The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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Notes -
I'm not in the US, and there's a reason I intentionally used "the West" instead of a specific country. The additional difficulty of child rearing seems to me to be a phenomenon present in most Western countries, and quite a few non-Western ones.
The cost of education isn't a major worry for me, at least on behalf of my kids. I expect the idea of college to be antiquated by the time they're 18, or even the concept of current systems of formal education for the purpose of becoming an earning member of society. I don't plan to save money for their college fund, since I doubt they'll attend one, though of course I wish to be financially prudent and save money in general for their sake.
I don't deny that there are people who are lucky/sensible in that regard. My surprise is expressed towards the idea of those who don't have those resources and yet have multiple kids! When they do so, they're doing something I perceive as difficult, and where they don't bother, I see why. While I might not have very close family in the West, I do expect to at least have money by the time I do have kids, even making an above average amount. The issue is that the money doesn't buy nearly as much time as I'd like, and yet there are people worse off doing it anyway.
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