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I'm going to take a general sentiment in a previous thread somewhat further.
I'm becoming increasingly convinced that having kids is the biggest and most successful disinformation campaign society has pulled on itself in all of history. Having kids is one of the worst things you can do to your short term happiness, up there with getting addicted to heroin or getting in a motorcycle accident. Whatever things you might have enjoyed in life before them is completely gone, for the rest of your life. Every waking moment of your life outside of work will be completely occupied by taking care of monstrous creatures that make every single bodily function besides breathing as difficult as humanly possible. Eating, sleeping, farting, shitting, drinking, etc. will each be a torturous ordeal that you will have to deal with multiple times per day. It's backbreaking, thankless, and absolutely positively unfulfilling. After having kids you will finally understand the men who work 18 hour days every day despite having kids. They're actually doing it because of the kids. Because work obligations are the only excuse they can give themselves to let them spend less time dealing with kids and instead doing something relaxing like writing TPS reports or updating excel spreadsheets. Getting into the office and getting a stack of work from your boss is sweet relief compared to the torture of taking care of the kids.
I'm pretty sure the lie around it has persisted for so long because of the corresponding hard social stigma against saying you absolutely fucking hate taking care of the kids. Anyone who even hints at that idea is going to get completely crucified in the comments section. It's like the Havel's greengrocer, where if he doesn't put up the sign with the approved message, he's going to get hauled off to the gulag. Except for parents the punishment will be worse.
Anyways I find it likely that the cratering of birthrates across the entire world is a mass viral sensation where the lie is breaking down. Likely fuelled by social media as well as other factors, people are finally realizing en masse (though not openly admitting it yet) that it seriously just sucks. Even the welfare queens and third world brown hordes realize that this is true for them too. And they're understandably picking the hedonism option.
And no I don't hate or dislike kids. Kids are great, as long as they're someone else's, and their parents are around to jump in and take care of it as soon as something goes wrong.
Pregnancy is a horrible experience, after three pregnancies I still think we basically lie to women about how bad it is.
My SIL just gave birth. For the last two months of the pregnancy she said she never wanted to have another kid after this one. I asked her how she was feeling about that post the kid and she said that basically as soon as the baby was out she was no longer as opposed.
That wasn't my experience with the kid who gave me PPD, there's a reason it took years to have the next one, when a kid literally drains away your ability to feel happiness that doesn't make you want another one. Although the PPD was also a pregnancy thing, because pregnancy is a garbage shit experience. It's possible if we had incubators I wouldn't have even had the hormonal imbalance that turned off my ability to feel happiness.
That said, overall I think you're wildly exaggerating how bad the actual kids are once you've finally expelled them from being literally parasites in your body. The first four months are basically the hardest it gets because they're not really cute yet and (if you're unlucky) they scream all the time and do nothing else worthwhile. But at least you can put them down occasionally instead of having them permanently pressing against your internal organs, which in the first few months is still enough of a relief to keep you going.
After four months they're usually cuter, they can do things like "move in a direction" or "smile", and things improve pretty rapidly from there.
Toddlers are annoying again mostly because you have to potty train them. I think some people also mind the tantrums. I found tantrums, like dirty diapers, to be significantly less annoying on my own kids than on other people's kids and in general this appears to be a common experience, so you can't assume you will find your own kids tantrums as obnoxious as other kids tantrums. Otoh, unlike new babies, toddlers are actually genuinely cute to help you not feel tempted to kill them. They love you very much and find ways to show it like sharing their treats with you. Being loved feels nice.
By the time kids are five years old basically all the things online parents complain about are over. Like your entire litany of complaints about them making life impossible sounds bizarre in the context of a five year old, I can eat, sleep, go to the bathroom, read a book, etc, all completely fine around a five year old. And as they get older they improve further. My nine year old is already a net benefit to the household. She helps with her siblings, we pay her to do small sewing repairs, she offers to make supper for fun, she's an actual entire human being. Yeah we still have conflicts over things and yeah she can still get moody, have tantrums, etc, but basically she's just a nice person to have around.
So yeah the pregnancy is truly awful, way beyond what it's sold as, and the early years are approximately exactly as hard as they're sold as, but it's around 2 years of peak difficulty once you survive the ten months of pregnancy.
I've been able to have an enjoyable career, maintain a workout schedule, have creative hobbies, and go travel to new countries, with three kids. And all this without much in the way of grandparents around, and without having ever found a reliable babysitter, so if you have those it's even easier.
(Yes obviously some of this is because I have a great husband but you too can acquire a good spouse and having kids is a lot nicer when you feel positively about increasing the copies of that person's genes anyway)
Now, to address some of the hyperbole
Not only is it not completely gone, to the extent that your amount of time free to do whatever you want is reduced it's certainly not for the rest of your life. Kids eventually leave home.
No? None of these things are as difficult as humanly possible with kids.
Backbreaking — no, they start out very light and you get stronger as you lift them
Thankless — no. From a very young age kids try to reciprocate, my baby would try to feed me back at six months or so. By the time they're writing they'll start making cards to you that they love you. I am not a person super comfortable with receiving thanks so I appreciate them less than others might I guess but my kids give me cards covered in hearts telling me thank you multiple times a year. And that's formalized thanks, they'll also just randomly hug me and say thanks pretty frequently.
Unfulfilling - listen, I personally am very low on the bell curve of how fulfilling I find kids, a combination of being naturally quite selfish and a little bit emotionally stunted. But I wouldn't call them unfulfilling either. I consider something to be unfulfilling if it feels totally pointless. Keeping another human being alive and happy isn't really able to be unfulfilling.
There's a grain of truth here. I would hate to be a SAHM. I really don't enjoy childcare in more than small doses. So going into work is a nice change of pace. But I wouldn't describe taking care of kids as torture, it's just something I don't like too high a dose of.
The internet is anonymous. There's subreddits for parents who regret having kids. I've read them, and I don't get at all the sense it's nearly as widespread as you're trying to suggest.
I do think wanting a break can be very common though. It's definitely a common complaint that parents don't get sick days. Doesn't matter how crappy you're feeling, you still gotta do the basic parenting tasks. So yeah that aspect sucks. But from there to "every moment of the rest of your life is torture" is a huge leap.
Pregnancy and early baby time is also really high-variance. My wife didn't mind the first one that much, until at around month 7 she suddenly couldn't lie down anymore without a massive heartburn. It got a bit better once she found an elevated positioning that was just the right mix of less heartburn while still being somewhat comfortable. The last three months were still kind of awful, and the birth was the crowning achievement, 24 hours of pain and screaming without any sleep, and at the end she was so tired that the nurses almost started a cesarian. Then the first few days the nurses tortured us by waking us up every 2 hours sharp (independent of the babies actual sleeping pattern, of course) to make absolutely sure the baby drinks enough, despite even the doctor visiting us saying that it's fine if the baby drinks irregularly early on, as long as they start drinking more, get enough overall and she looked healthy anyway. Chadette nurses don't give a fuck about virgin doctor advice, though, and carried on. After the third day we were let go, and finally got some okayish sleep for the first time.
Some others friends even apparently mostly enjoy pregnancy, while others were suffering from day one, with pain and throwing up. Birth is universally awful, though. But after the first it's at least usually relatively quickly over.
Sleep is also really variable; Our first was mostly sleeping through the night except for a single milk (which we didn't mind at all) from around 1 until 3, and then completely slept through. Among other friends, we know babies that sleep through the night with like 4 months (really jealous), and toddlers that still wake up every two hours with 3. Our second also certainly sleeps worse than the first. The pregnancy and even the birth were much better, though.
Then there are kids like me. Early birth, low weight. Barely drank anything. According to my parents, I loudly screamed through large parts of the night, and regularly during the day, up until one. My parents don't say it, but I suspect that might be one reason I'm an only child. And we still don't know why, I have no lasting condition and there was no family history. Just random.
Of course, this makes it no less scary for first time parents; You really don't know which way the dice will roll.
I see what you did there
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On hospitals not letting exhausted new mothers sleep when baby is sleeping: I set myself up at the door to the room and refused entry for anything not critical, and it turned out there was nothing critical. Doctors making rounds, nurses taking vitals, all that can be deferred.
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I had something quite similar. I got about 5 hours of sleep over the course of 96 hours in the hospital because the hospital had precisely zero respect for any need on my part to sleep. So yes I definitely skipped over the -1 to +3 days of the baby's life but they are a peak of badness relative to the entire rest of the experience. Not really the baby's fault though that's definitely an "adults caused this suffering needlessly" situation.
(This was the first birth. Subsequent births were at other hospitals and I got more sleep)
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