I have 3 kids with one due at the end of the year. All are from the same woman and we’ve known each other since being teenagers. We are planning to have 5-7 total. They really add a richness to life. It’s fun to see people stare when we go out.
Events with all the kids are lovely and many of the adults who grew up in this church know the other adults because they all used to be kids here once.
Great community and a lovely life.
Bonus is we live in Japan and get to enjoy the surplus of an aging/retiring society. Cars are cheap, houses are cheap. We got a mortgage for a new build house as two newly weds at 25 years old, no down payment as is common in this bank-deposit-surplus country. Society is pretty broken in lots of ways, but with family you can side step the foolishness. The important skill is to say no when society suggests a silly idea.
Sometimes I day dream about our kids perceptions of things in the future never having been exposed to the constant barrage of advertising conditioning them to buy buy buy and find satisfaction in material crap. I’m excited to see the sort of people they will become, there’s already great excitement at their growing virtues and strengths. Amazing stuff.
You don't have to engage with everything society tells you you need. You can just... ignore it. In my experience, many people speak highly of freedom, yet don't behave freely themselves.
We won't be using contraception after we are married, only NFP (or abstain) and if she gets pregnant, then it's a cause for celebration by both the community and our families. We have average jobs and no one in our extended family is rich either, yet they all had many kids.
The truth is that having children requires a lot of sacrifice and not many people are up for it. Who could blame them? outside of strong cultural / religious boundaries, you will spend the majority of your time climbing a corporate ladder, going for a bigger degree, constantly thinking about retirement and finances,.. etc.
However, I personally think that no matter which one of those summits you climb, it will fade away. So for us, unless we will literally be out on the street due to financial stress, we are looking forward to having kids, who could deny such grace?
Anyway, just wanted to throw out a different point of view into the mix here.
It's not exactly the incredible expense some folks imagine it to be; it's certainly not worth not having children over.
Unless of course you're dead-set on sending your children to Oberlin or Harvard or something and coming out of it with no debt, I don't think it's a reasonable objection. And even if you were dead-set on it, shouldn't you be making enough to be able to afford to let your wife stay at home if she wanted to anyway?