‘I just assumed it would happen’: the unspoken grief of childless men • Hacker News Board

Re: ‘I just assumed it would happen’: the unspoken grief of childless men

#171

Post by em-bee » Tue, Sep 05, 2023, 2:47 PM UTC

_V_ wrote: post #167

em-bee wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the offending part is that there should some kind of drive to have your own children or more specifically that the desire to have children is reduced to the need to reproduce. i have children because i love them and want to care for them. i would adopt children for the same reason. i felt no drive to have children be my own. i could not care less if it is me who reproduced instead of someone else. of course if humani…

Why is that offending? There is some kind of drive to have kids/to reproduce. That drive makes biological sense. I'd say that majority of living things acts on it. If you personally don't feel that drive, there is nothing inherently bad with you and you certainly can have full and happy life. Maybe even happier because you can separate your decision and weigh pros/cons of having kids wihtout emotional involvement. Bu…

thank you. this may be true. obviously i can't emphasize what others feel for something that i don't feel. whether that is an anomaly is something i am rather curious about. but i can most certainly say that all my kids were a choice, one that i would make again, regardless of any troubles having them may have caused.

as for offending, i guess i am generally bothered when people make assumptions about other peoples motivations

Re: ‘I just assumed it would happen’: the unspoken grief of childless men

#172

Post by jimmydddd » Tue, Sep 05, 2023, 2:47 PM UTC

legacynl wrote: post #156

atlantic wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. Starting a family is a leap in the dark. Always was, always will be. The only difference today is that people (may) have a lower risk tolerance, and a tendency to plan everything in advance. I had my first son with no house and no income. I just did the best I could, and things fell into place as I needed them.

I'm not trying to diminish your hardships, but the fact that everything worked out for you in the end is either the result of luck or (mild) privilege. Imagine that everytime somebody helped you out, that didn't happen?. how much worse off would you be right now? There are loads of people who are in your situation who don't have any family, or have a mental or physical handicap, or who happened to get twins instead o…

Agreed. However, I also think that help does tend to "materialize" if you end up needing it. I've noticed that couples who make a lot of "wrong" decisions (e.g., financially, timing wise) end up getting help while couples who make the "right" decisions seem to get less help. And both types of couples end up with almost the same outcome.

Re: ‘I just assumed it would happen’: the unspoken grief of childless men

#173

Post by jimmydddd » Tue, Sep 05, 2023, 2:49 PM UTC

JKCalhoun wrote: post #16

bell-cot wrote: post #6

Geezer* Perspective... [*If not in the USA, read "Old geezer". Credit: Aachen] Many varieties of "I really regret that I [did|didn't] do X when I was younger" occur in older humans. The stereotype of young men wanting to avoid all the work and commitment of setting down, marrying, and raising children is older than the pyramids. It is obviously not true of all young men, but there's very seldom been a shortage. Sure,…

> where kids generally grow up and move far away for jobs - having had children would probably not help much with that. Companionship was never a part of why I fathered children. And in hindsight, raising my daughters was the most meaningful thing I did in this life. I'm just suggesting that there may be other motives for parenting. Big Brothers and Sisters of America is an organization that pairs men up with boys wh…

I was a big brother while single and in college. So it's likely still possible.

Re: ‘I just assumed it would happen’: the unspoken grief of childless men

#174

Post by Tangurena2 » Tue, Sep 05, 2023, 2:50 PM UTC

_V_ wrote: post #124

Tangurena2 wrote: post #119

I wanted to get married and have kids. Being rather effeminate, I don't attract the women who do want to have kids. I was about 40 when I finally realized that if she said she didn't want kids, she really meant it and it was not negotiable. I swore a vow: no more childless relationships. Being in no relationship is far better than being in the wrong relationship. When I tried to adopt, Florida's child welfare agency…

Wtf? O.O How can you be declared "legally gay"? That sounds like something from a dystopian novel...

The attitude was that "no hetero would do that sort of thing." A similar attitude for race relations would be to use the "one drop rule" [0] against white-looking [1] supporters of civil rights for blacks (back in the 1950s & 1960s), that since no white would do that, I must have some black blood in my ancestry and therefore I'd be legally black.

> In the United States, the “one-drop rule” — also known as hypodescent — dates to a 1662 Virginia law on the treatment of mixed-race individuals. The legal notion of hypodescent has been upheld as recently as 1985, when a Louisiana court ruled that a woman with a black great-great-great-great-grandmother could not identify herself as “white” on her passport. [2]

> Not only does the one-drop rule apply to no other group than American blacks, but apparently the rule is unique in that it is found only in the United States and not in any other nation in the world. In fact, definitions of who is black vary quite sharply from country to country, and for this reason people in other countries often express consternation about our definition.

> The phenomenon known as "passing as white" is difficult to explain in other countries or to foreign students. [3]

This happened back in the 1990s. In 2007, Florida repealed the ban on homosexuals adopting, but I had left the state years before.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-drop_rule

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passing_(racial_identity)

2 - https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2010/12/one-drop-rule...

3 - https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/jefferson/mix...

Re: ‘I just assumed it would happen’: the unspoken grief of childless men

#175

Post by em-bee » Tue, Sep 05, 2023, 2:54 PM UTC

neilv wrote: post #139

I love teaching/interacting with the occasional good-natured, learning-sponge kids, but the stars haven't yet aligned to have kids of my own. Now that I'm 50-ish, although I'm energetic and not yet noticeably graying, when I think about kids of my own, I have to consider: * A dear friend adored her father, and when he died while she was in college, she was devastated. I could nurture a kid to be resilient in that pos…

depending on what culture you are from you may have a challenge to find someone your age who still wants to have kids (even adopted ones)

Re: ‘I just assumed it would happen’: the unspoken grief of childless men

#176

Post by em-bee » Tue, Sep 05, 2023, 3:02 PM UTC

fullstop wrote: post #89

theGeatZhopa wrote: post #3

I can't have kids. So am I big sad. Congratulations to all fathers out there. Want to adopt some poor kid and give him/her a possibility to have a kind of a standard life and to help to open a door to the world :( But a single man adopting is considered as pervert. So I am even bigger sad.

Does fostering have less of a barrier of entry? You may also be able to participate in a mentoring program like Big Brothers Big Sisters.

i actually think fostering should have a higher barrier because foster kids usually come from difficult situations and eventually go back to their parents and they need to be raised and taken care of in a way that enables that. for adoption it should be more like: you are capable to be parents, here is your kid. off you go.

Re: ‘I just assumed it would happen’: the unspoken grief of childless men

#177

Post by fullstop » Tue, Sep 05, 2023, 3:08 PM UTC

em-bee wrote: post #176

fullstop wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does fostering have less of a barrier of entry? You may also be able to participate in a mentoring program like Big Brothers Big Sisters.

i actually think fostering should have a higher barrier because foster kids usually come from difficult situations and eventually go back to their parents and they need to be raised and taken care of in a way that enables that. for adoption it should be more like: you are capable to be parents, here is your kid. off you go.

I hear what you're saying, but the legal aspects of being a parent likely outweigh that. With foster children the state retains legal custody. Adoption is not just finding suitable parent(s) for a child, it is transferring both legal rights and obligations.

I'm saying this through a US centric lens, of course.

Re: ‘I just assumed it would happen’: the unspoken grief of childless men

#178

Post by dTal » Tue, Sep 05, 2023, 3:13 PM UTC

anon291 wrote: post #143

alphabettsy wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Society used to be predictable and rational No. It really wasn’t. Read some history books. There was nothing uniquely great about the 80s-90s. Impending global lockdown? You might be well served from a lot less time online and more time with your fellow humans or nature.

> Impending global lockdown? You might be well served from a lot less time online and more time with your fellow humans or nature. Please stop trying to gaslight people. I too would have thought such a thing impossible in 2019/early 2020, but we saw that that is not beyond our leaders. Many people in the world have a lot of trauma from the government-imposed lockdowns and subsequent seizing of basic human freedoms. U…

Bit of a difference between "global lockdowns can happen" and "we can all sense the impending global lockdown coming". Could a lockdown happen again? Sure, if there were another pandemic. But "we can all sense the impending global lockdown coming" is ridiculous new-world-order conspiracy bullshit.

The only surprising or novel thing about the "global lockdowns" of 2020 was the degree of international cooperation on the matter, and even that - positive though it was - left a lot to be desired. It certainly didn't signify any kind of ominous freedom-hating shadow government. Pandemic-driven quarantines, crisis-driven restrictions on movement etc are hardly unprecedented in the 20th century. "Basic human freedoms" are subject to restriction when lives are at stake, that's just a fact of life. Londoners in 1940 weren't even allowed to turn the light on.

Re: ‘I just assumed it would happen’: the unspoken grief of childless men

#179

Post by em-bee » Tue, Sep 05, 2023, 3:14 PM UTC

fullstop wrote: post #177

em-bee wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i actually think fostering should have a higher barrier because foster kids usually come from difficult situations and eventually go back to their parents and they need to be raised and taken care of in a way that enables that. for adoption it should be more like: you are capable to be parents, here is your kid. off you go.

I hear what you're saying, but the legal aspects of being a parent likely outweigh that. With foster children the state retains legal custody. Adoption is not just finding suitable parent(s) for a child, it is transferring both legal rights and obligations. I'm saying this through a US centric lens, of course.

i understand why things are that way, but it is exactly the legal situation that makes me think it should be otherwise. when adopting you are giving parents the full responsibility to raise the children as they see fit. so obviously they should be capable, but that is all that is needed, just as if they had kids of their own.

for foster children the state retains a continuous responsibility for these children, and foster parents need to be able to go along with that.

i think part of the reason why it is otherwise is because it is easier to take foster children away, so if a mistake was made, it can be undone, or so the thinking goes, but i actually think that is wrong.

the most suffering foster children experience comes from changing families all to frequently. it hurts their ability to form trusting relationships. the adopted kids will be fine even if the parents make a mistake here or there, but the foster kids who are moved to another family because the foster parents made that same mistake have their world shattered.

Re: ‘I just assumed it would happen’: the unspoken grief of childless men

#180

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Sep 05, 2023, 3:16 PM UTC

lisardo wrote: post #90

rambambram wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Filter for Age: > 35, Kids: "Want someday" And... you're in bed with a borderliner or covert narcissist before you know it. Maybe this important step is missing: vetting the prospective mother of your children for some time?

I learned this lesson the hard way.

[deleted]