My sister is pregnant and part of me is excited to be an uncle but part of me is also kind of scared.
I’m not a full blown anti-natalist or anything, but part of me feels it’s a bit irresponsible to bring a kids into the world right now. And outside of that larger existential fear I also have some personal ones.
Me and my sis had a kinda rough childhood. Our parents weren’t directly abusive but they had a really dysfunctional relationship that made growing up in the same house as them really stressful. The result is I’m kinda of jaded about relationships and have personally sworn off the idea of having a family, but my sister wants to. And I want to be supportive but I’m afraid of her repeating the same mistakes. Her and her husband haven’t been together that long and while he seems like a good guy overall I question how compatible they are. And I already see the stress of being pregnant taking a toll on their relationship and am worried a baby is just gonna make it worse and they’ll end up just like our parents, angry, resentful, and unconsciously taking it out on their kids.
Again, I love her, I want to support her family, I even like the idea of being a cool communist uncle, but I guess part of me is scared she’s gonna repeat our parents mistakes. But I don’t feel like I can be honest about that without really hurting her feelings.
Idk, just venting.
I get it, which is why the important thing is to be there and be supportive
If you’re worried the kid is gonna get messed up, you’re not going to know if you end up starting a fight and having your sister cut contact with you
Several of my friends (who i barely support them having dogs) have had kids and it’s weird
But I held my tongue because, oh my god, you do not want to go down the road of “Are you sure you want to do this?” Because that road only leads to people losing their goddamn minds
Yeah this makes sense.
Even if this is a bad decision I guess the best thing I can do is be a good bro/unc.
At the very least I can teach the kid to play Valheim!
Plus even if things do end up your worst case scenario (hopefully/probably they won’t) you can be a cool and supportive uncle to the kid, and give them another role model/support structure. And you get to have some of the joy of kids (I’m not sure if this is real, or myth) without a lot of the annoying stuff, so you both can win a little bit.
When I was a kiddo I remember being fascinated with my uncle, thought he was the coolest thing ever.
Kids are great, but also terrible
Like all people, they contain multitudes
My parents always loved to tell me how much easier I was to raise compared to my brother
I was easier because I was bullied so badly, that I basically gave up on doing anything and just wanted to die
Didn’t want to do anything other than play NES games and read my comics, all things I could do in the safety of my room
Yeah I think it’s completely reasonable to be realistic about kids, particularly before you have em. I have similar concerns about kids as OP. But I figured if their sister is having a kid? Just gotta look for upsides, because the thing is happening or not happening outside of your control-and like others mentioned, you are not going to improve things by estranging yourself from your dining by trying to convince them to not do the thing they clearly want to do. So you just gotta accept and focus on the potentially good stuff. The kids could be psychos—I thought my nephew was a little psycho and basically didn’t like him, but turns out he just needed to get some socialization (kid was born during pandemic, home schooled) and now that he’s in preschool, he’s a pretty nice little guy. But just to say, you never know I guess.
As someone with some much younger cousins I can second basically everything you said. It really is cool being the grizzled old radical role model.