The 'No Children' question

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All my siblings, cousins, aunts and uncles, nephews and nieces have kids. I'm the only one who never did and it's part of the reason why I'd never attend a family reunion. The one parts are I despise crowded gatherings anyway and would hate to explain why I'm childless.

For me, it isn’t that I don’t want kids, it’s that I worry that I am too old to be a parent, and that being a new parent after 40 (which is about 1 1/2 years away) is socially unacceptable outside of Hollywood.

I'm still looking for financial stability.

I'm learning on the fly that I can cook up some pretty good Javascript in Angular... but... not much of anything it seems has the going rate or security to know that you could shelter a family - much less afford a mortgage on your own - with what it brings in.

1.6 million children in America are homeless.
400,540 American children are in foster care.
16.4 million American children live in poverty; one in five.
16 million American children struggle with hunger; one in five.
Every year, 3.8 million American children are victims of child abuse. 1,640 are killed.
Every year, 10,000 American children are shot.
2,600 of them are killed.
Globally, a child dies every ten seconds from hunger or preventable disease, while eight individuals hoard more wealth than 4 billion people.
Over 90% of the casualties of modern warfare are civilian. During the last ten years, 2 million children have been killed, 4-5 million children disabled, 12 million children left homeless, more than one million children orphaned, and 10 million children psychologically traumatized.
Anthropogenic climate change, the concomitant Anthropocene Mass Extinction Event, overexploitation of resources and overpopulation will certainly result in the very near future in a Malthusian Check to the human population beyond most human comprehension, perhaps even extinction as a species.
Considering how catastrophically and irreparably we have betrayed our children and all future generations, I personally cannot imagine a rational argument for bringing one more into this world.
If you want to have a positive effect on a child's life, try to do something to try and mitigate the suffering of those already here.

Personally, I believe reproduction to be an immoral, evil act. It is impossible to reproduce with a regard for the wishes of the child, and reproduction therefore violates Kant's categorical imperative.

I had 2 kids before I found out I had ASD.
I would have to agree with czarsmom; motherhood was almost impossibly difficult for me also.
It was also extremely difficult for my children. Cue the remainder of my life, spent in regret.
Basically, I have come to the conclusion that having kids is not a special or enlightening experience.
I mean, dogs breed. Cows breed. Even carrots have carrot babies. It is just a biological drive.
I don't mean to sound cynical, but please, just close your eyes for a moment and stretch your mind out to listen to the clamour of 7,660,420,659 (and counting) humans already infesting this planet. That number has already increased by 400 in the time it has taken to type this sentence.
Do you really need any more reasons not to reproduce......

Keep your options open. My husband's cousin was an autistic old bachelor and scientist. He made it to age 40 enjoying living by himself in his own house. Then we had a family reunion and he fell in love with my SIL's baby. I could see the longing in his eyes when he looked at that baby and just wished it's his own. The power of a cute baby can not be underestimated! I know they're so cute because they multiply by making other adults want babies, too. Shortly after that vacation he started dating, and a year later he was married. Got their first baby at age 43 and he couldn't be happier. He is only the oldest of the five male cousins who are autistic or borderline. The other four aren't dating. They're all physicists if you can believe that. I'll be watching them with interest.

It's perfectly fine to decide you don't want children. It's also perfectly fine to change your mind. No divine power is keeping a tally of your decisions and punish you for changing them.

I'm apart of the autistic spectrum. Within my "agency", out over 100 individuals, I'm the only one with kids. I think it's a human right and choice if capable of, if you are responsible enough and willing to accept those challenges and changes, it's your decision. I'm thankful to have my own family and wouldn't change it for anything. It compels you to be a better person if you're capable of thinking and putting others first before your own self, you'd make a great parent. If not, then maybe it's not for that individual.

I totally agree. Alas, autistic and autistic-like people are challenged in building that wider social network we so badly need.

Hopefully we can grow the autistic community itself and thereby create local networks of autistic, autistic-like, and autistic-friendly people?

This is very much of concern to me personally. In my case I do have a boyfriend (who was diagnosed with Asperger's back in 2001), but, even if I were still young enough to have kids, both of us believe that we are not now, never have been, and never will be capable of handling the responsibilities of being a parent. My parents are dead, and so are most of the friends I managed to make when I was younger. So we need to build a network of local friends.

Here's some extra spice to the topic, and it might be closer to what I meant in my original topic.

Lately I've had a nagging sense of loneliness and even suffocation, like something in me is gasping for air. Its intensified over the last couple years and it seems to amplify when I read things on this topic, like if some anti-feminist posts an article on Facebook where she talks about women's regrets for getting to 35 or 40 and realizing time's just about run out and I get a similar sens when I see likely collapse of our future economy, also consider that no matter how sharp I might be I'm also socially 'different' in ways that rote social skills can't fix, and I think all of that piles into this same effect - as if, somewhere at my core, some subconscious piece of me really truly believes that the only point to living is procreating and being forced to fail at that task is its execution.

My thought on this - I'll likely have to just close my eyes and breath deep when this happens. A lot of the above isn't in my control, and no one finds the right person by charging out in a panic - that's how they end up ruining their lives. I have to believe that this is at least a somewhat common problem for people in their late 30s, in their 40's, etc. - perhaps even with kids and the context might just change, I don't know, this is just sort of the symbolism that hooks into it with me.

It really makes me wish that our culture was a hell of a lot more forthright about what people go through at each phase of life so everyone at least has some idea of what the road map likely is. I think about how distracting and focus-jacking this is for me and I also hold this up against just how resourceful I know myself to be and how many different techniques I know to get myself out of emotional jams, and this is more persistent. I try to imagine someone going through this who didn't have the psychology and mysticism resources I do and, it would be terrifying.

It also makes me wonder, just how important is ends-justifies-the-means BS'ing in our culture? I get that these things get papered over for a reason, and maybe it's because more and more people are encouraged to think and act 25 at 50 and instead of never growing old they're encouraged to never grow up. Don't know if that's advertisers that like that regimen, politicians and bureaucracies who like hapless/listless people who need them, or what but seriously - lacking knowledge on life makes things much harder than they otherwise need to be because you run into these 'discoveries' that should really be common knowledge. Considering that the human body doesn't come with a manual, it's frustrating that we tend to just flush accrued knowledge down the drain these days.

You talk about this as if it's a cultural phenomenon. It's not. It's called having Asperger's. Neurotypicality is the manual of which you speak, regardless of how the 50 year old man is dressed. Our Aspie "discoveries" in life are us slowly intellectualizing things that NTs didn't have to even consider.

You're suggesting that that they don't have any internal/limbic registering of the aging process? That's were I'm not not sure I disagree with you. I might find myself amazed on a regular basis at how opaque even college graduates, who can speak English clearly and drive vehicles, can be but not having an emotional or limbic response? If anything that seems like it's the one thing you could count on NT's to experience even more intensely than we would.

I'm saying they have a much better coping strategy, often tied in with their NT wiring. It's based on plausible deniability, or plain denial. Or not expressing these things openly. Certain things are either not questioned nor expressed. Aspies, by virtue, are forced to question and ponder nearly everything. Yes, even aging is experienced differently between the two neurotypes.

Yes, both groups are physically human. A gray hair is a gray hair, a liver spot, etc. Processing and perception is different.

All I can say is that I am a 70 year old Aspie. I have a wife, 2 children, 5 grandchildren. My children and grandchildren turned out just fine. I have an INTJ personality.

INTJs are perfectionists, with a seemingly endless capacity for improving upon anything that takes their interest. What prevents them from becoming chronically bogged down in this pursuit of perfection is the pragmatism so characteristic of the type: INTJs apply (often ruthlessly) the criterion "Does it work?" to everything from their own research efforts to the prevailing social norms. This in turn produces an unusual independence of mind, freeing the INTJ from the constraints of authority, convention, or sentiment for its own sake.

So from my experience, "Can an Aspie get married and raise a family?" My answer from personal experience is the following: I have been married 45 years. I have wonderful children and grandchildren and I am happy. Sure there have been problems along the way - but everyone (Aspies and NTs alike) faces problems. I am adequate at solving problems.

I think at the most, maybe, they're better at extroverting and then projecting any internal discomfort and instinctively, rather than owning it, someone around them is bothering them. Then again too I really doubt that introverted NT's would have that luxury. There's also a really big thing among NTs - that any show of weakness, even being overly thoughtful, is blood in the water among sharks, and maybe this sort of existential thing smells like a display of weakness if talked about among peers but that doesn't normally stop psychology journals, magazine editorials, exploratory news Youtube channels, etc. from hitting on all kinds of different topics even more embarassing than this in that respect.

Yes, there are appropriate times and places to discuss these things, this is understood in the NT world. But even internally, I think their mindset is so different in wiring that their perceptions and worries are even experienced differently.