I'm a man. My first thread. Help me understand children.

[DouglasMajor]

I'm a straight middle-aged man. I've been either married or in a marriage-like relationship for most of my adult life. I don't have kids and I never wanted them.

And I never quite understood, deep down, why other people want them.

Can you help me understand what makes you want kids, if you do? What's the emotion? What do you feel you're missing? What are you hoping to get? What does it mean for you to feel like "I want to have kids"? What that feeling is like?

I know there's no right answer here and there's nothing wrong with not having kids. I just never quite understood what it's like to want to have kids, and I'd love to understand others' experience.

It’s a hard wired primal urge, via natural selection, that must have existed in every kind od animal that has ever lived. Don’t deep it.

Hope you got enough information for your research OP.

Totally this

I can't really explain it. I just always knew I wanted to be a parent. I'm not sure if i could articulate why, it was just instinctive. A biological urge maybe?

It is much easier now that I've had a child (who is now an adult) to articulate how much that child has enriched my life. She is, quite simply, my single greatest source of joy in my life, and being her parent is the most rewarding and fulfilling thing that I have ever done. There is nothing else that I would not swap out of my life - my lovely DH of 26 years, my amazing friends, my very successful career, all the travel and experiences that I've enjoyed - in order to keep her in it.

One of the reasons I knew my dp really loved me was that I knew he wanted children very much but was prepared to wait til I did too. Actually, that’s how I knew he really wanted children-he was prepared to wait until we were ready to offer them the best life we could.

You fall in love with your own children. It’s as heady, and exciting and as obsessive as that. But lasts a lifetime.

Ours are young adults now and we reminisce about how cute they were when they were little but life is even better now - we hang out, can go out for a drink together and it’s exciting see what great people they’ve turned out to be. I can’t think of a life without them. For us, nothing else compares to the joy of having kids.

My daughter is greatest and best thing my husband and I ever did. It hasn't always been easy, but she has brought so much joy and has turned out to be the most compassionate and amazing person. When she was little she was cute and adorable and so much fun - hard work too, but so lovely to be around. And now she is 17 she is my best friend and companion. My husband died very recently at a young age and I thank God for my daughter, I don't know what I would do without her, because of her I am never alone and have hugs on tap. She totally 'gets' me. I love her more than life itself.

I never felt "broody" and mostly quite disliked my friends' children or at least found them dull. But in my 30s I tried to envisage my future with or without children in it and tentatively felt that I'd regret not having one. Helped that my husband really wanted a child and I knew he'd be a decent dad. So anyway, never had that longing many women describe but I love my daughter more than life itself. Once the abstract became concrete, I felt all the maternal love I couldn't have imagined prior (and I actually quite like other people's kids now too!)

Well I'm also a man OP.

I've always wanted children ever since I was a young teenager. I don't think it was a primal urge like for many women.
It was more a variety of thoughts in my head.

-I thought the most important job a man could do was to father and then prepare a brand new human for life in this world, hoping to teach them to make the world a slightly better place.
-I thought I could do a better job than my own father.
-My realisation that human families stretch back hundreds of thousands of years through time, and it felt like the most natural thing to continue that line.
-I realised that when you die most people don't leave much of substance behind. And they are soon forgotten, almost like they never existed. But if you have children, that is almost like a way to continue your life through another person. It gives your life meaning, in that your are creating and bringing up the next generation.

When I met my now wife in our early 20s, I checked she wanted children pretty early on. We didn't have them for another 10 years, but I knew I wouldn't have stayed with her if she hadn't have wanted them.

I guess maybe I'm not a typical man, because I was also a stay at home dad for several years.

I'm father to two boys, and without them I think I would struggle to see any meaning in my life.

No, she doesn't. It's just it's strange I find it hard to emotionally connect to such a meaningful part of human experience for many.

A few people asked why I'm asking this question in the first place. It genuinely puzzles me. There are plenty of things other people want that I don't, but I can quite easily imagine why someone might want to be an artist, or a billionaire, or a pop star, or a nurse, or have a tattoo, or take their own life, or live in a monastery, or travel the world in an RV — I don't want any of these, but I kind of "get it". But not children. I discussed it to death with my psychoanalyst over the years, not to mention my ex-wife (she didn't want them), but thought it might be interesting to ask it here, too. Thank you, everyone, for sharing; I really appreciate it :)

*actual footage of OP

You don't want to be a father and don't understand why someone would, so most definitely you shouldn't become a father.

I had a relationship break up in my mid 20s due, in part, to the fact that I at the time couldn't see myself as having children, the more complete reason for the break up was that I was emotionally immature, reason in itself not to be a father.

Move forward a few years and by the time I met my wife and our relationship developed I had matured and we both knew that children were in our future.

My two daughters are the joy and breath of my life.

Watching them grow and learn has taught me more than all my education and training ever could.

Yes at times it has felt like I was less parent and more subject in a psychological experiment but that has all been part of the special privilege of being their father.

The love I have for them is greater than I would ever have imagined you could have for anyone.

It’s like opening a new portal in your heart for an unconditional love. Made me a better and a much happier person.

I think my husband had the male equivalent of broodiness. He talked about kids before we got married and he was keen to try for them as soon as we did. He was delighted with our first, and when baby was a bit older he would start noticing newborns and was a bit ga-ga around them. When we had our second he was exactly the same. We’re both exhausted now and probably should have stopped after one but we just lost any logic and very much wanted a second. I agree there’s not much rationale behind it.