Parenting, yea or nay?

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How so?

I don't get along with 'normal' females at all. I do not understand even a fraction of their thought patterns. And NT's in general tend to read motives into everything and their motives are completely invisible to me because I just don't operate in terms of motives. So I can just see myself having daily fights with my NT child who is misreading everything I say and do and sending me all kinds of signals that go completely over my head. I am very naive and, like I said, don't operate on terms of motive so am therefore pretty easy for NT's to manipulate.

In addition, my NT child may be constantly bringing lots of friends over to the house or needing me to take him places or meet with the other parents about some crap at school or god knows what.

A reclusive child would be easier but this stuff is just icing on the already baked cake of why I do not want children.

I think I might agree with you there.

Why not have kids? Besides complete lack of reason or desire to raise children...

Look at the "What's the meanest thing a bully's ever done to you?" thread in the "Adult Autism Issues" section.

Even if I wanted kids, I wouldn't want to bring them into this crappy world.

They wouldn't be idiots, they would do stupid things. That's different and rather unavoidable.


Just reading through the posts before mine...

Other threads, however, have focused on that. Personally, though, I don't see the spectrum as being some blight needing quarantine.
Spread it!! Let it become stronger and better respected!


Plus, if you think of humanity as being like a corporation and population as being like stock, then with enough of us, we would get a controlling interest, so to speak... Or at least become a recognized minority.

LOL! I totally agree. I've always thought that if I had to have a kid I'd like to have a gay son, preferably nerdy

DO NOT WANT


1. I need a lot of alone time. Children need their parents to spend time with them.
2. My ability to care for people is impaired. Being related to me is no guarantee of care from me; the only thing that gets me to care is if I see that a person is worth caring about. Children deserve a parent who is guaranteed to feel some emotional connection to them.
3. They are expensive, and I like spending my money on myself.
4. They are time-consuming, and I like spending my time on my interests and building a career.
5. If I had children taking my money and time, I'd resent that, and children SHOULD NOT have to live with a parent who resents them.

In summary, if I had children, it would create a very bad situation both for me and the children.

^ The first three are some of my reasons (with a small dissent on #3, I don't like spending money on myself. I don't like spending money period.)

I'll spare you my list. It would have at least 20 entries.

My family's genes has already been spread by a brother. My composition dies with me, natural selection.

*alarm sound* It's the bad science alarm!

That's not what natural selection is. Natural selection allows suitable creatures to survive long enough to reproduce.

In our current, unprecedentedly stable living conditions, natural selection mostly fails to apply to humanity, allowing diversity to flourish. If things go on like this, then the results should be very interesting.

Yeah, I was trying to be funny.

*alarm sound* It's the double bad science alarm! If you're going to mock somebody for having the wrong idea about what something is, at least make damn sure that you know what you're talking about yourself, lest you look like a hypocrite and an as*hole.

The instinct/desire to have kids is one of the most important traits for natural selection.

Natural selection very simply is the 'selecting' out of particular traits that increase the chances that a particular entity will reproduce, thus propagating them, and selecting out traits that decrease that chance, thus eliminating them, through self-authorization (reproduction or not-reproduction). Take increased fertility, for example, which does nothing to help you survive longer, but increases your chances of reproducing within a shorter time period. Statistically, more people with the 'good' traits will reproduce, and less people with the 'bad' ones will, thus changing their proportions over time until only the 'good' ones are left as the process is repeated a large number of times. This is independent of how they go about reproducing or any of the particulars therein, but simply looks at the simple outcome of whether reproduction happens for an organism or not.

Basically, natural selection doesn't just refer to things that allow an organism to survive in their environment long enough to reproduce; it also refers to things that help organisms reproduce in less time, or reproduce more frequently, etc. It refers to anything genetically based (ie that passes on to the offspring) at all that increases/decreases an organism's likelihood of successfully reproducing.

Not wanting to have kids would definitely fall into this category. Natural selection at it's finest. It's why 90% of all NTs want to have kids and why society (a complex function of compounded genetic social contributions from billions of humans over time, itself subject to a form of natural selection) has developed in such a way so as to pressure the other 10% who don't into having them anyway. They're genetically predisposed, because those who don't want to have kids obviously don't usually have them and hence do not propagate this trait. In fact, since as you mentioned, living conditions have become so stable that the 'ability to survive for X period of time thus increasing the amount of chances you have to attempt to reproduce' is now largely independent of natural selection, it might be one of the very last remaining traits in humanity still subject to it.

Natural selection is a very simple and elegant concept, with its roots in the pure logic of cause and effect. Trying to pigeon hole its meaning into one specific application in biology is going to cause you to really miss out on some of its most important and intellectually satisfying properties.

*****

As for me, although I can think of plenty of reasons why having kids would be a bad idea, I actually happen to have that instinctual desire. I want to see my genetic material propagated, and perhaps be able to accomplish things that I never got the chance to. It's a form of self-improvement (I keep thinking of my potential child as an 'upgraded me' that will hopefully learn from my experience and grow more efficiently than I did as a result) as well as a form of immortality.

My idealism aside, the practical chances of that happening are very small. Much more likely my kid would turn out even worse, and one of my greatest fears is that the genetic dice will go the other way and he will end up being some kind of supervillain or shoot up his school or something. My genetic makeup is such a way that I believe some of my traits can toggle from one extreme to the other based on certain other 'fine line' traits or environmental factors.

So basically yes and no. I haven't managed to sort out my feelings or my thoughts on the matter yet. I like babies and children and second chances, and thinking about having them makes me happy... And yet even though I know that's a pretty naive, biased, and poorly developed outlook that ignores a lot of relevant opposing factors as well as all practical concerns entirely, I can't seem to be able to move past it in my decision making process.

Stupid natural selection.

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Especialy if they wound up being more normal than me. Being a parent is difficult. My parents want to be grandparents, though. I don't care how they feel about it. I'm not phsycologicaly healthy or financialy capable.

I want at least two kids now. I have a husband who will help me. It's a risk I'm willing to take and I think I'll be a good parent. I can feel it. I will love my kid too much to push it away like some parents do because they are too lazy to spend time with them and would rather do their own thing. So they see their own kids as in the way and don't ever spend time with them or take them to places even though they have the money.

You can limit to how many people your kid can have over. Your house, your rules. You can bring your kid to places under your own standards because you be the parent. My mom sure didn't take my brothers and I to places right away when we wanted to go there. She bring us there in her own time frame.


I can see myself not letting my kid have parties and I tell him or her to have them somewhere else like at a friend's and I can see myself limiting on how much friends my kid can have over and I can see myself about telling them to keep their voices down and not get so loud. I think I can reason with my child and kid will know about my condition so they aren't expecting me to read them and stuff. Instead they will say their feelings and what they want and not rely on me to read them.

I am undecided on how many kids I would want. Then again, it's too early to think about it yet.