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Having kids, especially infants and toddlers, is distinctly type II fun: "miserable while it's happening, but fun in retrospect." Think skydiving or similar. IMO the availability of easy and effective family planning makes it really easy to look at that description and decide that misery doesn't sound fun, and hedonism seems like a better short-term choice. I think it's similar in that regard to, say, unhealthy-but-tasty food and living metabolically healthy.
I don't know that I consider birth control to be a net negative, but I can at least see how given the choice people might decide to not take the leap that turns out better primarily in hindsight. I would agree with other posters that this can probably be countered with a reasonably small amount of culture shifting to make child rearing and families higher status, and perhaps a bit more general encouragement to temporary discomfort that makes things better in the long run.
As a dad, this has not been my experience with infant and toddlers, except for the first two months of the first child. The journey itself is intensely rewarding. Has it been your experience?
First baby screamed All. The. Time for the first 7 months or so, and continued to be fairly high maintenance thereafter. Second baby exists partly as a distraction for first baby, and is also much calmer and more enjoyable as an infant. I do not think this is on account of anything we did, as far as I can tell.
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Feedings continually interrupting sleep are a form of torture, and that was the first few months of each baby.
From maybe 9-months-old onward has been net fun, but I think the bigger tradeoff is the growing senses of connection and meaning vs the reduction of individual freedom. More and more family member needs and schedules mean less and less opportunity to do adventurous things on a whim ... but now everything we do as a family, I get to experience empathetically from all their perspectives at once, along with the dual experience of watching how the activities change them, and the additional motivation from that has me actually getting off my butt and doing interesting things no less often than I did when it was simpler 20 years ago.
Fellow dad here; my wife had it ... not better or worse, but definitely different. She felt a bond with the newborns that I didn't fully match until they started talking, but on the other hand every pregnancy was exhausted suffering for her.
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One terrible week when one child was sick at about 1 month was pretty bad. Other than that it's much more of the hard but intensely rewarding here.
Another unexpected benefit of being here is there aren't nearly so many subreddit s to spill personal information.
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I would say that the overall experience has definitely been positive, but it also brings a lot of not-always-fun tasks like late-night doctor visits, dirty diapers, and scheduling parent-teacher conferences. Doing things together is lots of fun, as is watching them learn and grow, but I'm still learning to work with the way the interaction is almost entirely interrupt-driven and impossible to schedule ("I fell down, I need a band-aid right now!").
As someone who's taken care of pets, my experience is that it's also rather interrupting. Either it's an emergency (cat throws up) or it's something that makes me have to put down something I'd rather be doing lest I procrastinate into near-infinity (walking the dog).
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I would call that what it is: not fun. You can have fond memories of things that aren't fun, but that doesn't make those things fun.
I think your food analogy kind of undermines your thesis as well. We all understand that we should eat vegetables and not junk food, but very few people are able to say they do so because they enjoy vegetables more. The reality is: vegetables suck, you just have to eat them. So that isn't exactly doing a great job of supporting the idea that having kids is fun.
I recognize the higher-level point you're making, and I think it's a valid point, but on the object level I think you might need a steamer or an air fryer. If your experience is that vegetables suck, you may get a lot of mileage out of figuring out ways to cook them that you actually like.
If I have the choice between a bag of doritos or a bowl of lightly steamed broccoli with lemon, pepper, and a sprinkle of msg, I'll generally take the broccoli (assuming both are already prepared). As snacks go, chips are cheaper, and much more convenient, and much easier to mindlessly eat with one hand while doing something else, but I don't think I actually experience more enjoyment while eating chips than I do while eating vegetables that I cooked according to my own preferences.
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This may not be your experience, but knowing that the meal is healthy can enhance the enjoyment of the meal like an exotic spice.
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