> Did we choose the age at which we would have children? What does it mean to choose?
we planned to have a kid by our early thirties. she specifically wanted one by 30. we were both healthy, financially stable with solid careers.
then came multiple miscarriages, 10 years of background/foreground stress, and IVF. now we finally have two healthy ones. i think daily about those 10 years we've lost to spend with our kids while still younger and able to do activities that i still enjoy like snowboarding, mountain biking, etc. thankfully i'll still be able to do some of it, but man, it has been rough. my awesome father-in-law died of cancer 9mo before his grandson's birth; the only thing he ever knew were our ongoing struggles :(
something else that happens is that all your same-aged friends with kids...they have different lives now. you can't talk to them about the same child struggles / tips in real time, the kids don't go to school together or know the same people; they're a generation apart. it becomes an isolating event when the delay is long enough.
despite all that, when i think of where i was financially then and now (and what i did in those 10 years to get from there to here that would not have happened otherwise), and that if i had a kid 10 years ago it would be a different [probably worse] kid instead of the adorable 2.5yo that runs to me each morning now, i feel a lot better.
my advice would not necessarily be to start earlier, but if you've decided to procreate and are consciously deferring it until the "right" time, just expect the really, really unexpected.
For decades the discussion in schools have been around "this is how you avoid unwanted pregnancy", safe sex and all of that.
With our(northern Europe) crashing fertility rate there's now also discussions about adding on "when the woman is 25 this happens and you're this likely to get pregnant, at 30 it's like this...", just so that people can plan and try for the family they want. If one wants 3 kids and don't want IVF you should apparently start around when the woman is 25-28 or something like that?
This is where free daycare, and support from the government helps.
(And yes of course it's not "free", it is paid for from taxes, people are so smart to point that out.)
Different countries have different incentives, but I was really pleased with the setup in Finland when we had our child. A free box of first-clothes, daycare from 1-5 years old cheap enough that it was almost free, and preschool at 6 before schooling started at 7.
Lots of minor perks, such as free transport on busses, trams, etc, if you were pushing a stroller, and so on.
Plenty of people have kids before then and they work out fine. I'm not saying that if you're truly destitute it's a good idea to have kids, but the only people I hear complaining about not being financially ready for kids are those who are objectively well off.
> my awesome father-in-law died of cancer 9mo before his grandson's birth
The death of the people I loved growing up is my biggest regret for leaving having children until my mid-thirties.
We have friends who got on with it early and their kids are great. The parents didn't have as much money or lived experience, but were fitter, more energetic, and now their kids are teenagers and they're able to focus on life. When our youngest is there, we'll be focussing on retirement.
It's impossible to know, I know, but every year deferred is another year less with a child that will probably love you, a love you will value above practically anything else.
While I understand and empathize with what this article is getting at ("If you intend to have children, but you don’t intend to have them just yet, you are not banking extra years as a person who is still too young to have children. You are subtracting years from the time you will share the world with your children."), I strongly disagree. I think people should have kids when they are ready. Make an assessment to the best of their ability when exactly that time has arrived. Then, don't dwell on it further. Especially don't blog about it. There are no counterfactuals, this kind of reflection can only serve to make us miserable.
I think most great parents didn't feel ready, and in some sense not feeling ready is evidence of the kind of conscientiousness that makes you a great parent. I think it is a valuable service to push people who want kids but aren't sure when to have them to have them earlier than they otherwise would. You never know how difficult it will be for you until you start trying.
I’m about to become a parent, about 10 years later than I’d have liked. Main reason for that is just not meeting the right person, pandemic, money etc.
But I only feel ready now. I’m a late developer in general (aren’t all software engineers haha arf) and I honestly felt too free spirited in the past. Many friends had kids a decade or more ago, and they are looking forward to their kids leaving home so they can travel etc. But I’ve already done all that, I have nothing to devote my life to now other than work and family.
In my case at least, being ready was a real thing. It’s really about maturity and having had enough of a life myself.
Providing food, clothes, health and shelter? My parents weren't ready. I interrupted my fathers dream he was on track for, but only later learned about by doing the math in his rare moments of nostalgia after a cancer diagnosis and given a handful of years to live. My parents did a hard pivot and worked 3-5 jobs between them at any given time to make ends meet because his sense of duty to the family he wasn't ready for. I rarely saw or interacted with them, but gained valuable experience in navigating the world independently and being responsible for myself. I had good parents -- I was fed, clothed, housed and healthy enough to make it to adulthood and move out on my own after high school.
This part stuck out:
There are good reasons to wait, [...] My children have not had to live with parents who are working 15-hour days, the way we worked in our 20s, or who are financially desperate, as we might have been if we’d been paying for children on the salaries of our 20s. Our professional standing allows us to skip work for pediatric appointments or parent-teacher conferences. [...] I got a promotion [...] when it was time to buy a piano. We all sit down together for home-cooked meals most evenings and talk about things.
That must be nice, but I wouldn't know. My youngest sibling does though, their grandchildren knew that with them when they were younger too. My parents finally built up the stability that gave them time -- as I was on my way out. I have no idea who they are, nor they me, that was not our relationship -- I had that with my grandfather, but only briefly. And I would not trade that decade for anything in the world, except maybe to have had that with my parents, even if only for a few years to get to know as a child should. My youngest sibling got the great parents because they were ready to be by that time.
You get to be a great parent because you can spend time with your kids -- whether you "felt" ready or not you were, but maybe consider that's because the time you waited gave you the time to spend with them. You're looking at it in terms of maximizing years. Having more years doesn't mean anything if they can't be quality years.
the question is if this is not survivor bias - 'Those were great parents and they where not ready so' doesn't implicate that most people that are not ready will be great parents.
It also what you want to optimize for. I would prefer to have hordes of good parents that just only dozens of great one in society. We most likely can also say: "Most worst parents didn't feel ready"
I'm torn here because you're both right, kinda, from my viewpoint. And that is you should do a thing, whether getting married, having kids, etc. as soon as you're sure you want that.
You shouldn't rush it thinking of years lost, but at the same time, shouldn't delay it until everything's perfect/'the right time', because, from experience, everything will never be perfect.
No matter how long we waited, we did not feel ready. There was always too much to do, it was never really the right time. At some point we just gave in and perhaps we should have done it sooner.
Having kids in a later stage has a lot of advantages. You (hopefully) saved more. You are more mature and informed. You know how to save for your children from day one and what to teach them.
But the thing about time is true and doubly so when it comes to grandparents. First of all if you live around your family and they can help out, it's an invaluable rock to lean on, and of course if you waited the grandparents are going to be too old to really help. But what's worse, is your kids will probably know them for a very short time if they even remember them when they grow up.
The thing about "being ready" is nonsense because you can't be ready. You don't understand what a massive gift and blessing it is to have children, and also how everything changes. You can't be ready because you just can't understand it before it happens. So waiting for the perfect time is useless. If you know want children at some point, just do it.
Ready? When is anyone ready? My wife (of 18 months) and I just decided to have a baby. It never occured to us we weren't ready. In the 9 months we decided we needed to live somewhere with another room for the baby and moved in with 3 months to go. We had next to nothing prepared, but do you know what, it didn't matter. Babies demands are, at first very simple, food and sleep. We just handled the rest as we went along. We had done having children by the time we were 30.
To some degree, you can't be 'ready' to have kids. They are a nuke that explodes in your life. You're totally different after having a kid. You're always 'on stage', listening, watching, being there for your kid. You can't just check out and 'do it tomorrow' when it comes to the kid (laundry, sure though). And telling people that don't have kids what it is like just ends up as a list of complaints and misses all the intense joys, and you can tell that they just don't get it.
For thousands of years, mankind struggled for survival. We invented agriculture, shelter, clawed our way into modern medicine and eventuallt multiplied on the face of the earth.
But as it turns out, the limit of our growth was that precious currency of desk space. We scoured the ends of the earth and wept, for there was no more desk space left.
If we all bury our heads in the sand, maybe it will go away. After all, our personal happyness is #1. It's our world and our children are just living in it
I feel we should have children as early as possible between 18 and 30, but we should also stay together with our parents. Grandparents can raise their grandchildren. They would do a better job. The problem is now everyone wants to go on their own, separate from the community, then call modern life difficult.
I read a book that discusses this - "The Weirdest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous" by Joseph Henrich. I found it interesting though I've heard some criticisms of it.
My partner died when my child was a year and a half. So I mostly moved in with my parents...
I used to have a good relationship with them, but they think I'm doing everything wrong. If my situation was a tiny bit better I'd move out. Like this, I sacrifice my sanity for some personal freedom: my parents enable me to go swimming or running or out to a pub every now and then.
Because fuck community. It's extremely rare to meet people who don't suck. My parents were never interested in me as a person, they were interested in me fulfilling their fantasy of a picture-perfect family. My aunt completely exploited her husband and then he happened to drink himself to death which was completely and unavoidably his own fault. Now she's ruining her daughter's teenage years just so that she can score popularity points among other religious nuts. When I was a kid I was the least popular in my class and I know that when you reach the bottom, literally nobody cares about you, unless they can extract something from you. It's dog eat dog. Now I'm an adult and the more I interact with general population the more it feeds my narcissism. I genuinely tried becoming a better person so that I'd have more friends but at some point I understood "it's not me, it's them". There's only so much I can do before I realize, most people aren't worth being friends with. The few people that are worth it are ridiculously difficult to find and usually have their own busy lives and chances are, the ones you happen to meet live on the other side of the city which is one hour one way.
This way of seeing the world is foreign to me. My family, friends, neighbours, co-workers, and even the guy who works at my local bakery are all good people.
I agree that most of the people I meet aren't going to be my friends, but disagree that they aren't worth being friends with for someone else. Most of them have got other friends. They're still worth something even when I don't have enough in common with them to want to hang out. I'm better than them at the things I'm good at, but they've all got their own strengths where they must surely outdo me.
I can't tell if you're from a different culture, carry some trauma, expect an unrealistic level of commitment, or something else that would cause us to have such a different outlook on life. I'm sorry that you've been let down by other people and I hope things get better for you.
1. If the community has "healing power", it can accept new broken members as long as they don't overwhelm the support system. Many hippie and religious movements work with some version of this idea.
2. A struggling loner might be so because of traits unattractive to general society, but attractive to the community. Pretty much all subcultures fit here.
In one sense, you can't; the world they lived in lived with them, and when they were gone their world was gone with them too.
In another sense, you can't *avoid* that world; the world they lived in was one they *created*, physically, and much of it is still here with us, shaping us as they shaped it.
And remember, none of the people who came before us ever experienced anything but pieces of their world, just like we only ever experience pieces of our own. But you can at least try to show your kids as many of those pieces as possible.
You don't need to. This is the first generation where there's millions of hours of online podcasts with tech bros for them to enjoy. In general, we're a uniquely well-documented set of generations, even if we exclude all the stuff that will be lost when Google/Facebook/VK etc. collapse.
This essay was in part an inspiration for my (much more upbeat) essay which was on here yesterday https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46452763, and I linked it at the end, but I thought it deserved a submission on its own.
I find your essay more downbeat. I actually disagree with it too, as it misses the fact that children aren’t really aware of their lives in the same way adults are. Life begins at 18 imo.
For those wishing to delay the inevitable...
"Large observational prospective epidemiological studies with adequate control of confounding and two large randomized trials support the benefits of the Mediterranean dietary pattern to increase life expectancy, reduce the risk of major chronic disease, and improve quality of life and well-being."
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5902736/
I (male) was very lucky and this made me realise. Had kids lateish (30) but that is due to finding soneone to do that with took that long. Being shy etc. But now I feel in 40s I am too old to have a baby! I glad I didnt wait too long.
Or dont have kids at all which is fine and max on the freedom to do whatever life. I think I agree decide if you want kids then if so have them early as possible but under proviso of a good relationship and no major issues like drugs/alcohol/violence etc.
Out of curiosity, what kind of physical shape are you in? I’m nearing 40 and have wanted kids my entire life, but similarly, haven’t found the right partner. If I ever felt I was too old to have kids I’d probably have no choice but to kill myself. But I’m also in excellent physical shape and feel no physically different than I did in my 20s (other than being stronger and more coordinated now).
I have health issues so there is that. I think most 40 yo if they go to the gym on a good routine can have the energy. Add in a reasonable job (not an AI startup with a hammock in the kitchen). But 40 you are rolling the dice. 40+ you can die from things and it is not unheard of. It is quite old in a way. You can also have issues unexpectedly that depleat capacity.
Just reread your comment. Don't kill yourself!!! Help raise your niece or nephew or friends kids. You can pass on social inheritence! And you can work in a cube at Google and send half the money to kids charities.
> If I ever felt I was too old to have kids I’d probably have no choice but to kill myself
sperm quantity and quality decreases with age. studies exist that suggest higher risk of autism when father's age >= 45.
you're not too old, but you should probably test & freeze some good sperm before you might actually be too old by the time you find the right person. this way you won't ever feel like you're too old to have kids. then the question becomes more of "how long and in what manner will my remaining health allow me to enjoy them"
I had kids 'early' for my peer group (early 30s when most are pushing 40) and there is a noticeable difference in the amount of energy I have. It's not playing games with kids (the stereotypical keeping up with the kids at the park) it's that early years of childhood mean that you have 5+ years of bad / shorter sleep and get sick more than you probably have since you were a child.
Being a parent gets harder the older you are, not just becoming a parent which is where the focus tends to be. Yes you have fewer financial resources and less life experience, but if you want kids the best time is as soon as you can. Kids don't care about how rich you are (so long as needs are met - those concerns come later and enough will never be enough for a teenager) and they don't know that we're all making it up as you go along. Have kids at 25 means that by your early 40s you are pretty much free again but parented in times of good health.
Doing the school run now and seeing parents pushing 50 with primary school aged children makes me sad for them and their kids when I see how physically shattered they look through the fatigue and stress.
> You are subtracting years from the time you will share the world with your children.
Love the thought. But for me I wasn't able to commit to wanting to have children because I had to learn so much about dating and what I think I deserve and what I want. I just went with the "cool uncle" (which often times hides the "I think I don't deserve love and thus sabotage myself") narrative the last decade or so and had to have the bad experiences I've had 2025 to come to the conclusion that I want a wife and kids. Sometimes your life task dictates how it goes for you and a little less grip on this journey seems beneficial to me.
This article came at a perfect time for me and I will go full steam ahead to find someone to make kids with o7
I like the text. A few additions: not everyone has to have children. Not all of us have the opportunity to do so. It is possible to live a fulfilling life even if you have not brought children into the world. If you do not have children and it is foreseeable that you will not have any, do not let anyone convince you that you are doomed to a marginal existence. A child does not only need parents. It also needs other adults: uncles, aunts, neighbors, teachers, etc. Children need a healthy society, and everyone who contributes to this is contributing to the well-being of children. For my taste, the text also lacks a political component. Parenting is not just a personal project. It is also a service to society. The parents of a child are raising a person who will participate productively in the economy of the future. It annoys me that this is treated as a free side effect. When you realize this connection, parenthood as an imperative for personal fulfillment takes on a strong ideological connotation. The fact that so many people remain childless today is a failure at the societal level and should not be compensated for by appeals at the individual level.
it’s never the right time, not everyone deserves to have kids, and not every kid deserves the parents they got, still, it has to be part of the meaning of life, to see something that is your blood, discover, play, become a responsible adult and one day hopefully decided that it is worth to also have children of their own
Very interesting article! Really like when people use fonts with serifs. I noticed the usage of accent aigu instead of apostrophes, was that on purpose? An accent isn‘t an apostrophe, it takes up more space horizontally. Much more obvious in this font.
I was born with a heart defect that will kill me young. I spent my youth waking up from surgeries until I became disappointed I'd woken up. This author is still just a tourist of death going through what I view as an early developmental stage of death realization and their view is effectively just myopic shaming because they had their first realization.
My parents died before I turned 20 and 28.
Death is horrible and loss is horrible but each person gets to pick their meaning generation, that's what makes humans fucking cool.
We are like a random forest of meaning generation, an epicenter of complex meaning creation, the plurality and uniqueness of paths is critical, and each of us gets to decide what our meaning exploration/creation will entail, and no one can rationally shame us for that.
We are all very special. Each and every person. We are the unique meaning generators of the universe, like stars emit photons we emit complex meaning, there is no entity we have observed that has explained to the universe the how and why of bird flight, we generated the how and why of that, we are meaning generating organs of the universe bootstrapped by simpler meaning in rna and dna and each one of us is rare.
Complex meaning generation, storage and emission is still in it's infancy from our empirical observations we can't predict how far into the future meaning generation will reach or what it will accomplish, we can't ex ante predict how important we are, no one can tell us we won't be very important to the casual chain of the universe, it simply cannot be computed ahead of time.
As a child I read the book version of A Baker's Dozen, a true story about an efficiency expert with a heart defect that had 12 children and dies at the end while calling his wife.
Each person generates unique meaning in the universe and the one thing we get to do is decide what our unique meaning exploration path is, no person is guaranteed to see any time with their kids, guaranteed to want to have kids, guaranteed to have a kid they enjoy being around. Decide what you intrinsically find meaningful and generate meaning, the random forrest requires the diversity of search/creation paths.
I have super-bad genetics. Not so bad that I have an entirely terrible life, but bad enough that I wouldn't wish them on a child. I know they would hate me, since I am aware of how bad my genetics are.
People who have children think having children is the right choice, generally. They have to, to find meaning in all of the work of having and raising a child. That's understandable. But it is by no means the right choice for everyone.
I had a lousy childhood -- not just because of my genetics. There's no license, no mandatory training for having a child. You can just have one. Many parents are not qualified, by any measure. This keeps therapists well-employed.
Only have a child if you would like to be that child. Only have a child if you feel competent, and able, and certain that when they are an adult they will not resent you -- yes, it's natural to have some resentment for your parents, but this is not the sort of resentment I am talking about.
Do not UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES have a child if you're just looking for 'legacy'. Write a book. Give to charity. But this is a terrible reason to have a child! Don't.
>Only have a child if you feel competent, and able, and certain that when they are an adult they will not resent you -- yes, it's natural to have some resentment for your parents, but this is not the sort of resentment I am talking about.
I don't think it's possible to raise children without them developing some resentment. To be a parent is to be a dictator. It's very difficult to be a perfect dictator especially when every kid is an individual; your kid is only vaguely similar to you but not the same and thus may have totally different ideas about living life (and eventually, parenting).
It's more about making sure you keep the relationship intact when they inevitably lash out and have the "ugh you did everything wrong" confrontation (which could last years). It takes unyielding love and endless forgiveness. I think the parent-child relationships that fall apart are those where the parent thinks of the child as their friend. Your kid is your kid, not your friend. You would never forgive a friend if they hurt you even 10% as much as your kid will hurt you. But your kid also loves you in a way that a friend never can, that's the difference. And vice versa for the kid to the parent. You just have to leave a much wider berth than you would for anyone who isn't immediate family. Cutting off is never the right answer except in cases of extreme abuse.
It is completely wild to me that we have apparently reached a stage where eugenics is such an accepted ideology that people will apply it to themselves.
This is disgusting. You deserve to live, and I'm sorry for whatever experiences made you think you shouldn't.
You deserve to live, but with bad genetics why to ensure your child's struggle in life? Especially now when you can get genetic material from a healthy donor.
> But this idea of certainty is a sham, a distraction, something to turn your attention away from the only truly certain thing, which is that your time will run out.
I hard disagree with this entire blog post. What an incredibly depressing, judgmental, and self-centered way to live life. It doesn't matter when you do things as long as you are satisfied with the results.
You should focus more on deeply appreciating all possible results life has to offer than making any particular decision. This is how you find certainty. You must have imagination and see how things would change even if, for better or worse, most of those things never come true. As a matter of fact, none of them will except for the ones you choose. You must always be visualizing what comes next, or else of course you'd be lost and scared. Everything single second of your life is compromises before you even realize you're making them, and there are no right answers. If you can't handle that, you'll never feel happy.
I see it as an argument to have kids earlier, which is rare outside of just "cus we did in our day". I feel there was a cut off maybe 90s someone has a baby you honour them 2000s onwards you feel sorry for them! Everyone wants freedom and pleasure because nothing lasts forever (!). So within agnostic/atheist etc. with the no kids movement it is good to have a balance and then people decide what to do. Make a decision considering the tradeoff.
I can only pray that there is a special heaven where sociopaths go, that is also populated with all the nialists and narcists, together at last, all there dreams writ large.
> Did we choose the age at which we would have children? What does it mean to choose?
we planned to have a kid by our early thirties. she specifically wanted one by 30. we were both healthy, financially stable with solid careers.
then came multiple miscarriages, 10 years of background/foreground stress, and IVF. now we finally have two healthy ones. i think daily about those 10 years we've lost to spend with our kids while still younger and able to do activities that i still enjoy like snowboarding, mountain biking, etc. thankfully i'll still be able to do some of it, but man, it has been rough. my awesome father-in-law died of cancer 9mo before his grandson's birth; the only thing he ever knew were our ongoing struggles :(
something else that happens is that all your same-aged friends with kids...they have different lives now. you can't talk to them about the same child struggles / tips in real time, the kids don't go to school together or know the same people; they're a generation apart. it becomes an isolating event when the delay is long enough.
despite all that, when i think of where i was financially then and now (and what i did in those 10 years to get from there to here that would not have happened otherwise), and that if i had a kid 10 years ago it would be a different [probably worse] kid instead of the adorable 2.5yo that runs to me each morning now, i feel a lot better.
my advice would not necessarily be to start earlier, but if you've decided to procreate and are consciously deferring it until the "right" time, just expect the really, really unexpected.
For decades the discussion in schools have been around "this is how you avoid unwanted pregnancy", safe sex and all of that.
With our(northern Europe) crashing fertility rate there's now also discussions about adding on "when the woman is 25 this happens and you're this likely to get pregnant, at 30 it's like this...", just so that people can plan and try for the family they want. If one wants 3 kids and don't want IVF you should apparently start around when the woman is 25-28 or something like that?
But who's financially secure at 25?
> But who's financially secure at 25?
This is where free daycare, and support from the government helps.
(And yes of course it's not "free", it is paid for from taxes, people are so smart to point that out.)
Different countries have different incentives, but I was really pleased with the setup in Finland when we had our child. A free box of first-clothes, daycare from 1-5 years old cheap enough that it was almost free, and preschool at 6 before schooling started at 7.
Lots of minor perks, such as free transport on busses, trams, etc, if you were pushing a stroller, and so on.
It doesn't seem to be helping with the birth rate though. Not much of a correlation on countries with great natal policies and higher birth rates.
> But who's financially secure at 25?
Those backed up by their government?
it's dysgenic to enable reproduction through welfare. Better to create an economy where young people can start families off of their own labor.
The party in power is doing neither so
We can't help ourselves, we can't help others, but did you see that politician's wife in her expensive boots?
It's the tribe supporting the newest members. Seems the most logical thing I can imagine.
Plenty of people have kids before then and they work out fine. I'm not saying that if you're truly destitute it's a good idea to have kids, but the only people I hear complaining about not being financially ready for kids are those who are objectively well off.
> my awesome father-in-law died of cancer 9mo before his grandson's birth
The death of the people I loved growing up is my biggest regret for leaving having children until my mid-thirties.
We have friends who got on with it early and their kids are great. The parents didn't have as much money or lived experience, but were fitter, more energetic, and now their kids are teenagers and they're able to focus on life. When our youngest is there, we'll be focussing on retirement.
It's impossible to know, I know, but every year deferred is another year less with a child that will probably love you, a love you will value above practically anything else.
With having kids, there is no 'right' time. Life is too unpredictable and hard and chaotic to get all your ducks in a row for that long.
But there are very much worse times. Clearly.
However, the adage with marriage applies with kids too: Marriage is not a capstone, its a cornerstone. You build a life together.
The same is sorta true with kids.
While I understand and empathize with what this article is getting at ("If you intend to have children, but you don’t intend to have them just yet, you are not banking extra years as a person who is still too young to have children. You are subtracting years from the time you will share the world with your children."), I strongly disagree. I think people should have kids when they are ready. Make an assessment to the best of their ability when exactly that time has arrived. Then, don't dwell on it further. Especially don't blog about it. There are no counterfactuals, this kind of reflection can only serve to make us miserable.
I think most great parents didn't feel ready, and in some sense not feeling ready is evidence of the kind of conscientiousness that makes you a great parent. I think it is a valuable service to push people who want kids but aren't sure when to have them to have them earlier than they otherwise would. You never know how difficult it will be for you until you start trying.
I’m about to become a parent, about 10 years later than I’d have liked. Main reason for that is just not meeting the right person, pandemic, money etc.
But I only feel ready now. I’m a late developer in general (aren’t all software engineers haha arf) and I honestly felt too free spirited in the past. Many friends had kids a decade or more ago, and they are looking forward to their kids leaving home so they can travel etc. But I’ve already done all that, I have nothing to devote my life to now other than work and family.
In my case at least, being ready was a real thing. It’s really about maturity and having had enough of a life myself.
> I think most great parents didn't feel ready
What makes a great parent?
Providing food, clothes, health and shelter? My parents weren't ready. I interrupted my fathers dream he was on track for, but only later learned about by doing the math in his rare moments of nostalgia after a cancer diagnosis and given a handful of years to live. My parents did a hard pivot and worked 3-5 jobs between them at any given time to make ends meet because his sense of duty to the family he wasn't ready for. I rarely saw or interacted with them, but gained valuable experience in navigating the world independently and being responsible for myself. I had good parents -- I was fed, clothed, housed and healthy enough to make it to adulthood and move out on my own after high school.
This part stuck out:
There are good reasons to wait, [...] My children have not had to live with parents who are working 15-hour days, the way we worked in our 20s, or who are financially desperate, as we might have been if we’d been paying for children on the salaries of our 20s. Our professional standing allows us to skip work for pediatric appointments or parent-teacher conferences. [...] I got a promotion [...] when it was time to buy a piano. We all sit down together for home-cooked meals most evenings and talk about things.
That must be nice, but I wouldn't know. My youngest sibling does though, their grandchildren knew that with them when they were younger too. My parents finally built up the stability that gave them time -- as I was on my way out. I have no idea who they are, nor they me, that was not our relationship -- I had that with my grandfather, but only briefly. And I would not trade that decade for anything in the world, except maybe to have had that with my parents, even if only for a few years to get to know as a child should. My youngest sibling got the great parents because they were ready to be by that time.
You get to be a great parent because you can spend time with your kids -- whether you "felt" ready or not you were, but maybe consider that's because the time you waited gave you the time to spend with them. You're looking at it in terms of maximizing years. Having more years doesn't mean anything if they can't be quality years.
the question is if this is not survivor bias - 'Those were great parents and they where not ready so' doesn't implicate that most people that are not ready will be great parents.
It also what you want to optimize for. I would prefer to have hordes of good parents that just only dozens of great one in society. We most likely can also say: "Most worst parents didn't feel ready"
I'm torn here because you're both right, kinda, from my viewpoint. And that is you should do a thing, whether getting married, having kids, etc. as soon as you're sure you want that.
You shouldn't rush it thinking of years lost, but at the same time, shouldn't delay it until everything's perfect/'the right time', because, from experience, everything will never be perfect.
No matter how long we waited, we did not feel ready. There was always too much to do, it was never really the right time. At some point we just gave in and perhaps we should have done it sooner.
Having kids in a later stage has a lot of advantages. You (hopefully) saved more. You are more mature and informed. You know how to save for your children from day one and what to teach them.
But the thing about time is true and doubly so when it comes to grandparents. First of all if you live around your family and they can help out, it's an invaluable rock to lean on, and of course if you waited the grandparents are going to be too old to really help. But what's worse, is your kids will probably know them for a very short time if they even remember them when they grow up.
The thing about "being ready" is nonsense because you can't be ready. You don't understand what a massive gift and blessing it is to have children, and also how everything changes. You can't be ready because you just can't understand it before it happens. So waiting for the perfect time is useless. If you know want children at some point, just do it.
Ready? When is anyone ready? My wife (of 18 months) and I just decided to have a baby. It never occured to us we weren't ready. In the 9 months we decided we needed to live somewhere with another room for the baby and moved in with 3 months to go. We had next to nothing prepared, but do you know what, it didn't matter. Babies demands are, at first very simple, food and sleep. We just handled the rest as we went along. We had done having children by the time we were 30.
To some degree, you can't be 'ready' to have kids. They are a nuke that explodes in your life. You're totally different after having a kid. You're always 'on stage', listening, watching, being there for your kid. You can't just check out and 'do it tomorrow' when it comes to the kid (laundry, sure though). And telling people that don't have kids what it is like just ends up as a list of complaints and misses all the intense joys, and you can tell that they just don't get it.
You replace one kind of good with another. If you never do that you will never grow.
> I think people should have kids when they are ready. Make an assessment to the best of their ability when exactly that time has arrived.
While I kinda agree with this, I've known some folks whose standard for 'ready' was a lot higher than previous generations/other cultures.
For example, I could get a folding desk, move my home office into my bedroom, and put 3 kids in bunk beds in one room.
Or I could say I'm not ready to have kids as I only have a 2 bedroom home, whereas in a few years time I'll be able to afford a bigger place.
For thousands of years, mankind struggled for survival. We invented agriculture, shelter, clawed our way into modern medicine and eventuallt multiplied on the face of the earth.
But as it turns out, the limit of our growth was that precious currency of desk space. We scoured the ends of the earth and wept, for there was no more desk space left.
Alas, a land value tax would fix this
I don't know how anyone gets wisdom, without taking very opposite views seriously.
And being grateful for those who took the time to share their epiphanies in such a readable way.
It didn't come across to me as pushy advice, but as advice to think.
Civilization ending copium.
>Especially don't blog about it.
If we all bury our heads in the sand, maybe it will go away. After all, our personal happyness is #1. It's our world and our children are just living in it
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It would be amazing if you could explain what woke means in this context.
I feel we should have children as early as possible between 18 and 30, but we should also stay together with our parents. Grandparents can raise their grandchildren. They would do a better job. The problem is now everyone wants to go on their own, separate from the community, then call modern life difficult.
I read a book that discusses this - "The Weirdest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous" by Joseph Henrich. I found it interesting though I've heard some criticisms of it.
My partner died when my child was a year and a half. So I mostly moved in with my parents...
I used to have a good relationship with them, but they think I'm doing everything wrong. If my situation was a tiny bit better I'd move out. Like this, I sacrifice my sanity for some personal freedom: my parents enable me to go swimming or running or out to a pub every now and then.
How grandparents can raise grandchildren if they both have a job? If they are unemployed and living of benefits - so can parents.
Also not many grandparents are willing to raise little kids as it is physically hard.
Because fuck community. It's extremely rare to meet people who don't suck. My parents were never interested in me as a person, they were interested in me fulfilling their fantasy of a picture-perfect family. My aunt completely exploited her husband and then he happened to drink himself to death which was completely and unavoidably his own fault. Now she's ruining her daughter's teenage years just so that she can score popularity points among other religious nuts. When I was a kid I was the least popular in my class and I know that when you reach the bottom, literally nobody cares about you, unless they can extract something from you. It's dog eat dog. Now I'm an adult and the more I interact with general population the more it feeds my narcissism. I genuinely tried becoming a better person so that I'd have more friends but at some point I understood "it's not me, it's them". There's only so much I can do before I realize, most people aren't worth being friends with. The few people that are worth it are ridiculously difficult to find and usually have their own busy lives and chances are, the ones you happen to meet live on the other side of the city which is one hour one way.
This way of seeing the world is foreign to me. My family, friends, neighbours, co-workers, and even the guy who works at my local bakery are all good people.
I agree that most of the people I meet aren't going to be my friends, but disagree that they aren't worth being friends with for someone else. Most of them have got other friends. They're still worth something even when I don't have enough in common with them to want to hang out. I'm better than them at the things I'm good at, but they've all got their own strengths where they must surely outdo me.
I can't tell if you're from a different culture, carry some trauma, expect an unrealistic level of commitment, or something else that would cause us to have such a different outlook on life. I'm sorry that you've been let down by other people and I hope things get better for you.
Don't look at the world through the lenses of your problematic upbringing.
Healthy communities exist. They are increasingly rare due to the massive shift in the way of living, but they do exist.
The thing is a healthy community, by definition, isn’t going to allow a struggling loner to join them
This isn't exactly true.
1. If the community has "healing power", it can accept new broken members as long as they don't overwhelm the support system. Many hippie and religious movements work with some version of this idea.
2. A struggling loner might be so because of traits unattractive to general society, but attractive to the community. Pretty much all subcultures fit here.
> That entire group of middle-aged people, who made up the adult world when my father was a child, is gone.
That really got me. How can I bring these people, this "adult world" forward in time as a gift to my children?
In one sense, you can't; the world they lived in lived with them, and when they were gone their world was gone with them too.
In another sense, you can't *avoid* that world; the world they lived in was one they *created*, physically, and much of it is still here with us, shaping us as they shaped it.
And remember, none of the people who came before us ever experienced anything but pieces of their world, just like we only ever experience pieces of our own. But you can at least try to show your kids as many of those pieces as possible.
You don't need to. This is the first generation where there's millions of hours of online podcasts with tech bros for them to enjoy. In general, we're a uniquely well-documented set of generations, even if we exclude all the stuff that will be lost when Google/Facebook/VK etc. collapse.
This essay was in part an inspiration for my (much more upbeat) essay which was on here yesterday https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46452763, and I linked it at the end, but I thought it deserved a submission on its own.
I find your essay more downbeat. I actually disagree with it too, as it misses the fact that children aren’t really aware of their lives in the same way adults are. Life begins at 18 imo.
I liked it, made me reflect and consider - not always easy these days.
Happy new years and thanks
For those wishing to delay the inevitable... "Large observational prospective epidemiological studies with adequate control of confounding and two large randomized trials support the benefits of the Mediterranean dietary pattern to increase life expectancy, reduce the risk of major chronic disease, and improve quality of life and well-being." https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5902736/
I (male) was very lucky and this made me realise. Had kids lateish (30) but that is due to finding soneone to do that with took that long. Being shy etc. But now I feel in 40s I am too old to have a baby! I glad I didnt wait too long.
Or dont have kids at all which is fine and max on the freedom to do whatever life. I think I agree decide if you want kids then if so have them early as possible but under proviso of a good relationship and no major issues like drugs/alcohol/violence etc.
Out of curiosity, what kind of physical shape are you in? I’m nearing 40 and have wanted kids my entire life, but similarly, haven’t found the right partner. If I ever felt I was too old to have kids I’d probably have no choice but to kill myself. But I’m also in excellent physical shape and feel no physically different than I did in my 20s (other than being stronger and more coordinated now).
I have health issues so there is that. I think most 40 yo if they go to the gym on a good routine can have the energy. Add in a reasonable job (not an AI startup with a hammock in the kitchen). But 40 you are rolling the dice. 40+ you can die from things and it is not unheard of. It is quite old in a way. You can also have issues unexpectedly that depleat capacity.
Just reread your comment. Don't kill yourself!!! Help raise your niece or nephew or friends kids. You can pass on social inheritence! And you can work in a cube at Google and send half the money to kids charities.
> And you can work in a cube at Google and
Only if you have a time machine
Ain't no more cubes at big tech companies, it's all open office
> If I ever felt I was too old to have kids I’d probably have no choice but to kill myself
sperm quantity and quality decreases with age. studies exist that suggest higher risk of autism when father's age >= 45.
you're not too old, but you should probably test & freeze some good sperm before you might actually be too old by the time you find the right person. this way you won't ever feel like you're too old to have kids. then the question becomes more of "how long and in what manner will my remaining health allow me to enjoy them"
I had kids 'early' for my peer group (early 30s when most are pushing 40) and there is a noticeable difference in the amount of energy I have. It's not playing games with kids (the stereotypical keeping up with the kids at the park) it's that early years of childhood mean that you have 5+ years of bad / shorter sleep and get sick more than you probably have since you were a child.
Being a parent gets harder the older you are, not just becoming a parent which is where the focus tends to be. Yes you have fewer financial resources and less life experience, but if you want kids the best time is as soon as you can. Kids don't care about how rich you are (so long as needs are met - those concerns come later and enough will never be enough for a teenager) and they don't know that we're all making it up as you go along. Have kids at 25 means that by your early 40s you are pretty much free again but parented in times of good health.
Doing the school run now and seeing parents pushing 50 with primary school aged children makes me sad for them and their kids when I see how physically shattered they look through the fatigue and stress.
>> Have kids at 25 means
Means your parents are 50 and have their jobs and not able to help even if they want (which not always the case).
Means woman has no career and cannot really progress, she basically sacrifices a career growth for her children.
> You are subtracting years from the time you will share the world with your children.
Love the thought. But for me I wasn't able to commit to wanting to have children because I had to learn so much about dating and what I think I deserve and what I want. I just went with the "cool uncle" (which often times hides the "I think I don't deserve love and thus sabotage myself") narrative the last decade or so and had to have the bad experiences I've had 2025 to come to the conclusion that I want a wife and kids. Sometimes your life task dictates how it goes for you and a little less grip on this journey seems beneficial to me.
This article came at a perfect time for me and I will go full steam ahead to find someone to make kids with o7
I like the text. A few additions: not everyone has to have children. Not all of us have the opportunity to do so. It is possible to live a fulfilling life even if you have not brought children into the world. If you do not have children and it is foreseeable that you will not have any, do not let anyone convince you that you are doomed to a marginal existence. A child does not only need parents. It also needs other adults: uncles, aunts, neighbors, teachers, etc. Children need a healthy society, and everyone who contributes to this is contributing to the well-being of children. For my taste, the text also lacks a political component. Parenting is not just a personal project. It is also a service to society. The parents of a child are raising a person who will participate productively in the economy of the future. It annoys me that this is treated as a free side effect. When you realize this connection, parenthood as an imperative for personal fulfillment takes on a strong ideological connotation. The fact that so many people remain childless today is a failure at the societal level and should not be compensated for by appeals at the individual level.
A baby born this year will have their 74th birthday in 2100.
Although with the climate the way it is, it'll get progressively harder to reach old age.
Speak for yourself, I plan to live forever
— Riker (TNG, Generations)
You will. Not you you. But you.
it’s never the right time, not everyone deserves to have kids, and not every kid deserves the parents they got, still, it has to be part of the meaning of life, to see something that is your blood, discover, play, become a responsible adult and one day hopefully decided that it is worth to also have children of their own
happy 2026
no one deserves to have kids
Very interesting article! Really like when people use fonts with serifs. I noticed the usage of accent aigu instead of apostrophes, was that on purpose? An accent isn‘t an apostrophe, it takes up more space horizontally. Much more obvious in this font.
(2018)
Some previous discussion:
2022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31121453
I was born with a heart defect that will kill me young. I spent my youth waking up from surgeries until I became disappointed I'd woken up. This author is still just a tourist of death going through what I view as an early developmental stage of death realization and their view is effectively just myopic shaming because they had their first realization.
My parents died before I turned 20 and 28.
Death is horrible and loss is horrible but each person gets to pick their meaning generation, that's what makes humans fucking cool.
We are like a random forest of meaning generation, an epicenter of complex meaning creation, the plurality and uniqueness of paths is critical, and each of us gets to decide what our meaning exploration/creation will entail, and no one can rationally shame us for that.
We are all very special. Each and every person. We are the unique meaning generators of the universe, like stars emit photons we emit complex meaning, there is no entity we have observed that has explained to the universe the how and why of bird flight, we generated the how and why of that, we are meaning generating organs of the universe bootstrapped by simpler meaning in rna and dna and each one of us is rare.
Complex meaning generation, storage and emission is still in it's infancy from our empirical observations we can't predict how far into the future meaning generation will reach or what it will accomplish, we can't ex ante predict how important we are, no one can tell us we won't be very important to the casual chain of the universe, it simply cannot be computed ahead of time.
As a child I read the book version of A Baker's Dozen, a true story about an efficiency expert with a heart defect that had 12 children and dies at the end while calling his wife.
Each person generates unique meaning in the universe and the one thing we get to do is decide what our unique meaning exploration path is, no person is guaranteed to see any time with their kids, guaranteed to want to have kids, guaranteed to have a kid they enjoy being around. Decide what you intrinsically find meaningful and generate meaning, the random forrest requires the diversity of search/creation paths.
I have super-bad genetics. Not so bad that I have an entirely terrible life, but bad enough that I wouldn't wish them on a child. I know they would hate me, since I am aware of how bad my genetics are.
People who have children think having children is the right choice, generally. They have to, to find meaning in all of the work of having and raising a child. That's understandable. But it is by no means the right choice for everyone.
I had a lousy childhood -- not just because of my genetics. There's no license, no mandatory training for having a child. You can just have one. Many parents are not qualified, by any measure. This keeps therapists well-employed.
Only have a child if you would like to be that child. Only have a child if you feel competent, and able, and certain that when they are an adult they will not resent you -- yes, it's natural to have some resentment for your parents, but this is not the sort of resentment I am talking about.
Do not UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES have a child if you're just looking for 'legacy'. Write a book. Give to charity. But this is a terrible reason to have a child! Don't.
>Only have a child if you feel competent, and able, and certain that when they are an adult they will not resent you -- yes, it's natural to have some resentment for your parents, but this is not the sort of resentment I am talking about.
I don't think it's possible to raise children without them developing some resentment. To be a parent is to be a dictator. It's very difficult to be a perfect dictator especially when every kid is an individual; your kid is only vaguely similar to you but not the same and thus may have totally different ideas about living life (and eventually, parenting).
It's more about making sure you keep the relationship intact when they inevitably lash out and have the "ugh you did everything wrong" confrontation (which could last years). It takes unyielding love and endless forgiveness. I think the parent-child relationships that fall apart are those where the parent thinks of the child as their friend. Your kid is your kid, not your friend. You would never forgive a friend if they hurt you even 10% as much as your kid will hurt you. But your kid also loves you in a way that a friend never can, that's the difference. And vice versa for the kid to the parent. You just have to leave a much wider berth than you would for anyone who isn't immediate family. Cutting off is never the right answer except in cases of extreme abuse.
> Do not UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES have a child if you're just looking for 'legacy'
Agreed with that. I couldn't even tell you the names of any of my great grandparents, much less anything above.
> Only have a child if you feel… certain that when they are an adult they will not resent you.
Resenting one’s parents, even like, a really really lot, is a small price indeed to pay to be alive. The other option is to not exist.
How can I not exist if I don't even exist?
It is completely wild to me that we have apparently reached a stage where eugenics is such an accepted ideology that people will apply it to themselves.
This is disgusting. You deserve to live, and I'm sorry for whatever experiences made you think you shouldn't.
You deserve to live, but with bad genetics why to ensure your child's struggle in life? Especially now when you can get genetic material from a healthy donor.
> But this idea of certainty is a sham, a distraction, something to turn your attention away from the only truly certain thing, which is that your time will run out.
I hard disagree with this entire blog post. What an incredibly depressing, judgmental, and self-centered way to live life. It doesn't matter when you do things as long as you are satisfied with the results.
You should focus more on deeply appreciating all possible results life has to offer than making any particular decision. This is how you find certainty. You must have imagination and see how things would change even if, for better or worse, most of those things never come true. As a matter of fact, none of them will except for the ones you choose. You must always be visualizing what comes next, or else of course you'd be lost and scared. Everything single second of your life is compromises before you even realize you're making them, and there are no right answers. If you can't handle that, you'll never feel happy.
Funny, for me the article reads like a ode to saying yes to life, not the other way round..
I see it as an argument to have kids earlier, which is rare outside of just "cus we did in our day". I feel there was a cut off maybe 90s someone has a baby you honour them 2000s onwards you feel sorry for them! Everyone wants freedom and pleasure because nothing lasts forever (!). So within agnostic/atheist etc. with the no kids movement it is good to have a balance and then people decide what to do. Make a decision considering the tradeoff.
I can only pray that there is a special heaven where sociopaths go, that is also populated with all the nialists and narcists, together at last, all there dreams writ large.
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