that’s tough to communicate. Stressed out and tired parents are doing their best in difficult circumstances.
There are a lot of reasons to have or not have a kid. Choose what’s right for you but make sure to be honest with yourself.
I didn’t feel a connection to him until he was almost a year old. Then paternal chemicals kicked in. I began to enjoy being “devoured” by his needs. Which is weird; but true.
Still, being a parent was much more work for my wife than I expected it to be. Nobody tells you how hard it is.
It’s like becoming a monk: you are cut off from your previous social life; your days are spent in menial chores; and you do all this in service of a quasi-divine being.
Dating drama is exhausting.
Late teenage rebellion period is exhausting.
Nothing like years of effort, lectures, standards tossed out the window. Umm daughter, your boyfriends profile picture is of him sticking a can up his ass. “”He loves me!, your stupid””
For younger ones chore battles are my current stress point.
It was unreal to see a happy, social, respectful teenager become depressed, uninvolved and nasty with a phone.
Then a complete reversal every time it was taken away.
Kids make terrible choices. Force good habits as long as possible.
I didn’t do it much. My wife seemed to think it was her job, and I wasn’t going to argue.
But I was surprised to discover that infant poop doesn’t hardly smell. And also surprised that when I got puked on, it didn’t bother me... it felt as if I had thrown up on myself, which is not fun, but also not really that terrible.
I will say it takes a huge amount of support. Knowing what I know now I would not recommend having a kid without a partner and supportive family. But that goes without saying. Most people who are single parents didn’t plan to be.
But that didn't happen. We just carried on being Jason and his partner, but with a baby in tow.
I had spent most of my 30s cramming in as much "living" as possible, to make sure I'd stocked away a lifetime supply of it. After all, I'd probably never get another chance to travel for long periods, keep up with climbing, and all that other stuff that Independent Jason could do.
But it was all for naught. We just packed the kid along and went traveling anyway. He had eleven stamps in his passport by his first birthday.
Life is just as much fun as ever. But now we have some kids to play with.
1. Watching other peoples’ kids is a time-limited exercise. A major challenge with your own kids is that it’s constant and effectively without end.
2. There’s a big difference between kids and MY kids. I just have more intrinsic interest in my own. I do have more “tools” available to me to engage with others’ kids now (up to my own kids’ ages at least) but I care less. Not saying I dislike others’ kids, just that it’s different.
So glad I didn't give up or say "enough is enough"... my life wouldn't be worth nearly as much as it is now...
I don't question our decision, but these seem the most important and affected for me.
If you haven't found such joy to share, I feel for you but will say it's out there if you'll just see it.
I would've had an easier time with family if I'd started earlier; but thats all I'd change about my parenting choices, had I the choice.
It boils down to the type of person you are. Are you someone who can love your children more than yourself? If not then I would suggest not having children.
I spent my twenties building a career, partying, and traveling, and I'd give it all back to have more time with my kids (and potentially even a few more kids.)
Any big events ahead? Masters degree, travel world? Timing is important.
Therefore this previously near zero cost activity of raising toddlers becomes a $15k+ per year expense for just daycare, on top of the time you personally have to attend to them at home.
He met his wife while gaming, and now they’ve been married six years. A family that plays together stays together.
Do you want to force someone to live on a planet where things happen which are a daily occurrence on ours?
"Bad things" have happened as a daily occurrence for all of history - it's only now that there's an echo chamber and attention economy for this kind of trauma porn.
All I'm trying to say is that "Do you want to force someone to live on a planet where things happen which are a daily occurrence on ours?" is a consideration that all of our ancestors had to consider, too.
If you were abount to be reincarnated and could pick a decade to be born, knowing that you would be born into a random family somewhere on earth, you'd be a fool to pick any decade in the past. Today, you'd have a ~10% chance of being born into extreme poverty. As recently as 1990, it was ~50%, while back in 1900 it would have been ~90%!
https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2021/3/28/extreme-poverty-i...
Is it? Personally, I doubt that people of the past considered reproduction as optional. There are still places where abortion, or even contraception, are illegal.
Nor did their decision involve "planet-scale" factors. They either succeeded at raising kids, or failed. Normalization of antinatalism is a relatively recent phenomenon. (Even the spell-checker doesn't know the word!)
It's only in modernity that people have the access to information (skewed as it may be), and the freedom (limited as it may be) to make a decision (biased as it may be) about whether to have kids or not.
>What if I just don't read/watch the news every day?
That'll probably make you more informed, not less.
Never ever do that. Healthy or sick it's just a bad idea ESPECIALLY right now. Put your mental health first and work on things you can actually affect.