to form babby, or not to form babby

oh she's progressed to much more serious crimes since you met her, let me assure you

hant we all man, hant we all

my older baby will be 18 in a month and we are getting into Japanese cinema and trap together, like a friend I didn’t have to go find

My friend w the 3 boys has always been an anxious type and very shy (self medicated with weed, which made the shyness worse I think). I can see that having kids has helped assuage that to some degree. He's a terrific father and that's a huge part of his self identity now. I know he always felt like a stunted adolescent and so hitting traditional milestones like getting married and then having kids was very important to him.

This run of posts while heartwarming and nice has not made me feel any less weird about the concept that ppl have kids to provide meaning in / order to their lives which I personally continue to feel icky about as a concept (not to judge anyone itt!)

do people have kids in order to provide meaning or order in their lives? maybe they do, i dunno, but my life isn't any more or less meaningful than it was before, i just have a different perspective on it now

they definitely do (I am not accusing ppl itt of doing it but it is definitely A Thing)

Yes, heartwarming posts. I am glad when good people make new people.

we almost immediately hit the jackpot, to our surprise and alarm and delight and guilt that we'd managed it without really trying when some of our friends, who seemed to want kids so much more than we did, were not nearly so lucky

so for us it was kinda both a deliberate decision and also a bit of a coin flip that came out babby-side up

Yes, this about sums it up for me too.

BTW there are probably far more people you know going through/having conceived by IVF than you might expect. Easily a couple (of couples) if not more in each of my social circles.

yeah, same here - a couple of our friends are going to be trying for their second ivf baby soon and i think we know three or four other couples who conceived that way

I have a friend who is big into psychedelics who thinks our biological drive to create children is derived from the fact that we don't know what the meaning of life is nor are we particularly close to figuring it out. But if we keep on procreating, eventually, some generation will figure it out

My early 20s were a ton of fun, I had a very active social life and I didn't want it to end, in part because I wasn't particularly popular in school and didn't make a lot of friends in college, but all my little social groups converged and brought in a bunch of new cool people and I wound up being somehow at the center of it. Also I had my first real job and was living in rural Wisconsin in a house with 3 other guys paying $100 a month for rent so I had money. Anyway as cool as that was it was hard to shake the feeling that it was all temporary. When you're young you have this feeling like "I don't really have to figure things out yet" but once you hit 22 or 23 the writing on the wall gets a bit clearer. You know that people are gonna move away, they're gonna start families, they're gonna get sick of partying all the time, and one day you'll hit the bars and notice that the kids who were several grades below you in high school aren't even getting carded anymore. I mean I felt that myself, just like turning to my buddies and going "this is all kinda stupid isn't it?" You change as you get older. I had a lot of hobbies but I didn't ascribe a lot of meaning to them. Kids on the other hand, that gives your life meaning, something to work towards, something to really feel proud about. Like I have days at work where I'm really on my game and get a ton of stuff done but the pride doesn't really last the drive home. On the other hand my kid dressing himself or doing a great job brushing his teeth really does make me light up inside. Not to mention the fact that you get to be somebody's whole world. I know a lot of people here have mentioned the experience of loving something more than you ever thought possible but it's more than that, your kids NEED you and there's something beautiful in that. One thing I absolutely love is going to the day care and seeing my kids go bonkers when they notice me. Their lives won't always be so simple but as long as they're around my life will have meaning. I can be replaced at my job and I know at some point I'll be a distant memory to a lot of the people I considered really good friends but as long as your kids are around you matter to someone. Anyway this doesn't really answer the question but whatever. There's really no pragmatic reason to do it.

one more stray thought about babbymaking considerations: babbyraising is tiring and boring and repetitive and you become extremely grateful for any kind of help

yeah this is really otm, I know couples who have no family around and it seems miserable. once you have kids you really appreciate whatever time "off" you get. especially since kids do strain relationships - recently my wife lamented the fact that we communicate better over WhatsApp than in person, because when we're at home the kids are ALWAYS talking, always needing something, so you can't really talk much. your relationship becomes more functional. so, like, even getting to go out once a month.....it's a big deal

you're otm on the pride thing - i have a hard time being proud of myself for stuff i've done because i never feel like i've properly earned it and pride aways felt like unconscionable self-indulgence anyway, which is probably an entirely different thread in its own right

but obviously i've been happy for people before and thrilled for their various successes and such

but i've never been as proud of ANYTHING as much as i'm proud today that my 20-month-old daughter can count to 13, and that when i got her out of her cot this morning she said 'please daddy put lights on' which was close to her first-ever sentence and i'm sitting here at my desk a little verklempt thinking about it and i know that there'll be something else i'll be equally proud of her for tomorrow and the day after that and the day after that

What do the kids get out of it tho

a lot of PB&J sandwiches

the chance to choose to experience it for themselves at some point i guess

also trips to the swimming pool

I have been ilxing since 2005 and parenting since 2007. Of the various communities and quasi-communities I'm in, ilx is - by a wide margin - the one that is most hostile to / dismissive of / boggled by the topic of children and parenting. With a few exceptions (El Tomboto and man alive topmost among them).

So it's no surprise to see this sentiment for the nth time:

I don’t want kids, don’t know what they’re for, don’t know why other people have kids, and don’t even necessarily feel like it’s okay that I don’t understand and think parents should explain themselves better

The last time I addressed this I probably said something like: Everybody here loves some human-produced stuff (indeed, it's in the name of the site). You love music, you love film, you love books, you love people kicking or throwing some type of ball.

Now. Every record you've ever grooved to, every film you've ever enjoyed, every book you've ever read was made by a person or persons. Each of those persons was once a babby. And that babby had parents who - at least to some extent - decided or agreed or grudgingly acquiesced or just failed to prevent - said babby.

None of the of human-produced magic on this planet - whether it's a painting, a cassingle, a novel, a moment of tender compassion, a sporting victory, or an inspiring social-justice movement - could exist without the continued churning cycle of parents who form babbies, who themselves become parents who form babbies.

If you love music (and most of us do) you have to at least accept the fact that without parents and babbies there wouldn't be any of it. You don't need to want to be a parent. In fact, if you don't want to become a parent, please don't! But you can leave it to those who do want to.

More to say on this but I can't get it down below essay-length, sorry.

having a kid is unethical, to the kid, for making it exist without consent*, i can give a pascal's-wager style argument to prove this but the margins of this post are too small to contain it

I don't get this, even in deontological terms. Science/probability aside, a non-existent unborn human cannot consent or deny consent to anything, nor do I see how. The human right to give or deny consent to things that are done with one's body can only be acquired subsequent to actually becoming human. How can someone have a retroactive right to require consent for things that were done before they were born, that resulted in the human birth that allows them to have the right in the first place?

*nor do I see how they have a right to do so

YMP that reads to me like an argument that people are valuable but let’s just say I accept that as stipulated. What I want to know is what good is it to a baby to be born?

In my case it has merely saddled me with a huge ordeal which within another 6 decades will be of no further consequence, which I’ve been having panic attacks about for 20+ years.

Maybe ILX is just a front for /r/childfree.

As you can see, I don't have anything intelligent to add. I'm at a point where my wife and I are actively talking about having a kid (we're both only children, so anything more than one is beyond our ken) but given our current financial prognosis it seems mildly irresponsible. Then again, fuck stories like this one and the high rolling motherfuckers who make them possible in the first place:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/feb/05/pregnancy-vermont-paid-parental-leave-abortion-difficult-decision

the universe can't experience itself subjectively in four dimensions unless it creates life, obv - you're doing the machine elves a favour by being conscripted into birth

this is canon

All is headcanon anyway tbh.

the birth canal is vagcannon iirc

https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/1145661889889931264/MQ2NtxYn_400x400.jpg

I'm 45, my wife and I have been together since 1994 and got married in 2001. We always kind of wanted kids, and started deliberately trying after a few years of marriage. It didn't work out, and we went through ten years of various fertility treatments before stopping short of IVF because we both felt there was something structurally wrong and it would be a incredibly expensive failure.

After we stopped pursuing medical interventions, we spent about a year pondering if we really wanted kids after all. We had two couple friends - one with (at that time) 2 young kids, and another who were intenionally childless art professors. I don't know what exactly made us pick sides, but we went with the chaos and terror of kids over the ability to travel and sleep in and do basically whatever we wanted whenever we wanted - which I miss dearly at times but don't think would have been good over the remainder of my life.

We went through an agency, were picked by a birth mother, and adopted our son at birth - we were in the hospital when he was born and took him home with us. The first year was kind of a blur, as adapting to a new baby schedule at age 40 after years of very little responsibility to anyone else was very hard and my depression amped up pretty good - I emphatically do NOT recommend having kids to fix your depression as I spent a lot of time thinking about how much of my life I had wasted because what did I do with all the free time I used to have? How could I have been so lazy / dumb / shiftless before? And when would I ever have time on my own again?

He's five now and is an actual person with opinions and preferences and habits and quirks. It's still exhausting, but in a different way - like constantly arguing about how shit that they don't want to do needs to get done, often the same things EVERY FUCKING DAY OVER AND OVER, and he's smart and coherent enough to argue and lawyer his way around things in a way that is both endearing and maddening.

As for adoption, I almost never consider that he doesn't share any of our DNA - he's our son, but he grew inside someone else and he talks casually about things like "when I was inside XXX's tummy". He looks a lot more like me than my sister's kids look like her or her husband, and people often have severe cognitive dissonance when they find out he's adopted. We're always questioning nature vs. nurture and it's really hard to tell what's what - he does and says a lot things the way I do, does and says other things that his mother does, and does and says things neither of us do and I can't tell what came from where.

Overall I'm very glad we did it - my life is really different now but I don't know what it would have been without him. I'm more social and outgoing and likely to talk to people than before, as carrying an adorable baby around strapped to your chest causes people to approach and talk to you and you also can now bullshit with other parents easily. I'm closer to my parents and inlaws now (including physically - we moved back to our home state for jobs that happen to be much closer to where they all live). He's smart and funny and loves music and Legos and drawing and other stuff that all comes straight from me, and he's also a lot of work and some days it's unbelievably hard. He's got a half-sibling (a few actually, but only one we're in regular contact with) who he sees once in a while when we visit the birth family, and at some point there is bound to be a lot of big questions and feelings about adoption and why his birth mom kept his younger brother but didn't keep him and I'm not sure how we're going to deal with it but it's all he's ever known so at least it won't be a shock to him. Everyone has their shit to deal with, and this will be his and hopefully we can prepare him for that.

As an aside, his birth mother is 25 now and is incredibly pro-choice and I love it - she had two babies, adopted one and kept one, and is very quick to tell people that it was her decision and to force anyone into doing what she did is unconscionable.

Of the various communities and quasi-communities I'm in, ilx is - by a wide margin - the one that is most hostile to / dismissive of / boggled by the topic of children and parenting.

It's a recurring phenomenon in the Guardian comments section too. Every time they publish an article touching on the topic of procreation, it's like an alarm goes off at the Antinatalism HQ.

What I want to know is what good is it to a baby to be born?

― Swilling Ambergris, Esq. (silby), Thursday, February 13, 2020 8:58 AM (sixteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

In my case

If I'm understanding you correctly via posts prior to these, you're accusing parents of being selfish. But you're viewing bringing a human life j to the world from a selfish angle too. You personally are unhappy and resentful for being brought into the universe "against your will" and so cast aspersions on everyone who brings anyone into it too. You're ignoring all the positive outcomes of the process due to your negative outcome.

I emphatically do NOT recommend having kids to fix your depression

yeah uh let me be clear that i was not being serious about that, please gentle reader do not try to spwan your way to better mental health

great post tho joygoat, thx

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/h5-0wgrWB9g/maxresdefault.jpg

I don’t care about outcomes really I’m not a consequentialist.

formed babby because I needed someone to go to Disneyland with

silby -

What I want to know is what good is it to a baby to be born?

Perhaps it will strike you as another non-answer but I think Tombot's post is fucking OTM:

by giving her life I’ve done nothing to my daughter that hasn’t been done to every other living thing

Right. A badger, or otter, or a gnat exists. There aren't like gnat parents agonizing over whether they were ready, or whether it was environmentally justifiable, or whether it would cut into their time for gnat brunches and gnat nightclubbing or whatever. The only difference with humans is that we can talk about it with one another and make it complicated and weird. Otters (or whatever) don't miss the brunches they're not getting to enjoy; they understand they're in a species that has a biological drive to make more otters.

My point remains that the sort of magic that we all claim to like (a great song coming on the radio, a really good glass of whiskey, a transcendent acid trip, a joke with old friends) is the result of billions of tiny little decisions that include people deciding to become parents and raising children. Even shitty parenting decisions can produce great art (cf. Philip Larkin). So even non-parents could spare a little gratitude for the people who decide to do it and try to do it well.

Now, I fully realize that the same thing could be said of all BAD art and all evil actions. That's part of why I can't get my thoughts under essay length.

ymp dropping booming posts itt

a while back my kids (5 & nearly 3) were wrestling on the bed, as they often do, and the older one was really irritating his little sister, like covering her mouth and saying things like "You have no mouth!! I don't know how you're going to eat!!". she was wearing a pig puppet on her hand at this time. suddenly she yells "OINK!!!" and smacks him across the face with the puppet. it made him cry but it also made me laugh so hard that it pretty much made the whole endeavor worth it.

I’m not complaining about people raising children, I don’t think? I don’t even necessarily think it’s bad that, at large, humans continue to have children. What I don’t get is being a specific person (and this is not a putative immoral imperative I’m trying to sketch out mind you) and looking around at all the other people on earth and…I don’t know! What’s the leap?! What is not sufficient about all other humans, including children, that you personally are compelled to bring one into being, at great moral hazard (as I think j. has articulated better than I could)?

formed babby because I needed someone to go to Disneyland with

Go to Disneyland with kids and you'll be furious at the single childless adults taking up space on the rides and adding to the queuing time.

oh I will :)

unless it's Alfred cuz I assume he would offer me a negroni as recompense, like a gentleman

Fuck you I’ll go to Disneyland alone and swear and get told off by a monorail employee if I want

tl; dr: My wife and I had kids because we thought/hoped that the kids we made could add more magic to the world.

More gentleness, more art, more laughter, more fun. More compassion, more empathy, more kindness.

Further, if people "like us" don't do it, then people "not like us" win. And rest assured, they want to.

Personally I want there a larger proportion of kids parented by people who value kindness, tolerance, inclusion, creativity, empathy, and sustainability. At the same time, I want there to be a smaller proportion of kids parented by people who are driven by racism, sexism, greed, xenophobia, etc.

Is any of that at all helpful for the non-understanders?

xp thanks biz

"Other animals do it" doesn't strike me as a great argument. Non-human animals do lots of things I don't consider socially acceptable or helpful.

My wife and I had kids because we thought/hoped that the kids we made could add more magic to the world.

More gentleness, more art, more laughter, more fun. More compassion, more empathy, more kindness.

This I can get behind.

Further, if people "like us" don't do it, then people "not like us" win. And rest assured, they want to.

This....what?

That’s a very instrumental attitude towards your own human children! xps

Fuck you I’ll go to Disneyland alone and swear and get told off by a monorail employee if I want

Ha! I'm still angry at the German guy who took up four teacups and filmed himself on an i-pad the whole ride

ymp's argument is basically the one my wife made when i was more unsure than her about having kids and i found it persuasive

My dilemma, centrally, is that I don’t think people are for anything, and yet I don’t know what people are having children for, and when they tell me, they sound like bad reasons!!

arg

I want there *to be* a larger proportion of kids parented by people who value kindness, tolerance, inclusion, creativity, empathy, and sustainability.

Right, I think I was just thrown off by the framing of it as some kind of child-rearing war between opposing forces.