We need some cooling of the jets here, please. There’s no call for insults.
Can I combine #3 thru #10 into one answer? You also need to add stuff like becoming involuntarily celibate, destruction and reformation of your pre-child marriage/relationship into a form you may not have anticipated, being chained to a job and redirection of your earnings to supporting your family and not your own desires. Pretty much every facet of your life will undergo change, like it or not.
OTOH, being a parent is rewarding and fulfilling in ways difficult to describe. Seeing your kids pass milestones: eating solid food, potty training, walking, riding a bike, the first time seeing snow or the ocean, going to school and doing well, scoring a soccer goal or basketball basket, making the football team, completing a 5K, etc. Talking with them about their future and seeing their optimism and excitement about it. Yes, there is an upside to all the shitty stuff, too.
I think this thread is a good one for those considering, or in the process of having kids. No one can tell you how it will be for you, and no amount of preparation is adequate - you have to go thru it all for yourself. That’s life.
I chose #8 though, as everyone has said, that isn’t quite right. Probably the “Losing a leg” option would have been better, but it’s too late to change my answer now. The change hit home as soon as we got her home from the hospital. Wanna eat/pee/sleep/read email/shower/do errands/clean the house? Think again!
Of course it’s slowly gotten better as she’s gotten older. Sixteen months later we once again have adult time and time for ourselves individually. The perspective change from childless to having a newborn, though, was extremely hard to deal with.
Maybe a better option would be: “Your leg falls off of you and turns into the world’s cutest and most irritating monkey.”
That is spot-on! Can I steal that? 
I haven’t been to a movie in a theater in over three years now.
Yeah, that’s more like it.
For me, the changes were
1: Far less freedom: I went from playing ball on 5 different teams and traveling tournaments, to 1 night a week
2: Focus: The responsibility of preparing for the life of the child became primary. I had to grow up as it were. Save money for college, health care, food, diapers. Daily family needs became a focus rather then making sure I got home in time to change for the game.
3: Health: I never worried about my health before. I drank a lot, played ball at light speed etc. Never worried about injury or risk to myself. Once I was “daddy”, I took the measures to make sure I was there for the child
Honestly, if I could, I’d have voted 7.5. It’s “worse” than getting married but not quite so high as imprisonment.
The fact of the matter is that when you have kids, your life isn’t your own anymore. Your schedule isn’t your own anymore. Whether you have a life outside your kid is based entirely on your ability to secure a babysitter for the night (which I’ve gotta try to do this afternoon).
The fact of the matter is that if you’re mature and not selfish, you give up a lot of yourself and your freetime because of your kid. But you do so voluntarily and you get a lot out of it in return.
Something most of the posters here have apparently not experienced yet: children grow up and go away. Even before they go away, they become so independent that the early childhood years when your life was not your own seems like a strange dream.
You come out of it changed (wiser, more wizened) but recognizably the person you were.
I voted “imprisonment,” but it’s not *that *bad. I mean, I still get good food. The biggest hurdle for us was that we have no immediate family nearby to help out. We were so jealous of the other new parents who had their own parents 10 minutes away to drop baby off now and then. That would help immensely in keeping your mojo.
I realize this could change A LOT, because my daughter is still a toddler so as she gets older, we expect more changes.
My relatively low numbered answer (4) is based on … well, the logistics of our life didn’t change that radically. I had a career change a few years ago that felt a lot more disruptive to the general conduct of my daily life.
The biggest change is that we plan our finances much differently. Other things, I can see how they would potentially be big for other people – like if you are the kind of couple whose ideal vacation plan is a wild Vegas trip. Being boring, our previous vacations were mostly spent hanging out at our cabin on a lake. Now, our vacations are mostly at the cabin on the lake, with a toddler in a kiddie pool on the front lawn.
I would give the experience of parenthood (especially the emotional component) a A+ so far, so please don’t take my low answer as a lack of enthusiasm for the concept.
I’ve never been in jail or lost a major body part, so NONE of the options really worked for me.
But I will say this: having kids changes your life FAR more than getting married does.
What I mean is, when you first get married, you’ll probably find that you and your spouse STILL socialize with the same people you socialized with before getting married. You’ll still take part in most of the same activities you did before getting married.
If you used to go out dancing on Saturday nights, you still will. If you used to go to happy hours with friends on Friday night, you still will. If you used to hang out with a lot of single friends, you still will.
But once you have kids, you’ll find that you just don’t have the time or energy to do a lot of those things any more. And worse yet, when you DO get a night off and try to hang out with old friends, you find that you no longer have much in common with people who don’t have kids.
.
Feel free! 
And I’m with delphica on the grade for parenting: I know not everyone has the same experience, but for me being a dad is the best part about my life. There’s plenty going on for me, but the experience of my love for my daughter is comparable to absolutely no other experience I’ve ever had.
Damn. 36 hours till I get to see her again.
It was a 10 for me - my entire life changed - my feelings about the world and society changed - I couldn’t believe how intense my feelings of love could be - or how angry I could get at that same person.
It lengthened my perspective on life - previously I pretty much lived for the moment - now I have to have a 18-23 year plan (including college). Both my husband and I are now pretty much glued to our present jobs - and we haven’t traveled in years even though we both enjoy it. Maybe NEXT year (my eternal mantra).
Some of the best moments in my life are when I’m putting my daughter to bed and we are just lying there, holding hands and being quiet in the dark. I can’t imagine a more perfect instant. And as she gets older, her conversations are immensely interesting - a new perspective on almost everything. I love watching her learn and figure things out on her own. Mostly it’s a new source of joy - and almost an equal new source of worry. Sometimes I feel a little too much like Gollum and his ring…
This is huge. Your support cannot be underestimated. We have none. My parents are gone, and I have one sibling many miles away. My wife’s an only child and her parents are 150 miles away. We essentially have no family help at all, ever. That’s a killer. Even on the very rare occasions when one of us goes out to have a little time off, we don’t even really enjoy it, since we know the other one is at home trying to keep the kid happy. It would be sooooooo nice to go out knowing that her mother, two cousins and a few other kids were at the house romping around together. My wife actually has a very large family (aunts, uncles, loads of cousins with kids), but they are all essentially unavailable to us. I’ve never wanted to live in the area my wife is from, but I’m now almost on the verge of suggesting we move – we’d gain literally 40 family baby-sitters within a thirty-minute drive and a dozen kids around the same age as ours.
Nonetheless, we love our little guy, and I found almost all of the options in the list to be completely inappropriate. It would be nice if they better reflected the good/bad aspect of raising a family.
I don’t subscribe to the theory that people without kids can’t possibly understand what it’s like to have one.
However, when asked by my friends how much of a change it’s been for me, I explain like this:
Assume the “baseline” for you, single, living alone is “1” (these are just arbitrary number-line numbers, not good versus bad or anything).
2 can be you dating someone.
3, maybe an exclusive, serious relationship.
Moving in together? We’ll step that up to a 20.
Getting married? Now we’re talking about 20.0001.
Having kids? 5324328943294382942839424392.
Bigger change than anything else in your life.
That works for me, except the monkey eventually wanted a new car and college and he wasn’t THAT cute anymore either. But the irritating is constant at least.
I think of my kids as the toughest and longest project I’ve ever taken on. Like any huge project, there are great rewards and pains in the ass. I am way ahead on the rewards.
It’s very difficult to express the magnitude of the change because I hardly even remember what it was like before I was a parent. My son is only two. My experience may be a bit extreme because, as it turns out, my son is autistic. This has presented daily logistic and emotional challenges that I could not have dreamed of before.
I am ordinarily on a very even keel in general. Having a child has transformed my life into a daily rollercoaster. Brief and transcendent moments of joy punctuate confusion, uncertainty, and unending toil. We really don’t know what is going to happen. If he starts to acquire some language and communication skills within the next year or so, his prognosis is pretty good. Otherwise, we just don’t know. The daily ups and downs combined with the sheer physical grind has changed my life in more ways than I can begin to say.
I picked 7, because getting married for me was a bigger change than for most, since we weren’t living together before, and in fact were hundreds of miles apart.
8 and 9 are too negative. As for 10, I immediately knew less about reality when we had kids. And they told me so when they were teenagers.
Yeah, having a kid meant we couldn’t pop out to see a movie or a lecture. But we also had an amazing and interesting piece of entertainment right at home. I mean, you just try to find an entertainment event which throws up on you. Can’t be done.
Instead of being limiting, which 8 and 9 imply, we did things with our kids we’d never do otherwise, and not just go to Sesame Place. I experienced the joy of horse ownership, vet bills, and massive amounts of poop. We met Adam West and Iggy Pop. Life would have been so boring without them.