*singles with babies
I would recommend reading the Baby decision to people. It’s a very open minded examination, despite what the title might implicate also very open and supportive for childless/childfree mindset. Even touches topics like, just because you like kids, doesn’t mean you have to have them, you can teach, volunteer for after school activities, etc.
I think the single most important take away from it is that whether you decide to have kid(s) or not, you give something up.
You also have to go into it responsibly and it’s also okay to reevaluate as you go along, e.g. just because you wanted 3 kids before getting married, doesn’t mean you can’t take a moment to reevaluate after the first if you still want that.
Even touches topics like, just because you like kids, doesn’t mean you have to have them, you can teach, volunteer for after school activities, etc.
Plus parenting is a lifelong role. Your kids are gonna be 50 one day, and you’ll probably be alive for that.
Personally, I’ve never liked children (the age group), but I have always admired wanted adult children (that is, the relationship) of my own, so I had kids. And although my kids are pretty cool, I still mostly think other people’s kids are annoying, and have only softened my views on that front a little bit.
Meh, there’s enough of a biological drive to have children there’s no need to pressure people into it socially. It’s condescending to assume someone else will follow your same “growth” trajectory.
evolution has given us a drive to have sex sure enough.
but my impression is that there’s not a lot of biological drive to have children per se, as shown by a lack of children the moment that women can actually decide whether to have them.
It’s probably difficult to prove that it’s genetic but at least anecdotally the biological clock is a thing.
And there are societies that exist today with relatively young first birth ages. But this is impossible to determine how much genetics vs culture contribute.
Some of my women friends have shared that they definitely felt a need/pang/drive to have kids. Not all of them listened based on the other things they decided to do with their lives or their bodies’ ability, but it doesn’t mean the feeling isn’t there. I wouldn’t conclude from my anecdotal information that that drive extends to all women, but I would guess that many women feel it given how prevalent the discussion is.
The choice of whether to have kids at all is important, but doesn’t rule out the presence of some evolutionary biological drive. Although, it’s possible it’s not some genetic instinct and is instead some cultural thing that becomes more powerful during certain hormonal shifts that occur across a woman’s life cycle. I’ve never studied such things, but I’m open to different possibilities.
I’m not sure it would only apply to women. Never had much of a parental drive myself but I met several men, both friends and partners, who wanted children very much.
Maybe it’s different somehow, I wouldn’t know, but something’s definitely there.
True. I didn’t have that drive, but my wife did. I’m very happy I have children, but I didn’t feel compelled.
Nuclear families are intentionally isolating because it makes women and children more vulnerable.
It really does take a village and we need to get back into living with big extended families.
Doesn’t Ruth know you can reuse the same glass instead of getting a new glass every time you want more wine
Yeah, but that makes it much more difficult for the artist to show you shes drunk.
That’s called a creative challenge
Oh I assume that was at a bar or something.
What was that movie about post partum depression and the nannie that comes over to help?
Tully by J reitman (2018)
Is it good? I’ve had it in the backlog for a while
I found it very good, fascinating, makes you feel a full range of emotions being confronted by such a natural yet heavy human experience.
One must understand that the hormones which motivate breeding instinct in social mammals override all other considerations on a neurochemical level when someone has a baby–if those hormones and emotional systems are working correctly.
(Sometimes they aren’t, after all; everyone knows those statistical outlier individuals who stick out like a sore thumb for having no parental instincts.)
If a common-sense-overriding mechanism were not in place to drive reproduction, a species will go extinct.
Brain: I’d have to be crazy to have a baby…
Biology: No problem!
What’s worse to me is that mother’s also forget the pain and awfulness of 9 months of pregnancy followed by childbirth, leading to them wanting another child.
It’s honestly not that bad for some mothers. For others it can be horrific.
my sister didnt really have any issues with pregnancy or labor, she said it was pretty easy
Maybe im misunderstanding:
Are you saying that there necessarily exists for all not extinct species of social mammals a “common-sense-overriding mechanism”?
There’s a reason bustin makes me feel good
There necessarily exists in all mammals (and also some other species as well such as several speeches of birds) a mechanism that will override all other motivators up to and including common sense if the specimen in question even manifests the feature of common sense in the first place.
It’s exactly the inability (more like refusal) of most of us to override our base instincts that is going to cause the extinction of not just ourselves, but most complex life on the planet along with us. I say that not just as someone with “no parental instincts,” but rather a humble human who actually uses the ability to see further than my nose.
Equally of course, if we use our mighty intellects to override our breeding instincts entirely then we’d arrive at the same extinction rather more quickly.
So you know, damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
Given our current birth rates in the western world I’m less worried about our breeding instincts than our inability to convince everyone that their children should live in a better world than them, apparently that’s the instinct that broke first.
Not really. I’m sure our mighty intellects could have settled on a birth rate somewhere between 25 and 0. There are a lot of numbers in between.
I mean… the developed world has settled on slightly below break even (or very below break even in a few cases). So yes, that did happen
We only settled on a “break even” point now that we’re many billions of people over capacity and society and the biosphere are collapsing. We needed to slow down a long time ago.
We are not over capacity at all, this is a fucked up lie propagated by the rich western northern hemisphere people and the rich in general, the wealthiest 10% causes over 50% of the pollution.
That includes lots of Americans and Europeans.
Here is an excellent episode from the climate deniers playbook podcast about this topic. https://pod.link/1694759084/episode/Z2lkOi8vYXJ0MTktZXBpc29kZS1sb2NhdG9yL1YwL3I3WDh5SjhNY3RKY1hab2Rva09pRUxiR0NZYzFoNWsyT3gzcE0wZm5sUk0
I don’t have kids but I still like to wonder about where planes are going
To get to the other side!
Of what? The disk?
Of the spacetime chicken
where planes are going
Another one that’s not corporate, and doesn’t remove planes when someone pays a fee.
This is also my preferred flight tracker. It’s important to understand how and why this site is available for free, and where the data come from:
- the FAA and others mandate that pretty much all aircraft broadcast ADS-B info automatically on every flight. ADS-B is an international standard for aircraft data to be broadcast for the purpose of conspicuous ID, locating, and other info about the craft. Only highly sensitive military flights are exempt, for obvious reasons.
- This particular site merely aggregates data from volunteers who have set up stations. These stations are easy enough to set up that there are enough volunteers to provide continuous, overlapping coverage in most places. If you wanted, you could set up a station of your own (requires just a cheap ~$30USD SDR, an antenna, and a laptop/raspberry pi/etc)
And that SDR is a hobby in and of itself. There are all kinds of interesting transmissions you can receive from around the world.
Oh, yeah, that’s a whole rabbit hole that I’ve been on for 5 years and counting, and I still feel like I know nothing :)
Another one that’s not corporate
Isn’t it owned by a company called Jetnet?
Justin Ling. (2023-01-27). “The Flight Tracker That Powered @ElonJet Just Took a Left Turn”. wired.com. Accessed 2025-10-16. “A major independent flight tracking platform, which has made enemies of the Saudi royal family and Elon Musk, has been sold to a subsidiary of a private equity firm. And its users are furious. ¶ ADS-B Exchange has made headlines in recent months for, as AFP put it, irking “billionaires and baddies.” But in a Wednesday morning press release, aviation intelligence firm Jetnet announced it had acquired the scrappy open source operation for an undisclosed sum.”.
ADSB exchange is the go-to
Now is my chance to share a useless fun fact! If there is a V-22 Osprey on the map the icon will change from helicopter mode to plane mode depending on airspeed
That is so cool. I just checked and there’s two in plane mode and two in helicopter mode right now.
Some people get easy babys.
And then there are the people who get to be parents of ever-screaming high energy high need children.
I have 1 of each. The first is our impossible one. I still get shocked how easy it has been the second time around. Things I used to stress about or cry over how fucked my life is are non existent this time around. Don’t get me wrong, a child, even a good one, is a huge amount of work. It’s just crazy how different they can be from each other.
I was a really easy baby. Too easy, actually. Didn’t say a word until I was 4.
Then there are the ones who have an easy baby, wonder what all the fuss is about, and then have a second which is a nightmare. Actual quote from friends of ours who had it that way round - “I understand what you were on about now.”
This happened to my family. Our first was all around pretty easy. Our second was absolutely insane. She gave my wife and I PTSD; we felt like abuse victims. She screamed 90% of her whole existence until she was 2. Any noise above a whisper would wake her up. This kid would break all parents. We tried everything to make it easier and literally nothing worked. She is the most intense child I’ve ever met, and she is cute as all hell. Love her to death, but my god is she difficult and stubborn.
We started watching TV with headphones because we were so scared of waking her up during nap time. Screamed for hours if she woke up, nothing could fix it.
My friend: “We wouldn’t have had three if the third one was first.”
my parents wanted three until they had my younger brother. even as a grown up that guy is a handful.
I knew a couple that had four super easy babies in a row. Just delightful, sleeping through the night within a month of birth, no colic, easy like Sunday morning girls. So they went for one more. Had a boy that was the hardest baby in the world. Didn’t sleep through the night till 5, colic, had a nuclear reactors worth of energy in him. They said if that had been their first they never would have had a second.
You never know what you’re going to get. My daughter was ROUGH the first 9 months, hardest thing I’ve ever been through. But then it got a lot easier and every day was better. She’s 15 now and the coolest kid. We had planned to have a second but by the time we could even wrap our heads around it she could talk, so we asked her if she wanted a sibling. She thought about her two best friends, who are brother and sister and fought like mad, and said nah. I didn’t want to go through that first 9 months again so that was that. Really glad we did that, we’ve got such a great bond with the three of us.
Crazy to think someone would actually go “4 isn’t enough, let’s go for 5”.
It’s like playing Russian roulette without spinning the chamber.
I’ve pulled the trigger 4 times already, I must just be lucky so let’s keep pulling that trigger!
That’s absolutely mental. Even three easy babies are a handful. Like, really a handful. Going for a fifth is tempting fate too much.
It’s child abuse. There is literally not enough time in a day to give each kid the attention they need.
You know that the oldest had to parent the younger ones and will never have kids of their own. For reasons.
This was my mom. I luckily had my easy babies after the more screamy one, but my mom had 3 kids, said she was always so judgemental of parents with kids throwing tantrums in the store, she knew she was doing something right because we didn’t do that, and in her words:
"For my hubris, God sent me Janet "
And she figured out that there are kids who scream in the store no matter what you do.
I know Lemmy is aggressively anti-child for some reason, but parenting was by far the best work I have ever done. Kids are work but such delightful little people.
Also my mom - I didn’t remember her being affectionate with us, she did a good job of clothing, feeding, educating us but wasn’t ever really, I dunno, Mom - like? I asked her about it once and she said "I don’t like little kids " and I was like WTF you had so many kids! And she said “well I like you all NOW, I knew you would grow up and become people.”
I decided to stay child free because I know that I would not be the mom that I’d like to have. I do like kids though.
So babies are like a box of chocolates?
Basically yes.
That’s why I’m pro abortion. But not after the child’s 10th year. That would be unethical.
Silly, you have to phrase it the way new parents do.
Legalize abortion through 129 months.
Come on. They’re not people until they’re 23.
Yeah I agree, by the tenth year you know for sure wether that child is an asshole or not.
There is both how easy is the kid and how much support there is around (not just from family and friends but also institutional). And then there is how fulfilling you personally find being “parent”. Honestly, it took me more than I would have wanted to find a parent-other life balance. And I still find the parent life to be a bit limiting at times. While I have friends that dove head first into the parent life apparently seamlessly.
We have one of those “major pain in the ass” ones, and sometimes I look at other people’s kids and think how boring they are. Love my demon spawn
Mine is crazy when she’s awake. But she has slept through the night alone since 6 months old. I have to remind myself when she’s awake how much more sleep I have gotten than other parents.
Though she did need to be held for every sleep period up until 5 months old. Some switch flipped. Before that she basically slept every hour on my wives lap or in my baby carrier.
There is no easy babie. Maybe an easier baby.
I didn’t really want kids, but my wife did, so we compromised and had 6.
Jokes aside I found it super fulfilling, I had struggled a lot with depression and feeling like everything was pointless, but raising kids gives me a purpose and makes mudane stuff like work feel meaningful. I definitely get what the comic is talking about, it’s rough a lot of the time, but it was what I unexpectedly needed in my life.
6???
Yep, 6. After you have several it’s kinda like “how much harder could it be to have another?”
I absolutely adore my kiddo and find meaning in my role as a dad that I did in very few other things I’ve done in life.
That said, it definitely does change your life in a way where you will not be able to prioritize the things that are just for you anymore. I am both deeply happy to have become a parent and simultaneously very glad that my wife and I waited and got our finances in order and traveled and lived our life as a couple for almost a decade before we decided to be parents. For parents whose story wasn’t quite as deliberate, I can imagine a lot of conflicting feelings.
When I was starting high school and going through registration with my mom, we were standing in line behind another kid and his mom that I knew pretty well from middle school.
My mom starts talking to his mom about how she now has one child each in elementary, middle school, and high school this year, and it’s going to be overwhelming.
What my mom didn’t know is that she was talking to the mom of a legendary family of like seven kids. The guy I went to school with was the second youngest of the bunch. In elementary school, one of his older brothers stopped by the class and talked about his time in boot camp. We had middle aged teachers who had gone to school with his older siblings. My mom did not pick her battle well on that one.
Naw, kids are great fun
I like kids but I do not want my own.
I think people should be OK with other people making their own choices.
Telling someone to “grow up and have kids” like in the comic is really shitty just like how telling someone they made a mistake by having kids would be.
Idk why the argument is "everyone should have kids or nobody should have kids. "
I feel like the internet has ruined many people’s tolerance for ambiguity or difference.
With a statement like that, there’s no middle ground. Either you’re a unicorn of a parent who can deal with it all or you’re leaving someone else with most of the burden.
… so tell us, precious, which is it?
“skiing is great fun”
With a statement like that, there’s no middle ground. You must be a one in a million natural athlete.
Just because it’s fun doesn’t mean it isn’t work and you don’t fall down many many times.
“deal with it all” is the falling on your behind repeatedly and not being discouraged by it. If that requires being a one in a million athlete, sure, that’s what I’m saying.
Things can be fun and difficult. Just ask any athlete. It can be fun but requires work and practice.
People who find difficult things fun are unicorns in my book.
What absolute nonsense, plenty of people like to challenge themselves.
You play video games?
Are we really going to compare video game “difficult” with real life “difficult”?
Maybe I’m just old and neurodivergent but going out and partying sounds like a miserable time to me. I’d take changing diapers and being a human jungle gym for my kid any day.
I’m also old and neurodivergent. Kids sound as much a nightmare as going out and partying.
I have no kids and I’m still as miserable.
Did you used to go places?
Maybe it’s time to have kids and share the misery
You’re not thinking the long game here!
You don’t have babies to be happy, you have babies to indoctrinate them into believing your bullshit!
You’re influencing generations to come! Just think, man! Think!You’re wrong. You have kids to assure your pension and some to pull the plug when you’re old and dement.
