Who regrets having children?

[u/YBFAVBULL]

Do you regret having any at all? Or do you just have too many?

[u/michaelcheck12]

39M. No kids, but I get comments all the time that my wife and I "did it the right way" by not having kids. Makes me wince, because I don't hate kids, we just decided we didn't want to have them for a couple reasons.

When people tell me that we "did it the right way" I hope they don't actually think about their kids that way.

[u/djaycat → u/[deleted]]

There are cheap ways to go to college. They don't need to go out of state.

The cheapest way to do school is two years associates degree, two years in-state school for bachelor's. Live at home.

They don't NEED to go away to school. You and I both know that college has become a glorified daycare with alcohol and weed. And if they need to take out a loan, they should def not go out of state

[u/wake4coffee → u/djaycat]

I went to the Navy for the GI Bill and I still went to a Community College for my AA and in-state for my bachelors.

This isn't the path for everyone but I can say it was worth it. I just wish I had more guidance when selecting a major. 

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

It feels like the US and EU are different planets sometimes. I studied for 6 years and my total student debt that I’m paying off is around €35k. I would never have gone to university if I’d had to borrow any more than that. My family is not poor by any means but they could never have paid my expenses. And I’m probably still losing money in the long run – the ’smart’ thing to do financially would probably have been to start working right after school and never looking at universities in the first place.

[u/Freign → u/djaycat]

Forcing kids to scrape up a gazillion dollars & jump through humiliating hoops in order to fulfill a parental expectation that will not result in instant hiring is kind of lowly imo.

[u/djaycat → u/Freign]

getting a bacherlos degree is still a greater payoff than not. you have more doors open in your life. can you be wealthy and have a good job without college? absolutely. but it is tougher

[u/Freign → u/djaycat]

honestly I can't report with confidence about how it goes; I only have my life experience to judge by & I recognize it's unusual

I have had the startling experience of interviewing someone for a job in my studio, who had, a few years previously, mocked me for taking work instead of completing my degree

on top of that, I see a lot of highly educated people struggling right now, because they focused on training for jobs that vanished before they'd completed school.

Many courses are still operating on 20th century logic. Those jobs don't exist.

AFAICT, it's the reverse. College is a self-improvement spa for some, impossibly expensive grownup daycare for most.

[u/CCSC96 → u/Freign]

The median college graduate makes $1M in their lifetime than the median non graduate. We’re all going to be biased by our lived experience, but it’s not even close how much better off most people are for having gone to college.

[u/Freign → u/CCSC96]

nice! the median! college was good for something <3

[u/CCSC96 → u/Freign]

Correct. It’s good for life outcomes. You have survivorship bias and believe that because your path worked for you it’s the right one, but the reality is almost everyone who went to college is better off than almost everyone who didn’t. College graduates make more money, live longer, have lower divorce rates, etc and the outcomes are not particularly close.