Hacker News Reader

Comment by volkk | Hacker News Reader

I've always thought that I'm just extremely late to mature. I'm 36 now and haven't really felt like I sort of "get" things until my early 30s. My 20s were full of learning experiences, failures, and addiction to doing whatever the hell I wanted. I got a puppy with my wife at 29 and it felt like my life was over. This all really makes a lot of sense to me. It also makes me wonder why the human body rewards young parents when their brains are just simply not fully finished cooking. I couldn't have imagined raising a child at 22 with the way I acted and how important freedom was to me. I would've simply been a miserable father.

View on HN

Thousands of generations of parents had children much younger than today. I think we’re too worried about having everything perfect and de-risked these days. Also realize that parenting is what grew me up. I don’t think people are ever “ready”

It’s a lot more complicated financially for people. You used to not have to rely on dual incomes just to survive. Wealth inequity, housing affordability, and healthcare have all changed. This is why many are choosing to have kids later in life or not even at all because of those reasons and even the environment with climate change it’s a hard decision to make to bring new life into this world to suffer in it.

It's always been financially complicated for most people. The notion of a nuclear family prospering with a single income was mostly only possible for a limited slice of the US population during a few decades post-WWII. If you take a broader historical view that was a brief anomaly.

And it's really weird that anyone would think of something amorphous and uncertain like climate change as a reason not to have children. Even the unlikely worst case scenarios are still going to have less impact than the major wars and plagues that our species has lived through. Some people just lack a sense of perspective.

...and all this is only true for the last few hundred years of "belongingship" / capitalism etc.

Dense population creates all this, in reverse without dense civi you wouldnt have all the gadgets we have today :-D

More complicated than when? You used to have kids because you needed more hands to work the farm and a good number of them died young.

Yes that model has been inverted.

The family used to tax the grown or mostly-grown children in the form of farm labor. The government in many prior centuries taxed like 2-5% total and the rest was intrafamilial support.

Now it is flipped on its head. Everyone else's families tax your child for their social security, socializing the benefits while still you retain most the costs privately.

Thus tragedy of the commons situation. Why make that investment when you can just tax everyone else's kids and rest assured of your own social security, if they don't pay it you can just have them tossed in a cage or their assets seized, no need to have children yourself.

What you write is the mathematical fact of societies with flattened and upside down population pyramids and wealth transfers from young to old, not sure why you are downvoted.

I don’t know about that. My great grandmas and grandmas didn’t have lots of kids for the labor, they had them because they didn’t have a way to not have them. The grandpas might have though.

Coincidentally, my aunts did not have to have more than 2, and almost every single one had 2 kids.

Exactly, so that made having children a financial benefit. I'm confused that you said it but don't get it.

It feels more like people [used to] have kids because they fucked and hadn't made the connection between that and having children. Them working at whatever you worked at was just necessary so you can help them grow, keep an eye on them, and pay for their upbringing.

> It feels more like people [used to] have kids because they fucked and hadn't made the connection between that and having children.

Why on earth would you believe that? People have bred animals for millennia. You think they didn’t understand that sex was a required step?

I imagine people have understood that sex led to pregnancy since before Homo sapiens.

I think you underestimate human intelligence. People have made that connection for a very long time.

People didn't have options besides "not having sex" that worked very well.

It’s amazing that the need for more hands on the farm declined at precisely the same time birth control became widely available.

> It’s a lot more complicated financially for. You used to not have to rely on dual incomes just to survive.

This is a toxic myth and acts as excuse to blame extrinsic factors that won't see change by the time you'll need them to, even if they can be fixed. Economic life today can be a lot more complicated for middle class professionals and skilled laborers, but they were only ever a fraction of the population in the first place, and families in tougher circumstances than today's middle class folk figured out how to navigate the cards they were dealt.

Emotionally, it legitimately sucks if you come from a comfy middle class background, and have a career that you believed should have been good enough to deliver the life you remember your parents or grandparents having and now doesn't seem to be. It feels unfair and disorienting, maybe. But the fact is that middle class lifestyle is gone for now, and if it does manage to get restored, that restoration will take a generation or two to come.

In the meantime, you have to figure out how to adapt and live that more modest and "more complicated financially" lifestyle. It can be done. Lots of people have been doing it for a long time. Along the way, you'll probably discover that lower class folk who never had the luxuries of your parents and grandparents in the first place were not seeing the world as something they had to "suffer in": they lived in homes, but often with more people in them. They traveled, but more infrequently, less glamorously, and with more pragmatic rationale like "visiting family" than "seeing the world". They had parties, but served simpler dishes on less fancy platters. They had "child care" when two parents worked, but got it by exchanging favors with family or neighbors instead of sending half a paycheck to a prestigious daycare. They laughed, they drank, they had kids. It's not a world of suffering to just not have some luxuries.

Yes and I think many of us remember childhood with rose-colored glasses. My 1970s "middle-class" parents had one car. My mom had to drive my dad to work and pick him up so that she could have a car during the day. When my brother and I were older and in school she worked part time. We lived in a simple ranch-style house. We almost never ate out or went anywhere out of town. Entertainment was going outside and finding something to do. Something like going to a movie was a rare treat. I think of it all fondly today, never with a sense that I had missed out on anything.

Today many young people would consider that life to be stifling, boring, or "suffering" but it was fine. Kids really don't care as long as they feel secure.

> Today many young people would consider that life to be stifling, boring, or "suffering" but it was fine.

There’s major inflation in middle class expectations. People earning median income are expecting a very upper-middle-class lifestyle. A house bigger than their parents owned with nicer finishes, two new cars, frequent travel, eating out constantly, etc.

My parents were on the upper end of middle class when I grew up and we lived in a home with carpet and laminate countertops. Now everyone wants hardwood floors and quartz and more square footage, too. A lot of folks are driving cars that cost a year of their take home pay. Cost of living is too high but expectations seem to have risen even faster.

> Now everyone wants hardwood floors and quartz and more square footage, too.

What you’re sensing is that things that were luxuries are now not. It’s not a big deal to pay $500 for the quartz countertops when your house is $800k.

What has gone up is the cost of essentials and the base level of goods to participate in society: housing, transportation, medicine, and education.

So yeah a TV you thought was untouchable is 3 days of minimum wage work. But it’s orthogonal to why people feel economically disposssed.

Capitalists figured out they needed a consumption-driven economy to keep the engine running.

Unfortunately, the music has to stop, and that's where we are now

This comment is harsh, but I think important to remember for a lot of people who don’t realize that yeah maybe the hand we’re dealt sucks, but you can find joy regardless. People dance, sang, drank and found life and love through all of history, it won’t stop now.

Most kids used to work as well as both their parents, school is a middle class and/or modern thing.

I suspect it's a cultural thing as well, with most (all?) wealthy cultures veering towards individualism and working. Whereas with previous generations, the grandparents and environment would be more involved in raising children and educating the new parents.

But I also feel like people grew up or had to grow up earlier back when. My parents were married, bought a house and had kids on the way by their mid 20's, when I was that age I had just about finished my education and started my first fulltime job, it'd take another decade to buy a house. Buying a house / getting a mortgage is a major commitment, and I think you'd get a big boost of adulthood / personal development if you do that in your mid 20's.

Early twenties family formation bring the norm was more of a postwar thing. The guys that came back from the war really did have to grow up fast (seeing your best friends getting blown up at 18 will do that), and they essentially had zero desire to have racous twenties filled with dating around and traveling and soul searching. They'd had enough chaos already, and were all extremely eager to settle down into a peaceful family life immediately upon their return home. The age of family formation has slowly crept back upward since then, and historically, in normal peaceful times it's usually been late twenties.

I agree. Having children does make ones priorities very cut and dry. I found it a lot easier to "adult" once I had children. My Friends, at the time often asked, "Is having children hard?" I often replied, in the beginning at least, "Children are easy, it's everything else that is hard."

Indeed, it is society's expectations that are hard.

I moved to the middle of nowhere after my kids were born. One day I let my child walk home "alone" from school, for the portion that is on our own property, and of course as soon as you do that a fucking Karen will randomly pop out of nowhere, and start interrogating the child. It is like clockwork. You could be 100 miles from civilization and as soon as you do something someone somewhere disagrees with, a fucking Karen (and even in a minivan, down rugged rural dirt roads, how the fuck did she get there?) will magically be there that exact second with a cell phone at the ready to call CPS. Thankfully I was able to stop her before that happened, as I was actually watching from behind the bushes, which in itself is shameful but saved my ass.

also its a lot easier to have kids at 20 if the kids grandparents are only 40 instead of 70

Exactly that. It's not an arbitrary dated threshold that lead to "growing up". It was the event of having kids. I'm still able to look at my current life through the lenses of a 25 year old me and hell, that looks bleak. But I can say with confidence that I'm content. Of course there are little things here and there but mostly everything is fine.

I only wonder if there is going to be a next stage, the magical "midlife crisis", where I'm going to question all my decisions up to that point and I'm curious how I'm going to handle that.

Maybe also because the life spent leading up to the child having was much different earlier - I mean society, jobs, distractions... I'm sure this has an important role as well in setting up expectations and kicking up responsibilities.

People that tell you you need to be ready are lying. The only thing you need to be able to sustain is feeding them, and the rest mostly works itself out. As it has for millennia.

The only reason this would not be the case is if you have specific requirements for the life of your child.

I would encourage you to look at the medical costs of children in the US. My children's braces alone will cost ~$7k-10k over the life of each of them, with insurance, and to do without will cause irreparable oral damage into adulthood. Certainly, this doesn't apply to other developed or developing countries, but to say "you just need to feed them" wildly differs from reality. You're just ignoring suffering at scale by saying "it'll work itself out." It doesn't, and I can provide pages of citations, grounded in data, to support this assertion. Also, having served a short stint as a Guardian ad Litem to advocate for children going through family court, I have anecdotal observations as to failure scenarios of failures to adequately provide for children, both materially and emotionally.

Maybe the "rewarding the young" in the top comment is from the genes of savanna humans when they collected fruit, hunted and didn't care about expensive medical procedures because the latter simply didn't exist?

Perhaps. Genetics doesn't reward rationality, empathy, suffering reduction desire and self awareness, etc, only biological line go up and reproduction fitness. A bug to patch.

Your whole message is the literal definition of:

> The only reason this would not be the case is if you have specific requirements for the life of your child.

If humans could do without 2000 years ago, if the kids in africa can do without now, then clearly the same is true for your own children. God knows they don’t need $7000 braces, which are unaffordable to 99% of the US population too.

Feed them, and love them.

> I've always thought that I'm just extremely late to mature. I'm 36 now and haven't really felt like I sort of "get" things until my early 30s.

I'm 43 and I'm still not convinced that I'm not three kids stacked in a trench coat.

I remember being 33 and buying a house and thinking "Someone call the cops, this banker is letting a child sign mortgage papers".

When I put on nice clothes for a fancy dinner, I feel like I'm cosplaying as a functional and responsible adult, despite having a great career (Staff-level engineer that will likely be promoted to Principal in a few months). I fly First Class and feel out of place, like First Class is reserved for people that have their shit together.

Someone said that this feeling goes away when your same-gendered parent dies, but my dad passed in 2019 and it's still pervasive.

"Everything before 40 is research" I once heard, and every day, I find it to be more true.

I'm a great parent because it is what is necessary and my children had no choice or consent in existing, but I also tell anyone younger that unless they are absolutely sure they want kids and are ready for decades of suck, don't do it [1] [2] [3]. Live your best life, be true to yourself, find your passion and joy exploring and being curious; one can do this without children. If one needs kids to mature or become a better human, find a therapist first. Also, maturity is optional. You have to grow old, you don't have to grow up (take on responsibility unnecessary to take care of yourself, broadly speaking). Religious beliefs aside (potential reincarnation and whatnot), enjoy life, you only get one run through your part of the timeline. Don't waste it on the expectations or belief systems of others.

[1] (lack of support systems, both social and familial, ~$380k in 2025 dollars to raise a child 0-18 in the US not including daycare and college, etc; n=1, ymmv)

[2] Parents Under Pressure: The U.S. Surgeon General's Advisory on the Mental Health & Well-Being of Parents - https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/parents-under-pressu... - 2024

[3] The American dream will cost you $5 million, report finds - https://www.axios.com/2025/09/22/the-american-dream-will-cos... - September 22nd, 2025

I would describe the age of 40 as the time when my brain truly started to function but unfortunately, I feel ashamed of that.

If it makes you feel any better, that's about the age I started functioning mostly like an adult. It started around 30 but took a good decade to take hold.

Same.

I always felt like I'm 10 years behind.

Do you consume marijuana on a regular base? :-D

I tried it a few times, but smoking in general was very unpleasant, so I never started smoking anything.

Just because people can physically, biologically have children does not automatically imply that they can - or should - be the only ones to raise the children. Children used to be a community effort; the US strayed from this a long time ago. Of course it would be much harder to raise a kid at 22 (or 16, or) than 40!

Yet our physiology is tuned to become parents at 16 rather than 40.

I think nature doesn't care whether it's easier or better or whatever. It only cares for _more_ children to survive until their own time to have children.

you just restated what i said. perhaps i could have been more clear.

by whatever mechanism, humans can breed at a much younger age than they can feasibly take care of their offspring. Up until maybe 75-100 years ago, "it takes a village" wasn't just a trite canard, it was actually how you raised children. I just finished watching a youtuber explain that raising children after having had to move away from your extended family because of affordability is suck and "maybe that's why young people are waiting to have kids, because there's no village anymore."

> It also makes me wonder why the human body rewards young parents when their brains are just simply not fully finished cooking.

Probably so that they can grow with their children.

We used to have grandparents around and extended family. Think about how different life was 50,100 or, 500 years ago. Not enough time for evolution to respond

> Not enough time for evolution to respond

And we have to guess that evolution didn't "respond".

Sooooo, we have some lack of fit, evolved over 10s of thousands of years for life as it was then and for the last ~5000 years in selected cultures faced with something quite different, powerful governments and armies, metals, weapons, tools, sailing ships, agriculture, domestic animals, ....

Supposedly for those 10s of thousands of years in parts of Europe people formed tribes and had some communal living, that is, in a long house, maybe 50-100 yards long 10-20 yards wide, with walls and roof forming a semi-circle. So, women and children got their socialization, security, lessons, skills, not merely from a couple, a bonded husband and wife living just as a couple, but from the tribe as a whole. I.e., now, for a lot for a person to learn and have, including shelter, we are depending heavily just on the mother and father.

100 years ago a lot of people (like my grandparents) left their extended family in Europe and emigrated to the USA.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com