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[AugustWest]

1.  Having babies is the single most significant (and best) thing I've ever done.

2.  I can't fault anyone for being dubious about having babies themself.

3.  Nothing was planned or intentional about either of our children.

4.  Everybody posting in this thread is exceedingly over-qualified to breed and raise children.  I base this assertion on our qualifications and upon the apparent qualifications of other breeders out there.

[littlefallsmets]

Part of my ambivalence about parenting is... frankly, I'm not so sure that the future is going to be a very nice place. The general jist of the news is that, if we don't blow ourselves up soon, there isn't gonna be a substantive middle class left to stabilize our culture and things are gonna be Gilded-Age-Shitty right around the time they'd be adults.

There is something to be said for believing that your kids will be part of what makes the future a BETTER place? But there is also something to be said for facing up to the idea that we may be well past the tipping point toward a Crappy Future and I'd just be inflicting the Coming Global Shitstorm...

Not just on tiny people but, worse, on tiny people that are pretty-much half me.

I don't know about that idea.

Also, I'm not gonna have the bread to raise a kid properly for years. That is the practical and more pressing objection to kid-having at this point in my life. My seeing the future through a glass darkly is more of a long-view concern.

[AugustWest]

When was the future going to be a nice place?  Also, who is going to make the future a nice place but you and your progeny?

Look at it from a Darwinian standpoint.  Breeding is a way of promoting your personal philosophy.  As an intelligent, enlightened person the hope of intelligent life on this planet depends on the like of you creating progeny.

[Muse_Of_Fire]

Or on the likes of us (intelligent, enlightened beings) influencing others' progeny on a wide scale, like, say, in public schools and youth organizations. I don't doubt that I'd be an awesome mom in terms of how I deal with kids and the fact that I have a loving/nurturing streak a million miles wide and twice as long. But the fact that I don't want to be a parent is a huge obstacle to that. I love children. I love working with children and playing with them and teaching them and helping them grow. In my heart I feel like it's what I was put on this earth to do. I know this to be true without even being able to explain why. But to me there is a huge difference between that (which I feel I was called by the PtB to do), and being a parent (which I have no desire to do).

I can make a brighter future even by not being a parent, by being an excellent teacher and influencing youth to shape a bright, awesome future, in batches of dozens at a time. I don't need to have my own children to do that. I just need to be a loving, positive, guiding adult in the lives of the children I encounter in my life.

[littlefallsmets]

Oh, I totally know. I understand that way of thinking.

But... I just see the merchants and soldiers and priests coming up all electric and I know my history.

There are days I wake up and look at the morning paper and... my genes scream out that now is the time to cut one's losses and call it a species. Let the other people tend to locking the doors and turning out the lights, get the hell out of here before the Real Badness comes down.

It's only some days. Other days, I got so much faith, I know what I'd name my future children.

It depends.

[AugustWest]

I dunno.  I'm not interested in compelling you to be a parent if you really don't want to be.  It's the most serious undertaking there is (or should be.)

It's just that cockroaches and morons breed exponentially.  We need all the help we can get.

Don't sell yourself short.  You'd be at least a good a parent as Cletus.  And the rewards by far outweigh the obligations.  Raising children costs vast sums of money and eons of time, but I can't imagine anything more worthwhile to spend either resource on.

[theinevitable]

as a child, my favorite toy was a baby doll. At least until I realized that that wasn't what boys were supposed to play with.

Sadly every girl I have ever been attracted to has hated babies. So, basically, I will likely never have kids.

[Sub_Topical]

AW, I think it's some kinda record that I could've quoted you three times on this page alone for sensible agreement.

[V-Adore]

See, I'm never sure how to address this question, because the overwhelming trend of the people I know and call my friends is a lack of desire to have children, sometimes quite militantly so. That's cool -- I am 100% of the belief that nobody who doesn't want to have kids should have kids, but... I worry that it seems somehow gauche to admit that, one day, I would like to have a child or two. Especially when the discussion is entirely about how wasteful and selgiraffe it is to inflict another child on the world... I don't know, maybe it is selgiraffe, but it's something I want nonetheless.

I think this is all kind of like my conversations with very determined ideological vegetarians: I end up admitting that, yes, eating meat is a selgiraffe, wasteful behavior, and that if I were a good and moral person, I wouldn't, but that I am just too weak not to. I am too weak to stop eating meat, and I am sufficiently weak that I'll probably have a baby eventually. Sometimes it's easier to yield to others' moral judgments.

[Lister]

Ain't nothing weak about being the top of the food chain and passing your genes along.

I'm probably not going to have kids of my own, but I make video games so apparently that makes me the totality of most kids' moral compass these days.  Sweet.

[wombat]

I received Folic Acid in my Christmas stocking for about five years

Sleeplessly perusing this thread at 4.30 am I was going to try to add something intelligent but now all I can say is that this is one of the funniest things I have ever heard.

[KeithHernandez]

I used to despise the idea of having kids, but now, financial situation in order, I would probably want to.  I am only 21 and this change has already happened, so I am pretty sure if I am in the right place I will have kids.

[CortJstr]

Everyone asks me all the time, and when I say I've made the choice not to have children, or not to get married, many folk patronize me to the extreme.  I haaate it.  "Oh just wait..."  "Oh, but if it happens..." 

I constantly want to slap my coworkers right in the face. Because as the guy they don't use the "oh just wait" line on me implying that I'll "mature" and change my mind. For me it's always, "well what does your fiancee say about this?" or "well that's what she's saying now" as if she's just pretending to not want kids to trick me or something. That's just fuck*ng insulting.

I keep getting the guilt trip from my parents because I'm an only child. And my dad was the only boy so they make it sound like I must procreate to continue the last name or something. There are 23,000 hits for our last name in Google (my mom is on page 2) and I'm adopted so it wouldn't be a true continuation anyway.

I think my dad has finally come to terms with the fact that he isn't getting grandkids. My mom will admit that I barely tolerated children when I was one but she also thinks that any time a person has non-standard behavior it's either "just a phase" or it's "acting out/rebelling."  She doesn't accept that any person is really an atheist, doesn't want kids, or doesn't want to marry.

[side_show]

Amen Court.  There is a sort of cult mentality I've come across in some folks that parenthood is really only motherhood with a man who may (or may not) tag along for the ride.  I'm lucky because though I'm sure my SO's family would be basting in joy if we turned traditional, got married and had a baby, they aren't saying a word.

V - your friends who claim choosing to have a baby is selgiraffe are nim-rods.  Choosing to be a parent can come from an egotistical space (the world needs one more of me), but it can also come from an altruistic place (the world needs good people, I'm going to make sure I raise a good human to add to the betterment of society). I see choosing to be a parent as being hella' generous - anyone who puts much thought into it knows they will be giving up a lot.  This is the strongest force that keeps me from wanting kids.  I'm deeply satisfied with my life, and my art is so important to me that a part of me would die if I had to live a life where it played second banana to the role of motherhood.

Oddly the whole "the world's going to hell" thing has never been a part of the equation as to why I don't want to have babies, even though I often think it is doing just that.  Probably because I've seen third world, fourth world, fifth world level poverty places, and hella' circumstances, and know that happy, decent humans are born into this all the time already, and that these happy, decent human beings live lives that are fulfilling to them.  True, we North Americans, in large part, are privilege to a life of comfort and ease that is unprecedented, and I don't doubt that the carpet may be pulled out from under us all hella' fast.  I totally agree that a big change is comming, but I have a lot of hope in the resiliency and adaptability of human kind.  All my material things could evaporate tomorrow, and I know I'd still be laughing and telling stories, and be essentially who I am now.  I've lived enough personal hell to know that even when it's all shit there's still possibility.  Skip to a future where there's only a clutch of us humans left, and I don't doubt that their society would still have singing and dancing and that people would love each other and such.  So what I'm saying is that I'm a post-apocalyptic optimist.

[Sub_Topical]

GODDAMN IT IF YOU DON'T HAVE KIDLINGS THEN WHOSE ASSES ARE MY KIDLINGS GOING TO SPEND THEIR LIVES KICKING?