Hacker News Reader

> Be absolutely ready to make a literal lifetime commitment to love and care for this child as a fellow human, before deciding to have one.

Unfortunately, if you decide after all of this reflection that you don't want to have kids there is no need to worry, at least, about perpetuating the human race... because for every couple who conscientiously decides not to have kids, there are a half dozen more who don't give any thought to any of this whatsoever and proceed to have (often multiple) kids anyway.

"there are a half dozen more who don't give any thought to any of this whatsoever and proceed to have (often multiple) kids anyway."

You might have to update this [1]. People do care. People have an iphone now. People can read. The "tons of kids poppin" arguments don't hold. We will see a global wide population decrease soon.

https://econofact.org/the-mystery-of-the-declining-u-s-birth...

spend a couple months in and out of your local NICU, as I have, seeing firsthand the depressingly common spectacle of premature neonates being left alone for days, sometimes over a week, by parents (or parent) who can't make the time to visit their own clinging-to-life offspring.

Because their lives are already overburdoned by the several other - somehow always toddler-age - children in tow with them. Lives frequently complicated by various degrees of substance abuse, leading to the NICU births. You would not be as comfortable googling some factoid response here.

Whatever the macro trend may be in terms of total birthrate, its the constitution of those births, in terms of quality of life, my post was referring to.

Pretty heavy selection bias in that sample. All the people who chose not to have kids obviously are not going to be in the NICU. Among the people who do choose to have kids, those with good prenatal care and healthy habits are going to be very underrepresented in the NICU, particularly if you're in a community where you see a lot of substance abuse. So what's left is what you've observed.

This seems awfully America-centric. I understand what you're saying but in my experience it is a local phenomena, not global. Most parents (or at least a parent) spend a lot of time with their kids at the start of their life.

I've heard stories of how difficult the process of adopting kids can be. So, kudos to you, that sounds like a lot to manage.

Regarding opting out, I get it, but I don't agree personally. Not having kids, can enable some pretty great lifestyles. But I do feel like you don't get a chance to understand what being a parent is all about. No amount of being a great aunt / uncle / whatever, gives you that feeling of needing to nurture or protect your child.

It forces you to change, maintain a good relationship w/ your partner, be a good role model, etc.

If I was do it again, I'd try to do it earlier.

It absolutely does not force you to change at all, nor does it force you to maintain a good relationship with your partner. Divorce rates are high, there are lots of bad parents. Having kids may have pushed you to be better, and that's great, but there are a lot of people out there for whom it makes no positive difference at all.

I don't disagree with you. Divorce rates are high, and for many it doesn't make a positive difference. I imagine most folks on HN are pretty conscious about striving to be better, so for this small subset I think my opinion is reasonable. And I know plenty of people who if they had kids (but abstain) would absolutely rock at it, and it *could* be a positive forcing function, such that they get to experience different aspects to life.

People who are having kids because they "want to be better" can go ahead and just be better by helping take care of the kids already here who need it.

In my experience, people who are having kids because they want to be better have something broken in their lives that they ought to to work on fixing before having kids, and the consequences if they don’t can be…quite bad.

Get a therapist for therapy, not a child.

Life is a series of choices, and it's impossible to explore every path you could take.

> But I do feel like you don't get a chance to understand what being a parent is all about.

That's 100% accurate.

There's a pretty much infinite number of possible life experiences I'm not going to get to experience personally and will not have the time/money/ability to fit into my lifespan. The wishlist of things I'd love to do or experience someday continually grows longer - no matter how much I try to fit more of them into my life.

Taking on what amounts to a lifetime commitment and a massive investment of time and money for an experience that I have zero interest in and think I would actively dislike, seems like a terrible use of my finite resources.

> It forces you to change, maintain a good relationship w/ your partner, be a good role model, etc.

Perhaps it inspired you to do that. But the divorce rate and number of parents out there are terrible role models, suggest that it's not exactly the case for everyone.

I'll also suggest that people who don't have much interest in becoming parents are probably a whole lot more likely to wind up on the negative side of those possibilities should they wind up having children anyway.

> Taking on what amounts to a lifetime commitment and a massive investment of time and money for an experience that I have zero interest in and think I would actively dislike, seems like a terrible use of my finite resources.

If you consider maximizing your experience the best use of your resources, I suppose not.

> Taking on what amounts to a lifetime commitment and a massive investment of time and money for an experience that I have zero interest in and think I would actively dislike, seems like a terrible use of my finite resources.

This is a naive way to think about it. In the grand scheme of things, as TFA hints at, kids don't take up a significant portion of your life. If you're goal is to focus on striking off entries on a wishlist, there are many, many things that can be sacrificed to make room that don't involve children.

It's not as bad as you make it seem.

Lastly, I don't really care about experiences the way I did when I was younger. Going on a trip to an exotic locale doesn't really excite me as much as, say, taking a good picture of a friend or family member and sharing it. Or hearing a good story or joke.

Kids expand to fill the space in your life you make for them. I have more fun with my kids than possibly anyone else. I want to share experiences with them, not for myself.

Have you ever been excited when telling a friend about a cool spot they've never been to, and subsequently taking them there? Kids are like a revolving door of those opportunities. They start from scratch.

I would have been a shit parent to a human child. I would still be a shit parent to a human child. I don’t want one, if I accidentally had one they would eventually not want me too. I’ve been a half decent parent to my youngest sibling, because what you say about life forcing you to change has some truth.

I’ve experienced what you described with my pup, but that’s because she is exactly the bond and the responsibility that fits my life. It revolves around her, every day, all the time. No amount of parenting a human would ever change that.

> It forces you to change, maintain a good relationship w/ your partner, be a good role model, etc.

No, it doesn’t actually, as any kind of even approximately universal effect, force any of that, and even a casual look around at society would demonstrate that pretty clearly. It may or may not have motivated that in you – but plenty of people who would describe themselves as having those traits in their own relationships / parenting objectively don’t, so self-assessment is pretty clearly not a reliable gauge here. I would agree that there are people whose combination of innate personality, life experiences, etc., will lead them to actually be nudged in those directions by having children, but there are plenty who won’t be. And there are plenty of people who will be nudged in much more negative directions by the experience.

As a parent myself, it amazes me how many people who are parents are drawn into a bizarre evangelization of parenting as some kind of universally ideal vocation, with stories about the effect it will have that are trivially refutable by looking outside of one’s own internal narrative of their own experience with their own kids at the rest of the world around them.

Much respect to you for adopting 4 kids, especially those with additional needs! :) To this "We have one child who is at high risk of never developing cognitively enough to safely live on their own as an adult.", I'd argue, society in general needs to look after people like this much better. Everyone, particularly the rich, should be paying their fare share of taxes to cover decent quality care for those unable to look after themselves due to disability. That includes respecting the people who work in that field properly as doing a vital job, and paying them well enough. When parents feel that this lifetime responsibility falls on them alone, I feel that something is severely broken. What about people with learning disability who do not have family to look out for them? They need a system to look after them. I think some of the comments on this discussion reflect that there's a lack of general support for families, especially in the USA with its insufficient social programmes.

I always say I only found unconditional love once I became a parent. (From me toward my child)

As you say, the commitment is forever, whether we are present or not. For the movie Interstellar, one of the themes Nolan developed was that at some point we become our children’s memories. It probably happens around the 12 year old mark.

For all parents out there, be present, however you can.

This is not always so.

For me, unconditional love was a youthful thing.

My parents are much less admirable now, as I have grown older.

My reasons are legion.

I don't wish them harm, but they are nothing like me.

From the comment you replied to:

>(From me toward my child)

i'm too young to be having kids rn anyway but i thought about it a little and this is one of the big things that makes me hesitate. i don't think i could handle raising a kid who ended up special needs and required lifelong care. seems like having a kid who ended up an alcoholic/junkie/mentally retarded/deeply at odds with my values would really remove most of the positives, so it would be a serious gamble.

of course, i also have it easier since men can just remarry at 50 and still have kids. i have time. but it really makes me wonder if i ever want children. my parents think it's a great thing and i shouldn't be quite so worried but they have quite the case of survivorship bias, all their kids turned out well and so it is easy from their perspective on the other side.

the annoying part is all the girls i meet either know they want kids or know they don't. nobody my age should be quite that certain yet in either direction. makes dating a bitch beyond casual relationships ngl.

Even I am young and lean childfree. My reasoning is that non-existence is better than existence. More and more I see the world, more and more I agree with Buddhism's first noble truth that there is suffering in life. There are some moments of joy, but is all of it worth it afterall? It's just a tough question. I don't want to bring any more suffering to this world. There is already so much suffering and I can't do anything about it. So many innocents throughout history have suffered so much. Millions of innocents died in holocaust or nuclear bombs or famines in the last 100 years ago alone. Recently teenagers are getting killed mercilessly in Iran. Life can be so unfair sometimes that it feels like a bad gamble to produce more of it. A child can give great joy to their parents for sure, but they can also cause great suffering. Like there is hardly anything more hurtful in life than the bereavement of your own child. People forget that something that can give you great joy can also give you great pain. And for me, it's not just about me and the happiness I derive from parenting my kid, but also the child who will one day grow into an adult and have to deal with this cruel world and the sheer pain of conscious existence itself. For these reasons I am leaning childfree for now.

The answer to all this is to stop considering it so abstractly and talk to some parents who have been in these situations and actually look at the incident rates. Anything could happen but not all outcomes are as likely. There’s loads of mundane activities we do that have serious life changing events that could happen. A kid is a commitment but also one that is profoundly human that people have been doing successfully for millennia.

> But also, anything can happen. Anything can happen. Your kids could be born with lifelong conditions or issues. They could be healthy at young ages, but develop special conditions as they hit early childhood or late adolescence. They could struggle with lifestyle issues (violence, drugs, alcohol, crime, etc).

I could never understand how people are so easy to punish someone with life. Especially someone who they'll love unconditionally. I didn't like my life from the start despite it being fairly decent in objective terms.