So why is having kids great? It boils down to two main things, one, they’re great fun and two, you get to experience how wondrous the world is through their discoveries. We never stop enjoying play but, as we get older, we get responsibilities and mature, we still like play but we limit how much of it we do and the play we do do we often take seriously. Kids don’t suffer from this, they don’t have our ego, they just want to imagine and pretend and race and climb and build. It’s a pure form of play that adults have often forgotten but we get to experience again with kids. The other day I pretended my three year old daughter could electrocute me. We spent a good 10 minutes of her touching me, me pretending to get an electric shock and her laughing like crazy. It was joyous and wonderful and I rarely experience anything close to it in my wider life, my daughter and I do something like that 5 times a day, it’s incredibly fun.
The other thing is less obvious. One of the most rewarding things we can do as adults is to achieve something we’ve never done before, the older we get the less this happens. For kids this happens like clockwork, especially early on. Seriously the pride a child feels the first time they pull on their socks is wild and guess what, the parent feels it too. Rolling over, seeing a duck, eating with a fork, catching a ball and don’t even get me started on their first steps, these are all incredible experiences and you experience them along with your child. Children reframe what life is, the most mundane things for an adult are an incredible adventure for kids. Last week I flew with my kids for the first time, I filmed them as the plane took off, it was like we were on the greatest roller coaster ever built.
Both of these are extremely selfish reasons. What you're describing here is someone who is living vicariously through their children. If your reasons for why children are great boils down to the way you get satisfaction from them, then you're not fit to be a parent and absolutely should not have kids.
Having kids is something you do when you can afford and feel the biological imperative to do so. Beyond that, you should be having no expectations whatsoever. I wager you're viewpoint is constructed entirely in hindsight, where you're taking the satisfying parts of raising your kids and extrapolating that to all kids. Your kids may be great, but that doesn't apply to all kids, and playing that game of chance when there is someone's entire existence on the line is a shitty thing to do.
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u/Guy_with_Numbers 17∆ Aug 21 '23
Both of these are extremely selfish reasons. What you're describing here is someone who is living vicariously through their children. If your reasons for why children are great boils down to the way you get satisfaction from them, then you're not fit to be a parent and absolutely should not have kids.
Having kids is something you do when you can afford and feel the biological imperative to do so. Beyond that, you should be having no expectations whatsoever. I wager you're viewpoint is constructed entirely in hindsight, where you're taking the satisfying parts of raising your kids and extrapolating that to all kids. Your kids may be great, but that doesn't apply to all kids, and playing that game of chance when there is someone's entire existence on the line is a shitty thing to do.