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Comment by helen___keller | Hacker News Reader

I believe it. For various reasons my wife and I haven’t had children yet. We’re urban DINKs with combined gross income at nearly half a million per year. We have a 3 month old puppy and he is our baby.

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The issue now is that the employment laws are so nasty in places like NYC that a scammy nanny can financially wipe you out with zero evidence. That doesn't happen with a dog.

I live in NYC and have heard this cited as a concern precisely zero times. Besides, a ton of people use daycares, not nannies.

Laws just changed. This will become more common. Similar to how NYC paid out 500m to a collection of some legit and many scammy 'police misconduct' lawsuits.

If your puppy could talk I wonder what he'd say about that.

I recommend getting dog(s) and kids - a very fun, life changing combo. You won’t regret.

We plan to, but life worked out this way so far. We’re still in our early 30s, and having the financial capability to thrive with children is very recent. We’re both rapidly progressing our careers so it’s hard to find the right time to shift direction. We’ve been together for a decade but most of that decade has been grad school, paying off student debt, paying lots of rent on entry level salaries, and so on :)

At 35 your ability to reproduce and have a healthy kid starts dropping. At 45, you are looking at IVF.

The recommendation is at least 18 months between kids so that the mother can recover.

Most people don't get pregnant the way your highschool threatened you would. It can take a year or two.

It can absolutely happen right away though - there’s no way to tell for sure until you try. Our kid #1 (both aged 33) was first month of trying, kid #2 (both aged 36) took 3 months.

Most of our friends took longer, but another same-age couple had a similar experience to us.

So go in with low expectations, but don’t try before you’re ready.

“Geriatric pregnancy” is a term that is sometimes used to describe a pregnancy in a woman 35 or older. It’s best, from a biological standpoint, for a woman to have all of her kids before age 35. I don’t think most people understand this or talk about it enough.

Yep. It’s especially difficult for my wife. She finished grad school at 28, and her industry is almost entirely within high CoL cities. We had wanted kids by 30, but when 30 rolled around it was a pandemic and we were locked in a 1000sqft apartment with my mother in law, and my wife was still new in her career and worried that if she took a break from her career it would mean never going back to it.

We’re in a place now that we can actually plan it out but as you mention, our time is low on the children front. There’s just very few sweet spots between “full career” and “no career” for women in some fields, especially if your childbearing dream includes taking a year or two off work.

Counter opinion: I regret getting a dog. Bad timing. It was around the time my second child was born. We are not succeeding at giving him the attention he requires because obviously the kids are the priority. He demonstrates his dissatisfaction by pissing on the stairs every other day. Pity, since you can tell he's a cool dog, just frustrated.

One of the reasons I rushed to get a puppy when we realized we were at least 6+ months out from any pregnancy is because I want my puppy to be fully grown and calmed down by the time we need to pour all our attention onto a newborn.

Puppies are actually nuts and are very needy. If I get another dog it’ll probably be when my future human children get to school age

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