5 ms·

I've always thought that I'm just extremely late to mature. I'm 36 now and haven't really felt like I sort of "get" things until my early 30s. My 20s were full

by volkk 11mo ago

I've always thought that I'm just extremely late to mature. I'm 36 now and haven't really felt like I sort of "get" things until my early 30s. My 20s were full of learning experiences, failures, and addiction to doing whatever the hell I wanted. I got a puppy with my wife at 29 and it felt like my life was over. This all really makes a lot of sense to me. It also makes me wonder why the human body rewards young parents when their brains are just simply not fully finished cooking. I couldn't have imagined raising a child at 22 with the way I acted and how important freedom was to me. I would've simply been a miserable father.

goalieca 11mo ago
Thousands of generations of parents had children much younger than today. I think we’re too worried about having everything perfect and de-risked these days. Also realize that parenting is what grew me up. I don’t think people are ever “ready”
- denvrede 11mo ago
  Exactly that. It's not an arbitrary dated threshold that lead to "growing up". It was the event of having kids. I'm still able to look at my current life through the lenses of a 25 year old me and hell, that looks bleak. But I can say with confidence that I'm content. Of course there are little things here and there but mostly everything is fine. I only wonder if there is going to be a next stage, the magical "midlife crisis", where I'm going to question all my decisions up to that point and I'm curious how I'm going to handle that.
- anthonypasq 11mo ago
  also its a lot easier to have kids at 20 if the kids grandparents are only 40 instead of 70
- wise_young_man 11mo ago
  It’s a lot more complicated financially for people. You used to not have to rely on dual incomes just to survive. Wealth inequity, housing affordability, and healthcare have all changed. This is why many are choosing to have kids later in life or not even at all because of those reasons and even the environment with climate change it’s a hard decision to make to bring new life into this world to suffer in it.
  - jfarina 11mo ago
    More complicated than when? You used to have kids because you needed more hands to work the farm and a good number of them died young.
    - mothballed 11mo ago
      Yes that model has been inverted. The family used to tax the grown or mostly-grown children in the form of farm labor. The government in many prior centuries taxed like 2-5% total and the rest was intrafamilial support. Now it is flipped on its head. Everyone else's families tax your child for their social security, socializing the benefits while still you retain most the costs privately. Thus tragedy of the commons situation. Why make that investment when you can just tax everyone else's kids and rest assured of your own social security, if they don't pay it you can just have them tossed in a cage or their assets seized, no need to have children yourself.
      - lotsofpulp 11mo ago
        What you write is the mathematical fact of societies with flattened and upside down population pyramids and wealth transfers from young to old, not sure why you are downvoted.
    - lotsofpulp 11mo ago
      I don’t know about that. My great grandmas and grandmas didn’t have lots of kids for the labor, they had them because they didn’t have a way to not have them. The grandpas might have though. Coincidentally, my aunts did not have to have more than 2, and almost every single one had 2 kids.
    - pessimizer 11mo ago
      Exactly, so that made having children a financial benefit. I'm confused that you said it but don't get it.
    - pbhjpbhj 11mo ago
      It feels more like people [used to] have kids because they fucked and hadn't made the connection between that and having children. Them working at whatever you worked at was just necessary so you can help them grow, keep an eye on them, and pay for their upbringing.
- soco 11mo ago
  Maybe also because the life spent leading up to the child having was much different earlier - I mean society, jobs, distractions... I'm sure this has an important role as well in setting up expectations and kicking up responsibilities.
- Aeolun 11mo ago
  People that tell you you need to be ready are lying. The only thing you need to be able to sustain is feeding them, and the rest mostly works itself out. As it has for millennia. The only reason this would not be the case is if you have specific requirements for the life of your child.
  - toomuchtodo 11mo ago
    I would encourage you to look at the medical costs of children in the US. My children's braces alone will cost ~$7k-10k over the life of each of them, with insurance, and to do without will cause irreparable oral damage into adulthood. Certainly, this doesn't apply to other developed or developing countries, but to say "you just need to feed them" wildly differs from reality. You're just ignoring suffering at scale by saying "it'll work itself out." It doesn't, and I can provide pages of citations, grounded in data, to support this assertion. Also, having served a short stint as a Guardian ad Litem to advocate for children going through family court, I have anecdotal observations as to failure scenarios of failures to adequately provide for children, both materially and emotionally.
    - Agraillo 11mo ago
      Maybe the "rewarding the young" in the top comment is from the genes of savanna humans when they collected fruit, hunted and didn't care about expensive medical procedures because the latter simply didn't exist?
      - toomuchtodo 11mo ago
        Perhaps. Genetics doesn't reward rationality, empathy, suffering reduction desire and self awareness, etc, only biological line go up and reproduction fitness. A bug to patch.
    - Aeolun 11mo ago
      Your whole message is the literal definition of: > The only reason this would not be the case is if you have specific requirements for the life of your child. If humans could do without 2000 years ago, if the kids in africa can do without now, then clearly the same is true for your own children. God knows they don’t need $7000 braces, which are unaffordable to 99% of the US population too. Feed them, and love them.
- Cthulhu_ 11mo ago
  I suspect it's a cultural thing as well, with most (all?) wealthy cultures veering towards individualism and working. Whereas with previous generations, the grandparents and environment would be more involved in raising children and educating the new parents. But I also feel like people grew up or had to grow up earlier back when. My parents were married, bought a house and had kids on the way by their mid 20's, when I was that age I had just about finished my education and started my first fulltime job, it'd take another decade to buy a house. Buying a house / getting a mortgage is a major commitment, and I think you'd get a big boost of adulthood / personal development if you do that in your mid 20's.
  - rrrrrrrrrrrryan 11mo ago
    Early twenties family formation bring the norm was more of a postwar thing. The guys that came back from the war really did have to grow up fast (seeing your best friends getting blown up at 18 will do that), and they essentially had zero desire to have racous twenties filled with dating around and traveling and soul searching. They'd had enough chaos already, and were all extremely eager to settle down into a peaceful family life immediately upon their return home. The age of family formation has slowly crept back upward since then, and historically, in normal peaceful times it's usually been late twenties.
- weatherlight 11mo ago
  I agree. Having children does make ones priorities very cut and dry. I found it a lot easier to "adult" once I had children. My Friends, at the time often asked, "Is having children hard?" I often replied, in the beginning at least, "Children are easy, it's everything else that is hard."
  - mothballed 11mo ago
    Indeed, it is society's expectations that are hard. I moved to the middle of nowhere after my kids were born. One day I let my child walk home "alone" from school, for the portion that is on our own property, and of course as soon as you do that a fucking Karen will randomly pop out of nowhere, and start interrogating the child. It is like clockwork. You could be 100 miles from civilization and as soon as you do something someone somewhere disagrees with, a fucking Karen (and even in a minivan, down rugged rural dirt roads, how the fuck did she get there?) will magically be there that exact second with a cell phone at the ready to call CPS. Thankfully I was able to stop her before that happened, as I was actually watching from behind the bushes, which in itself is shameful but saved my ass.
genewitch 11mo ago
Just because people can physically, biologically have children does not automatically imply that they can - or should - be the only ones to raise the children. Children used to be a community effort; the US strayed from this a long time ago. Of course it would be much harder to raise a kid at 22 (or 16, or) than 40!
- deepsun 11mo ago
  Yet our physiology is tuned to become parents at 16 rather than 40. I think nature doesn't care whether it's easier or better or whatever. It only cares for _more_ children to survive until their own time to have children.
  - genewitch 11mo ago
    you just restated what i said. perhaps i could have been more clear. by whatever mechanism, humans can breed at a much younger age than they can feasibly take care of their offspring. Up until maybe 75-100 years ago, "it takes a village" wasn't just a trite canard, it was actually how you raised children. I just finished watching a youtuber explain that raising children after having had to move away from your extended family because of affordability is suck and "maybe that's why young people are waiting to have kids, because there's no village anymore."
tayo42 11mo ago
We used to have grandparents around and extended family. Think about how different life was 50,100 or, 500 years ago. Not enough time for evolution to respond
- graycat 11mo ago
  > Not enough time for evolution to respond And we have to guess that evolution didn't "respond". Sooooo, we have some lack of fit, evolved over 10s of thousands of years for life as it was then and for the last ~5000 years in selected cultures faced with something quite different, powerful governments and armies, metals, weapons, tools, sailing ships, agriculture, domestic animals, .... Supposedly for those 10s of thousands of years in parts of Europe people formed tribes and had some communal living, that is, in a long house, maybe 50-100 yards long 10-20 yards wide, with walls and roof forming a semi-circle. So, women and children got their socialization, security, lessons, skills, not merely from a couple, a bonded husband and wife living just as a couple, but from the tribe as a whole. I.e., now, for a lot for a person to learn and have, including shelter, we are depending heavily just on the mother and father.
- nradov 11mo ago
  100 years ago a lot of people (like my grandparents) left their extended family in Europe and emigrated to the USA.
toomuchtodo 11mo ago
"Everything before 40 is research" I once heard, and every day, I find it to be more true. I'm a great parent because it is what is necessary and my children had no choice or consent in existing, but I also tell anyone younger that unless they are absolutely sure they want kids and are ready for decades of suck, don't do it [1] [2] [3]. Live your best life, be true to yourself, find your passion and joy exploring and being curious; one can do this without children. If one needs kids to mature or become a better human, find a therapist first. Also, maturity is optional. You have to grow old, you don't have to grow up (take on responsibility unnecessary to take care of yourself, broadly speaking). Religious beliefs aside (potential reincarnation and whatnot), enjoy life, you only get one run through your part of the timeline. Don't waste it on the expectations or belief systems of others. [1] (lack of support systems, both social and familial, ~$380k in 2025 dollars to raise a child 0-18 in the US not including daycare and college, etc; n=1, ymmv) [2] Parents Under Pressure: The U.S. Surgeon General's Advisory on the Mental Health & Well-Being of Parents - https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/parents-under-pressure.pdf https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/parents-under-pressu... - 2024 [3] The American dream will cost you $5 million, report finds - https://www.axios.com/2025/09/22/the-american-dream-will-cost-you-5-million-report-finds https://www.axios.com/2025/09/22/the-american-dream-will-cos... - September 22nd, 2025
- evrimsel 11mo ago
  I would describe the age of 40 as the time when my brain truly started to function but unfortunately, I feel ashamed of that.
  - hvs 11mo ago
    If it makes you feel any better, that's about the age I started functioning mostly like an adult. It started around 30 but took a good decade to take hold.
    - k__ 11mo ago
      Same. I always felt like I'm 10 years behind.
Sohcahtoa82 11mo ago
> I've always thought that I'm just extremely late to mature. I'm 36 now and haven't really felt like I sort of "get" things until my early 30s. I'm 43 and I'm still not convinced that I'm not three kids stacked in a trench coat. I remember being 33 and buying a house and thinking "Someone call the cops, this banker is letting a child sign mortgage papers". When I put on nice clothes for a fancy dinner, I feel like I'm cosplaying as a functional and responsible adult, despite having a great career (Staff-level engineer that will likely be promoted to Principal in a few months). I fly First Class and feel out of place, like First Class is reserved for people that have their shit together. Someone said that this feeling goes away when your same-gendered parent dies, but my dad passed in 2019 and it's still pervasive.
Qem 11mo ago
> It also makes me wonder why the human body rewards young parents when their brains are just simply not fully finished cooking. Probably so that they can grow with their children.

by volkk 11mo ago

goalieca 11mo ago

Thousands of generations of parents had children much younger than today. I think we’re too worried about having everything perfect and de-risked these days. Also realize that parenting is what grew me up. I don’t think people are ever “ready”

denvrede 11mo ago
Exactly that. It's not an arbitrary dated threshold that lead to "growing up". It was the event of having kids. I'm still able to look at my current life through the lenses of a 25 year old me and hell, that looks bleak. But I can say with confidence that I'm content. Of course there are little things here and there but mostly everything is fine. I only wonder if there is going to be a next stage, the magical "midlife crisis", where I'm going to question all my decisions up to that point and I'm curious how I'm going to handle that.
anthonypasq 11mo ago
also its a lot easier to have kids at 20 if the kids grandparents are only 40 instead of 70
wise_young_man 11mo ago
It’s a lot more complicated financially for people. You used to not have to rely on dual incomes just to survive. Wealth inequity, housing affordability, and healthcare have all changed. This is why many are choosing to have kids later in life or not even at all because of those reasons and even the environment with climate change it’s a hard decision to make to bring new life into this world to suffer in it.
- jfarina 11mo ago
  More complicated than when? You used to have kids because you needed more hands to work the farm and a good number of them died young.
  - mothballed 11mo ago
    Yes that model has been inverted. The family used to tax the grown or mostly-grown children in the form of farm labor. The government in many prior centuries taxed like 2-5% total and the rest was intrafamilial support. Now it is flipped on its head. Everyone else's families tax your child for their social security, socializing the benefits while still you retain most the costs privately. Thus tragedy of the commons situation. Why make that investment when you can just tax everyone else's kids and rest assured of your own social security, if they don't pay it you can just have them tossed in a cage or their assets seized, no need to have children yourself.
    - lotsofpulp 11mo ago
      What you write is the mathematical fact of societies with flattened and upside down population pyramids and wealth transfers from young to old, not sure why you are downvoted.
  - lotsofpulp 11mo ago
    I don’t know about that. My great grandmas and grandmas didn’t have lots of kids for the labor, they had them because they didn’t have a way to not have them. The grandpas might have though. Coincidentally, my aunts did not have to have more than 2, and almost every single one had 2 kids.
  - pessimizer 11mo ago
    Exactly, so that made having children a financial benefit. I'm confused that you said it but don't get it.
  - pbhjpbhj 11mo ago
    It feels more like people [used to] have kids because they fucked and hadn't made the connection between that and having children. Them working at whatever you worked at was just necessary so you can help them grow, keep an eye on them, and pay for their upbringing.
soco 11mo ago
Maybe also because the life spent leading up to the child having was much different earlier - I mean society, jobs, distractions... I'm sure this has an important role as well in setting up expectations and kicking up responsibilities.
Aeolun 11mo ago
People that tell you you need to be ready are lying. The only thing you need to be able to sustain is feeding them, and the rest mostly works itself out. As it has for millennia. The only reason this would not be the case is if you have specific requirements for the life of your child.
- toomuchtodo 11mo ago
  I would encourage you to look at the medical costs of children in the US. My children's braces alone will cost ~$7k-10k over the life of each of them, with insurance, and to do without will cause irreparable oral damage into adulthood. Certainly, this doesn't apply to other developed or developing countries, but to say "you just need to feed them" wildly differs from reality. You're just ignoring suffering at scale by saying "it'll work itself out." It doesn't, and I can provide pages of citations, grounded in data, to support this assertion. Also, having served a short stint as a Guardian ad Litem to advocate for children going through family court, I have anecdotal observations as to failure scenarios of failures to adequately provide for children, both materially and emotionally.
  - Agraillo 11mo ago
    Maybe the "rewarding the young" in the top comment is from the genes of savanna humans when they collected fruit, hunted and didn't care about expensive medical procedures because the latter simply didn't exist?
    - toomuchtodo 11mo ago
      Perhaps. Genetics doesn't reward rationality, empathy, suffering reduction desire and self awareness, etc, only biological line go up and reproduction fitness. A bug to patch.
  - Aeolun 11mo ago
    Your whole message is the literal definition of: > The only reason this would not be the case is if you have specific requirements for the life of your child. If humans could do without 2000 years ago, if the kids in africa can do without now, then clearly the same is true for your own children. God knows they don’t need $7000 braces, which are unaffordable to 99% of the US population too. Feed them, and love them.
Cthulhu_ 11mo ago
I suspect it's a cultural thing as well, with most (all?) wealthy cultures veering towards individualism and working. Whereas with previous generations, the grandparents and environment would be more involved in raising children and educating the new parents. But I also feel like people grew up or had to grow up earlier back when. My parents were married, bought a house and had kids on the way by their mid 20's, when I was that age I had just about finished my education and started my first fulltime job, it'd take another decade to buy a house. Buying a house / getting a mortgage is a major commitment, and I think you'd get a big boost of adulthood / personal development if you do that in your mid 20's.
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 11mo ago
  Early twenties family formation bring the norm was more of a postwar thing. The guys that came back from the war really did have to grow up fast (seeing your best friends getting blown up at 18 will do that), and they essentially had zero desire to have racous twenties filled with dating around and traveling and soul searching. They'd had enough chaos already, and were all extremely eager to settle down into a peaceful family life immediately upon their return home. The age of family formation has slowly crept back upward since then, and historically, in normal peaceful times it's usually been late twenties.
weatherlight 11mo ago
I agree. Having children does make ones priorities very cut and dry. I found it a lot easier to "adult" once I had children. My Friends, at the time often asked, "Is having children hard?" I often replied, in the beginning at least, "Children are easy, it's everything else that is hard."
- mothballed 11mo ago
  Indeed, it is society's expectations that are hard. I moved to the middle of nowhere after my kids were born. One day I let my child walk home "alone" from school, for the portion that is on our own property, and of course as soon as you do that a fucking Karen will randomly pop out of nowhere, and start interrogating the child. It is like clockwork. You could be 100 miles from civilization and as soon as you do something someone somewhere disagrees with, a fucking Karen (and even in a minivan, down rugged rural dirt roads, how the fuck did she get there?) will magically be there that exact second with a cell phone at the ready to call CPS. Thankfully I was able to stop her before that happened, as I was actually watching from behind the bushes, which in itself is shameful but saved my ass.

genewitch 11mo ago

Just because people can physically, biologically have children does not automatically imply that they can - or should - be the only ones to raise the children. Children used to be a community effort; the US strayed from this a long time ago. Of course it would be much harder to raise a kid at 22 (or 16, or) than 40!

deepsun 11mo ago
Yet our physiology is tuned to become parents at 16 rather than 40. I think nature doesn't care whether it's easier or better or whatever. It only cares for _more_ children to survive until their own time to have children.
- genewitch 11mo ago
  you just restated what i said. perhaps i could have been more clear. by whatever mechanism, humans can breed at a much younger age than they can feasibly take care of their offspring. Up until maybe 75-100 years ago, "it takes a village" wasn't just a trite canard, it was actually how you raised children. I just finished watching a youtuber explain that raising children after having had to move away from your extended family because of affordability is suck and "maybe that's why young people are waiting to have kids, because there's no village anymore."

tayo42 11mo ago

We used to have grandparents around and extended family. Think about how different life was 50,100 or, 500 years ago. Not enough time for evolution to respond

graycat 11mo ago
> Not enough time for evolution to respond And we have to guess that evolution didn't "respond". Sooooo, we have some lack of fit, evolved over 10s of thousands of years for life as it was then and for the last ~5000 years in selected cultures faced with something quite different, powerful governments and armies, metals, weapons, tools, sailing ships, agriculture, domestic animals, .... Supposedly for those 10s of thousands of years in parts of Europe people formed tribes and had some communal living, that is, in a long house, maybe 50-100 yards long 10-20 yards wide, with walls and roof forming a semi-circle. So, women and children got their socialization, security, lessons, skills, not merely from a couple, a bonded husband and wife living just as a couple, but from the tribe as a whole. I.e., now, for a lot for a person to learn and have, including shelter, we are depending heavily just on the mother and father.
nradov 11mo ago
100 years ago a lot of people (like my grandparents) left their extended family in Europe and emigrated to the USA.

toomuchtodo 11mo ago

"Everything before 40 is research" I once heard, and every day, I find it to be more true. I'm a great parent because it is what is necessary and my children had no choice or consent in existing, but I also tell anyone younger that unless they are absolutely sure they want kids and are ready for decades of suck, don't do it [1] [2] [3]. Live your best life, be true to yourself, find your passion and joy exploring and being curious; one can do this without children. If one needs kids to mature or become a better human, find a therapist first. Also, maturity is optional. You have to grow old, you don't have to grow up (take on responsibility unnecessary to take care of yourself, broadly speaking). Religious beliefs aside (potential reincarnation and whatnot), enjoy life, you only get one run through your part of the timeline. Don't waste it on the expectations or belief systems of others. [1] (lack of support systems, both social and familial, ~$380k in 2025 dollars to raise a child 0-18 in the US not including daycare and college, etc; n=1, ymmv) [2] Parents Under Pressure: The U.S. Surgeon General's Advisory on the Mental Health & Well-Being of Parents - https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/parents-under-pressure.pdf https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/parents-under-pressu... - 2024 [3] The American dream will cost you $5 million, report finds - https://www.axios.com/2025/09/22/the-american-dream-will-cost-you-5-million-report-finds https://www.axios.com/2025/09/22/the-american-dream-will-cos... - September 22nd, 2025

evrimsel 11mo ago
I would describe the age of 40 as the time when my brain truly started to function but unfortunately, I feel ashamed of that.
- hvs 11mo ago
  If it makes you feel any better, that's about the age I started functioning mostly like an adult. It started around 30 but took a good decade to take hold.
  - k__ 11mo ago
    Same. I always felt like I'm 10 years behind.

Sohcahtoa82 11mo ago

> I've always thought that I'm just extremely late to mature. I'm 36 now and haven't really felt like I sort of "get" things until my early 30s. I'm 43 and I'm still not convinced that I'm not three kids stacked in a trench coat. I remember being 33 and buying a house and thinking "Someone call the cops, this banker is letting a child sign mortgage papers". When I put on nice clothes for a fancy dinner, I feel like I'm cosplaying as a functional and responsible adult, despite having a great career (Staff-level engineer that will likely be promoted to Principal in a few months). I fly First Class and feel out of place, like First Class is reserved for people that have their shit together. Someone said that this feeling goes away when your same-gendered parent dies, but my dad passed in 2019 and it's still pervasive.

Qem 11mo ago

> It also makes me wonder why the human body rewards young parents when their brains are just simply not fully finished cooking. Probably so that they can grow with their children.