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Are you Childfree?

Crossbreed said:
We're the opposite of DINKs [Double Income, No Kids].
We're SILKs [Single Income, Lotsa Kids]!
Family scorecard: ⚤ ♀♀♂♂♂♂♂♂♀♀♂♂♂⎛♀⎞♂♀♂♂♂
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What are the squiggles in between and what's the one in brackets?
 
I'm childfree. I hate small children, and do not have the patience to look after kids all the time. I can manage a few hours with my niece and nephew, as they're 9 and 10.
 
I respect anyone's decision to not have children. There are a lot of very good reasons not to have children, most are listed in this thread.

However, this is not the case fore my wife and myself. We enjoyed our kids so much that we had five. Now we are enjoying grandchildren and a few great grandchildren. My wife and I consider our family our biggest gift and our greatest accomplishment.
 
I have kids, 2 girls. I had a VERY POWERFUL need to have a 2nd kid at some point (first was an accident, whoops!), not sure why that was. But I made it happen & am not unhappy with the choice.
 
clg114 said:
I respect anyone's decision to not have children. There are a lot of very good reasons not to have children, most are listed in this thread.

However, this is not the case fore my wife and myself. We enjoyed our kids so much that we had five. Now we are enjoying grandchildren and a few great grandchildren. My wife and I consider our family our biggest gift and our greatest accomplishment.
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Another reason a lot of people are deciding to not have children is that it cost so much to do so. if you think about it. In the last 30 years. Rent has gone up more then 6 times and that cost of health care had gone up more the 12 times and that's adjusted for inflation. By the time you're done paying all the bills. There isn't much(if any?) left over. And it gets even worse if you have student loan debt.

I wonder if you would've still had kids if you where born 30 years later.
 
FreeDiver said:
Another reason a lot of people are deciding to not have children is that it cost so much to do so. if you think about it. In the last 30 years. Rent has gone up more then 6 times and that cost of health care had gone up more the 12 times and that's adjusted for inflation. By the time you're done paying all the bills. There isn't much(if any?) left over. And it gets even worse if you have student loan debt.

I wonder if you would've still had kids if you where born 30 years later.
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That is a very good point. My youngest is 36, so everything was cheaper then. Would we still have had kids if we would have been born 30 years later? I would like to think that we would have, but you never know.
 
I don't think we will have kids. I've always felt like I didn't want any, but that mostly came from my struggles with mental health. I've been doing a lot better the past couple of years and so came to reconsider the issue as my reasons for not wanting children changed. Turns out I still don't want them. I like children, I work with them and I very much like to leave them at work. :rolleyes:
 
what i would like is a baby (v young infant) that never wakes and is completely silent ,apart from that children are indescribably horrible IMO.
 
Streetwise said:
what i would like is a baby (v young infant) that never wakes and is completely silent ,apart from that children are indescribably horrible IMO.
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I guess I wouldn't mind kids if they came with an off switch built in. That way, if they get noisy, all I'd have to do is reach over and turn them off.


 
I'm only 15, but have been thinking about my future a lot lately, and I actually want kids. I love helping with babies and toddlers at my church and babysitting. I love kids, which I guess is weird for an Aspie...
 
I am childfree and no one will be able to convince me to have them. I agree - having children is a choice in majority of cases (can't make it a 100% thing considering life is too complicated to be that black and white). I like to joke that my siblings had my children instead of me. I was upfront with my husband very quickly when we first got together that I did not want children and he 100% respects that. I have nothing against people who want to have children; I wish the majority respected my choice in return though, but hey ho, some people just can't see beyond their own points of view. Kids can be okay, but I can get super anxious around them like any other person I meet or spend time with.
 
I am also childfree. I do enjoy my nieces & nephews, but I’m not very involved in their lives. I’ve always known I never wanted children & went out of my way to avoid that fate. I never had family pressure me.
 
That is a totally normal feeling. Give yourself the freedom to explore how you really feel about it and don't let people pollute your own sense of what's right or wrong for you. I strongly identify with all of this, even as a 35 yr old male. The same feeling. I would say as I've gotten older I've grown to like kids more than I used to, but that doesn't mean its the right choice for me to have any. It seemed so obvious to me once I first struck out on my own in my 20's that having kids was not for me... in fact I questioned if people ever looked at it objectively.

This is probably a spectrumy thing for me to say, but I don't have a lot of sympathy for complaining parents. You got yourself in that position. You chose to have kids. If the harsh realities surprise you, its not anyone else's fault you were naive of what it would really look like. ---Sorry, flashback to many people I know having kids and then complaining about their lives and me saying, "Well, yeah. Duh." :laughing:

With that said, it IS a very meaningful way to live life. To put someone else's needs above your own.

I can tell you have a similar perspective as I did when I was younger. I took parenthood very seriously - after all, it is a life-long decision - and I observed from peers what it really looked like to be a parent. Its because of that I realized quite bluntly I didn't want kids. Its not this whole "selfishness" thing people go on about - that's probably the last word anyone who knows me would use to describe me. It's merely knowing my own capacity and temperament.
 
I made this thread many months ago asking if there were anyone else here that was Childfree themselves and got lots of fairly good answers

I'm Childfree as well.

---

I'm just now realizing I replied to my own thread :tearsofjoy: ah... that's a new one

---

and I'm now realizing that SunnyD's post got merged into mine... :D hooray, hopefully more CF people come out of the woodworks :)
 
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