I absolutely do not want to have children.
I already know that upon reading that sentence a lot of people are thinking something along the lines of “he just isn’t old enough yet,” or “good luck finding a woman that doesn’t want to have kids and to raise a family.”
As for the first thought, I’m almost 21, so I will admit I’m still really young but I pretty much have never wanted kids and they have never fit in my life plan. The second thought is luckily taken care of already. I’m already married to someone who regularly mentions how having children would ruin her life and that’s probably true.
After I graduate from Ferris, I fully intend to move out of Michigan to somewhere with better job opportunities and no snow in the winter. After that, I plan on moving many more times. I want to experience different areas of the country by living there for at least a couple years and then leaving.
Having children basically eliminates my opportunity to move frequently without uprooting them from their school and friends every time I want to leave. That isn’t fair to a child and it isn’t fair to me to not be able to live out my dream of traveling.
Even if I decided not to travel and to settle down somewhere right after graduation, it still doesn’t change the fact that having children is ridiculously expensive. According to the most recent report from the Department of Agriculture, raising a child from infancy through age 17 costs a middle-class family $233,610 on average. That averages out to $13,741 annually and that’s if you only have one kid.
The average salary for a journalist is $40,000, meaning $13,741 would take up about 3 percent of my annual salary. That could pay my mortgage, allow me to rent a nice apartment in many areas or fund multiple vacations around the country. When you take into account the massive student loan debt that I am going to graduate with, it doesn’t financially make sense for me to have children.
Focusing on the whole instead of just on my own life, there are already way too many people in the world. I feel absolutely no desire to bring another person into the world when we are already populating it at a rate that cannot be sustained. If more people take the approach of not having kids, it would be better for the people already here and for the planet’s resources.
Another deterrent is my desire to focus on my career. I want to have time to grow in my chosen career path and kids, at the very least, make that harder. I want to move up in my field and take on more responsibilities, which means more time spent on work.
Once again, it isn’t fair to a child to have a father that is gone all the time for work and it isn’t fair for me to have to sacrifice my career in order to meet a child’s needs. It simply makes more sense to not have kids.