Since this is pretty much exactly what I was going to post I'll just Q it FT. Plenty of young kids can't imagine that they'd ever want to have sex but they sure as hell will. It's hard if not impossible to imagine feeling or thinking differently (I believe this is why some people think that, E.G., non-human animals are not conscious; I can't imagine what it's like to be a dog but that doesn't mean a dog doesn't experience anything) but that doesn't mean feeling or thinking differently is impossible itself.

Also, the people who rant about how much they actually hate children baffle and sicken me.

I'm not oblivious to this fact, but I stand by that even if I do eventually want kids, I would be an awful father. I am quick to anger, I'm irresponsible, and I have far too many other things I'm invested in to take care of any larvae.

Also, 35 is a bit steep. Your biological clock kicks in about 10 years earlier than that. Even earlier for girls.

The second two tend to change after having kids if you're a half-way decent human being.

As for the first, they'll manage. I did.

I'm not.

You're at least two-thirds. You'll be fine.

I really really do not want kids. If that changes, I'm going to be pissed at my future self.

I'm only saying that you would not suck, not that you secretly do or will want kids. Even though you might.

I'm pretty sure I would suck. I can be very patient, but I already have so much self loathing. Adding "bad father" to the repertoire would probably put me in the grave.

If I absolutely had to have a child (which I don't, and for me to instinctually feel otherwise seems like an evolutionary flaw), I would do what Strike Witch would and adopt. The world has enough fucking people. Might as well take one of the spare ones.

Harder than you'd think, competition is high.

Then why are so many kids still orphaned?

I bet your a good father OANST. its inspiring actually :)

How are you counting 'so many'? There are actually very few orphaned kids in the developed world these days.

I don't hate children, I just hate how adults think about them.

EDIT: I'm not talking about paedophilia.

You hate how adults have a compassionate protective urge towards the very young and defenseless?

The world would be a lot simpler if everyone was acutely aware that their instinctive love for their offspring was a base evolutionary strategy that makes them blind to pretty much every other priority in life... but it wouldn't be any nicer.

It's a liberal estimate. Note the use of the qualifer "by the time".

How would it be simpler?

My basic instincts say I want kids, but I really don't. Too much money, work, and even though I know this tends to change after a child is born, I'm way too selfish. I dislike children. Occasionally I'll run into one phenomenal kid with a great personality and fun to talk to, but that doesn't really change my view on kids. I'd much rather care for any other young or newborn animal out there than a human.

Even if I had decided yeah sure I'll raise a kid, I'd prefer to adopt because there's already a lot of people in the world and I don't want to add on to our already massive population. Unfortunately because of personal reasons it would be incredibly difficult for any adoption agencies to even consider me as "qualified".

The statistic changes every year for the US, but it's always somewhere between 2-5%. That's still several million.

This. I've gone down the list of qualifications from CPS and the like, and I do not meet their standards for raising a child by a mile. If they say I'm not qualified to adopt, then I'm not qualified to parent my own either.

We're all the children of a humanoid alien race...and they hate us.

Anyone else seen it yet? ;D

Without having seen the statistics, I suspect you're talking about kids in need of foster care, rather than orphans. There's no way that the parents of 2-5% of children in the US are both dead.

Foster care is a very different legal situation. You're not their legal parent and you really don't get a chance to raise the child as your own. They can be taken back if their parents clean their act up.

I only know the stats for Australia, but on a national level (population of 23 million), there are something like 8 internal adoptions every year. By 'internal', I mean Australian parents adopting Australian-born children. And most of those are children being adopted by members of their extended family.

The statistics were broken down between children who have two parents, children who have one parent, and children who have none. They did not state the circumstances in which the child was parentless, so it could go either way I suppose.

If you want to get into the semantics of the word "orphan", I'm using it to refer to kids who do not know or live with their biological parents. I have a friend who worked for a foster care agency, and she's told me that most of the kids either don't know who their parents are, or don't know where they went. Finding a lifelong foster home is the ultimate goal of most of these places. Whether or not that's technically 'adoption' of an 'orphan' seems kind of irrelevant at that point. It's a kid who needs a stable and permanent home. CPS understands the effect that constantly changing homes/families can have on a child, so the pressure is on them to get it right the first time.

We're playing with semantics here, but most of the people in this thread were talking about adoption in terms of raising a child, not simply fostering.