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Friends I cannot stress this enough: have kids.
People talk about loss of meaning and loss of rigid rites of passage that take you from being a child to being a man.
It's kids. It's always been kids.
Having kids is really hard (I apparently phrased this poorly since people are responding to it as if I am saying the opposite. My point is that you will find that the following things are the things you end of loving, and you will find the idea that these should ever have prevented you from having kids to be childish): your house will constantly be a filthy mess. They will keep you from sleeping, they will make it impossible to go out to dinner or to go to parties, and they make travel really difficult. Any of the dreams of adventure that you had before you had kids will be pushed back by 10 years.
And NONE of that will matter once you have them. You'll find the idea that you ever cared about any of this stuff laughable.
People say having kids is really hard but i strongly disagree with that. It's pretty easy, your life is just different.
If you're hellbent on travelling and partying then, yes, it's going to be hard, but if you're intending to care for your kids it's pretty easy, especially if your not trying to force them to become something they're not.
I think an issue is that some people don't actually want to have kids and they whine loudly and incessantly, with some other parents jumping on the bandwagon for clout. In my friend group there is one person that's actually had a hard time and a fair bit of that is self inflicted, and none of us were really aiming to have kids. In reality almost every single parent I know (including myself) are very satisfied with being parents.
Don't let the whine brigade fool you into thinking having kids is some kind of herculan endeavour, it's not.
The difficulty is pretty variable.
I'm an introvert who loves alone time, and currently 7 months pregnant with two children under 5. I would go on week long silent retreats if I could. My daughter is extremely hyper, showing signs of ADHD. Trying to rest at home with her is awful. Going on adventures with her is pretty fun. I'm reasonably optimistic that her energy levels will pay off in the end, but times were bad when she was a baby in a little apartment. A teacher friend with similarity energetic children is putting them in a bunch of cheap Parks & Rec day camps, and I think I'm going to have to do something like that in the future.
My brother was very challenging for my mom as well. Some parent/child combinations are just really difficult, for personality and energy level reasons.
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