Anonymous wrote:I don't think you can answer that question because you are both a product of society and your genes. I'm a guy, but I always envisioned myself being married with a couple kids ever since kindergarten (I distinctly remember the first girl that year that I was sure I was going to marry). You could say that social norms dictated that but apparently I also told my mom that I wanted to be a Transformer when I grew up, and becoming a transformer was not the social norm.

BEst effing comment in this thread.

Yes. I love having kids. I didn't want them until my 30s though.

I'm not sure... I always enjoyed babysitting when I was a young adult and picked a career with working with kids....and love my kids and would take a bullet for them. I definitely felt the pressure as my friends began to get married and have kids..but damn, the relentlessness of raising healthy, happy kids in todays's world plus working full time, and having a chronic illness is tough!! If I knew how damn hard it was going to be, and there was no societal pressure, I might have been totally fine with being a doting aunt and volunteering with children

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I'm surrounded by adults who didn't have kids. I live in NYC and I feel like it's one of the few places where it's not unusual to make it through adulthood without having kids. I could totally see myself living an awesome life without kids -- I have plenty of models for what that might look like and I have to say it's pretty nice. That said, I didn't give parenthood much thought until I met my DH and realized that the only thing better than him alone would be raising kids with him, and I'm really glad we did (we have 2).

This thread actually made me search to see if it was the norm, and wow! By age 40, 86% of U.S. women have had a child. I'm kind of shocked by that.

Wow, I had no idea it was that high! But I guess I'm not surprised. Whenever I meet an older person without a kid it seems unusual.

Anonymous wrote:If I could have had them, yes. Infertility is more and more of a problem, and younger generations don't have the money for infertility treatment or adoption.

Yes because people are postponing childbearing longer and longer.

If I could have had them, yes. Infertility is more and more of a problem, and younger generations don't have the money for infertility treatment or adoption.

Yes but my BIL & his wife wouldn't.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:If most people in society (>50%) chose to never have kids, would you? This is assuming your “circle” has these stats too.

I love my kids but I probably wouldn’t…

We’re at 43% last time I checked, just an FYI

I assume that's the percentage of adults with kids, right? In which case, that's an incredibly misleading figure, since it doesn't count the people that simply haven't had kids *yet.*. The overwhelming percentage of adults have kids in their lifetime.

Probably not. It would have sent it me down a very different path. I went into relationships basically accepting that most partners would want children. If it wasn't the norm it would have been practical to consider, or even specifically pursue, partners that did not want children.

Kids are the luck of the draw, and the odds aren't always in your favor. It's definitely a choice I regret, although it's not obvious it was a mistake given the information I had at the time.

Nope! I caved to society.

Anonymous wrote:If most people in society (>50%) chose to never have kids, would you? This is assuming your “circle” has these stats too.

I love my kids but I probably wouldn’t…

If it wasn’t the norm, you probably wouldn’t be here. So there’s that.

Yes. I feel like this is basically my life now because almost nobody in my circle has kids. Lots of child free by choice, some who still haven’t met a partner and don’t want to explore single parenthood. While I’m also dedicated to my career, travel, and whatnot, I’ve always known I wanted kids and having them has been great.

Most people around here have kids relatively late (by comparison, it wasn’t and isn’t uncommon where I grew up for someone to be 22 and married with 2 kids). So if there is indeed a “biological urge” to have kids, most of my peers now suppressed that urge for a long time.

Anonymous wrote:If most people in society (>50%) chose to never have kids, would you? This is assuming your “circle” has these stats too.

I love my kids but I probably wouldn’t…

We’re at 43% last time I checked, just an FYI

My peer group for more than a decade before I had a kid was extremely anti-child. The pressure was definitely to NOT have kids. So I felt like I had to go against the social pressure that I experienced to birth a kid.