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Comment by theshackleford | Hacker News Reader

> You don't need to have life all figured out before you have kids

My parents didn’t have their life figured out and I paid the price with extreme mental and physical abuse as their life entered a never ending downward spiral.

This had impacts on me, which extended to impacts on others.

I’m ok now, after years of intensive counselling reversed the violent tendencies that were beaten into me with their fists over two decades. It did contribute to me not having kids of my own as I didn’t want to repeat the cycle, but other things impacted it as well.

So yeah, maybe it turns out ok in some cases, maybe in others it doesn’t.

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but this comes from parents being expected to have their life figured out and not giving them any help. if we accept as normal that young parents will not have their life figured out then we will also make sure that we don't leave them alone but actually support them.

i think this is especially extreme in the US where some parents tell their kids that at their 18th birthday they are on their own. that's an insane attitude. not everyone is that extreme, but what ever you experienced is more a failure of society, and less a failure of your parents.

I think you are correct, but not in a manner likely to happen.

My parents had all the support they needed from their parents, but it wasn’t enough, their life was interrupted before they found their footing and they just never developed that footing once children were added to the mix.

To your point though, maybe if there was more support of parents from society from a larger perspective, maybe it would have been different.

If my upbringing hadn’t been getting bashed into an inch of my life because apparently being unable to afford rent was my fault, I suspect I would have been far more amenable to children.

ouch, i can't imagine the stress your parents must have been under that they lost control like that, or the pain you had to experience. i can somewhat sympathize. my dad had a rough temper too at times, but nowhere near what you describe. and we lived in germany where we got financial support from the government. not being able to pay rent is not a thing there. if that was all it took to set your parents off then this totally could have been prevented with a better welfare system.

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