Relationships Does anyone regret having kids?

[method115]

Yea man it was worth it, I couldn't imagine not having my little guy around now, seems like a stupid question to have even asked in retrospect. Sure I miss my old life from time to time, but I realize the life I have now being a parent is a better one.

I could understand what others said earlier in the thread about regretting who they had the kid with. Thankfully I am not in that position but some of these women are crazy as fuck and I've seen with other couples how they make the lives of the dad a living hell.

I do maybe regret now not starting a family when I was a few years younger. We want to have another one and I've been pushing the Mrs. for a couple years and she still wants another one as well, but she is going to be 39 in a few weeks so the clock is ticking. We'll be old ass parents either way. Better late than never.

Glad to hear it. I try to tell would be parents all the time that I can't sell them on being a parent you just have to experience it for yourself. It can look bad from the outside depending on what's going on that day. You can't explain to a non-parent how special it is to have your child come up and hung you, be happy that you get home from work, doing simple things for the first time, etc.

 

[Phlog]

"but by it's very nature a life without children is less, in the same way that a life without a parent is definitively less"

See, this is bad logic. Not having kids is in no way comparable to not having parents, if for no other reason - and there are many other reasons - but for the fact that the experience of being a child catered to by parents is by no stretch of imagination comparable to that of being a parent catering to a child (and I will not belabor this point, it cannot not be self-evident). But even if those two experiences were, for the sake of this argument, comparable (they're absolutely not) - what of the people whose parents died early in their lives, or left them for adoption, and who also don't have/can't have/don't want kids - are those lives automatically capped at how happy they can be compared to those of the people with children? To me, arguing that is very naive and reflects a very simplistic, unimaginative view of what life can be. Every mind is, to a lesser or greater extent, a black box, so making blanket assumptions or claims about what someone can or cannot experience, especially based on arbitrary factors like familial relationships, is guesswork at best - never a statement of observable or measurable facts. Not having kids is not a disability or an illness for us to assume that it invariably has an adverse effect on happiness or on the capacity for happiness - or on the maximum achievable happiness.

A life without ice cream is less too.

It was a base statement for sure but I think inarguable. These are things you cannot really appreciate without experience, at least as reported by everyone who has experienced them and thus fulfilled both categories.

That's not to say you can't be lactose intolerant, or critically damaged, or subject to abuse etc. But it's basically the difference between having a throw of the dice or not.