The psychology behind ‘revenge bedtime procrastination’

If you're seriously considering the question, you owe it to yourself to seek out parents who specifically enjoy and thrive with parenting.

There's a serious imbalance in conversation about children. Most of the internet comments you read about raising children will sound negative or burdensome. Why is that? It's because they're venting, or wanting to discuss a challenging situation.

Meanwhile, you're likely surrounded by countless parents who simply don't talk about their experience. No one wants to hear endless "I love my children" stories, so we just keep quiet. As you get older, you also realize that many people want children but struggle to conceive, so we refrain from child talk around non-parents out of caution and sensitivity.

Chances are good that the majority of parents in your community, office, or social circle are actually very happy most of the time. There's just not much to talk about because being happy with your family is the boring, normal state.

It also helps to keep in mind that the infant and toddler phases are relatively short. It's only 4 years, relative to your expected lifespan of around 80 years. If you're in your early 20s and just barely out of college, spending 4 years raising a child past the toddler age probably feels like an eternity. When you're in your late 30s and 40s, you realize that it's merely a blip on the radar. 5% of your life.

Look at this way: If you walked into an Ivy League university library around finals time and started asking sleep deprived students cramming for tests if they're enjoying their decision to enroll, you wouldn't get an accurate picture of the lifelong benefits of an Ivy League degree. Ask them if it was worth it in their 40s or 50s and you'll get a very different answer. Asking parents in the middle of the most difficult few childraising years if a lifetime of child raising makes sense isn't going to give you an accurate picture, either.

> I’m sure you’re biased and it’s culturally unacceptable (to say the least) to say that you’d rather not have had kids, but I wonder how often you think about that loss of individuality?

It's actually an extremely common question from my non-parent friends. I was afraid of it myself before having kids. The truth is that your old self doesn't disappear when you have kids. Free time still exists. Time management and efficiency becomes vastly more important. When I first had kids, it would take me hours to handle feeding, bathing, prepping for bed, and so on. We made a deliberate effort to streamline our workflows and now we can get it all done quickly and get on with having fun. Believe it or not, dinner time and bath time can actually be fun.

If you approach everything as a miserable chore that you have to slog through before you can get back to wasting time on the internet, you're going to have a bad time. If you lean into it and make an effort to make things fun, it's way better than messing around online.

And don't forget that after a few years they feed and bathe themselves. After 18 years they're off to college and you're back to you. People seem to forget that children grow up quickly.

Frankly, having kids helped me improve some aspects of my individuality and social life. I'm more likely to take the kids for a hike or schedule a meetup with fellow parents. I meet new friends through community functions. And this won't make sense to non-parents, but I actually enjoy spending time my kids.

That said, I agree more with you, because as much as I like to say, "oh I could be doing x or y if I weren't caring for my kids," in reality, I probably wouldn't be doing much differently. Maybe I'd go out a few more times a month, but oops pandemic.

Slightly off-topic, but this isn't limited to parenting feedback, it's true of nearly any topic online.

Some forums are full of people venting, some forums are full of people showing off how great their lives are.

It's very difficult to get an accurate view of an average person's experience with X (and maybe it's not even relevant to you—what you really want is a picture of your experience with X, which may depend a lot on your socioeconomic circumstances).

I've found anecdotes from friends to significantly outperform online anecdotes in predicting my personal experience.

Nope.. It's great that you are making an informed decision and really thinking about it. People have different experiences. Mine is that as a baby you are just really into it, the whole baby thing and don't really worry about individualism. As they get a bit older you think about that again - your career, maybe travel etc. and realize it is constraining having kids, and 90% of that is because of cost of living (IMO). I.e. if I had millions that'd fix it, ha ha! (maybe it wouldn't!) but money does help - you can buy time with it by getting help like cleaners, working less, and can afford holidays etc.