Reply to If you never had/never wanted children by choice

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[quote=Anonymous]I will speak only for myself/DH and how our decision was reached.  We are almost 50, and made the permanent decision when we were, I think 32 or 33 when DH was able to convince a Dr to give him a vasectomy.  A lot of time and careful thinking went into the decision, and we did talk to several older coworkers and friends who did not have kids and said they did not regret the choice.  We have been married almost 30 years, we are each other's best friend and fiercest ally - for context.

When we were in our late 20s and finishing up grad school/just launching careers, we started the discussion of kids - when, how many, etc.  We are both very logical/analytical thinkers and we looked at kids much like a major purchase - because kids are a huge investment and you can't return them if you get one you don't like, you're stuck with what you get, there are no guarantees here.  You can't go shopping and pick out the best one on the shelf.  We watched a lot of our friends deal with special needs kids, and even the "normal" kid raising didn't look like fun, it just looked like... more work.  And as much as women want to think we have made progress, the bulk of child rearing falls to us.  Yes, there are some equal-share partnerships with child rearing, but if we're honest, most work falls on the mother of the kids and honestly, I didn't want to do that after slogging through an 8 hour workday then have to be the "on" parent for the rest of the day/week/year/life.  I've watched almost all of my friends with kids harbor some sort of resentment towards their spouses when it comes to their kids - they don't say it outright, but the nonverbals and snarky comments come out in conversations.  Almost 3/4 of our coupled friends with kids divorced within 5 years of having kids - watching that happen was eye-opening.

Then there are the financial aspects of it, which is a lot.

I wish more people would really sit down and think about kids, not just the warm fuzzy stuff, but the hard stuff that comes with it, if you do it right.  Because maybe if people thought about it, the time, expense, heartache, hard work, sleepless nights, the worrying, we would not have so many kids in trouble these days.

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