If you’re a young parent, you’re more likely to scar your children with your psychological issues that might have had time to resolve if you had children later, when you’re likely wiser and calmer. The young parents who get this mature rapidly, and become great parents.

In a lot of trad circles, they get this half right– “it can be good to have kids early”– and then they go off the deep end with treating children as if they’re tools for your personality and social development. Kids can mature you. But it’s less likely to happen if you did it on purpose just to mature you.

Attaining that maturity is least likely or comes with the most collateral damage if you don’t have the mental tools and social support to improve yourself and provide a healthy atmosphere for the many uncertainties in yourself and your children.

If you are in a mentally and physically/socially bad place, at any age, maybe don’t have kids.

And if having kids suddenly magically made it better, it probably has much less to do with your biology suddenly being respected and more to do with you teaching your kids bullshit that makes you feel good. It may be that you now have a target to apply your desire for control to, a blank slate to accept your worldviews and biases without complaint, criticism and resistance, and to live vicariously through.

This doesn’t mean you are inherently bad or unusual. It means you are human. Which means you also have the capability to not be that way.

If you find yourself in a place where you have kids but are not in a mentally good place about them– there’s no point suggesting cliched things like therapy as a be-all-end-all. There are many ways to go about it. But the first step is recognizing one’s lack of wisdom or experience.

Because once you recognize it in you, and even in the extreme case where you think you can’t then attain it– you will be able to identify and encourage your kids to be in spaces where they can get that mentorship. Like with grandparents, coaches, teachers, even friends etc

I am, for the record, deeply pro-natalist. And I adore seeing young, happy parents. <3

But I find that conservatives and pro-natalists are just as guilty of dehumanizing and outcome-optimizing children as many liberals and anti-natalists are.