I DON'T WANT CHILDREN!! !

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I am tired of people telling me I have problem, because I DON'T want children!! !
I'll even give 20 reasons why I don't want them:

1. Birth.

2. Responsibility. All of life's prior responsibilities pale in comparison.

3. Diapers.

4. 3am wake ups. Caring for a child takes a lot of physical and emotional energy, made all the harder by babies that only sleep for ninety minutes at a time.

5. Hard on marriages. A baby takes so much time and attention that spouses must already have a great friendship and work well together before the baby arrives.

6. Advice. Total strangers leap forward to offer advice about how to raise your child. Most of the advice is contradictory and flat out wrong. Strangers will be much easier to ignore than your friends and family, many of whom have raised children quite successfully. Some advice you may want, but lots of it will be unsolicited and unappreciated.

7. Changed relationships. When your family expands by the addition of a child, your relationships with everyone, and I mean everyone, changes.

8. Free time. You will have none. Most time not spent with your child will be spent catching up on work you need to get done.

9. Worry. Parents always worry about their children, monitoring how fast they reach each milestone and how well they grow, eat, sleep, crawl, walk, read, make friends, and so on.

10. Money. Children are expensive in several ways.

11. Laundry. Children do not contribute to household chores until they are older, and even then they generate more work than labor.

12. Tantrums.

13. Rebellion.

14. Dissonance.

15. Pain. Your child will cry and you won't know why or how to fix it.

16. 6 billion people.

17. Failed expectations.

18. Lost freedom.

19. Hard work.

20. The unthinkable. The death of a child, while unlikely, is devastating.

Id LIKE to have children but probably wont. I can even imagine being married at the moment. ive got this feeling it wont happen. Plus i still dont know if i really have AS or not but i do know its highly genetic and i dont want to force it onto someone else, especially my own child.

Wow, I totally agree with you StewartMango. Another reason not to have children though is the state the world is in today. It isn't the sort of place I want to bring children into personally.

Childfree topic

No one has to give reasons for being childfree, but since you were so thorough, this should convince people that you are firm in NOT WANTING THEM.

Yeah, totally. Why would anyone want to bring someone into this crappy world? No one's ever pressured me to have kids though. I think I would just put the burden on them to give me a reason why to have them, instead of my giving reasons not to.

I'm 37 and I have never had the "maternal instinct". I have difficulty even being around children, let alone having them.

My list is at 30 items now. It centers around questioning ability and willingness to fulfill the provider role, now exacerbated by the current economic and legal climate. But it includes most items from SM's list.

Been married for decades, never felt "maternal", never had kids. Yes, folks can put the pressure on you, but after a few years of seeing no effect, most of the relatives moved on to the younger, newly-married cousins and harassed them instead. A few never gave up, but I find it amusing that they are constantly griping about their own kids' ingratitude and bad choices.

Deleted. See my later post.

Last edited by mechanicalgirl39 on 21 Nov 2009, 6:03 pm, edited 1 time in total.

The thing is you don't need any more valid a reason than "I don't want to." Personally I never felt strongly about it either way, but when I had an unplanned pregnancy (beer happens) I made the conscious choice to become a parent and just do the best job I could. I have never regretted it but it happened to be right for me personally. It's nuts for anyone to tell you you ought to have children. The last thing this planet needs is more people.

Same here.

The pressure was never much on me, though, since I took my husband's last name when we got married and could not carry on the family name anyway. My brother, who also never wanted/had kids and who shows a lot of AS tendencies (although not a DX'ed Aspie like me), did get some grief from the family about not carrying on the name. However, he has been in a long-term stable relationship with a woman who has one grown/married/moved away daughter and cannot have any more kids. I think people have now come to terms with the fact that our part of the family tree (we have no other siblings) is not going to make any more branches.

I don't want to bring a child into this insane world. I can just barely take care of myself, let alone a kid. One of my most serious auditory sensory triggers is sounds that babies and small children make. I don't want to perpetuate a line of emotional abuse that has been handed down for at least four generations that I know of. And I certainly don't want to create another human being that has to go through the hell of having an ASD.

My cats, on the other hand, are the purrfect kids for me, so I am quite content in that regard, and so is my husband.

i am pretty sure to just being friends with your spouse is a requisite for getting married in the first place.

No I don't want to have any, I am
not mature enough to handle them,
I am still too much of a kid myself.

When I was younger I was in a group of me and three other girls. They all wanted to marry and have kids. Lots of kids. Be housewives. I wanted to have a career and maybe live with a guy or marry him later on, but never any kids. Ever. I wanted nothing to do with them. Here's what happened.

One married six different times to five different guys and tried and tried and could never have kids and was killed in a wreck about 12 years ago.

One never married and lived alone. She survived breast cancer and died from a heart attack last summer.

One joined the Air Force and got a dishonerable discharge because she got addicted to pain killers and stole stuff, and now lives alone in a trailer park in the country.

I dated my husband and tried to not let myself fall in love with him, then did anyway and I dropped out of college to move to his home state and marry. Then we moved back here and I went back to college for a different major and I got pregnant with my first so I dropped out again until he was born. I just never went back and decided to stay home with him until he started school but three more came before then so here I am. Funny thing is, it looks like I had a baby for each of us.

PaganMom

You missed an option off the poll: Already got children but wish they hadn't

I voted no. I just couldn't cope with all the noise, mess and fuss and having to live my life around looking after them. The world seems plenty full of kids without me contributing to them.

I'm glad to see no one's forcing me to have children, I had some father send me a message saying "You need help" I was assuming because he thought I was crazy for NOT wanting children.

I hate when people imply that you're selfish for not wanting kids.