How many people feel having children is not worth it?

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My kids are worth it. Worth the time and money.

I may be young, but I feel that I have good "selfless" reasons not to have children. I fear that by having kids, I'll curse them through the burden of living and doom the next generations the same way, especially if my inherited autism causes them to succumb to insanity as a reaction to the world. Plus, I really don't see any real benefit of having kids beside fulfilling any biological needs. By not existing, they will neither experience sadness or need happiness and the world won't have as many people to feed (Like we need anymore people.). Also, I do not see why continuing the family bloodline is important and why not doing so would be "selfish" (Either way is "selfish."). I wish I can reprogram my endocrine and reproductive systems to my whims. It's not that my life is that bad, I just don't want to endanger anyone because of overly successful evolution. Is it really wrong to question the ritual people take for granted?

I have three and they are my entire life!! !

I don't think I want children anymore ... it occurred to me awhile ago that they might be born NT. That would be a frightening thing parenting children I'd never be able to understand or relate to

It kind of makes me think of two cat's mating and then producing a puppy that terrorizes the cats... scary stuff

It's not worth it for me.

Call me naive, but I actually thought that my choice would be exactly that- my choice. Yet everyone who has asked (after questioning me first- I don't tell everyone I meet that I never want kids) has always, always said "Oh, but you'll change your mind sooner or later." As if!

I think I'm old enough to make up my own mind, and old enough to remember my nephew and nieces terrible twos. I love them all, but I couldn't put up with it 24/7. No, I am definetly not a children person.

I am a complete hypocrite with the subject of children. I know that the world is overpopulated, and the effects of overpopulation are very apparent. Many ecosystems such as forests are being destroyed to make room for the swarms of humans wanting homes, when at one time when the human population was at a sensible level there were small villages inside these ecosystems and people thrived on them (Amazon tribes anyone?), now there are too many people and these environments aren't enough. I hate what we have done to the world. Also many countries in Africa and Asia are in extreme poverty because of over population. I have a feeling, actually I know that bringing more children into the world won't be worth it, there are already too many people, and too many children are already born that need an adoptive family.

But I still have this strong desire to be a parent! I still have this urge and want to have children, I plan to in the future. In fact I want more than one. Call me selfish, say what you want but one of my biggest ambitions for the future is to be a biological mother. Even if at the same time I still despair at what humans have done to the earth as a results of the population growth, the amount of destruction of environments that we used to call home before city life became the norm. I just wonder how many more people there would be if there were no such thing as asexuals and homosexuals, I thank you all.

So yeah, I want children but I know it's not "worth it". Well it is for me, but not for the world.

Haha An apt metaphor.

Made me laugh good.

When I was young I said that I didn't want to have children.
People said to me "you are selfish". I couldn't understand that. How could I be selfish for not wanting to share with people who didn't even exist?

Well anyway I did have two children. I tried my best but quite frankly both of them are a disappointment to me.
Perhaps I am a disappointment to them as well. Who knows?

If I had it to do all over again?
I probably wouldn't have had children.
I probably wouldn't have married.

Why did they disappoint you? Just wondering

I don't want to have children now, for a few reasons:

• I remember how things were when I was in school and how people told me I was weird and crazy and I don't want to put a child through that. I don't want to create someone who would think that there was something wrong with them for not thinking like everyone else.
• The United States is mostly controlled by people with lots of money who create laws that are not to protect people but to make it easier for corporations to gain money. I don't want to make it easier for them to get money by creating a child that they can prey on and advertise to and try to take as much money from that child as possible. The government lies, the politicians lie, the corporations lie, and people lie to the people they call friends and family. I don't want to create someone who will be lied to so much.
• I would worry about there not being enough food, water, or energy to support so many people, and it wouldn't be fair to the child or to other people to create another child and make it harder to feed and provide energy and water for everyone.
• Having children costs a lot of money, and I both don't want to have to pay the cost and don't want to have to worry that I wouldn't be able to feed or care enough for a child.

I may change my mind in the future, and if I did somehow end up being a parent I believe that I would love my child. As a human I can sometimes be selfish too. But I don't think the continuation of my bloodline is really an important thing. There are many amazing things in the universe, and even if I'm not alive and moving around every particle of me has always existed and will always exist. I will exist even when I am not alive. I existed as particles for billions of years before I was alive, and the world and the universe were amazing. The world and the universe would still be just as amazing even if I wasn't here and even if there was no evidence of me and no children to think like me.

My son is everything to me. He doesn't cost that much but he is already costing us. More money in electricity (babies need to be warm), more money being spent on laundry (it costs us to wash clothes and dry them) and I think that is about it. We don't use formula and I am so lucky I can breast feed and my body makes enough to feed him. I also use cloth than disposables so more money for us. And I have already spent money on him for things like clothes or books or breast pump, storage milk bags, and other baby items but I don't mind it because it's worth it. My husband jokes to me about how we are going to go broke if I keep spending money at this baby resale store. That's where I go to take in clothes to sell and get in store credit. And it takes lot of willpower to not buy anything there. Lot of stuff there is so cute and some toys there are great and the prices are inexpensive but it all adds up. And they have a cafe there and a play area for kids and books for them to look at and a area for moms to nurse and they have some classes there for kids like music and they also do a breast feeding class for new time moms. That place is awesome but shame my son is too young to have fun there. Some even go there to work on their laptops as their kids play.

I don't care about spending my money on him. To me it's worth it.

Well...I was what a friend of mine cutely calls an 'oops baby' - I was unplanned and, as it turns out, not very much wanted. My folks' plans (at least, my mother's) were to have lots of kids, all boys, one after another, but then my dad had a bunch of health problems, and when I 'came along' (it was always treated as if I'd simply turned up through no fault of theirs to spite them), I came too late in their lives and the wrong gender. My mother was anti-abortion and, it turns out, anti-adoption on principle that if you made your bed you should lie in it and 'do your duty'. For much of my childhood they were broke, my dad's health was still poor, my folks argued (my mother was a control freak, while my dad was much more easy-going) and as I grew older I got told that I was the cause of all this bad stuff. Plus (although, bear in mind, she hadn't wanted a girl in the first place) my mother became increasingly verbally and emotionally abusive in the hope that cruelty and humiliation would turn me into a 'proper girl' (i.e looks-obsessed, housework-obsessed, compliant and dumb - think of the images in 1950s housewife magazines and you've more or less got it). This got worse as she got older, until she got sick herself - whereupon I learned that the 'plan' was for me to drop my home, job and marriage to become her full-time carer. You can probably guess what my response was.

Basically, psychological wisdom suggests that there's a very, very big risk that you will parent the way you were parented, however hard you try not to. And since my husband's father was an a-hole to him as well (for similar reasons to mine - he was the surplus-to-requirements youngest child, and always seen as not 'masculine' enough), neither of us wants to risk screwing up a child's life.

There are very many people who treat their kids, not as people, but as a means to an end. As a meal ticket, or a sticking-plaster on a bad relationship, or a toy or a trophy or a status symbol, or as something that means they are a Proper Adult, or as a clone of themselves which will do either everything they did, or everything they wanted to do but didn't get the chance to. I've seen examples of all these, and in all of them, the kids end up hating their parents. I've also met a lot of great parents who know that that's not what it's all about. But too few people really think about why they want a child in the first place.

I'm old enough to have children, but I don't want any. I am watching this Korean drama, and the main cast has a 30 year old young man and his mother. Well his mother has some disabilities, not sure which kind. She acts like a child too even though she has a grown son. Her son does respect his mom but he doesn't have any disabilities at all. I'm just afraid if I had children, that my children would be much much smarter than me and have to take care of me 24/7. They would be my parent in other wards.