Four (or Five!) Reasons Why

….You Shouldn’t Have Children

1. They’re expensive from the time they are born to the time you manage to kick them out of the house - that is, if you can ever get them to actually leave and find somewhere else to live as opposed to camping out in the basement and eating you out of house and home. It’s estimated that the cost of raising a child from birth to 18 years-old is $160,000. If you’re curious about what it’s going to cost you, check out this child raising calculator.

2. They eliminate any kind of spontaneity you enjoyed in the past, especially if you have more than one. Remember the days when you could pick up on a moment’s notice when someone called to invite you somewhere? Remember when you didn’t have to home at an appointment time. Yes, you had all kinds of freedom, which, unfortunately, you took for granted. Once you have children, life gets a lot more structured and regimented.

3. Having children makes you chronically sleep-deprived. When they’re young, children keep you awake with bad dreams, cries for water or visits to the bathroom and the need to sleep in your bed, which usually entails them taking control while you struggle to find a place to call your own. When children get older, you have to wait up for them when they go out, or they wake you up when they arrive home and you happen to be sleeping.

4. You become consumed with their activities as opposed to your own. Forget about going about for nice dinners on a regular basis or taking classes or going for exciting trips. When you have children, you’re usually taking them to their activities and then watching them. Unless you’ve got a big budget for babysitting, going out is not an option. Not that you’d want to go out when you take into account reason #3 - you’re too tired to even think about socializing.

More: Before you take the leap and actually have children, these books - Are We There Yet? And 99 Other Reasons Not to Have Kids; and Corinne Maier’s: No Kid: 40 Reasons for Not Having Children.

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