Genuinely I can’t express the depths of my love and adoration for this man any more clearly than I already have

Shoutout to proship selfshippers of any and every age. Your f/os absolutely love and adore you, and there’s no such thing as “too old” to be with them. 🩵🩵🩵

You ever wanna talk about your ocs but you dont have anything to say really you just kinda

This is so important, stories like this need to be told.  The cultural insistence we have that parenthood is some kind of magical bonding that happens every time without exception does real harm to both parents and children, as you can see from some of these stories:

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Are there people for whom having children completes their lives?  No doubt.  Are there parents for whom the downsides like sleeplessness and loss of personal time are outweighed by the love and joy they feel?  Of course.  Are there people who change their minds about wanting kids once they have them?  Sure.  But that’s not true for everyone.  It doesn’t happen every time, it’s never guaranteed, and the consequences are grievous when people who don’t want children have them anyway trusting that they will love the child and be happy.

We need to dispel the starry-eyed myths around pregnancy, childbirth, and marriage and create more realistic expectations.  Parenthood is too important a choice for people not to go into it with their eyes open.

“It doesn’t happen every time, it’s never guaranteed, and the consequences are grievous when people who don’t want children have them anyway trusting that they will love the child and be happy.” 

There’s a book on this topic that was groundbreaking when it came out, called Regretting Motherhood: A Study by Dr. Orna Donath. The backlash was insane. This is a topic that simply wasn’t discussed, and as the book became more famous (was translated into multiple languages, received a lot of public attention), the responses also became more incendiary. I had the utter honor and pleasure of studying with Orna - she read us some of the death threats she received, in her calm and measured manner, using them to further show just how deeply society expects motherhood of women.

I haven’t read the book myself, but knowing Orna, and having read some of her other work, I wholeheartedly recommend it.

The original link seems to be broken, so you can try reading the article here:

Or you can read the reddit threads:

Parents of Reddit, do any of you regret having children? Honesty appreciated

Parents who regret having kids: Why? [Warning: Some ableism.]

“it takes a village” is not bullshit, humans need a percentage of adults who don’t have their own biological children in order to contribute labor to the group, including childcare! this is one theory of why we benefit so much from gay people (and why birth order seems to correlate slightly with likelihood to be gay: later in the birth order means more likely), who especially in premodernism would be much less likely to reproduce biologically themselves. we all need aunties and uncles and siblings who aren’t parents, they’re important for the survival of the species. they contribute to group survival but even from the perspective of gene continuation, childless siblings, children, aunts and uncles who take care of related children are contributing to the survival of their own genetic material, just at a slightly more distant DNA difference than if the child was biologically theirs. the human, elephant and cetacean feature of very long-lived females (and for humans, some males also) is another aspect of this, along with menopause. nonreproducing members of society are immensely valuable specifically because they have time and resources to do things other than raise their own children, things we desperately need to survive.

not having children is also a calling, and a benefit to the survival of the species, and not just in the sense of resource protection (“overpopulation” is a racist dog whistle, I’m not talking about that), but in the sense that we need teachers and babysitters and big siblings and other people who can do labor that parents can’t do, because they’re busy raising children. and almost all social species have members who don’t personally reproduce but do contribute to group labor, either for their entire lives or whenever they are not raising offspring themselves.