This is kind of my family. My brother and I have not fathered any children, he’s a step dad, with no intention to have any of his own, I’m happily in a childfree relationship.
The only (sort of) exception is that my eldest brother (of three), had four kids… All girls.
So our biological lineage will continue, but our family name ends here, since once my niece’s get married, our family name will be dead.
The closest continuance of our family name is through my one male cousin on my dad’s side. I don’t keep in touch with him enough to know if he has kids or he’s planning to have kids, or to even be informed as to whether or not those children would be boys or girls, etc.
After that, you would have to go back about 3 generations to find someone of the same lineage that’s actually continuing the family name. Second or third cousins… I believe. I’m unaware if my grandfather had any siblings, or cousins… So that part of my family tree is a complete unknown.
For my brother, he wasn’t in a stable relationship long enough to get married and have kids (though, he’s on his second marriage, the first did not last very long… It’s a long story as to why)… And since his second wife (his current wife) already had children from a previous marriage, he has no interest. For me, I never cared either way, and stuck to the philosophy of “I’ll let my wife decide”. My current, and longest, relationship, under which we’ve been together for nearly a decade now, is with a beautiful woman who has been very childfree for a long time, and I support her in that. I also wouldn’t be able to financially support children, which is why I kept waiting for marriage before kids. I at least wanted the illusion that someone was going to stick around before making that commitment.
My oldest brother got married pretty young and to his credit, they’re still together. I’m mostly estranged from him, but I’m aware of some of the details of his life. His children are at the age where they can start having kids of their own now (which should give some indication of how old I am… I’m “great uncle” age). I don’t have any pressure to have kids at this point because my SO doesn’t want them, my breeder brother is estranged, my father is dead, and I’m estranged from my mom. The only time I even hear about kids is either from my sister-in-law taking about her (now post-teen) children, and from my SO’s family, who we see online only a few times a year at most.
When I was a teenager I wanted kids. I fully bought into ‘the American dream’ being sold. I’d get me a wife, kids, house, and a career. Helped that I actually like kids. Made it my life’s goal to try to be the best provider, best dad, best husband I could be.
Put myself through college, I have a good career, bought a house when I was 24, and still love kids. But I gave up on dating when I was like 28(?). It just became not worth it for so many reasons.
This last fall marked 20 years since I left my hometown to start my life… And I felt like a failure (still do). I exist to work and pay bills.
Vasectomy is up there in the top 5 best things to happen in my life.
Highly recommend if you are sure you want to go child-free. There is nothing quite so worry free as shooting blanks instead of using condoms and birth control.
Also, I said this before as a parent and I will say it again- please do not have children unless you really want children. No child deserves to go through their childhood neglected and unloved. Which is going to be a major result of the end of Roe v. Wade in the U.S. and why abortion rights are vital.
No one should have to be a parent unless they absolutely want to be a parent.
In an abortion, the unborn child. In a partial birth abortion in an unbelievably brutal way, involving a drill to the base of the skull as the baby is writhing in pain. But even with earlier methods, it’s still murder. I know, you’ll say you’re fine with it, like to call it something else, pretend since it hasn’t breathed on its own it’s not a child. Deep down though, you know.
Do I know deep down? Or do I not give a shit whether or not it’s considered murder by you because no one should be forced to give up their bodily autonomy for someone else and if you consider it murder, then it is a person using someone else’s body for their own personal gain against that person’s will. Which is slavery. And you’re fine for that.
Either it is not a person, so it isn’t murder, or if it is a person, a slaver killing the person enslaving them is also not murder. Not in my world.
That anger comes from knowing deep down you’re on the wrong side of this, it’s the inner conflict. I’m very sorry you’re too entrenched politically to listen to your conscience. I’ll leave you alone with your enemy, yourself.
Adolf Hitler had a sister who emigrated to England before the war and had two kids. Both kids actually fought in the war against their uncle with no one aware of who they were. They both agreed to never have children.
As a father and a very rational person, I can fully understand you.
Especially if you don’t have any kids around you and/or problems inside your family anyways.
I’d lie if I said I wouldn’t sometimes love to have some alone time. But I would never go back to sleeping in every Saturday and missing out on my child.
Can’t quantify the feeling of having kids until you have one, but it’s very easy to articulate the perceived drawbacks of said unknown. They bring a life buff like nothing else, speaking a someone who regularly chases altered states of consciousness.
They provide a large opportunity for some enormous maturation, removal of bitterness/edgelord-iness and to not be so self-centred.
Your description of kids sounds like me beforehand. Have 2 happy accidents now.
Lie-ins are still possible if you are actually in a decent relationship by the way. To anybody reading, don’t have kids if you are in a bad one. No kid deserves to grow up around that.
I grew up in a family with eighteen kids. If having such a huge family is good for anything, it’s that I don’t have the romantic veneer that most people do when it comes to childrearing.
I know exactly how expensive and hard it is, and just how much it sucks.
Your life experience is actually so extreme that you don’t know exactly how hard it is or how much it sucks. Your experience is not going to be representative of 99.9% of the populace.
You should basically never use your family life experiences growing as a reference point because of how extremely unusual it is. This is the equivalent of complaining about how hard it is to drive around town in the truckasaurus.
Unless you are intentionally misrepresenting a foster home, which is again different than having your own child or 2.
Eh idk. I think most people who are alive were children at some point. Don’t think it is a huge leap to extrapolate what it would be like to have kids now that we are adults.
Most people who are alive didn’t get raised with as many children as the post I was responding to. Your point stands but is irrelevant to the post you are responding to.
Also, that argument ignores the fact that everyone with children at one point did not. This means we already know what it’s like to assume what having children was like. We then also have the experience of actually having one. So when someone tells you it’s different, they’ve already got the “no kid” experience under their belt and can tell you how successfully they extrapolated what it meant to be a parent in that life atage.
Driving a monster truck on a tiny road will give you a lot of life experience about driving safely. It’s the same when you have to do a lot of parenting and have no other choice. I have more practical experience rearing children than most people on this thread, guaranteed.
There are few things sweeter than sleeping in on a Saturday and waking up to a clean, quiet house.
Waking up early, making pancakes for a couple of gleeful little munchkins, and then going out to the park to run around and have fun is one of those things you forget you used to love doing when you were younger.
one of them screams about something that doesn’t matter
I mean, one of the challenges of child care is having empathy for kids who are still struggling to regulate their emotions. If you’re openly dismissive and adversarial to kids, their behavior tends to get worse over time.
There are plenty of people who simply aren’t mature enough, themselves, to know how to interact with children. That’s one big reason why its helpful to have large extended family homes. Grandparents - particularly those who are retired, experienced, and nostalgic for parenthood - can be way better at dealing with little kids than adults who are themselves too emotionally congested and socially anxious to know how to respond.
But people routinely overstate how difficult child care can be, in large part because they fixate on the grumpy and frustrated children while suffering total blindness towards the happy, well-adjusted, and well-behaved kids.
Its a grueling slog in a good state and a fucking nightmare in a bad one. My experience with the Texas adoption system has me convinced that the entire agency is run by a collection of sadists. Feels like it exists just to traumatize people further.
The bigger problem is that it can be prohibitively expensive, which is why the ‘people will just adopt unwanted children’ line that anti-abortion advocates take is bullshit. They make as many barriers to adoption as possible, the biggest one being cost.
All legitimate concerns. It’s definitely not the best option, or even feasible, for everyone. But it deserves more consideration than it tends to receive whenever the subject of having kids comes up.
I mean real talk, how many generations back are you actually disappointing? Like I’m only going to disappoint my dad, as once you go up to grandparent level I have plenty of cousins who can and have already passed “our line” down.
Absolutely nothing wrong with eugenics when applied properly. Like nuclear power, AI, the internet, eugenics would fix a lot that’s wrong with humanity. If I could generically engineer myself into someone with no anxiety disorder or adhd or no postural tachycardia or naturally muscular body maybe even different color eyes and a different voice, I would. My genes aren’t unique and my traits don’t need to be passed on. I’m not a chinchilla.
What you are describing is gene therapy, not eugenics. When eugenics was a thing, it was mostly voluntary in liberal countries. Propaganda was used to convince “inferior” people to sterilize themselves, including black people. How is that different than reinforcing the idea that “dysgenic” people are doing the right thing by not having kids?
My genes aren’t unique and my traits don’t need to be passed on
I never said they did. Some people will never have kids and that’s fine. That’s not the issue at hand with eugenics. Eugenics is treating people like chinchillas actually, animals that must be bred and selected for the best traits.
If I could generically engineer myself into someone with no anxiety disorder…
That’s the thing, you can’t. Not synthetically at least. The current gene framework is a house of cards and it will be replaced by a better system of understanding. Look into Denis Noble’s work. Also look into epigenetics. The genes you pass on to your children are not the genes you inherit from your parents, they change, and they are changed by your body in response to your environment for the better. No organism is doomed to the fate of inferior genes, they are naturally mutable. But perhaps your environment and lifestyle is not serving you well, and that may be your real problem.
I asked my wife if she wanted kids and she just waved around and said “look at this shit, do you really want to put a someone through this?” Yep, the world is screwed. But I believe people have to make their own, conscious choice. No sense in forcing them to either have kids or not.
you wont catch me raising children both because im a mess, and i refuse to raise children in a dysfunctional society that hasn’t got its shit together.
My wife and I were planning to have kids in 2020. We had already started the process in 2019. Then covid happened. Then people hoarded toilet paper during a respiratory pandemic that doesn’t even affect your bowels. Then supply lines shut down. Then forest fires raged out of control across the country, turning the skies into red ash. Then protests and riots broke out across the country. All the while trump was happening about eleventy billion times. Ultimately we got a master class on how fucking ridiculous this world has become. We decided never to have kids. We’re already middle aged, so that’s it for us. It’s too late now. We occasionally consider adopting, but that’s a whole other bag of cats.
People weren’t hoarding toilet paper because they thought it affected their bowels – they were hoarding it because who knew what might happen where we’d have to stay at home or be isolated for a long time.
What’s strange is, why toilet paper and not much else lol. At least where I lived. I wasn’t hoarding, I was just trying to get some at the store because we were running out completely, and the shelves were empty. 💀 Had to buy some non-bulk expensive and fragile af paper.
The why TP is because it was big and noticeable in store. There was a chunk missing and then word got that “you need to get some before they run out” and that causes a run and the stores run out.
If you remember during the gas pipeline cyber attack. It only effected a specific area of the country SE area, but areas outside of the actual problem ran out of fuel because people heard about other stations running out and having problems. We are not good at handling stressful situations together. We turn into a “fuck you, I got mine and I might need to stockpile more for later” type of people.
If you ever decide you do want kids, I’d endorse adopting. That way you’re not bringing a new life into this shitty world, you’re hopefully improving one that’s already gotten dealt a bad hand in life.
Just FYI it does affect bowels. My mom had straight diarrhea for weeks while she had covid. I may have had it and my bf we both had the hits for over a week.
Same, same. Well just in Germany. We haven’t been hit as bad as the U.S. but your country stretches over three climate zones. However, we live in a small town on the Baltic coast and last year was nuts with the weather. And yes, some people are unfortunately very egoistical and make it even harder for the rest who just want to have a halfway decent life.
We had a long talk about it and the above statement is just the gist of it. If we lived in better times, sure. But not in this timeline. We both came to that conclusion and it is perfectly fine.
Not to butt in your business, but if that’s your only reason to not have children, and you’re otherwise financially capable and willing to raise kids, have you two considered adoption? Instead of bringing someone extra into this shit as you put it, you’d just be helping one of the people who’re unfortunately already in it.
Sorry for the late reply, was night here. Yes, we actually thought about that. But while it is easy to just have a kid, adoption (at least here in Germany where you only have around 4000 adoptions per year) comes with quite the list of requirements. We are both working full time and just recently found a very nice apartment, but without a seperate room for a kid. Then again my wife is a kindergarten teacher, so she already has like 20 kids ;)
The sad part of this is the people here with the critial thinking and reasoning skills to make that descision are the ones not passing on those attributes, but its the low income & education people are the ones who cant even think far enough ahead to wear a fucking condom.
You say that as if it’s necessary for human kind to improve. We don’t have control over what happens to our species and we will go extinct which is absolutely fine. Not sure what is up with this whole obsession with continuing the species. Stop worrying about something that will naturally work itself out instead of complaining that the ‘wrong’ pe ople are breeding. Maybe thats just the natural way of things. I mean, greed, violence, hatred and discrimination are all ingrained parts of the human animal meant to aide in the whole survival aspect of things. It wasn’t meant to catapult earth species into space. Unless you are ok with genetic engineering and removing those traits from the gene pool you will never not have power hungry assholes ruining it for the rest of us. And that’s fine. That’s just what life on earth is like.
Add comment