Haven't posted in a while, so her's a good one to jump right in to haha.
Point to kids? "Family" is important to me. Life is a ***** guys. Mother nature is selfish, kniving, and generally doesn't give a crap about you or anything else. Family is who has your back when everyone else in the world is giving you grief. I'm sure I'll get called out on this, but I've seen both sides of the fence, and believe me, I'd much rather have family than not. I'm fortunate enough to have a decent family, and am extremely grateful and thankful for this. It gives you that second chance that you just might need one day.
The difference (and difficulties) surrounding parenting these days in my opinion is how warped and soft Western society has become. The last generation that really had to struggle and grind it out was our grandfathers, and they are all kicking off. No generation since then has really had a tough go of things, and it's allowed some strange things to happen:
For one, men aren't men anymore. A lot of the articles (read: "husbands") being quoted in this thread, and other threads in general, are AFC douches. AFCs, from a pure evolutionary standpoint, should NOT dictate the reproductive chain, and yet here they seem to be dictating the pros and cons of parenthood. Sorry Mr. AFC, but I tend to take advice from people who are successful at what they do, not from ignorant and unworldly beings.
The relationships of past worked because of the very distinct separate roles the husband and wife took on. Men worked, women took care of the kids. If a man took "maternity leave" (god forbid) he was ostricised terribly (an understatement). If a woman worked full time, she was looked on and regarded by the community as strange. Now there were a lot of bad things about the 50's, don't get me wrong, but in my opinion one thing that worked well was that family structure.
These days we have parents who aren't at home: both mum and dad are working, and the kids are in day care. When the parents are home, the wife dictates what the husband does/doesn't do, which is an affront to evolution and our genetic make up. The kids are raised by people who aren't their parents. They are forced to sit in public schools with the weird junkie single mom's kid spitting on them. Then the kid has to come home to an evoltionarily disfunctional home? No wonder things are so screwed up.
On the other hand, it seems to me the most well-rounded and decent kids seem to come from homes where the men are Men, and the wife is actually quite content with the situation, regardless of what the feminists would have you believe. It's natural, and has worked for lots and lots and lots of years. I would argue things changed dramatically in the 60's, and now Western society is just realizing the extent of these changes.
So the point of all this rambling is me trying to point out that kids are just another phase of life. Family is an amazing thing. If handled poorly, they move across the country with some oilfield trash named Tyler and you only see them at Christmas, when both of you are heavy into the eggnog in hopes of forgetting the past. If done well, having a family reunion with well over 100 people from 4 generations all under one roof is quite an experience.
At the very least, I always remember what my dad told me once: "Before I had kids, I was a hard-nosed a s s and wasn't very pleasant to be around. After I had kids, the hard edges of my personality were ground down, and surprisingly enough my blood pressure went down too."
