Reply to Deciding to have kids later- do you regret/ are you happy?

Forum Index » Relationship Discussion (non-explicit)

Reply to "Deciding to have kids later- do you regret/ are you happy? "

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I am one of the older kids in a large family with a big hreak between most of the siblings and the one surprise pre-menopausal baby.

Here are my observations.

The surprise child was easily one of the best things that happened to our family. When he was younger, keeping up with him kept our parents much younger than their peers who were shifting into child free then grandparent mode.

However, when he hit his teen years our parents were senior citizens. They alternated between being a bit unrealistic to what being a teen was like (using standards of what it was like for the older siblings, a couple of whome were old enough to be his parents) to being too tired to keep up with a teenager. He got away with soo much because our parents were either too tired or too clueless to parent a teenager.

Our mom ended up with serious health problems when he was in high school and passed away after his first year of college. That loss impacted him fsr more than the rest of us. All his peers had parents in their 40s & 50s so none of them really could understand or support him well.  He had the advantage of having plenty of older siblings to not only deal with supporting our mom through her health crisis, but also to help parent him through his loss. If he had been an only, particularly with no close extended family, dealing with an elderly parent's health issues and death would be a terrible burden for a teenager.

If you are going to do it, I doubt you will regret it. From my experience, I would make sure you stay as healthy as possible, think through how you plan to handle a teenager as a possible senior citizen, and consider trying to have more than one kid so your future teenager does not have to deal with potential older parent health, finance and  mental issues alone.

It is so difficult dealing with elderly parent issues as a 40 year old. Think of the issues you are facing with your aging parents now and how you think you could handle those problems as a high school or college student, then plan to make those possible future issues as manageable as possible for your future child.
[/quote]

+1 people are not being mean spirited when they say "the time has passed" Age is more than just a number.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics