Should makin' a baby be planned like a business arrangement?

Doesn’t seem like it’s gonna last long. Playing house is for kids.

Bringing up a child in an environment where the parents don’t love each other is going to teach that child some skewed lessons about love.

hmmm…good points….but lots of parents aren’t in romantic love and their kids come out ok. But I guess explaining it to the child would be awkward..

soooooooo awkward

I’m pretty sure child rearing should include some kind of written test.

What if one of the parents meets someone else in a year or two and wants to get married? Or just wants to move in with someone else? Having a baby isn’t something you do as a hobby. It doesn’t seem like they are thinking of the child’s best interests.

That said, there are plenty of people who have a child together but aren’t in love, never marry, and never even live together. Not all of those children have messed-up lives. I would hope they take all of these things into consideration. Maybe they should just get a cat or a dog together?

I see no problem with it.

If they are “best friends” it’s safe to assume they care a lot about each other. Planning details of having a child is smart- perhaps more people should do that instead of just winging it.
Also, @The_Compassionate_Heretic I have to disagree with you (might be the first time). Lots of people grow up in homes without “in love” parents and grow up fine. Children of parents who remain kind and loving (not necessarily in love) towards each other have a situation that isn’t too shabby.

There’s a reason having a kid is called a “life-changing event”. This isn’t something to be done on a whim. This is the end of your life as you know it, and the start of your new life. The future after this child is born cannot be planned out in advance. That’s why baby-making is “traditionally” supposed to happen between people who’ve already comitted to being with each other “forever”.

What a novel idea. I like it. Forever means nothing. Marriage means nothing. If two people want to have a child together, and take it so serious as to draw up papers, great. That’s putting much more thought into bringing a child into the world than most people bother with.

Making babies? First thing I’m hearing human managed to manufacture themselves .

At some point it’s likely they will each find mates who aren’t each other. Uh-oh. Will all four live together? Will they share joint custody? Will this breakup their friendship? It could get very ugly. Raising a child is damn hard enough when you are committed to someone, whether you’re married or not.

Will they continue to date other people? That could be very confusing to a child to see their mommy and daddy go out on dates with other people. Will the two adults have a joint banking account? Will everything baby/family related be paid for separately?

It’s pretty much the classic arranged marriage. Sure, it works in many countries, but is it really what you want? I feel that at least one of them will have affairs down the road, and in the end they will divorce. Just because they want kids. I don’t know. It feels flawed.

Wow. Sounds like something out of a movie or tv show. Kinda like that Will and Grace episode…I can’t see it working out very well. What happens if one of them falls in love with someone after they’ve had the baby. Are they all going to share a house together? Seems like it’d get pretty complicated.

That’s my main concern…what if they fall in love with someone else?

A married person can fall in love with someone else.

alarm bells go off for me….
sounds pretty selfish.

However, if they have really thought this through and are truly committed to it, I don’t see why they’d do any worse than the rest of us.

@noelasun Which part seems selfish to you?

If they are committed to the plan it just might work. Many unions last because the partners have come to a comfortable sort of accommodation and the children seem to grow without any apparent hangups.

Any questions about this situation could just as easily be applied to a newly married couple. I don’t think their kid will be screwed up, nor do I think this will inevitably end in disaster. Certainly not any more than a “traditional” family will screw up their kid or end in disaster! Potentially there’s even less chance of that, since I assume that dating other people is ok, rather than a divorce-able offense. If they’ve thought through it enough to know that this is what they want to do, I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that it’ll work for them.

I just worry about how that scenario would realistically play out. I see nothing wrong with planning a child together, but them not being together and living together…emotions will get involved eventually—possible jealousy. But, maybe they’ll fall in love.
Love isn’t necessary, but living together, raising a child..it’s HUGE. It’s very difficult.

If it works for them, then I see nothing wrong with it.

No, it should be more than that. When you make a child, you are giving it your lives and that means the people in it, friends, jobs and family members.

People take having a child too lightly. A hell of a lot goes into raising, teaching, nurturing, loving, and funding a child’s life into adulthood. These two need to get their acts together.

@Facade What about planning out how they will raise a child means they don’t have their act together? Is it because they’re not a romantic couple?

A firm committment to the child would be most important. Otherwise, I see nothing wrong with it.

I think there is room for all different types of families in this world. So many people are “in love” and they get married and have babies, become unhappy and get divorced. Children that are raised in single parent homes are not freaks of nature that cannot function in society. There are risks to every single family arrangement. If they both want the baby more than anything, then love will prevail, and the baby will be just fine.

i don’t know uhhmmm! why would some people do things like that. child bearing is a very important responsibility. it requires both parents nurturing. i would say playhouse doesn’t just work for mature and responsible people. why don’t they try to explore and find the right persons for them. the baby making thing can follow afterwards.

Still confused about why some of you say this situation would be “playing house.”
These are adults in their thirties, and I guess it’s safe to assume they’re financially secure. They’re planning an unconventional family, but it sounds like they are being responsible. They both want a child, and if they platonicly love, trust, and respect each other what is the problem? How is this “playing house”?

Only when there’s a fertility problem / trouble getting pregnant. A fertility specialist might at first recommend specific (natural) procedures that might sound like business arrangements.

I was cool with it until you mentioned that they were sharing a house. I mean, come on. They’re both single, they’re both in their thirties, they’re both straight, one of them is a man and one is a woman, they do NOT love each other, and they have decided to move into the same house and have a child together? Hello – why? They’re claiming to be logical but this makes no sense at all. I think that maybe one of these people is in love with the other, and hopes by this arrangement to entangle the second person into falling in love with them. If that’s true, they’re both lying to themselves. Maybe they both had their hearts broken really badly, so they’ve decided to have a child who will have to love them no matter what, and they’ll have a stable, cozy family unit instead of braving the turbulence of the dating scene. Maybe one of them has been in a coma for fifteen years and the other one has an evil twin who…ok, yes, these are really melodramatic assumptions, but melodrama makes sense here. If they were using their heads they wouldn’t live together; they’d raise the child together but keep separate residences so that they wouldn’t disrupt the kid’s life when they met a girlfriend or boyfriend, which they’re very likely to do given how young they are. Clearly their hearts are involved in some way, and as a result they don’t see the glaring flaw in their cohabitation scheme. If we know one thing, it’s this: the human heart is extremely unprofessional.

@facevalue…I want that last line tattoo’d on my body…. I’ll give you props for it of course.

@facevalue: Excellent last line!!! I’ll be tucking this away for myself as well as sharing it around :D