Ben Hur Horse Race

  • 0 Posts
  • 300 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: June 13th, 2023
  • Ben Hur Horse Race@lemm.eetoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•Do you have kids? Do you want to have kids? Did you regret having / not having kids?
    6·
    17 days ago

    Thats all fair. I wrote what I wrote for OP, though, and I’m truly confident my wife and I made the right choice for us. I’ve also never felt babies or toddlers were cute. Yesterday, I went shopping for dress shoes, and there was a family there with a kid who was maybe 7, and he flopped down on a bench and shouted “PHONE” and his father handed him his iphone so the kid could watch youtube videos.

    We’re going to Tenerife for 10 days in a week or so, and we’re looking at a 2 berth campervan to shoot off around Ireland in as well. l also just booked 5 days going to Valencia, Spain and then up to Barcelona by train to see my favorite band, Bad Religion play a show in both of those cities. I have a full time(ish) job that I actually like and also have time to try to make money doing my creative things, which is actually growing year on year.

    I am also very aware of overpopulation. The planet has twice as many people now as it did in the 70s. It cannot endure continued human expansion when everyone wants their own house and car and swimming pools.

  • Ben Hur Horse Race@lemm.eetoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•Do you have kids? Do you want to have kids? Did you regret having / not having kids?
    332·
    17 days ago

    So my wife and I are child-free by choice. I’m in a rare position that I wind up speaking to many people in-depth about their lives, and the folks who have children talk about raising their kids all the time.

    If I’m honest, many, many days I think “the moral of the story here is do not have kids, foks”.

    That’s not to say that it’s all bad for everyone, but it is very bad for a lot of people. Essentially, their lives become exclusively about managing their children’s problems. Everyone thinks their children will be well mannered, sweet and thoughtful little guys who will fill their hearts with joy and purpose. The reality is many children are little nightmares with behavior problems that don’t seem to improve no matter how much work they put into seeing child psychologists and play therapists- every single day they spend 3-4 hours trying to calm their kid down as they fly into an uncontrollable rage, overturning tables and swinging their arms as hard as they can at the care givers and their parents. They want to help their kids learn how to control their feelings but they can’t. It’s really sad. The parents live in hell a little, every hour of the day is spent trying to manage their screaming, raging child.

    I will also tell you that many people have tried to convince me over the years that we should have children. Family members, neighbors, co-workers… I also once had a neighbor (who’s kids were little terrors, I once saw one take a swing at his face because he was being punished, and they also once threw BIG rocks over the wall separating our properties without seeing where they’d land) say to me: “You just get to do whatever you want, don’t you?” when I was getting in the car to leave to go work remotely out in the countryside for a week.

    My point is people don’t often tell you how hard it can be, most people lie and say that it’s great. At least half a dozen times I’ve had parents say “now I don’t wish that my child was gone or would never have been born as such, but I do often long for a life where I didn’t have to take care of them all the time”. Like they DO wish they never had kids, but they have to be careful to say they don’t want their child to disappear because its too dark of a thing to say.