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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][b]I think if there was full disclosure many people would not have chosen to have children. [/b] If I had known how hard it was going to be and how much of my life would have been affected, I may have made a different choice.  Once they are here, there is no going back.  Both my children had special needs that needed to be addressed and made the hard core parenting years much more intensive and much longer.  They are currently in college and the time spent ameliorating their issues has proven to be worth it, but during the long slow slog it was really really hard.  My career was one of the casualties and DH's took a hit too.  [/quote]

I completly agree with you. I think a lot of folks are being flat out dishonest because the truth would be looked down on.

I have 4 and if I could do it all over again, I would likely only have 1-2. I feel immense guilt saying this because I love my children dearly. It's a lot of work and I think in fairness to the children, parents should not have a lot. Trying to equally distribute my time and attention amongst 4 kids is damn near impossible. Another factor for me is that my husband is deceased, so I am now unexpectedly doing this on my own. Raising 4 kids alone was not supposed to be a part of the plan. [/quote]

I don't think this is right--it's not about full disclosure, and your post about your not planning to raise 4 children alone illustrates that vividly.

The reality is that THERE IS NO WAY TO KNOW what it will be like to have a child before you have one. There is no way to know how it will affect you and your partner or how difficult your particular child will be to care for or whether you and your partner will like the unrelenting responsibility of being a parent. There is no way to predict job loss or financial disaster or a parent's death or a parent's or child's illness or disability. Even once you have a child, you can't reliably predict whether you will be glad you had another. Someone who enjoys parenting 1 or 2 may find 3 or 4 children completely overwhelming. Someone with 3 relatively easy healthy kids might have hated parenting 2 difficult kids. But we don't know it before it happens. And frankly, most of us don't listen when other people remind us of the potential downsides of pursuing something that we think we want.[/quote]

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