That's great! Reminds me of elementary school when I was in "gifted and talented... " program. We did a similar experiment. Each kid had some ornate paper airplane, but my simple design won out.
My dad studied aviation in USSR between 1980-83 while my country was part of USSR. He also had amazing skills in aerodynamics and making paper planes. I guess USSR aviation schools were pretty good that times. Dad's school now http://kkluga.ru/
I've heard stories of how difficult the process of adopting kids can be. So, kudos to you, that sounds like a lot to manage.
Regarding opting out, I get it, but I don't agree personally. Not having kids, can enable some pretty great lifestyles. But I do feel like you don't get a chance to understand what being a parent is all about. No amount of being a great aunt / uncle / whatever, gives you that feeling of needing to nurture or protect your child.
It forces you to change, maintain a good relationship w/ your partner, be a good role model, etc.
Life is a series of choices, and it's impossible to explore every path you could take.
> But I do feel like you don't get a chance to understand what being a parent is all about.
That's 100% accurate.
There's a pretty much infinite number of possible life experiences I'm not going to get to experience personally and will not have the time/money/ability to fit into my lifespan. The wishlist of things I'd love to do or experience someday continually grows longer - no matter how much I try to fit more of them into my life.
Taking on what amounts to a lifetime commitment and a massive investment of time and money for an experience that I have zero interest in and think I would actively dislike, seems like a terrible use of my finite resources.
> It forces you to change, maintain a good relationship w/ your partner, be a good role model, etc.
Perhaps it inspired you to do that. But the divorce rate and number of parents out there are terrible role models, suggest that it's not exactly the case for everyone.
I'll also suggest that people who don't have much interest in becoming parents are probably a whole lot more likely to wind up on the negative side of those possibilities should they wind up having children anyway.
> Taking on what amounts to a lifetime commitment and a massive investment of time and money for an experience that I have zero interest in and think I would actively dislike, seems like a terrible use of my finite resources.
If you consider maximizing your experience the best use of your resources, I suppose not.
> Taking on what amounts to a lifetime commitment and a massive investment of time and money for an experience that I have zero interest in and think I would actively dislike, seems like a terrible use of my finite resources.
This is a naive way to think about it. In the grand scheme of things, as TFA hints at, kids don't take up a significant portion of your life. If you're goal is to focus on striking off entries on a wishlist, there are many, many things that can be sacrificed to make room that don't involve children.
It's not as bad as you make it seem.
Lastly, I don't really care about experiences the way I did when I was younger. Going on a trip to an exotic locale doesn't really excite me as much as, say, taking a good picture of a friend or family member and sharing it. Or hearing a good story or joke.
Kids expand to fill the space in your life you make for them. I have more fun with my kids than possibly anyone else. I want to share experiences with them, not for myself.
Have you ever been excited when telling a friend about a cool spot they've never been to, and subsequently taking them there? Kids are like a revolving door of those opportunities. They start from scratch.
It absolutely does not force you to change at all, nor does it force you to maintain a good relationship with your partner. Divorce rates are high, there are lots of bad parents. Having kids may have pushed you to be better, and that's great, but there are a lot of people out there for whom it makes no positive difference at all.
I don't disagree with you. Divorce rates are high, and for many it doesn't make a positive difference. I imagine most folks on HN are pretty conscious about striving to be better, so for this small subset I think my opinion is reasonable. And I know plenty of people who if they had kids (but abstain) would absolutely rock at it, and it *could* be a positive forcing function, such that they get to experience different aspects to life.
In my experience, people who are having kids because they want to be better have something broken in their lives that they ought to to work on fixing before having kids, and the consequences if they don’t can be…quite bad.
> It forces you to change, maintain a good relationship w/ your partner, be a good role model, etc.
No, it doesn’t actually, as any kind of even approximately universal effect, force any of that, and even a casual look around at society would demonstrate that pretty clearly. It may or may not have motivated that in you – but plenty of people who would describe themselves as having those traits in their own relationships / parenting objectively don’t, so self-assessment is pretty clearly not a reliable gauge here. I would agree that there are people whose combination of innate personality, life experiences, etc., will lead them to actually be nudged in those directions by having children, but there are plenty who won’t be. And there are plenty of people who will be nudged in much more negative directions by the experience.
As a parent myself, it amazes me how many people who are parents are drawn into a bizarre evangelization of parenting as some kind of universally ideal vocation, with stories about the effect it will have that are trivially refutable by looking outside of one’s own internal narrative of their own experience with their own kids at the rest of the world around them.
I would have been a shit parent to a human child. I would still be a shit parent to a human child. I don’t want one, if I accidentally had one they would eventually not want me too. I’ve been a half decent parent to my youngest sibling, because what you say about life forcing you to change has some truth.
I’ve experienced what you described with my pup, but that’s because she is exactly the bond and the responsibility that fits my life. It revolves around her, every day, all the time. No amount of parenting a human would ever change that.
