Just another reason...I don't want kids

[Jmpty]

I have 3 little freethinkers growing up in an atheist household. They are polite, they get good grades, they are funny, and smart, and they bring me no end of great joy and pride. I know that by having kids, I have made the world a better place by not only diluting the gene pool, ( they are half Chinese, half Northern European) but I have added 3 more freethinkers to the world.

[Youssuf Ramadan]

I have 3 little freethinkers growing up in an atheist household. They are polite, they get good grades, they are funny, and smart, and they bring me no end of great joy and pride. I know that by having kids, I have made the world a better place by not only diluting the gene pool, ( they are half Chinese, half Northern European) but I have added 3 more freethinkers to the world.

That's great to hear.  :-D  Shame that seems to be the exception rather than the rule in my experience.   8-[

[BarkAtTheMoon]

I have one son that was by no means planned, but has always been good, very smart, and is now a freshman in college.

So last night I was driving back from my friend's place.  I decided to cut through a neighborhood near my house to avoid the lights on my street.  Mind you, I live in MA and we just got a pretty good amount of snow earlier.  And as I'm driving down the street I see shadowy figures running across the street, just beyond my headlights.  As I get closer I realize there is a small mob of children...and these little fucks made a roadblock of snow in the middle of the road.  I pulled up closer to see if there was any way I could get around it, but they piled it 4 ft high and I drive a Taurus, so no luck.  As I'm maneuvering my three point turn in the middle of the road these demon children start throwing rocks, snowballs, and literally coming up to the car and hitting it.  Pretty much, I felt like I was in a modern New England, Lord of the Flies reenactment.

Now even though I have thought about the possibility of kids from time to time, I can honestly say that throughout my entire life that I have always leaned heavily towards not wanting to have them.  And this further pushes me over that side of the fence.

Seriously, I applaud you parents, I just don't understand why.

For every asshole kid that would do something like this, there's more than likely an asshole and/or negligent parent who's doing a shitty job raising their kids or keeping an eye on them. No parent who's paying even a little attention would let them build a snow fort in the middle of the fucking road.

[AllPurposeAtheist]

You all must have had extraordinarily boring childhoods.. We did the same thing as kids and worse. The victims jumped out of their cars to chase our sorry asses down and coerced confessions in front of witnesses..
Someday you'll be 80 with no grown offspring to give a shit.. Sounds lonely as hell, but whatever.. I love my kids..

Wrong, I did no such thing.

Having children is NOT a guarantee of company in old age...  Take a trip to an assisted living facility and show me all of this attention that these older folks are getting from their offspring.  

Being childfree has it's pros and it's cons, it merely depends on what YOU consider to be a pro or a con.  To me, there ARE no pros to having children AT ALL.

Yeah.. You're right. Your father probably shoüld have worn a better quality condom. :roll:

[surly74]

Being childfree has it's pros and it's cons, it merely depends on what YOU consider to be a pro or a con.  To me, there ARE no pros to having children AT ALL.

can't miss what you've never had.

just out of curiosity, are there any posters here who are married/in LT relationships that have decided to not have kids? I just suspect it's the same people that say who say "money doesn't buy happiness" because they are poor.

perhaps i'm wrong.

[surly74]

For every asshole kid that would do something like this, there's more than likely an asshole and/or negligent parent who's doing a shitty job raising their kids or keeping an eye on them. No parent who's paying even a little attention would let them build a snow fort in the middle of the fucking road.

do you have kids?

[AllPurposeAtheist]

Well, the mere fact there are kids who do bad things is not, at least in my mind an indictment of all kids everywhere.
Be that as it may, some of you have forsaken parenting using that as the justification and using the same line of thinking everyone should be forced to be sterilized as to avoid children with bad behavior. Makes sense. :-k

[BarkAtTheMoon]

For every asshole kid that would do something like this, there's more than likely an asshole and/or negligent parent who's doing a shitty job raising their kids or keeping an eye on them. No parent who's paying even a little attention would let them build a snow fort in the middle of the fucking road.

do you have kids?

One son in college.

[surly74]

For every asshole kid that would do something like this, there's more than likely an asshole and/or negligent parent who's doing a shitty job raising their kids or keeping an eye on them. No parent who's paying even a little attention would let them build a snow fort in the middle of the fucking road.

do you have kids?

One son in college.

very good. he ever do something stupid?

[BarkAtTheMoon]

very good. he ever do something stupid?

Honestly, not really, certainly not that stupid, though he was never that adventuresome particularly with being an only child growing up in the digital age.

I grew up doing ill-advised stuff all the time with my brother and his or my friends, including building snow forts, but we knew better and my mom would have stopped us if we had done something as bafflingly stupid as building one in the middle of the fucking road....then swarming a random car that was blocked by it and throwing rocks and snowballs at the car. We played in the street all the time, and we'd all yell "CAR!!!" (or "Game off" followed by "Game on" after Wayne's World came out) when a car came and knew to get out of the street. And any and all of the above of us would've been in some serious shit if we got caught doing something as stupid as what the OP kids did.

My point being that far too often a bad kid comes prepackaged with a bad parent, so the idiot kid isn't entirely to blame. You want an easy way to see who the good kids and bad kids are, on average? Go to a school open house. The parents that show up are usually the ones with the relatively good kids. We'd see the same ones show up every year at my son's school open houses. I've known a lot of teachers including my mom and my dad's current wife, and they've always said the same thing. I seriously doubt many child psychologists or teachers would dispute any of that.

[Aroura33]

This topic comes up every now and then, and it always makes me fear for the future of humanity.  Atheists and other intelligent groups of people are less likely to have children, or if they do, they tend to have fewer children than average.

The religious and the really, really stupid people in society, however, breed like rabbits.  Many religions even command that you have as many children as yo can until your female drops dead from having them, then go get another one and keep doing it.  Seriously.  This is SOOO bad for so many reasons.  Overpopulation being #1, but also the fact that the lower IQ people are out-breeding the higher IQ people.  And now, the higher IQ people have, in larger numbers than ever before, decided not to have ANY kids because of overpopulation, pollution, and a questionable future for humanity.  Ironically, this makes the future of humanity even less optimistic, lol.

I was married for 6 years the first time, no kids.  The second time, we also decided on no kids, but fate said otherwise, and we decided to go with it.  So, we just have the one.  I got my tubes tied asap, one is enough for us.  She is very smart and well behaved, but I do see TONs of kids at her school wehre the parents don't seem to care, and are fairly neglectful, and so you get pretty bratty little kids.  The brattiness of the kid really is in direct relation to the attentiveness of the parent, most of the time.  All kids can be bad of course, that is one of the ways they learn.

There is one kid in my daughters class who cannot sit still or shut up for 2 minutes.  He's always in trouble, always disrupting class and making uit hard for the other kids to learn.  His parents are creationists who believe that he needs more God in his life to make him better at school.  :Hangman:   He told me the other day that God told him school was stupid and that he shouldn't do his schoolwork.  Both his parents and teacher shrugged that off like it was funny.....

[wolf39us]

You all must have had extraordinarily boring childhoods.. We did the same thing as kids and worse. The victims jumped out of their cars to chase our sorry asses down and coerced confessions in front of witnesses..
Someday you'll be 80 with no grown offspring to give a shit.. Sounds lonely as hell, but whatever.. I love my kids..

Wrong, I did no such thing.

Having children is NOT a guarantee of company in old age...  Take a trip to an assisted living facility and show me all of this attention that these older folks are getting from their offspring.  

Being childfree has it's pros and it's cons, it merely depends on what YOU consider to be a pro or a con.  To me, there ARE no pros to having children AT ALL.

Yeah.. You're right. Your father probably shoüld have worn a better quality condom. :roll:

What does that have to do with a choice to have children or not?

[surly74]

Go to a school open house. The parents that show up are usually the ones with the relatively good kids. We'd see the same ones show up every year at my son's school open houses. I've known a lot of teachers including my mom and my dad's current wife, and they've always said the same thing. I seriously doubt many child psychologists or teachers would dispute any of that.

open houses are good. I coach a 9/10 year old football team to the same result. want to see a nanny society? coach youth sports.

anyhow, i've had conversations with my sister who is a mother for the first time. There is a whole self esteem thing going on. Everyone thinks they deserve to have good self esteem without actually doing anything. It's people like that which scare me. One facebook conversation someone chimed in that complimenting the looks of a five year old girl, as in saying "my aren't you cute", was the same as homophobic or racial slurs.

everyone is afraid of putting their child through discomfort. of any kind.

[Farroc]

Open houses? Good? BAH! The only people who come to those things are goodytooshoe soccer-mom barbie idiots.(No offense to those of you who go to them. :) ) Maybe it's different in other states, but at least in Texas those type of people are the only one's I've ever seen at my schools open houses. They're the type of people who think cannabis is evil, that "Everybody's special!", that "You can be whatever you want to be!", that children who don't live in brick houses are being "neglected", that metal music is bad, that put bumper stickers like "Baby-on-board!"  and "Support our troops!" on their cars, and think that anyone who doesn't conform to their ideals is stupid. Those extroverted, hypocritical, condescending, patronizing, puke-inducing, shallow, barbie, "patriotic", do-gooder, pat-themselves-on-the-back, virus with shoes, dumb-asses are the very reason I'm such an asocial misanthrope.

Again, this only applies to the people I've met at these school events, here in Texas. I'm not trying to offend anyone. :rollin:

[BarkAtTheMoon]

open houses are good. I coach a 9/10 year old football team to the same result. want to see a nanny society? coach youth sports.

I've wanted to punch parents at youth sports games before, particularly the imbecile soccer moms who think they know something about the sport and scream at the kids to do X, Y, Z in the game. Shut up, lady. You're an idiot.