Interesting thought. I’m almost your age so that’s something I’ll have to ponder. Not that I’m going to run out and adopt 5 kids or anything. 
Oh, come off it, **Leaffan.**The OP had already noted that retirement planning needs to be different because there won’t be adult kids to help out as he becomes more infirm. The point had already been made, there was no real need for you to remake it. And there was certainly no need for you to phrase it in the most inflammatory way possible. That, more than anything else, makes you sound like you’re not so much expressing a thoughtful and honest opinion as thread-shitting and calling a game of Breeder Bingo.
While I wouldn’t trade my children for anything, I think going childfree has a lot of advantages.
In addition to issues mentioned above, you don’t have to deal with “mommy track” in your career, and/or daycare orchestration each day. Even if you use daycare and work full time, you have to jam in a lot of parenting stuff that makes life hectic. On the other hand, I’m looking at one day soon trying to get a job after about a decade of being at home. Not fun. (The paycheck as a SAHM sucks too!)
I think other than the worry about their health and safety, the thing that’s hardest for me is my time is almost never my own. The lazy Saturday no longer exists for us. Even if the kids go to their grandparents’, we’re very aware of a clock ticking down. When they’re around, I need to tend to them constantly. When I get up is dictated by when the kids get up. I can’t just make myself breakfast and ease into the day, I have to feed them and clean up after them. And I can NEVER do anything without being interrupted. Never.
These days, I can’t even read a book properly. Even if I’m alone, with no current responsibilities, my brain has been trained to never pay attention to something for more than a few minutes. I find myself reading a couple paragraphs, then just looking up from the page for no reason.
Again, I think it’s totally worth it. There is a tender love for your children that can’t be replicated in any other relationship. They make me laugh like crazy. It is literally awesome to have the crafting of a human being in your hands. And at the same time that you feel responsible to make them into good people, you get to see their natural personalities, that no amount of parenting can change, emerge and blossom. It’s great, but it is heavy duty, and not for everyone, and I think that’s fine.
Its is fundamental - and I think its true that you can’t really understand it until you have a small life dependent on you. I’ve slowed my career because I didn’t want kids in daycare 10 hours a day. I’m the person that takes them to the doctor and stays home when they are sick - childless couples might have to compromise on “whose career is more important” if a move is involved - people with kids get to have that battle every time the school nurse calls - or just reach an accommodation up front.
And the changes I would have made had I known. I would have just gotten rid of white bread in the house - and pop. Eating healthy has been a huge battle since they were little and I’ve done a bad job simply because I didn’t know to set myself up to make it easy - by just having only whole grains in the house to start with and very little sugar.
We are at the age where our social lives completely take a back seat to theirs. They can’t drive yet (and when they can will need the supervision of parents home at their curfew time), so we drive them to sleepovers, friends houses. “We can’t go to your barbecue, we have a birthday party that day” is a social excuse we give - and hear from our friends with kids - all the time.
There also becomes a long term look to things - for at least some people. The world needs to be intact for me to pass it along to my children and grandchilden - not that I’m pressuring my kids to give me any - but chances are good that at least one of them will be a breeder. There was a certain fatalism to “life as we know it will end” (environment, economy, energy, culture wars - whatever the current scare is/was) when I was childless - ‘yeah, but I’ll be dead.’
Forgot something. IMO childless people have made far more contribution to saving natural resources than virtually any person with children will ever do. So we can feel better about buying SUVs and coal fired toasters.
Not having children means never having to receive a large envelope from your sons school, containing your sex toys, that your son took in to show his friends :eek:
This boy was my sons classmate, my boy delighted in telling us all the details over dinner.
One of the big things for me was that I married someone who was going to die and I deliberately didn’t have kids because I didn’t feel that I could handle being a single parent. I didn’t want to have a child whose father wasn’t going to be around long. So, having kids or not having kids, there’s an element of viewing children with a sense of responsibility. My choices have meaning for kids I do have or for kids I don’t.
And anyone who thinks having kids makes them immune to a lonely old age has never spent time in hospitals.
How are you suppose to feel? Confident in your choice and thankful for your children.
I am a parent and I participated in this thread because I thought I could add a bit of humor and maybe point a few things that non-parents are totally missing out on…like the stepping on of the Legos.
Or nursing homes. I love my parents, live twenty minutes away from them, and they are still independent. I see my mother once or twice a week, my father once or twice a month, my mother in law maybe once a month (though my husband probably sees her twice a month). I think I’ll need more than my kids to entertain me in my old age - they’ll have lives and families of their own, so I’d better keep some of my own life and hobbies. I don’t want to be my grandmother, bitter because her children weren’t there every minute of their adult lives.
I know a number of people who are childless in similar circumstances. It isn’t that they didn’t want kids, its that their situation was such that they made the sacrifice to not have kids due to health concerns or some other factor. You are very right, and your point of view often gets lost.
No one has yet brought up the issue of car seats.
I had the rare pleasure of having my niece (and her mother) visiting me a few weeks ago. I was looking forward to meeting my niece’s daughter for the first time, but they ultimately decided against it. Aside from the hassle of smuggling a baby through airport security and dealing with a baby on a 5+ hour flight, they had to figure out a way to put the baby in a rental car. They could have brought a car seat and paid the extra baggage fee to check it, or they could have rented one here. Ultimately they decided it was just too much hassle.
And taking a baby on a plane is a special level of hell that I won’t ever have to deal with.
Ridiculous! You can have immediate family like the Waltons, and I guarantee you can die old and lonely. If you expect them to install you into their home in your last days, you are nuts.
I have a neighbor in her 50’s who never had kids. She was at the beck and call of her mother and brother for years, and now shes having second thoughts of her future. “Maybe I should have had kids to take care of me in my old aaaagggge.” Well, too late now, but I told her right out if she thinks she should have had a kid just to have the grownup kid hanging around to change her loaded Depends, she’s full of it. Just because she made herself a slave to her mother and brother? There are NO GUARANTEES. And, being childless, she and her husband have loads of money, they could start planning on how they want to end their final years in one of those expensive assisted living places. Not moldering away in their McMansion and calling up some adult child to drop everything and run over to mow their lawn, take them here, take them there - what if that adult child lives 1,000 miles away? What if that adult child despises them, or vice versa? What if that adult child dies or goes to prison or just disappears? … I tell her just because you have a kid, that kid is NOT necessarily going to be your personal nurse. You’ve got money, start planning for your ‘future’.
You never have to worry about missing a day of work because of a sick kid or school snow days or teacher training days etc.
After reading this thread, I realize that I’m not sure what the OP is actually asking.
Is he asking: What are the advantages and disadvantages to having children? Well I’m not getting into that. It’s such a personal decision. Everybody has to make the right choice for themselves. There’s no logical answer.
But I thought he was asking: How is life different for someone with children vs. someone without children?
I was childless for over 40 years, and now I’m a parent of a baby boy, so I haven’t been a parent that long. Even though I haven’t been a parent long I can aalready tell you: everything is different. There’s not a decision I make that doesn’t take into account the fact that I now have a child.
So making a list of differences is silly: It would go on forever.
No, but you do have to worry about working extra days or being called in because some OTHER co-worker has a sick kid.
Though there is no guarantee, I do really believe that it’s smart for childless/childfree people to try to cultivate relationships with the younger generation (nieces/nephews, friends’ kids, etc.) so that someone may be around to be their advocate later on if they should end up outliving their spouse and friends.
Even if the youngster doesn’t want to be involved to the level of personally wiping your butt every day (which of course most people won’t), it’s nice if there is someone who is available to simply answer questions that the treating doctors might have about you. Or someone who can stop in occasionally to make sure the nursing home and your doctors are doing what they’re supposed to be doing and not doing what they shouldn’t be doing.
Sure, you can write a living will to spell out the big stuff like feeding tubes and such, but if a lazy nursing home staffer decided to inappropriately restrain a demented patient or didn’t change their diaper fast enough, the odds are that it will be uncovered faster if you have a friend or family member around to check on you.
I work in healthcare myself, so of course I’m not saying everyone involved in elderly care is going to mistreat a frail elderly person. However, I do feel like the elderly people who have a friend or family member involved in their care do get better care.
The biggest funeral I ever went to was for a delightful old codger who got divorced around 30 and never had any children and not a single member of his tiny family in the country. He was a great, generous and social man who was well-loved in his community. His entire apartment building turned up at his funeral and had an enormous wake in their common room after, with everyone sharing stories.
“Family” can extend well-beyond biological ties. If you die old and lonely, then it probably has more to do with how you lived your life rather than whether or not you created any.
There are millions of differences, but as a parent I think it is best summarized in this way:
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When I was a non-parent, I was, as it were, the star of my own biographical movie - in my head. Everything I encountered was, as it were, related to me.
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As a parent, I sometimes feel that I’m now the supporting player in the kid’s biography. In many cases, what I see and do is related to him.
This can be both good and bad, though overally I find the good far outweighs the bad.
There is a saying that if you want all of the world’s wisdom, you can climb to ther top of the tallest mountain and contemplate life for 20 years – or you can have kids,
If anyone wants me I’ll be on my mountain.
Sure, but it will be lonely up there.
Ouch! Stop hitting me! Ouch! Ouch!!!
I’m fine up here on Lonely Mountain, except for all the Smaug.