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Post by cnu5000 on May 31, 2010 6:47:29 GMT -5
I am fortunate that I live in an area where there are a lot of people without children. I have found it hard to be friends with people with small children but I have reconnected with people with children who are twelve years or older. They seem to have more free time.
I have read in a book that people who are really hard core childfree don't regret their decision.
I was a fence-sitter who married a hard-core CF man. At 50, I can say I am not lonely. Indeed, I would like to have more time for myself. My parents are in the eighties and are starting to need more help but I am glad that I also don't have also to worry about children.
I do feel more need to connect with younger people as I get older but I think that can be done without children.
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Post by preraph on May 31, 2010 21:54:55 GMT -5
I think lots of people like to connect with younger people. It's because we never feel that old ourselves, and younger people are more connected with what's going on in pop culture, etc, so they can be rejuvenating. Certainly if anyone was really craving that sort of connection, mentoring (Big Brother/Big Sister) is a great thing to do. A person can be a huge influence to a kid or teen. Think about how easily inspired you were as a kid/teen and how influenced you were by certain people not in your immediate family. Kids grow up thinking what is in their household is all there is and what everyone is like, so outside contact can be enlightening and even comforting to a kid, can give them hope, make them feel it's okay to be different than those surrounding them.
You know, your comment about not being lonely and wanting more time alone, even -- I've always been that way. I'm dichotomous. I want more time alone AND I want more time with friends, but the time alone is more important and the thing I miss first when I'm not getting enough. But I usually get enough these days.
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Post by cnu5000 on Jun 3, 2010 3:19:17 GMT -5
I have started making more an effort to meet younger people through work and outside social groups. I think being CF makes my age a little more ambigious to people. Children date people. There was a good old Bette Davis movie where the Bette Davis character has a daughter and sends the daughter away because having a daughter dates her.
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Post by preraph on Jun 3, 2010 19:29:51 GMT -5
Love Bette Davis. No one like her! My generation thought everyone over 30 was poison. It doesn't seem like it's been that extreme since, though, and I wonder if it was because our generation was the one divided so bitterly in what was known as "the generation gap," which I certainly felt the brunt of, as did most all my friends.
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Post by cnu5000 on Jun 23, 2010 6:11:25 GMT -5
I was born in 1959 and consider myself at the end of the hippie generation. To me the people invovled in the sixties were my cool older friends.
However, I have noticed though technically people born 1961-1964 are part of the baby boomer they psychologically don't consider themselves to be boomers and can be critical of them.
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Post by happy2bchildfree on Jun 23, 2010 13:50:02 GMT -5
However, I have noticed though technically people born 1961-1964 are part of the baby boomer they psychologically don't consider themselves to be boomers and can be critical of them. I've noticed that those born at the very end of the baby boom might as well be a completely different generation. They are nothing like those of us born in the earlier part of the baby boom.
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Post by preraph on Jun 26, 2010 15:05:09 GMT -5
I agree. I was born in 52 and was the youngest of the hippie generation in middle America (3 years later than California, of course!) Me and my friends used to call the guys we met born in those years you mentioned, the ones in our crowd, a fanatical music crowd, "the bad bunch," because they seemed like boring prudes to us sixties and seventies-era women.
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