Death By Adulting
A podcast focused on helping you make decisions today that you won't regret tomorrow. Hosted by Dr. Steve and Megan Scheibner. The Scheibners share wisdom and advice regarding marriage, parenting, dating, communication and even sex.
Death By Adulting
The Art of Balancing Careers and Family Dreams
When is the right time to start a family, and how do you navigate the societal pressures that come with it? Megan and Dr. Steve Scheibner are here to share their own personal insights and experiences from raising eight wonderful children. We'll tackle the age-old conversation about the infamous "biological clock" and explore how career aspirations can mesh with family life. With a focus on intentional and prayerful decision-making, we discuss the potential challenges of postponing parenthood, especially for women approaching their late thirties. Our journey is filled with anecdotes and lessons that aim to guide couples on their family planning adventure, ensuring decisions are made with care and thoughtfulness.
From personal adoption stories to the everyday chaos of a large family, this episode offers a heartwarming look into our unique family dynamic. Megan shares her transformative journey of adopting our son, Taylor, from Guatemala and how it enriched our lives beyond measure. Adoption added a new layer of love and unity, transcending racial backgrounds and societal expectations. The lively energy of our household is both a blessing and a source of endless humor, from juggling logistics to fielding funny questions from strangers. We celebrate the profound satisfaction of nurturing a bustling household, embracing the joys and trials that come with a large family, and finding strength and laughter amid the chaos.
On this episode of Death by Adulting. When should you start a family? How many children should you have? Is your biological clock ticking Tick, tick, tick, boom when it comes to having kids. Which is more important? Quantity or quality, plus much, much more. Roll the intro. I wish that I knew what I know now when I was younger Roll the intro.
Speaker 2:Welcome to Death by Adulting. And today it's bring on the babies. I'm your host, megan Scheibner, with my co-host, dr Steve.
Speaker 1:Scheibner, and this is Baby Talk. Wow, okay, full disclosure on this. If you haven't heard before, we've had children. Yes, we had eight children, seven birth children, one, one adopted child adopted, which, and it was the last one, yeah, which begs the question wasn't seven enough? Maybe we'll do that on another episode.
Speaker 2:Apparently not.
Speaker 1:Apparently not is the answer to that plus a bunch of halfway adopted kids and everything else, but we're not here advocating that. You have that large a family? Oh, my word I know, but there are there's that life, you get married and you're walking down that road and and you know, career, children, children, career.
Speaker 2:What people are beginning to ask you questions, you know death by adulting is all about Okay, so we're going to unwrap help unwrap all of that, all about Okay.
Speaker 1:So we're going to unwrap, help unwrap all of that for you.
Speaker 2:Okay, so we have some questions we want to answer for you today, and and you kind of alluded to them in the opening but the first is this when should you start your family? Is there a date Like could we go well, once you've been married this long, you really should be starting to have children. You know I do know some young couples that as soon as they're married, the in-laws start doing the uh, so la la loo.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And it's tempting. I'll admit it's tempting, but um when should you start a family?
Speaker 1:Well, again, it's. It starts with the conversation that you should have about that. You should have had that conversation probably before you got married. Do you want children? That conversation probably before you got married. Do you want children? How many children, you know? And again we we talked about wanting to have children. We didn't sit down and say, yeah, I think we're gonna have eight kids if you said eight kids, I would have run for the hell out of there and and again.
Speaker 1:That was a. It wasn't something that that I said. I demanded that we have eight kids.
Speaker 2:No.
Speaker 1:We've gotten accused of that over the years. People say, well, why don't you leave your hands off that woman? The wonderful thing is when somebody says that Megan just chimes in and says what makes you think it's him. I love it.
Speaker 2:That's great. That's my girl.
Speaker 1:Yes, yes exactly, but it was something that, as we were going down that road in the early years, we talked about, we kept discussing, we kept praying about it and we felt like the Lord wanted us to have a larger family and we liked our kids and, as we got deliberate and intentional about raising them, it was fun and so it was okay to have more.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, you hit a crazy concept there. We pray about jobs, we pray about where we're going to move, we pray, you know, we pray about all these things, but do we pray about when it's time to have a child? And so, uh, let's just do some full disclosure with questions that people are going to ask. No, we were not anti-birth control correct, although there are forms of birth control that we are anti-birth control and talking about the praying we always both of us would come to it together it's time to have a baby. And then, pretty quickly, I would be pregnant. But we had one child, our fourth child, that we prayed about it and we both said I don't think like it, I don't feel like it's time to have another child, but I do feel like God's saying lay off the birth control. And we didn't have a child for six, seven months after that. And then we continued to pray about it and when we both felt like, oh, it's time for another child, voila, there she was, hurricane Molly.
Speaker 1:So the question of when is between the two of you? Just some thoughts on our part. I think being married for a year or two before you start having children is good. You kind of get the primary relationship founded. There's the temptation there is to get going with your career and all of a sudden you're putting money in the bank and you're buying some nice things and you've got some payments, and all of a sudden it's like I don't know if a kid fits in here or not. The most rewarding thing you're ever going to have is a child, and so you can't put a price tag on that. But is it OK to say I think we're going to wait a couple of years? Sure, that's up to you. Well, we were about two years, two years yeah, and you know what?
Speaker 2:There are times it's too soon to have a child and I would say to you, before marriage, it's too soon, and are there times that it's too late? Yeah, women, you can set yourself up to have difficulty having children. Are there women in their 40s who have children? Yes, there are, there are. However comma, it's more difficult and all of the recent studies are showing that our environment, the foods that we eat, the pesticides we ingest just through the air around us, and plastics and all those things are lowering the women's ability to have children. And so, if you're thinking, well, I'll just wait, you know, 10 years, I'll wait till I'm in my mid thirties to have children. Maybe, maybe you'll have children, and we know many, many, many families who have dealt with the heartbreak of, of an inability to conceive.
Speaker 1:So you wonder cause? You're listening to the news around and you're saying all these women are doing IVF and other things to have children later on in life and some not so much later on in life. What's causing that? There's a lot of things that cause it. Like Megan said, the processed foods that we eat. It's changing our binomes and sperm counts are down 50% over the last 50 years. So all of that has to do with the drugs that we ingest, the antibiotics we take.
Speaker 1:Where you get your kids started on Ritalin one of these little and it's going to kill his testosterone levels and everything else. All of that. It has dividends not good ones that get paid on the other end, right? So it's not necessarily. You know. Just think about having a kid. You're going to have one, and especially if you wait later on in life. So there's all those things that you have to consider. When you're younger, you're more fertile. Yeah, that's probably a time if you're going to start a family. To start a family, it gets very, very expensive with IVF treatments and everything else later and there's no guarantee on any of that stuff which is what makes prayer so important.
Speaker 2:If we pray with an eager acceptance of whatever God has for us.
Speaker 1:Right. So when should you start your family? It's up to you, but there's some things to consider. Biological the clock is ticking.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and we would say it's up to God, so ask him.
Speaker 1:Ask him, have that conversation with you and the Lord. Now, how many children.
Speaker 2:Oh, eight obviously.
Speaker 1:No, no, no.
Speaker 2:You know, some people are limited physically by how many children they can have. I don't know that there's a number of children that you go. Well, this is the magic number of children to have, although I will say that now we have worked with hundreds of families over the past 20 years there is a real benefit in having more than one child. There are certain now not I'm painting with a broad brush here there are some many, I will say many only children who deal with the same issues. So you know, we, you begin to make diagnoses and statistics come out when you seem to see the same predictable behavior. Many only children deal with perfectionism, fear of failure. They're afraid of saying no, and it's because there's just been too much of a spotlight on them, because both parents had only them to focus on. There is something to be said for a little healthy neglect.
Speaker 1:Yes. Um, and being part of a team a bigger team yeah. So if you have three, four or five kids the bigger team, you're just part of that team. You're not the center of that universe, Right? You understand what I'm saying, Right?
Speaker 2:And brother and sister relationships are a beautiful thing. Right are a beautiful thing. Right, if you work hard and the other things we've taught, like last week and the week before, um, you're gonna. You're gonna come up with kids who love one another and and are a force.
Speaker 1:They're a force for the lord and the bible says be fruitful and multiply. So what does multiply mean? Well, there's lots of different ways to interpret it. If there's two of us and we have two children, we haven't really multiplied yet right.
Speaker 1:There's just we've replaced ourselves. So there's one school of thought is at least replace yourselves, but add to that. So now you're multiplying, you have three or more children. That's up to you. I just I want to give a word of caution at this moment, because it's easy at this point to be heartbroken and to say Steve Megan, we're not able to have children, or we've tried for years and it's just not working.
Speaker 2:We spent money and we spent the money and all that stuff and I get that there's.
Speaker 1:there's are those very real realities of like some of you are unable to have children.
Speaker 2:You can adopt.
Speaker 1:We adopted a child, you're adopted.
Speaker 2:I'm adopted, yeah.
Speaker 1:As a child, and so you can still have an expanding family through adoption. But I get it, you're trying to have your own biological kids. We don't want to put a burden on you. We're talking about, in general terms, those who are able to have children, and when should they and how many. It's up to you. But I'm going to challenge our Christian listeners and I'm going to say that the Muslims have been having huge families and there's a reason that they're taking over large portions of the world, and that's because they have seven, eight, nine kids. Back in the day, here in this country, we had large families. We don't have large families anymore. We've gotten spoiled with the lifestyle that we have these days we see kids as an inconvenience.
Speaker 1:We've become cynical about the whole thing and that's made its way into the church and that's a shame. You should be having that conversation with the Lord about how many kids you should have. We never looked at kids as a burden. We looked at them as a blessing, and they are.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it's interesting. In the scriptures they're called a blessing. Money isn't called a blessing, hobbies aren't called a blessing. Your job isn't called a blessing. But children are called a blessing.
Speaker 1:Stuff your cars, your toys.
Speaker 2:And you kind of alluded to it, but one of the things that we have counseled with people that are struggling with the idea of having more kids is but they just cost so much, and I would just encourage you that kids don't need all the bling. We feel like we need to spend oodles and oodles of dollars on them, but all they look for is security and a family that loves them.
Speaker 1:Right, absolutely. We both grew up in pretty, very humble circumstances. My parents my mother was a single mom and we were very poor and but there was a lot of love and that was the key. You know, when I was a little kid.
Speaker 2:I didn't.
Speaker 1:I didn't know that we didn't have stuff. It didn't make any difference to me back then. I just wanted to be in a family and I was and and have somebody love me and hug me and kiss on me, and I had two sisters and they did that and and all that's wonderful. Um, but when you start doing the dollars and cents thing and you turn children or expanding your family into like a business adventure, it doesn't really work out very well.
Speaker 1:So stop thinking about that and just thinking about hey, you know what, if we can, why don't we? Yeah, Right.
Speaker 2:And you know, probably the biggest question we got when all eight kids were at home was you know, I don't know how you do it. I could never do that. I could never be that patient, I could never manage it. And my encouragement to you is, yeah, you could, because you don't know what you can do until you're presented the opportunity to do it. When we got married, I was not a kid person. I Didn't particularly like children. I Worked at a daycare and I really didn't like children. I didn't babysit. I was a youngest child and and God taught me so much as a parent and as a mother that I never would have learned if I'd kind of just gone the life path that I thought I wanted to go. You know, children sandpaper off our rough edges because we see ourselves reflected in their behavior and their attitudes and their words and it helps us to bump it up a little bit.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and we didn't. It's not down on our agenda, but why don't you talk a little bit, Megan, about adoption?
Speaker 2:Well, I I'm so pro adoption Now. I was adopted as a tiny baby. I was three days old when I was brought home from the hospital and didn't meet anyone from my birth family till later in life. But I always knew I wanted to adopt. We both knew that, that we wanted to adopt, and when we had seven children it's hard to find a compelling reason to adopt, but still there was just that burning desire in my heart and um, and I actually wrote in my journal Lord, you know that I want to adopt. We have no money and we have no time. You're going to have to take care of this. And he did. And he dropped Taylor in our lap and I would say we I call him my gem and the other kids tease us because they say you know, taylor's your favorite, your favorite, but quite frankly, he's their favorite too yeah, we always throw that right back out.
Speaker 1:Right well, who's your favorite? They go.
Speaker 2:Well, taylor, okay, we all agree then but I can tell you that our entire family is colorblind. We don't see asian, hispanic, um colored people. You know we, we see everyone as a person. Because taylor is guatemalan but he's a Scheibner. I don't look at him and see a Guatemalan. I see my son and he's more like Steve and I than any of the others. I think adoption is an incredible thing and I think when you do adoption well which I think we did because there was the history of me, which I think we did because there was the history of me my parents weren't perfect by any means, but they handled my adoption well. And, talking to me about adoption, you have kids who are just naturally grateful. Taylor understands that he could be in a much worse situation than he is as a Scheibner. I understood that I could have been in a much worse situation and when I found my birth family, I for sure understood that that in a sense, god had rescued me out of a situation that I wouldn't have been able to thrive in.
Speaker 1:And maybe we'll do an episode in the future about looking up your birth family for adopted kids and the ups and downs of that, because you went through that.
Speaker 2:And we don't really want to get into that now but that was quite a thing, yeah, and I'll share an interesting story about Taylor and with this idea of not seeing different races. But we moved to North Carolina and Taylor immediately became best friends with a boy named Landon, a tall blonde, um, kind of Norwegian looking kid, and um, they just were, they were as close as you could be. And after and Landon had a little sister named Lily, who his parents adopted from China beautiful Chinese little girl, but we never really mentioned that. But it's pretty obvious in this tall Norwegian family that this is a adopted child. And Tate came home to me one time after he was at Landon's house. He was about 12 years old, 13 maybe, and he said to me hey, mom, I don't know if you know this, but Lily is adopted. Right, he just he doesn't see people as different races, he just sees people as people. And adoption does that, yeah, especially international adoption.
Speaker 1:Absolutely Well my skin color. I blame it on my parents. I find them guilty for what happened to me. Yeah Right, absolutely Well my skin color. I blame it on my parents. I find them guilty for what happened to me.
Speaker 2:Yeah, right, yeah.
Speaker 1:Okay, so that's great, that's good. I wanted you to talk about that for a little bit. I kind of touched on the spiritual, the scriptural principle of being fruitful and multiplying. But do you have anything you want to add to?
Speaker 2:that, yeah, just the idea that children are a blessing. And you know what? There's been some hard times with our kids and there's been times that hard things that weren't their fault but honestly, a lot of hard things that were their fault they were still a blessing and it's a blessing to have a family Right and there's strength in the family.
Speaker 1:Yep, and you know, I've heard this refrained from people that don't want to have kids or they don't want to have a lot of kids. They'll make all these cynical excuses for why it's too hard and too expensive and everything. I would say that having a large family, like we did, stretched us as people. There were times. There were hard times.
Speaker 2:There were hard times.
Speaker 1:There were hard times. There still are, there's when you, whatever it is that you have, we're going to multiply it by eight in our family, and but that makes us better people. The idea that you're going to go through life and never experience any hardship is ridiculous. And or trying to orchestrate life so that you don't face any sort of hardship. Good luck on that. But you're going to be a shallow person and you're not going to get the the richness out of life that you could in the depth of character that you could. And I think children are a great tool from God to help us to achieve those things that make us better people. And it's challenging, it's hard. I'm not sure I'd sign up for it again, but looking back over my shoulder, which one would I give up? I wouldn't. It's been a wonderful journey and I'm glad that, as you and I were praying about it over all those years, we didn't just draw a line in the sand and say that's it, because we got a lot of pressure.
Speaker 2:We did. And you know I'll be honest, we talked a little bit about only children. But there are upsides and downsides to whatever number of children you have. You know, if you have two girls and one boy and you've got a boy who goes, oh, I just got, I had all the mothers in the family, right? If you have eight children, there's times that one feels left out. There is no perfect number of children, but there are families that can pour into the number of children that they've been given. And let me just touch on that hard, hard times. Now. You know many of our watchers and our listeners if you're on a pod, spotify or Apple podcasts know that you're an airline pilot as well, and so there's the well, you had the money for all the kids. But, to be quite honest, when we had five children, when you got out of the Navy and we were unemployed for a while, and then your first year with American Airlines, you made less than the Navy.
Speaker 1:Well, the first five years I was on something called the B scale, which was a 50% pay cut. Right, and then all the nine 11 came around, there was layoffs, there was, uh, a big 50% give back, uh, in 2003. Now I'm not crying foul, I'm just saying the, the rich airline pilot that you think is out, there is not not in our, our experience and then you take all of our child expenses and multiply it times eight.
Speaker 2:Right braces diapers but there were times that we ate a lot of eggs or a lot of uh, soup and bread, right, and I looked at those times and thought, oh, my poor kids. You know they're so deprived, but they don't look at it that way at all. They all felt cared for, right, right, and that's. That's what it's all about.
Speaker 1:It is. It's it's really great fun and, uh, I'm glad you know I uh for those of you who are, uh, also aviation, uh aficionados, and maybe you flew prop airplanes, uh, you'll understand this illustration around our house. It was high RPM and low torque, and what that means is there was always a lot going on but not much was getting accomplished. Lots of energy and all the other neighborhood kids were over.
Speaker 1:I wouldn't have had it any other way. So having a large family just is man. You're going to be totally immersed in life because every other kid in the neighborhood is going to come over to your house and I highly recommend it.
Speaker 2:But regardless of how many kids you have, God calls it a blessing and we would say it is so let's finish this episode with the ridiculous things people said to us over the years about kids.
Speaker 1:Number one did your TV break, Okay?
Speaker 2:Number two are you Catholic, mormon or Amish? Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Number three what size van do you drive? And the answer is a 15 passenger van.
Speaker 2:Yeah, all right. Yeah, number four. Did you always want a large?
Speaker 1:family, number five Do you know where they come from? And finally, the most important one that they've ever said about me, all the time, that you always put down, which was Can't you keep your hands off that woman? The answer is absolutely not. Yes, and I do know where babies come from, and it was a 15 passenger van.
Speaker 2:Yes, and our TV wasn't broken. We just didn't watch it we just didn't watch it.
Speaker 1:I'll give you a fist bump on that.
Speaker 2:All right. Well, this is Before you sign off.
Speaker 1:I'm going to say this here. Let me put you on your camera. Look at her. She's adorable, she's beautiful. She gave birth to seven children, seven children, and we adopted one. And you know what? It's just good for you.
Speaker 2:There you go, it's just good for you. Thank you, honey, you're very sweet, all right, all right. Well, this has been Death by Adulting, the baby edition. And remember what doesn't kill you just makes you tired.