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On Having Kids To Avoid Social Commitments

This happens maybe more than we openly discuss.

Ted Bauer
4 min readAug 29, 2023

Anecdotally, I’ve probably had 12 people tell me in the last few years some variation of this: “Kids are hard but awesome, and one of the best parts is that you can opt out of so many social situations.” I would never claim that’s the primary reason people choose to have children, but I think for a nice slice of the introvert class and a heaping slice of some other classes, it probably is a perk of entering BabyLand.

I’ve got this one dude I know from afar. We were at best casual acquaintances and now are more like frenemies. Masculinity is confusing. Anyway, he had a set of twins years ago, and all his friends would tell me that for 36 months after the twins were born, he’d respond to any social text with:

“Twins (shrug emoji)”

That literally lasted three years.

Here’s the full list of reasons why people have kids, best I can tell:

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Ted Bauer
Ted Bauer

Written by Ted Bauer

I write about a lot of different topics, from work to masculinity to relationships and social dynamics, I.e. modern friendship. Pleasure to be here.

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