Someone who truly has a childfree personality will know it early on. I can’t say for sure if it is an honest to god biological orientation, but I knew this about myself from adolescence. And I knew it wasn’t “just a phase”. I knew I wouldn’t change my mind. And I haven’t. Children are not for me. Never have been.
I’m sure there are others like me. I have a male cousin who seems the same way. Just plain uninterested in procreating. Maybe even has a physical aversion to the concept like I do.
If you have even the slightest thought of “maybe I will, maybe I won’t” regarding children, then a sterilization is not for you. But there are those who, like me, will never make a good parent. We see tragic stories all the time about people who never should have had children.
I got a vasectomy in my mid-20s; I’m 71 now. I’ve never regretted it. I got a bit of resistance from the urologist, until I told him my fiancee, now my wife, didn’t want kids either.
I figured, and still do, that however good your parenting intentions are, when the chips are down you’re going to treat your kids the way your parents treated you. I’m the son of a toxic father who messed me up in ways I’m still trying to cope with. I did not want to pass that on to another generation. My wife had bailed out of a brief career teaching 2nd and 3rd-graders, so she knew she was not cut out for that kind of work.
Same here. Extremely toxic mother hardwired me to be unfit for parenting. I make a pretty good grandfather/uncle surrogate and enjoy the role immensly, but deep in my genes enough of my mother’s behavioral defects persist to guarantee I would have been a poor parent at best. My wife and I like to quote Nietzsche by saying “(We) did our children the favor of not having them.”
I can understand that attitude, and for a long time I felt the same way. But for reasons I generally don’t disclose, I did end up having a child finally. And I parented exactly the opposite of the way I was raised. It wasn’t easy - well, it was very easy to avoid hitting my child, as I have never understood how anyone could use physical violence on a child - because sometimes I was unsure what a good parent would do, not having experienced good parenting myself.
The thing is, my son (now 22) came out beautifully. He’s not perfect by any means, but he is well grounded, thoughtful, a good friend and loving partner, and hard working. Most rewarding for me personally is how good he feels about his family. In fact just before he left for grad school a few weeks ago, he told me how much he loves me and his dad, how good he feels about the way he was brought up, and how he credits his good upbringing with turning him into a decent young man.
I believe that my single most impressive accomplishment in life is that I raised a son in love, kindness, security, and understanding, despite having been raised with fear and contempt myself. If I experience self-doubt or depression at times, I have that wonderful thought to keep me going.
Mind you, I’m not arguing with your decision at all. I think it’s perfectly fine to choose the path that you and your wife chose, and it would probably be a good thing if more people did. But what I am saying is that the cycle CAN be broken.
Adults who grew up in abusive circumstances should not feel that they are automatically disqualified from ever being a decent parent. There is hope.
There’re various theories that parents raise their kids the opposite of how they’re raised, so you more resemble your grandparents than your parents.
There are also theories that it runs in a cycle of 4 generations.
I suppose a better way to think of it as as @CairoCarol almost says. If you are self-aware, you have an opportunity not to repeat your parents’ errors raising you. If you are not self-aware, you may well be doomed to reprise those errors plus/minus some individual variation. And here are two different examples of large sources of individual variation:
If your Dad was a mean drunk, and you’re kinda mean but not an alcoholic (or vice versa) you’re going to treat your kids a bunch better even if you’re oblivious to your internal dynamics. And if you’re not oblivious you can break the cycle pretty thoroughly.
A lot of truly toxic parenting is a direct result of diagnosable mental illness. BPD, psychopath, narcissist, etc. If you, the child, don’t inherit that illness, you’ll be harmed by the insanely bad parenting, but you’re not doomed to reprise it because you’re not actually insane like your Mom/Dad was.
IANA expert, but that’s certainly commonly believed to be common.
But don’t read too much into that statement.
If for argument’s sake we assume the majority of abusers were themselves abused, that does NOT imply that the majority of abused kids grow up to be abusing parents. The correlation runs the other way. And correlation isn’t causation in any case.
The same sort of logic can be applied to any other form of lousy parenting, not just abusive. The most that can be said, assuming your premise is accurate (and I’m not arguing that for or against), is that being abused as a child increases the likelihood you will be an abuser as a parent.
Thank you. Very interesting, and I find myself agreeing with your post. I’ll add this for a very weak data point: My younger Sister and I are very close and have very similar personalities. The one glaring exception: our parents were both “messy’s” with hoarding tendencies. Because I always found the chaos upsetting, I grew up to be a hyper organized person who can’t stand clutter; my Sister ended up being just like them (in that one regard).
Edit to add: actually I just re-read your first post, and I agree 100%. Interesting!
When I was 28, I asked my doctor for one. He refused saying that it wasn’t my age, but because I was single. I’ll go to my grave wondering if I’ve been shooting blanks all my life!
My wife & her sis have a lot of personality in common. The one area they’re totally different is how they dealt with their rather domineering single Mom. They’re both 60-something and Mom is now 90-something and the same dynamics play out as did when they were kids. Very similar inputs, radically different outputs.
Human nature is a lot more complicated than e.g. training dogs to sit, stay, and fetch.
Another observation about vasectomies is that they cannot generally be “add ons”.
When our dog needed surgery, while she was under anesthesia we had her nails trimmed and her teeth cleaned/polished. It seemed a standard way to do things.
When I had my gallbladder removed, I asked my surgeon (who does vasectomies every Friday) to snip my vas when my primary procedure was complete. I told him if my insurance balked, I’d pay cash.
He didn’t say no, he said hell no. Things like that were never done. I tried to reason with him, but he said reason had nothing to do with it.
kayaker, when my wife was born on her mom’s 36th birthday, it happened out of town. That’s because my MIL wanted her tubes tied at the same time, and our town’s (Catholic) hospital wouldn’t do it.
Urologists and gynecologists are honestly some of the most territorial doctors out there, so I’m surprised that a general surgeon would do a vasectomy.
