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Wellness Wednesday for September 14, 2022

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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My wife just gave birth to a healthy baby boy yesterday. This is our second child, we also have a 2,5-year-old daughter.

How many other people here have children? If I remember past surveys of SSC and the SSC extended universe forums (ie. /r/themotte etc.), actually being a parent doesn't seem to be that common.

Congratulations! Wishing your family health and prosperity.

I’m in my early 30s and have a toddler. All the usual cliches apply about the experience thus far, and it’s certainly altered some of my political views.

Many of my friends, almost all who are liberal urbanites, have no plans to have children. I suspect a number of them might regret this later in life.

The only space I hear about anti-natal stuff is in the rat sphere. I have never really encountered it offline and I live in a liberal bubble.

The one guy I know that doesn't want to have kids doesn't because of mental health issues in his family that he doesn't want to propagate but even he seems to warming up to the idea.

The one guy I know that doesn't want to have kids doesn't because of mental health issues in his family that he doesn't want to propagate

Man, that's a big mood. I spent a long time being tortured by that very question. My parents have mental health issues, I have mental health issues, so can I really justify having a child who will almost certainly inherit those problems? It literally kept me up at night.

Thankfully the question got answered for me. My wife wound up having to get a hysterectomy, so we're not having biological kids (cause we sure as hell can't afford surrogacy).