BellaOnline Forums Relationships Married No Kids The new stupid

I don't know how people can watch Dr. Phil and still want kids. Today's show (which I will ignore out of boredom) is about kids who are finding new ways to maim and kill themselves. Several weeks ago they were talking about street racing and car surfing, where the little idiots would climb out of a vehicle while it's driving down the street and lay on the roof or in the bed of the truck.

This time the story is about kids who brand each other with hot irons and surf on mattresses behind vehicles at high speeds.

How can ANYONE watch this and then say, "I want to have a baby SOOOOO bad?!" When those women who so desperately wanted children were on the Dr. Phil show a few weeks ago, Dr. Phil should've made them watch these shows!

There were also the shows about the little boy who had autism and told his mother over and over that he was going to kill her and eat her corpse, and the girl who beat her father with a hammer in his bed... for no apparent reason.

Yup, I'm going off the birth control tomorrow.

Oh yeah, sign me up for that excursion...

You just wait though, Tress...you think we'll get at least one mommy to cry out in a reply with, "Not all kids are bad!!"

Let me save any lurking breeders the time and text: I'm fully aware that not all kids grow up to be rambunctious demons (or, ahem, murderers). But the fact that there is a possibility of them doing anything similar (which includes something as light as inconveniencing me) is what keeps me skipping around happily on my CF side of the fence.

I think most people don't think beyond the baby. I just got an email from an old friend that had a baby a few months ago. She said "I don't know why we didn't do this sooner," meaning have a baby. Well, she's only experienced less than 1/18th of the life of this person she is going to be responsible for. I think babies are like the newlywed phase for couples. Everything is great, they can't talk, and say things that hurt you.

I agree with you - the stuff teenagers do is scary. And you don't know what your kid is going to be like. I can't think of anything riskier than having a baby. There are few things in life that change as much as a baby. Couples change and grow, and sometimes change a lot. But most people pretty much know who they are by the time they reach a certain age. Not true with babies. They go from someone that can't feed themselves to someone that could drive drunk, vandalize, get someone pregnant or get pregnant, do drugs, etc. Too scary. I'll stick with my 40 YO DH! He's more predictable.

Exactly...it would scare me to death that a person I had put so much love, time, effort, sacrifice into trying to raise into a productive human being could eventually make one bad decision, and bam! It's all over. Here in Dallas there are stories every week of teens dying, because of a bad decision, or other reasons. You can do all you can to raise them right, but if they get in with the wrong crowd their lives can get completely messed up. Or it could be something as simple as not being an experienced driver and getting distracted for one moment, or misjudging a distance. It's just too much of a gamble for me, I'd be a nervous wreck and wouldn't ever want to let the kids leave the house!

Cindy

For the first time, I had a parent say I am lucky I didn't have kids... it was from a male though, I never heard a female say this.
His son has turned into a bum. He went one semester of college then dropped out, doesn't want to work, and is turning into an alcoholic.
I see a lot of teenagers going down this road. My mom and family always say that since I am a good person, I would have a good child. I say that is not true!
Kids are getting worse and worse and sometimes it even happens with wonderful parents.

I knew we wouldn't have to look long or far to get a real-life example of what this thread is about. Compliments one of today's truemomconfessions.com posters:

Hmmpf. This poor woman is experiencing only the early stages of what these little blessings are capable.

I know I'm a newbie, so this post will either be flamed or laughed at (I'm hoping people laugh *with* me, but it takes a while to work out my humour sometimes :-S)

I look at these kind of things as a 'cleansing of the gene pool'... you guys read the Darwin awards? Now.. we all do stupid things as kids, granted.. that's how we learn about boundries, danger, pain.. etc.. I did dumb stuff like run down steep hills really fast and worked out that stoppng at a high speed was actually rather hard. I also learnt that actually.. mud didn't taste like chocolate and throwing snowballs with stones in them was fun, but getting hit with them wasn't...

Anyhoo... if a kid is that stupid you could say that maybe it's best that it kills itself, rather than matures and breeds even *more* stupid kids who do even more stupid things... so as I said, it's a 'cleansing of the gene pool'?

As for the kid with Autism.. surely the Mother should have replied ' Not if I get there first... and I'm the one with the kitchen knives'? ... the kid might be so freaked out by that.. he'll stay up all night as he's worried.. then sleep during the day - ergo, a normal teenager.

(please read entire post with tongue in cheek :-D)

ETA: I don't think we get Dr Phill over here... I have to make do with re-runs of Riki Lake, Sally J-R and Montel :-(

I think that watching the portrayals of kids/teens gone bad in TV/movies nowadays is enough to scare off most people that are almost 100% CF. I haven't seen the end yet, but last night, I started watching the first part of the new "Halloween" (Rob Zombie's version from 2007) with my DH, and Michael Myers' childhood years and all the demonic things he did was enough to make me thankful we don't have kids!

It doesn't matter how great DH & I are as people, we could still end up with a child who makes bad decisions, whether it be from peer pressure/people he/she would hang out with, or if it's a psychological disorder of some kind. We could also end up with a kid who tries to sponge off of us for the rest of our lives, like one of my brothers was doing to my parents (they're great people, and my other brother and I are the responsible ones) up until just recently. You can't predict what your children will do in life, that's for sure. DH & I both went to college and got out of the house from high school graduation on, and our parents appreciate that. Though each of us has a sibling who faltered for a couple of years but then got responsible and started working/living on his/her own, we also have siblings who are irresponsible, float from job to job, decide to go to college and then quit, etc. You just never can tell.

I know that if I tried, I could be good parent, if I put forth the effort and I had the desire. That comes with thinking about the future and exactly what would be required in becoming a parent.

However, the knowledge that no matter how hard you work, how good a parent you try to be, your child could turn into the biggest burden on society is a downing kind of thought. I liken it to trying to manipulate a pair of dice. You can try to shape and mold and cut away the dice until the odds of rolling snake eyes is very little, but still, the chance is always there that you'll lose when you do the next roll.

It doesn't help when you know what sort of trouble you as a kid got into when things weren't as messed up today. Take that, multiply that by all the thing that we KNOW we didn't do, and that is a recipe for potential disaster in my book.

But that is how I see things, and that keeps me on the CF side of the mountain ridge

I'm sure Ted Bundy's parents were good people too.

I look back on some of the dumb stuff I did as a teen, and my hair stands on end. At the time my teen self saw nothing out of the ordinary. I often wonder if the current fascination with extreme sports is a backlash against the so-safe environment that we create for kids now - where there is no danger, they'll go and make some.

I think it was cookiecody who made the point that you can be a great parent, but when your child stops listening to you and starts listening to all the other bad influences in their life - it's all going to go custard side up pretty quick. Point the gun at your head and spin the barrel. Not for me, thanks.