Why on earth are some people still having kids now?

I absolutely agree with most (but not everything) you say. And that's just scratching the surface.

It's a matter of time before a virus emerges that has the transmissibility of measles and the lethality of ebola. Peak oil may have hit already, income inequality is only going to get worse, civil war is more likely than at any other time since 1865, and it's not going to be pretty when the billions of climate refugees from third world countries start pouring in.

I'm hopeful that my generation won't see the worst of it until they're elderly. But anyone born today will be dealing with that chaos for most of their adult lives. It's totally nuts to voluntarily bring anyone into that kind of world.

As much as I hate to admit it, Flagpole is spot on with his observations.

I've got 4 kids, a wonderful wife, a couple of small businesses (if you can call it that), work my butt off providing for them, and couldn't be living a fuller and more meaningful life.

I did wait to have kids until I turned 40 and had developed marketable skills over decades.

Here are some keys; choose your wife very, very carefully, learn to live in the moment, rise to the challenge, celebrate the little victories, don't dwell on the defeats, keep learning, take mitigated risks, ignore the haters, surround yourself with optimistic friends, develop a more myopic mindset, and, most importantly, learn to love Bourbon.

So you are saying that humans should no longer reproduce and we should just let the species die out because there are problems? That seems nuts to me. Imagine what a miserable place the world will be when everyone is over 50.

Having kids is the most basic human thing. It's instinct. Any idiot can do it and it is not some "noble sacrifice"

But why would a man and women (at this day and age of over-population and climate change and lack of resources) choose to have more than 2 biological kids? It is actually more selfish to procreate and have all these extra kids....I mean talk about adding to your carbon footprint!

More people should adopt. They like to adopt rescue dogs. Why not adopt more kids if you want more than 2?

DragonLady wrote:

You’re right, and it’s destined to get progressively worse as smarter people elect not to have kids, leaving the imbeciles to populate the planet.

Wouldn't this strengthen the case for pushing postsecondary education harder and making it more financially accessible to people? I know right wingers hate the concept of equality of opportunity, but your prediction surely has to overcome that opposition

I can understand your pessimism, but it's very unlikely we'll encounter a virus that can spread like measles and kill like Ebola. Mostly agree with your other points

Tons of people have lots of kids and make equal to or less than you and do just fine. You just have a YOU problem.

Alan

My wife and I are about to have our first kid. Now's the time because in your late 30's pregnancies get pretty risky, and even more so in your 40's. We are roughly 30 years old. We combine for about $160k and bought a house pretty easily in a moderately priced housing market and it's nearly half paid off already. We've got over $100k of investments that we'll use to upgrade to our next house after we get the family going down the road a bit and another $100k+ in retirement plans so far, all this while going on multiple trips per year the past number of years (sadly that is admittedly about to stop for a bit while we have an infant) including one international trip per year (until the pandemic). My question to you is what are you blowing all your money on to make $75k and barely scraping by? What are you spending your money on? I guess I have never purchased a new car, and both my wife and my car is very old and inexpensive to begin with. We don't buy material items. We just spend money on food/drink, mortgage, and travel for the most part. And when we travel we get the best flight deals we can find or even drive, and we stay at bargain AirBnB's. We both lived in crappy apartments during school and immediately after school since we had no money at the time and worked 40 hours per week summer jobs to help pay for school, and the school was the cheapest public university option we had available to us, so our debts were paid off within 2 years after graduating college. I guess we're the only millennials who aren't complaining about the world. Seems to me people just make terrible life decisions and like to complain about them.

Oh and why during a pandemic? Do you think healthy people at age 30 and kids are particularly vulnerable to Covid? Well no, they're not. So it doesn't matter. I'd rather be my age and having kids during this pandemic than being an 85 year old in a nursing home.

I don't want to be 50-60 years old with no kids and wishing I would have created a family. I imagine it'll be fun to visit and hang out with my kids once they start their lives and visit their families in my old age.

The world is fine. The problems the world has are not significant enough to much dampen the joy of family. After all, you're not doubting the value of your own existence now, so why doubt the value of existence for kids you helped bring into the world? As for time to care for them, there's a big overlap between what you do now and the future, and you work together with someone else to care for them, plus the school system that cares for and educates them from age 5 to 18 for 8-11 hours a day (counting sports) for 180-200 days a year.

If you lived in the British Isles in 950 AD you had to worry that Vikings would come, carry off your crops, livestock, and wife, then kill you. If you lived in Central Europe a couple centuries or so later the same was the case but with Mongols rather than Vikings. As recently as the very late 19th Century you could never be sure you weren't soon to die in an outbreak of typhus or cholera. Life probably has never been safer than it is today, which is not to say it's risk free.

Either way, more and more liberals have this way of thinking, and are not having kids. Im ok with that.

Too bad your parents didn’t share your concerns.

GOPrunnerboi wrote:

Either way, more and more liberals have this way of thinking, and are not having kids. Im ok with that.

Meanwhile the GOP antivaxxers are dying away. So we call it even.

because procreation is an innate animal instinct.

We have two kids that are now finished with college. It was incredibly difficult but we knew that going in. We were dirt poor for the first ten years. We could not even afford a babysitter so they never had one.

We are doing well now financially and put

them both through two very expensive colleges. I can not imagine having done it differently.

I’m happy we have a family.

What I can’t imagine is having raised them without my wife there. So many people do and often not by choice. Also, are kids did not have any major ailments so we are lucky that way.

This doom and gloom about bringing up kids today in this troubled world is the same thing that has been said for the past 50 years.

The real reasons for not having kids are typically selfish but there is nothing wrong with that either.

I have two kids and one on their way. Kids are more expensive than I realized, but you know what else is? A luxury car with hidden costs that one might buy with the money they save. I spend money and time on what I like, which in this case is kids.

To be honest, every person/couple I know that adamantly doesn’t want kids have been extremely selfish, narcissistic people and just justify it in all sorts of ways. I don’t buy it and I’m thankful I have kids so I’m not left with these type of people in my social circle.

OP, you just sound like a dud, tbh. Good luck.

otter wrote:

The real reasons for not having kids are typically selfish but there is nothing wrong with that either.

It is not selfish to abstain from bringing new life into this world if one has serious concerns about being able to adequately provide for those lives, be it in terms of financially, time spent with the children, and provision of other resources. It's pretty easy to screw a kid up, and most people arguably don't put enough effort into parenting well. It' s also not at all selfish to abstain from having kids due to serious concerns about the current world climate, be it literal or figurative. Much of these things are what the OP emphasized in his/her original post.

Quite frankly it's selfish to have kids--much of it is motivated by either a desire to pass on one's own genes, a desire to escape loneliness, a desire to have someone to "take care of you" in old age, etc. Furthermore, having a child is the single most destructive thing a person can do in terms of contributing to pollution, global warming, and overall footprint on the planet.

Maybe it's even more selfish and destructive to the planet to keep on living. Let's all kill ourselves and save the earth. I'll go after you.

None of these people who are concerned about the environment are willing to hold their breath to stop emitting CO2.