Hacker News Reader

Comment by stnikolauswagne | Hacker News Reader

33 year old with a kid due in a few months time:

I would not want 23 year old me raising a child, I was way too status and money obsessed then and could not provide my son with the model of what I personally deem a good man.

My wife had (too) young parents and it left lasting damage, they dragged her into interpersonal spats and their worries about money before she had the tools to properly process it.

View on HN

The question is if that has gotten better over time? Because age doesn’t really change all that much in my experience.

At least for me it did, 10 years ago I was in the first year of my career so all I wanted was to climb, with no regard of what bridges need burning to make that happen. I'm now at a stage where I have is less to prove so those toxic traits have faded.

My Wifes parents on the other hand might not have grown up but on the other hand they would have divorced way sooner without a child forcing them to stay together

but then it's not the age that made the difference, but the focus in your life. you had other interests, and that also told you that it's not the right time for you to have children. not everyone has the same focus at 23. i wasn't interested in getting married at 23 either. but other people are. did your wife's parents want to have children that early, or was that unplanned? you don't need to answer, but i think that question makes a difference. i don't believe people chose to have children if they don't feel ready for it.

In my mind age and this shift in focus are at least somewhat linked. 23 year old me would be pissed at 30 year old me for not moving to a FAANG company and instead focus on marriage, those 7 years did teach me a lot of important things about myself and the world.

My Wife comes from a country where getting married and having kids before the age of 20 was very much the norm at the time, which led to a lot of people having children at a time where they were not ready for that responsibility.

would you mind sharing the country/culture? as i said elsewhere, in china people also marry and have children young, and they are ready. but they also have a lot of support from their parents and society. young couples normally live with their parents who help them raise the children and run the household, allowing the young couple to learn but also focus on work and career.

This would be Romania, specifically shortly before and during the fall of communism, there were all kinds of weird incentives in place to encourage the birth rate, for example military engineers (like my FIL) where able to get out of deployment to rural infrastructure projects if they had a (pregnant) wife or a newborn. So a good chunk of his unit had children in a span of give or take 4 months, which coincidentally was about a year after an upcoming deployment to build a dam in a godforsaken area of the country was announced.

30 year old me looks back at 20 year old me and wishes he had known better. 40 year old me looks back at 30 year old me and wishes he had known better. 50 year old me looks back at 40 year old me and wishes he had known better. 60 year old me looks back at 50 year old me and wishes he had known better.

I believe generally most people do grow and mature over time. Sometimes it's not that obvious externally or even internally without reflection, but it's a natural part of aging IMHO.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com