[munificent]

It's complicated. It's definitely true that we're less mature in our 20s than we are in our 30s. But, also, maturity doesn't just accumulate on us like growth rings. You can easily be a completely immature thirty-something if you don't have the kind of challenging life experiences that cause maturity.

Probably the number one life experience that increases maturity is having kids. If you'd had kids younger, you would have grown up faster too and earned some of the maturity needed to raise them well earlier.

Of course, there's an obvious counter-argument that no one should deliberately have children as a tool for their own person growth. That's fair. But it's also reality than you can never be fully prepared for any situation until you're in it. Sometimes you just have to accept that live is one long improv scene and do your best.

I'm not saying anyone should have kids early, or at all. But I think there's pernicious, unhealthy meme in our culture today that says kids deserve perfect parents and therefore no one should have children until they're perfectly prepared, but that's just an impossible bar.

[BirAdam]

A very close friend of mine was murdered at 18, his sister was a year younger and she matured very quickly as a result of this experience. She’s now in her early 20s and you’d assume she’s 35 by her personality and view points.

[pfannkuchen]

I wonder if you’d mind sharing some examples of her viewpoints? It’s not obvious to me what sort of maturity a sibling murder would induce. She moved to the suburbs already?

[nyokodo]

> no one should deliberately have children as a tool for their own person growth

I’m not suggesting you’re saying this, but there seems to be an idea floating around that any motivation to have children that incorporates your own good is evil. There is absolutely nothing wrong with anticipating and desiring an ancillary benefit to having children or from any other relationship for that matter. Yes, if it’s your primary goal then that is cold and inhuman since children have a right to exist and be loved and cared for for their own sake, and they and other people do not exist merely to sate your desires. However, the fact that they also sate one’s good and ordered needs and desires and that those are part of the equation of forming relationships and having children is perfectly natural and an unavoidable human experience across cultures and times.

[munificent]

> there seems to be an idea floating around that any motivation to have children that incorporates your own good is evil.

This is a really good observation.

Yes, there's a whole toxic thread in today's culture that if you are not 100% altruistic towards any dependent then you must be an evil person who is traumatizing them. It seems like there are a lot of people out there today who believe that no one is good enough to deserve to have kids or pets.