Skill issue. Kids are really not that hard if you take it seriously like any other job. Traveling is mostly dead though until they turn teen.
My parents took my sister and I to China, Hawaii, Europe, as well as other vacations when I was like 10-14 or something. I knew it wasn't normal when we were doing it, like my friends families weren't doing this, but I didn't realize how unusual it was until much later. I definitely respect them for not leaving us, the kids, out of it, and teaching us how to travel, but man it's crazy to spend that much money on a kid that'll only remember a fraction of the trip at best.
Tangentially, speaking of memory - in China specifically, I remember being kinda swarmed by locals taking selfies with us, as my sister and I were two blond white kids, which isn't an everyday sight there. I still wonder if we're in any photo albums.
Hard disagree. Kids are different, have different needs, and behave differently. Parents also have a wide variety of support structures around them, which also has a huge impact on how difficult raising kids is.
There are people who will struggle to be good parent regardless of other factors, but that is not the only reason raising kids might be hard. I'm glad you haven't had some of the struggles other people have, but you sound like the guy born on third who thought he got a home run.
Don't understand your baseball metaphor, not an american.
...yeah, I actually should have left that part off. It was unnecessarily fussy of me, and I apologize for putting that in. I stand by the rest of what I said, but that part was an unnecessary personal attack.
In baseball, you can only score by getting past the opposing team without being tagged with the ball; which usually requires your teammates to keep them busy as you move from one safe base to the next. To start from third (last before scoring) and think you hit a home run is to start out almost done and think you did the whole thing without support.
Again, I apologize for putting that in - we have not had easy kids, and the "skill issue" comment hit a nerve.
Offtopic, but after reading these comments, I'm so glad I'm so glad I first opened Lemmy today rather than Reddit. Thoughtful, varied discussion, instead of sifting through a ton of samey "joke" comments to maybe (if ever) find some nugget of humanistic or original thought, or get bored, doomscrolling and lose hope in humanity.
I just love this community, thank you all for being here.
*singles with babies
Both
I didn't really want kids, but my wife did, so we compromised and had 6.
Jokes aside I found it super fulfilling, I had struggled a lot with depression and feeling like everything was pointless, but raising kids gives me a purpose and makes mudane stuff like work feel meaningful. I definitely get what the comic is talking about, it's rough a lot of the time, but it was what I unexpectedly needed in my life.
6???
Yep, 6. After you have several it's kinda like "how much harder could it be to have another?"
We had the same thought with our cats and ended up with five. Then we realized that if you're unlucky it can get really unsustainable really quickly. For example if you have one cat and it develops 3 problems you have 3 problems to deal with. Five cats and each develop 3 problems...yeah you now have 15 problems to keep up with (vet bills, messed to clean up, fights to break up etc etc.).
I can't imagine juggling six kids. Props to you all for being able to keep up with that.
Rich people travel too much
One must understand that the hormones which motivate breeding instinct in social mammals override all other considerations on a neurochemical level when someone has a baby--if those hormones and emotional systems are working correctly.
(Sometimes they aren't, after all; everyone knows those statistical outlier individuals who stick out like a sore thumb for having no parental instincts.)
If a common-sense-overriding mechanism were not in place to drive reproduction, a species will go extinct.
Brain: I'd have to be crazy to have a baby...
Biology: No problem!
What's worse to me is that mother's also forget the pain and awfulness of 9 months of pregnancy followed by childbirth, leading to them wanting another child.
my sister didnt really have any issues with pregnancy or labor, she said it was pretty easy
It’s honestly not that bad for some mothers. For others it can be horrific.
Meh. My wife and I had kids based upon our own thoughts of how we wanted our life to go, not based upon some reproduction drive. The sex drive is a totally different thing, but there was no urge and pull to have kids for us.
We've had three kids and it's been an incredible experience with very few downsides and massive upsides. I was not a "kid person" before having kids, but IMO it's one of the peek good experiences in life.
It's exactly the inability (more like refusal) of most of us to override our base instincts that is going to cause the extinction of not just ourselves, but most complex life on the planet along with us. I say that not just as someone with "no parental instincts," but rather a humble human who actually uses the ability to see further than my nose.
Equally of course, if we use our mighty intellects to override our breeding instincts entirely then we’d arrive at the same extinction rather more quickly.
So you know, damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
Given our current birth rates in the western world I’m less worried about our breeding instincts than our inability to convince everyone that their children should live in a better world than them, apparently that’s the instinct that broke first.
Not really. I'm sure our mighty intellects could have settled on a birth rate somewhere between 25 and 0. There are a lot of numbers in between.
I mean… the developed world has settled on slightly below break even (or very below break even in a few cases). So yes, that did happen
We only settled on a "break even" point now that we're many billions of people over capacity and society and the biosphere are collapsing. We needed to slow down a long time ago.
We are not over capacity at all, this is a fucked up lie propagated by the rich western northern hemisphere people and the rich in general, the wealthiest 10% causes over 50% of the pollution.
That includes lots of Americans and Europeans.
Here is an excellent episode from the climate deniers playbook podcast about this topic. https://pod.link/1694759084/episode/Z2lkOi8vYXJ0MTktZXBpc29kZS1sb2NhdG9yL1YwL3I3WDh5SjhNY3RKY1hab2Rva09pRUxiR0NZYzFoNWsyT3gzcE0wZm5sUk0
We are not over capacity at all
We're in a state of ecological overshoot, defined as a population consuming more resources than its environment can replenish. At its simplest, overshoot is a function of individual consumption x total population.
The Global Footprint Network calculates that we crossed this line in 1971, when both our global population (3.8B) and individual energy consumption (15.8kWh) were far lower than they are today (8.2B and 21.7kWh, respectively). Consider also that population is both a cause and effect of energy consumption.
the wealthiest 10% causes over 50% of the pollution.
You're referring to CO2 emissions here (and it's actually closer to 60%), but there are many other symptoms of overshoot. Habitat loss, species extinctions, overharvesting of resources, and other forms of pollution (industrial, particulate, trash) are huge problems in less wealthy nations. In South America, for example, we've seen a 95% loss of wildlife species over the past 50 years. The planetary boundaries framework is helpful for looking at overshoot more holistically, instead of focusing solely on emissions (although that's important too).
In wealthy nations, populations are declining but consumption is unsustainable. In poorer nations, individual consumption is low but population growth is unsustainable. Only by reducing both do we have a hope of living equitably on this planet.
We could feed and clothe every single person on the planet right now with about one third of the resources that we use. We aren't over capacity, we're being murdered by the owners of about 100 companies across the globe that are responsible for 50% of global pollution.
For how long? The current output is unsustainable. Respectfully, you're not seeing the whole picture.
They get mad because I “don’t have responsibilities” and it’s not a conversation just people shouting at me
pfft. friends with kids have to get public assistance which is constantly reduced and taken away. I don't have kids but I have a roof over my wife and I's head. For now anyway.
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