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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   1790 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for December 20, 2023

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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I appear to be one month pregnant.

How do you make decisions about parenting?

What do you mean? If all goes well, this will be our third child.

How do you weigh the pros and cons of having children, and how do you do research and come to conclusions about the various decisions you have to make about how to raise the kid?

Oh. No, I don't do that.

The first child was sort of an accident, I was on oral contraception, but didn't take it at the same time every day, got pregnant, was married and 30, and thought that we would regret it if we killed it.

Then that child was really hyper and more social than me, and it seemed like she shouldn't be an only child.

Then several of my friends had third children, and it's not like we can go to bars or fly much anyway, and have a largish house and yard, might as well.

Both of our families are basically alright, so we're basically raising them the same way as ourselves. I was homeschooled, but it isn't financially viable, and also firstborn needs more socialization and structure than I'm likely to provide. Our neighborhood school seems basically fine, we'll give that a try and see how it goes. I kind of believe Caplan and DeBoer's philosophy, where the sort of decisions parents and teachers are in a position to make (aside from the really obvious -- father is not a terrible person, some kind of education, at least average nutrition, don't let them fall in with terrible peers, that kind of thing) don't ultimately matter all that much.

Why didn't you want to have kids earlier?

Both of us are very high openness, low conscientiousness. We were wandering around without a house or steady job. Now we do have a house and steady jobs, mostly because of the kids, but are restless about it.

Thanks for sharing.

Congratulations! I hope you have a strong and healthy baby. :)

Great timing to find out too! Merry Christmas

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