Decision for children or not

Again, hogwash! I'm a single parent of two children and I know many single parents (men and women) with full or 50/50 custody.

Let's suppose her job is 9am to 5pm and she has a commute so she's really "out" from 8am to 6pm, and she needs 8 hours sleep (more than me or many parents) plus a 30-minute "eat & get ready" routine. That still gives her 5.5 hours home each workday evening! That's 27.5 hours during the workweek alone that she could use for productive activities.

Fine, subtract 2 hours for weekly grocery shopping.

Subtract 2 hours for cleaning, 2 hours for laundry, and 2 hours for waste management? No way! The old Karate Kid motto was "Wax on, wax off". The new Karate Kid motto is "Take the jacket off, put the jack on." Most chores provide some exercise. You'd be surprised how many calories mopping the floor burns for you. Less than jogging, but quite a bit!

And you still have 21.5 hours to explain away plus weekends.

There are very few parents who prioritize exercise who can't find 30 dedicated minutes/day for it. Now, if you were to tell me they can't find time for their favorite T.V. show plus eHarmony plus that 30 minutes of exercise I would probably believe you. If you said the days are sometimes incredibly long and hard, I would totally believe you.

I don't regularly watch t.v. or pay for cable.

Seriously, you know women who can eat and get dressed for work in 30 minutes?

I'm relatively low-maintenance and it still takes me close to an hour - and that's shoving breakfast in my pocket and eating during my commute.

Also, some of us, you don't want to be around us if we've not had 8 hours sleep.

My day starts at 6:15. If I mind my business (and I don't have kids, so we're talking just me here), I'm out the door at 7:20 with a cup of coffee and breakfast in hand. I work 8 to 5 (or 5:30 on days when I take a lunch break). I have every other Friday off. My commute is upwards of 45 minutes one-way. That means on a non-yoga night I'm walking in the door sorting mail just before 6. If I make a stop at the gym (or on yoga nights), my commute starts around 7:30 in the evening, which puts me home around 8:15 or roughly an hour and 45 minutes before I need to be sleeping so as to save the world from Madame Crankypants. This means when I come straight home (about two nights a week, on average), I have 4 hours between hitting the door and hitting bed which, in my case, is taken up with dinner, prepping for the next day (lunch, gym bag, etc.), writing projects, and some downtime - and my job is only cyclic in terms of high stress. Living alone, I have the luxury of being able to save cleaning for the weekends.

I honestly don't know how people with kids manage. I think they must be like alchemists, manufacturing extra time out of nothing.

The best decision I have ever made was to have children. I have raised my kids on my own for 10 years. I own a nice house in the "OC" (Southern California), drive a nice car, run half marathons, duathalons and mud runs and participate in all my kid's activities because I love supporting them.

If you're worried about your wife's after baby body or the money and time you could spend on other things you clearly have no business having children and are certainly not derserving of them.

I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree on a lot of the points you’ve made with exception of:

1. It’s a highly personal decision to have kids
2. Everyone has the right to have or not have children

My point was that I haven’t missed out on anything financially or otherwise because I had children. I might not have as much but who cares? I guess he does and possibly you do. And I made the world a better place by adding two wonderful people to it.

I feel fortunate to have a different view than you but if we all had the same opinion life wouldn’t be as interesting.

How is a rational decision made on whether to have (biological) children?
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