But who will look after you when you're old?

Isn’t it presumptuous to give birth to someone and expect them to take are of you in your old age? They might have to give up a lot. If I had had kids I’d rather they had their freedom.

My mother also has Parkinsons. She’s at home with my dad, half the country away. They are pushing 70 soon and it’s not ideal. I have my own family and work here. I have no issue with anybody wanting or not wanting kids, just wanted to respond to a fellow poster with a parent with Parkinsons! Balls of a disease.

We don't have kids and both my wife and I are only kids so very small family, not sure how it will pang out but will cross that bridge when we come to it.

Yes, both are terrible. This chat brings back both cherished and sad memories for sure. A lot of people have had elders with life limiting- if you can call them that- diseases or will experience them themselves. I suppose we could all do with being a bit kinder, myself defo included, to those around us with them.

Seems like adoption is a crapshoot, there's not a lot of data but, somewhat unsurprising, once the adoption's done the church that helped organize it, isn't interested. And the risks of a problem are high:

"More than a decade after this movement peaked, many families who went overseas are in crisis mode: respite weekends are booked through 2023, there is an annual Christian conference devoted to burned-out parents, and a new documentary has been released on desperate families who have extremely ill children. Parents now say that the churches that encouraged them to adopt in the first place aren't there for them now.

Few statistics exist on the number of adoptions gone wrong, other than a 10-year-old study by the US Department of Health and Human Services reporting "adoption disruptions" ranging from 10-25 percent. This little-known statistic points to a meltdown in the industry and a sign that adoption and foster care have become a landmine for many families who believed God had called them to help these children."

Edited for more info. Thanks.

Sure enough, no evacuation by those children who'll take care of you when your old, of elderlies in the path of Hurricane Ian in advance of the hurricane, here's a recent photo

Must've been some scene in the elderly storage facility.

Jamieson and xanax.

How exactly do you figure out if you can handle it in advance?

If everyone avoided it until they were sure (and the only logical way to be sure is to actually have kids) then that will be more of an issue for humans than any climate change.

I didn't say that I knew they wouldn't be, merely that you cant state that you would find your own children annoying, you don't have any.

I didnt know that my own wouldn't be annoying, but I took the big brave step of assuming that since the vast, vast majority of people have children and have done so literally since time began, it was probably going to work out ok for us.

Your "simples" explanation is too simplistic I'm afraid. Fewer people doesn't necessarily mean less climate change, unless you take the incredibly simplistic and naïve approach that everyone equally produces climate change?

You cant accurately analyze something that you have no experience of. If you are going to say that you have family members with kids or friends with kids then I'm going to inform you that someone else's kids are nothing like your own kids. The reasons you mention for potentially not having kids seem little to do with "handling" them and more to do with being able to afford them.

So today I found out that asking yourself if you are emotionally and financially capable of having children is actually eugenics! I shall shun such thinking in the future lest I wish to be accused of wanting to sterilise the homeless!