> my eye was on the babies, and I couldn’t help but notice that one of them was chubbier, calmer and more beautiful than the others. My baby alone ... was much better than any of the others. Why wasn’t anyone remarking on this?
I am fascinated by this phenomenon. I remember my kid being in a school play when he was young: everybody who wanted could be in it and they clearly added trivial non-speaking spots for kids who might not have passed an audition but still wanted to be on stage. He had one of those! Yet whenever he was on the stage he just dominated -- expanded to fill the whole field of view. At least for me. I really recognized this phenomenon years later when I watched another play which had two kids in its cast who were really good. Probably the first time I really noticed that there were even other kids on the stage.
As for new parents groups: they really are for mothers and aren't about the babies. So I understand what she felt ("It was around the time I abandoned my third or fourth new moms group that I began to consider the possibility that I might be the problem."). And I mean mothers: as a father I was clearly not welcome (this was back in the late 1990s). At the park I was definitely viewed with suspicion by the other mothers even though I was a regular, and none would really talk to me (that's OK, I had EE times and the NYRB). Back then I was the only father pushing a pram around downtown Palo Alto in the middle of the day, and certain segments of the population clearly treated me with scorn. After the 2000 crash I saw more fathers doing this and I hope this has changed to some extent.
Interestingly at a party this phenomenon didn't appear, which I feel was due to context: if I was carrying a baby I believe the presumption was this was a dad being cute and "helping out" and that the rest of the child rearing was done by the mother (in fact she did a lot but had no patience for the American baby rituals). I saw this play out in other countries when I had the baby (and later child).
I don't agree that the child controls the process, but rather the child is a big responsibility, and that controls the process. Frankly owning a home is a lot of responsibility too, but the home is not in control.
Really appreciate your post! I'm a dad who also takes an active role in raising and nurturing his kids. I agree with your point at the end about responsibility, but another way of looking at the author's reframing of "parenting" as "childing" is that the parent is also on the receiving end of the experience. As a parent I've found I've learned a tremendous amount of patience, humility, perspective, perseverance, and self-awareness from the role, so I found a lot of truth in that idea.
I've experienced this. I tried to volunteer with the summer band camp my daughter was in. The volunteers were all mothers. I got lots of vaguely accusatory questions, and then got turned away. The implication was that I was some sort of threat.
Things can go a different way too. I've heard of other fathers getting lots of unwelcome romantic attention from the mothers.
> At the park I was definitely viewed with suspicion by the other mothers even though I was a regular, and none would really talk to me
Interesting. My experience as the only dad at the parks with my young child was that all the moms wanted to come tell me what a great thing it was that I was there, and how they were really proud of me for doing it. It felt very condescending and awkward.
Baby goggles. Your own kid is clearly the most talented/intelligent/cute of the bunch. It's probably an adaptive response, because any kid whose parents thought other kids were more talented/intelligent/cute probably didn't survive long in our ancestral environment.
Mom's groups are still for moms (I think this is because they often discuss mom-things where they don't want men around), but the park and downtown have become a shared spaces. I don't get strange looks for taking my kid to the playground, about half the parents there are dads (more on Sunday morning), sometimes moms or other dads will even talk to me. I do remember my dad (a househusband back in the 80s) complaining about how he'd get lots of strange glances taking my sister and me to the playground.
Re school play: the phenomenon also neatly explains why Gene Hackman's line as Royal in The Tenenbaum's - "just a bunch of kids in animal costumes" - is so funny.
We’ve never given our baby formula (made it almost 11 months so far) and the thing that really frustrates me, as a new father, is to watch my wife struggle to feed our kid and work full time because she’s been told she needs to breast feed. I’m not arguing the health benefits, but if I were, here’s one for you:
It’s better for the long term health of the baby if the mom doesn’t jump off the fucking roof because you put too much pressure on fucking breast feeding!
It’s probably fine to supplement once in a while to ensure the mother has a lower stress level. All things in moderation I think...
>I beg to differ [that there is no reason for a healthy well-fed mother not to breast feed her baby]. There are a lot of healthy well-fed mothers who have found what they think are valid reasons not to breastfeed. I chose not to breastfeed my babies because it was inconvenient, time-consuming, interfered with my sleep, and was incompatible with my job as a doctor working 24 hour shifts in the emergency room and as a flight surgeon on call. I suppose I could have pumped milk and planned ahead and found a way to do it, but it would have required heroic measures. I can imagine leaking breast milk all over my flight suit when I was on an emergency helicopter mission and simply couldn’t stop to pump. Moreover, I tried breastfeeding briefly with my first baby and frankly, I didn’t like it. All in all, I thought my babies were better off with a happy mother and a bottle.
We gave our son both. My wife breastfed him in the mornings and in the evenings when she worked, and in between he got formula. He’s as healthy and strong as anyone.
Everyone has an opinion about how to raise a kid. As long as you use some common sense and treat your kid with as much respect as you would any other human, he or she will most likely turn out fine. Considering that much more stupid people have managed to raise kids, it actually seem hard to fail if you succeed reasonably well with other endeavours in your life.
It's truly insane. My wife is panicked over it. She's _only_ producing about 1500mL per day. Which is an insane amount of milk. But, we have 5 month old twins. She can no longer keep pace with their needs. We have a freezer stash of her own milk plus some donor milk from a friend, but we will run out in ~2 months by my estimate. She's slowly coming around to the idea of doing their last feeding of the day with formula. I hope we're now on a path to start weening back the scale and magnitude of pumping operations in our home. It's been... quite a ride.
The pendulum really has swung too far on breast feeding.
Yes, if you can do it, it’s better than formula.
But if you can’t, you’re not a bad parent. If you can only sustain it for 6 months because it’s too much work, that’s ok.
Only 50 years ago we had a couple generations of kids where breast feeding was almost never done. Those adults don’t seem to have been handicapped by it.
So true! The bias towards breastfeeding is out of control. It's nutrition / calories, not magic fairy dust.
Research shows they will get slightly less of your antibodies, which if I understand correctly translates to one or two less cold viruses in the first year.
I usually stay the heck away from parenting articles but there was a genuine honesty to this one.
> "The women in these groups had bent over backwards to be welcoming"."
People love to believe that mom's groups are full of snotty judgments and anti-vaxx sentimens which is rarely, if ever true
> "My baby alone had the brilliant promise of profound intelligence shining out of his eyes."
Shhh - we're not supposed to admit that!
> "Every story about parenting has to do double duty as a story about how I am such a good parent."
I am pretty impervious to guilt trips, but 90% of parenting articles are just flat out boring. I don't know why it can't be addressed with any sort of intelligence and introspection.
As a newish dad this is relatable but not as much as for my wife. There is so much pressure and she is constantly telling me she feels like a bad mom. I say listen , who cares about the media or twitter. There is always some person posting on instagram about how they make a gourmet vegan meal for their baby. As a male, an alternative dude, and a bit of a stoner with open mind I can pretty easy filter out all the crap and focus in on what matters. Not as easy for the females, i have mad respect for all the moms out there grinding.
As for the whole 'my kid is so amazing', yeah i have that feeling as well with my kid. seems like it's just a paternal thing. but damn man kid is fucking cute and EVERYONE says hi to her. This doesnt happen with all little ones right? Our kid is smiley as shit, waving, laughing and basically a smile generator. IF you dont smile as this kid you have no soul
I wondered when our first one came out and looked pretty damn good from, literally, minute one, just how powerful those my-own-kid-is-cute hormones must be. I mean even cute kids are a bit ugly for the first week or two, right? Certainly the first hour. Figured strangers were just being kind when they said (several times) that we should try to get her in commercials or something ("the pictures", one old guy said, hahaha) when she was still under 90 days old.
Then we had two more and no, it wasn't the hormones. They both had the usual newborn uglies and even we could see that. Our first one actually was remarkably cute. No one ever told us we should contact acting agents about either of the later ones.
Having more kids makes it easier to tell where your kids truly fall, absent parental bias, on the cuteness or cleverness scale or whatever. Sometimes they actually are unusually cute or unusually smart or unusually well-coordinated, and that's not just parent-insanity talking.
"As a newish dad this is relatable but not as much as for my wife. There is so much pressure and she is constantly telling me she feels like a bad mom. I say listen , who cares about the media or twitter. There is always some person posting on instagram about how they make a gourmet vegan meal for their baby. As a male, an alternative dude, and a bit of a stoner with open mind I can pretty easy filter out all the crap and focus in on what matters. Not as easy for the females, i have mad respect for all the moms out there grinding."
Might I suggest one of the aspects that you may be missing is that mothers are judged as mothers first and humans second in society (at least in America where I live). Often times a woman who doesn't mother as vigorously as another woman is considered less worthy as a human being and less deserving of respect, care, comfort, etc.
I would compare this to ask if men are judged the same way as fathers. For example, if a male CEO doesn't take the day off to nurse his sick infant, is he considered a bad human being and judged as morally a less worthy person?
Or, in my experience, if my male friends are letting their spouses handle taking care of the child for the evening, they are not casually discussed as allowing malnutrition and unkemptness the way women are discussed when they let their husbands take care of the kids while they have a night or a week out for a business trip or just to have some fun.
An interesting thing to note is that women on average were studied to have an additional 2 hours of work per day upon becoming new parents, while men on average have an additional 40 minutes.
> I would compare this to ask if men are judged the same way as fathers. For example, if a male CEO doesn't take the day off to nurse his sick infant
The example I would use is a father who looses his job. Is he considered as morally a less worthy person compared to a mother who lost her job?
Cultural we still have gender role leftovers from the perception that mothers are judged based on how they are able to raise children, fathers on how they are able to provide for their children and spouse. A man who can't provide is cultural viewed as an unfit father. A woman who can't raise her children a unfit mother.
In such culture it is of no surprise that the father can take a much more relax attitude to question such as nutrition.
> women on average were studied to have an additional 2 hours of work per day upon becoming new parents, while men on average have an additional 40 minutes.
And how many work hours at the office? Should anyone given our current culture be surprised if fathers spend more time in the office than mothers?
That misses the point. Gender roles is a cause for anxiety because the cost of failure is magnified and strike at the gender identity of the person.
Without understanding gender roles the different in anxiety in fathers and mothers is unexplained, but there is no reason to do so as gender roles is a fairly well documented and understood concept. Even in households that do not perceive the father as the provider and the mother as the caregiver the gender roles in society still imposes expectations that results in anxiety and stress that align identically to those gender roles.
I am not sure where you got the concept of a competition, as the key insight from identify the problems of gender roles is that both women and men suffer from it. A simple decision such as taking a day off to nurse a sick infant should have same outcome for both women and men, but with gender roles pushing the mother to prioritize the child over work and the father to prioritize work over the child the outcome becomes stereotypical.
"That misses the point. Gender roles is a cause for anxiety because the cost of failure is magnified and strike at the gender identity of the person."
Yes, that's... kind of what I was pointing at, because the original guy said he was baffled at the anxiety of his wife. That's literally all I'm saying. I'm so confused at your responses.
I often read about moms feeling bad because of other moms' perfectly curated instagram feeds. As someone who doesn't remember ever feeling instagram envy - and btw all photos of my adorable children that I post are adorable :) - I must admit I'm envious of people whose feelings of sadness and inadequacy are cased by things farther removed from day to day life. For me the most disheartening feelings are usually the result of interactions with people close to me, mother and mother in law particularly so. Nine years after becoming a parent I still am unable to not let it phase me when my mother says "oh, they never act in this [terrible] way when you're not around" or when my mother in law asks "oh, did you want to brush her hair before the family photo?" "did you want me to get some cute plates for her birthday party so she feels special?". I'm sure much it can be helped by me just growing thicker skin - but I do feel lonelier sometimes when I think, people worry about instagram, they don't often talk about family making them feel like they are not good enough, I guess it is me.
I haven't got a lot to add apart from saying that my experience parallels your own. We have an eight-month-old, our first, and my wife feels inadequate all the time because she can't ignore the carefully cultivated facades from 'influencer' parents. Rationally she knows that these standards are impossible and unnecessary, but we humans don't get to select our anxieties.
Also my daughter is super cute and smiley and we secretly suspect she really is unusually adorable, even though we rationally realize that it's mostly hormones. Mostly.
Same problem for me in Firefox on Windows. Scrolling using cursor keys doesn't work. Using the scroll wheel on the mouse doesn't work. Scrolling by clicking and dragging the scroll widget also doesn't work, because the page puts a transparent header at the top of the page, that somehow extends over into the scrollbar, blocking the widget!
I found three ways to scroll the page:
- Click in the scrollbar below the scroll widget; this moves the widget out from under the invisible header, allowing it to be clicked
- Use the Kill Sticky Headers[0] extension to remove the header
Ooh, I don't know Outline. Does it have a browser extension? I can't find one.
I've been using Mercury Reader, and the old Readability extension before that, but I like the idea of being able to share readable urls, like you just did.
> "you're THE car, but your child is the one driving it"
There's a different perspective to that from the standpoint of a middle/upper or a working class family.
In most working class families, time and money are scarce resources and it is the responsibility of parents to allocate them by prioritising the essentials. It is not an option for a father for example to spend more time with his child, when working on a weekend means being able to repair the car which is used for going to work, which guarantees the financial safety of the family.
Affluent families buy time in many ways - by hiring ladies to do their cleaning, by letting their children attend various cultural, educational and sports activities, by having more automated homes, etc.
It may work for the wealthy, but it can be detrimental to the integrity of paycheck-to-paycheck families.
This kind of attitude towards children baffles me. It was always very clear where the authority lay in my family, and it certainly was not in my childish hands. You did what you were told, and with not too much grumbling. It's a much more effective system, by all indications.
The scariest thing about being a parent is that the only thing that keeps your kids from wrecking your life and running everything is that they're too short-sighted and impatient to do it. They have a lot more power than they realize—fortunately, they don't realize it, and won't keep pushing when things get tough for them.
... so long as you keep pushing when things get tough for you. They'll cave. After a few times, it'll stick and the struggle will get easier. Unless you start caving too fast. Unless you can't handle frustration and deferring goals or altering plans. Then you're so very, very screwed.
How old were you? I think you're speaking about older children than what the author is implying in her article, and I was relating to her experience.
When you've got a baby, or a toddler, you can't just leverage your authority and expect them to comply. It's a slow voyage. And, even when they comply, it may not be a victory; would the author feel better if his child actually used the bear costume?
I suspect from the fact that you said "not my childish hands" that you're referring to your own childhood, and you're not a parent (yet). Maybe you should ask your parents about their feelings.
Sometimes you expect parenthood to be hard, complex, tedious, but oddly satisfying. But it can be totally unsatisfying. Because it's about children, not about parents.
Something I've noticed is that some parents think that you can't be "firm" without being some strict victorian ogre of a parent.
Even when they are little (perhaps especially) you can insist on things without being some monster. You can say no, and mean it, without being an awful person.
One of your jobs as a parent is to teach them how to get on with other people, and part of that is realising that no, the world does not revolve entirely around them, and sometimes they can't get their own way.
> This kind of attitude towards children baffles me. It was always very clear where the authority lay in my family, and it certainly was not in my childish hands.
The author here wasn’t talking about authority, she’s saying that the goal of parenting is ultimately to raise another human being. You can try to be the best parent you can be, but in the end, it’s not about you.
I didn't read that meaning that the child had authority at all. I read it more as "Things could happen in the child's life that directly affects the parents' lives." I was thinking about external factors, and health issues in particular.
The author is lamenting how much the whims of the child control her parenting. I don't want to make this about wealth but it kind of has to be. Wealth buys the freedom to cater to these whims and make the cost seem justified. This is normal to her because the author lives somewhere and associates with people in similar situations, it's the local status quo. The kind of stuff the author describes does not fly in families of lesser means. Good for her for having those means but her experience is not universal.
You can bet that when daddy is waking up at 5am so he can be sitting in the cab of an excavator at 6am mommy would be making the whiny 6yo sleep in his own bed. The parenting experience would be very, very different with less emphasis on the needs and whims of the individual child and more emphasis on what's best for the family unit, parents have to work, kids have to go to school. There is little room for compromising the routines around that.
Edit: I'd be interested to know why people disagree with me so much.
You were down voted because this is HN and someone felt offended.
You're spot on with what you said and I appreciate your perspective. We cave to the whims of our kids eventually but that's because we earn a large dual income so it's no big deal if the eldest girl wants some new expensive art supplies. She told us that one of her friends has second hand / used clothes for school and doesn't even get her own bedroom. Sometimes I think it's better to grow up with some sort of struggle, our kids will never really know struggles so they'll assume things just come when you want them.
I'm still figuring out the best way to handle this as I'd like to build up resilient kids rather than entitled ones that are confused when they don't get given that $100 block of clay.
The eldest is a straight A student and we told her that straight A's get us off your back. This was a mistake as grades are only one aspect of what is important in raising children. I know try to teach her patience and persistence, how to be confident with people, how to handle angry people and how to negotiate, I feel like some of this is coming too late though however the last 18 months have seen her go from being shy to be being more confident with approaching adults.
It's hard to be a parent, you never know if you're doing the right thing and you don't find out until it's too late!
Of course it's from a wealthy perspective. The author was raising her kid in Silicon Valley in the the 2000s. Even before the startup/VC explosion, it was expensive to live there. It's a good piece of writing, but also very sheltered and privileged. Not everyone has the luxury to romanticize parenting as a "hostage situation" where the child is always in control.
That might be more in the "very low" segment. At any rate, the point stands in my experience; so many of the whims and desires my partner and I have been able to cater to for our kids come from our privileged ability to do so, and I can list a few dozen things we'd cut out immediately if time and money were more scarce.
Sure, it is basically free after all. Caving to a 6yo's request to deviate from the normal weeknight routine is not more common though which was my point.
Just more evidence that everyone parents differently. My friends hardly hear about the good stuff that my kids do. I want to talk about the grime and the shit and the speech delays and the temper tantrums. That's the stuff I feel like I need to get off my chest, when I'm afraid for their future.
We and most of the parents we know probably spend more time talking about the crappy bits of parenting than how awesome our kids are. The single best part of doing anti-natal classes was meeting a small group of people who were all going through the same kinds of stuff we were. Knowing "It's not just me" is a really big help coping with some of the tougher stuff.
We do still talk about the good stuff, but we all know they are awesome.
Thankfully most of my FB friends are pretty light on the performative parent posting. The ones who go in for that also tend to be the one who overdo the posting generally.
" While they were comparing and affirming baby-care choices, my eye was on the babies, and I couldn’t help but notice that one of them was chubbier, calmer and more beautiful than the others. My baby alone had the brilliant promise of profound intelligence shining out of his eyes. He was much better than any of the others. Why wasn’t anyone remarking on this?"
"More good mail days. Join our newsletter."
I think some kind of paywall was squelched by tracker blocking. But it's not worth figuring it out to read more of that.
that's what i thought too, until i had children. there is so much more to being an adult than to be able to handle your own life. parenting teaches you something no other aspect in life can.
> my eye was on the babies, and I couldn’t help but notice that one of them was chubbier, calmer and more beautiful than the others. My baby alone ... was much better than any of the others. Why wasn’t anyone remarking on this?
Probably because every other mother in that room was thinking the same thing about their kid.
* have a 11 month old who’s objectively more cute than every other kid in the room.
This was just an incredibly thoughtful essay and really captured some of the deeper movements of raising children better than most “OMG, raising children is NUTZ!” essays.
I can only say this so emphatically over the internet, but if you have not yet had kids, and you even remotely enjoy your life, DO NOT HAVE KIDS. Source: I am a dad.
They are in incredible burden that you cannot imagine or conceptualize prior. The company you founded, the marathons you ran, your PhD thesis, etc., these are all peanuts. Having a kid is like running a marathon every day for a year. If that sounds like fun to you, then go right ahead.
There are 8 billion people on the planet. You don't need them to run the farm, if you want to mentor someone there are lots of opportunities already. It's also a shit job. Kiss your weekends and evenings and any other free time goodbye. Like exercising? Good luck squeezing that in. Where this idea came from that having kids should be the default in life I have no idea, but it has got to stop.
The test I give my childless friends is to ask them what percent certain they are that they want kids. If it's less than 100% (and it usually is) I tell them not to have kids.
I mean anyone that tells me they're 100% certain of anything outside of basic facts, the BS meter starts going off, so that feels like a bit of a trap. It's a total game changer, but I'm 3 years in, and would not change it. I'm way more certain of having kids now than I was 5 minutes after finding out we were having kids, that's for sure.
It does change you, and it is a lot of work. But it's been the most contextualizing experience of my life. I don't want my old life back, even though I was very happy with it. A lot of things that I was happy with were relatively meaningless in a big-picture sort of way. I'm not partying on the weekend? Oh, well, thank god, I should have had kids earlier!
>> They are in incredible burden that you cannot imagine or conceptualize prior. The company you founded, the marathons you ran, your PhD thesis, etc., these are all peanuts.
Haha .... I agree.
The first kid is the hardest. For the second one, you think you've wised up, and it is still difficult for different reasons.
It is like every time you think you have solved the parenting issues and leveled up, the kids evolve too and present you with entirely new issues you were not prepared for.
And yet, like the other poster said, I'll still do it and go through it again.
[EDIT] Children are a joy, if you understand and respect them. Sometimes they need to be treated like adults, sometimes like the kids they are. The trick is to figure out which to apply when.
To paraphrase Antoine de Saint-Exupéry [1].
"Children exist to remind adults, what it is to be a child again."
[1] All grown-ups were children first. (But few of them remember it.)
As an only semi-related aside, I've always thought it was interesting that my friends who didn't want kids when we were younger because of the responsibility have nonetheless spent the last 10 years having dogs. Kids are far more expensive than dogs, for sure, but I feel like logistically, dogs and kids are more similar than people think.
You have to take care of a set of daily tasks to keep them happy and healthy. If you work, you'll have to send the child to daycare, which you don't have to do with a dog, but for me personally, there's some mental stress associated with leaving a dog home alone all day. Other than that, you can't just up and leave your house for longer than a work day without making arrangements for either kids or dogs. Naturally, there are certain kinds of vacations that you can't take with children, but in my experience, most people vastly overestimate how much time they'll actually spend travelling the world over the next decade or two.
Dogs have to be walked regularly enough that I don't think it's unreasonable to say that a lot of people will spend more time actively caring for their dog than they would caring for a child once the child is older than 5 or 6, at least when the child doesn't have a ridiculous amount of extracurriculars, though that's far from universal. Some kids are quite self-sufficient, though.
In my mind, the major thing that makes dogs less of a responsbility is that they don't live as long, but then no one ever just has one dog, they tend to string together 30 or 40 years of dogs, whereas kids are theoretically out of the house after 18 years.
Lest it be said that I must not have much experience with kids, I have 4 and have been a stay at home dad. It must also be said that I derive much more joy from interacting with my kids than I do from interacting with my pets so my whole perspective is certainly biased.
All in all, I think culture has instilled in us this fear that we'll ruin our children's lives if we just let them be children and that has made having children so much more daunting and intense and exhausting than I think it needs to be(though babies, I fear, will always be intense and exhausting).
I'd rather have a second kid before I ever get a dog. Kids grow out of diapers after a couple of years. You have to pick up a dog's crap for its entire life. Kids eventually go off on their own and do things, get their own food, and take more and more care of themselves. Dogs will never do that. And lastly, if you raise 'em right, your kids will eventually take care of you!.
I didn’t say they were easier, I said that I thought the disruption to a person’s life was a lot more comparable than people think. If you’re footloose and fancy-free without a kid or a dog, both a kid and a dog will require serious lifestyle changes and will take up a ton of your attention. My contention is that people overestimate the responsibility required for kids and underestimate the responsibility required for dogs, or any pets for that matter.
I found having kids added more context to my life. Prior to kids I was doing things for my wife and my self, which is fine, but after kids I was forced to grow into myself more and really set my values and my priorities. I matured significantly after having children, to the point where I even look back at my childless antics as childish.
Sure, things in my life peeled away after having children, but I also gained a tremendous amount as well.
It’s all perspective. Enjoy the ride, don’t regret your children.
Indeed, up to the prevalance of birth control in the last century, living with hordes of small humans was the default mode of existence for all humanity.
Nowadays it's rare to have more than 2-3 siblings. In the old days, everyone pretty much had older and younger siblings, and lots of them. So the "dealing with children" skill was well practised and common.
I juxtapose that situation with myself. Although I had neices and nephews, I didn't spend any significant time with children until I had my own (late 30's). And wow what a shock! I had lived mostly for myself, for decades prior. All the work and responsibility for dealing with babies and toddlers was a real surprise. If I knew anything about kids, I'd long forgotten it.
It's been one hell of a learning curve. My kids are really creative and clever. They can be kind and generous, they can be little fiends. They can be sweet as honey or ornery as can be. But they're PEOPLE. When you make kids you make PEOPLE. Miraculous and banal all at the same time.
I agree. I'm 46 and do not want children. When my coworkers with kids talk about all the things they have to do with their kids on the weekend I say, "you know what I'm doing this weekend? Whatever I want!"
Of course I'm also single and never been married so this may be a "me" issue...
My grandmother used to run a general store out in a small rural village where I grew up. She had the only store in town, and she sold everything from groceries, to gas, barbed wire by the spool, salt licks for cows, nails by the pound, you get the idea. It was a super busy place.
One time, my grandmother asked her father to look after his three young grandsons so she could get some work done in peace.
He sat them all in a row on the counter and gave them candy to keep them busy as he started to tell them a story.
A customer observing this scene said: "Look at you, you must be so proud to have three such beautiful grandsons!"
To which he replied: "Yeah, you couldn't pay me millions of dollars to part with a single one of them...but I wouldn't give a dollar for another one though..."
But when people say kids are terrible because they take up too much time, stress you out, cause you to loose sleep, yes, all of that is true.
But it would be the same as saying “Dogs are terrible because you have to pick up their food, you have to find someone to watch them when you travel, their vet bills are so expensive.” Again, all true, but those statements completely ignore the positives.
I have a boy that is soon to be three years old. I enjoyed my life before I became a father, and I enjoy it even more now. I like my work, but I always look forward to leaving early and pick him up from daycare and spend the rest of the afternoon together with him. And he’s the best things with my weekends.
Of course I don’t train as much as I used too. And most of my old hobbies are on hold for a couple of years. But I haven’t regretted a second that we got a child.
I sent this link to my daughter, who is raising an 18-month old baby.
I do not agree with the "don't have kids" advice. I have two grown-up kids; no regrets whatsoever. Neither child was planned (yeah, two accidents!) You have to be quite unlucky, I think, to have kids that don't make you happy.
Having said that, there's a good argument that the world is already full-up, that the world is getting worse, and that bringing kids into the world is not a kindness. I'm OK with not having kids for those reasons; and I'm also OK with not having kids because you have better things to do with your time. No judgements, be happy your own way.
Nobody is a good parent; we're all beginners, none of us has ever done it before. It works out; kids can deal with crap parents, otherwise our race would have died out.
BTW, I used to spank my kids when they were naughty. Word of advice: do not do that. Even if it's legal where you live, it is just a way of expressing your anger, it solves no problems. Grown-ups should never beat-up children, not even gently.
Um, dawgs, no thanks. I'm not enthusiastic about hoovering. I'd sooner change nappies (or become a school governor).
Child-rearing only takes about 15 years. It really isn't a river of tears; a lot of it is fun. Children can be a total gas. When it's over, they leave, and chances are you'll be on your own again, with nothing left but photos and memories.
I mean - no one can talk outside anything outside their experiences but I completely, emphatically disagree.
Nothing I've ever experienced can match the pure joy of coming home and having my kid run up to give me a giant hug. Everything else pales next to it. I went though a lot of job angst a couple of years ago but none of it could overshadow the happiness I felt just being able to read my kid to sleep at night. It's incompatible.
Good point; I should at least reply to him here so that he doesn't think I hate him, which of course I don't. But more to your point, it's the self-censorship you're describing that perpetuates the myth that having kids is for everyone.
Arthur! I love you buddy! And I am also allowed to not like being a parent, it's a weird thing, but trust me it has nothing to do with you, you are the best! The best analogy I can give is that it's like how even though you have teachers you really like, you might not like that you have to go to school every day.
I hope that my own honesty about this will help you make your own choice when the time comes. The bottom line is, having kids is not the only acceptable path in life, though it is usually presented that way.
OP is certainly not politically correct, but I don't see how that is a reason to down vote. It's not like they suggested mistreating children or so. Somehow would hope HN to be open to different views.
Didn't notice (now too late to edit) that parent and grandparent are the same - Duncan. So guess I fell for the ruse here.
Anyway: above statement still stands no matter who objected to the original post. Still feel stupidly manipulated ;-)
People growing up in western society have become so egocentric it's absurd. We've finally made it, we're incompatible with what human society has been for thousands of years and to some extent still is in Asia -- "discipline" has finaly become the biggest cuss-word and the most horrible thing ever.
Sure, the world doesn't need more people, you certainly don't NEED kids but come on.
The key reasons boil down to "you'll have more responsibilities, it's hard work, and will need to share your life with other people and not make it all about you". You even somehow managed to utter "the company you founded" in that same sentence.
Having done both, I'd say raising children is actually lot like starting a company, just requires a lot more discipline and is more stressful. It would happen that I tried to do both at the same time, and both are hard work, you pile on responsibilities, reduce hobbies and "me time" and become responsible for other people's lives in the process and in both you're essentially fucked without strong willpower and discipline. I wasn't good enough to do both at the same time so I sold off and left the company and got a well paying 9-5.
Btw the ticket out of the "children situation" for man-children (and sorry but you managed to paint yourself as one) also exists, it's not impossibly hard and, assuming you'd do your fair share of obligations, could possibly even benefit your wife and kid(s).
I too hated the lack of "me time", don't get me wrong. I had a hobby I was deeply passionate about and really got back to it (and still fairly infrequently) only when my kids were well into school age. I also gained about 12 kg (some 25 pounds) that it took me years of gym, running and mountaineering more-less just to halve and I don't really go down from there (tho my "build quality" did improve :) ). I've also halved my learning rate in things, had to rearrange my priorities and generally "streamline" my career in many ways.
But here's the other side of it. Had I not become a parent I'd probably have fucked up my business. Neither of the issues were me not having enough time -- most were not knowing enough, not being man enough and not being mature enough. The children might have hindered my speed of improving in the first thing but have made me surmount a Mont Everest in the latter two -- which I don't feel that I would be able to (short of some traumatic experience). I'm much more confident as a man than I would ever be without having them and knowing them.
Also children return on that investment of time, nerves and forgoing with (at least in that age between two/three and puberty) unreserved love you'll never witness (and I've had dogs and kitties so, no, sorry, no contest there really), and later, with slowly becoming men (well, people, It's just that I have two boys) and although much of their accomplishment has fuckall to do with you, you can't help but be filled with pride.
I regret a thing or two in my life, but having them was the best damn thing that ever happened to me.
I think in addition to questioning having kids as a default in life society needs to ask if it is ethical to continue having kids. We have an impending climate crisis we haven't even begun to address that will make the life of any child born today much harder and much different than life today.
> We have an impending climate crisis we haven't even begun to address that will make the life of any child born today much harder and much different than life today.
I find this argument extremely offensive. Do you think the life of a child born in a +3C USA is going to be worse than the life of an adult currently in say Bangladesh? If not, the implication is that it wasn’t “ethical” for the parents of living Bangladeshis to have had kids given how “hard” their lives are. That currently living Bangladeshis would’ve been better off never being born than suffer such a low standard of living.
Presumably, there is a standard of living where it becomes “ethical” to have children. Show me where in the happiness scale (from Norway at the top to Central African Republic at the bottom) that transition happens: https://news.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/206468/happiest-unhap.... Italy has a happiness rating a full point lower than the US. Was it “unethical” for the previous generation of Italians to birth the current generation of Italians into such a hard life? Or do we need to go further down the scale? About a point below Italy is Nigeria. Is that the transition point? Once you can expect your kids to have a quality of life better than that of Nigerians currently, it’s ethical to have kids?
Life expectancy is at an all time high. World hunger is at an all time low. More humans means more opportunity to create and discover. There is nothing unethical about having children.
Those things are true in the current climate regime. They may not hold true when global average temperatures exceed 1.5 degrees over preindustrial. In addition to decreased crop yields what we will be able to grow will be less nutritious, not even getting into increased mortality due to heat and other human impacts: https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2865/a-degree-of-concern-why-g...
Maybe, just maybe, we should ask questions about people who have 10-12 kids or something like that, but a replacement rate of 1-2 kids seems more or less unquestionable to me.
I mean, if you feel you don't want to bring kids into this turbulent, uncertain world, by all means don't, but please also recognize that one of life's biggest purposes is to beget life and we will do nothing (and have never done anything) if we didn't reproduce
I am fascinated by this phenomenon. I remember my kid being in a school play when he was young: everybody who wanted could be in it and they clearly added trivial non-speaking spots for kids who might not have passed an audition but still wanted to be on stage. He had one of those! Yet whenever he was on the stage he just dominated -- expanded to fill the whole field of view. At least for me. I really recognized this phenomenon years later when I watched another play which had two kids in its cast who were really good. Probably the first time I really noticed that there were even other kids on the stage.
As for new parents groups: they really are for mothers and aren't about the babies. So I understand what she felt ("It was around the time I abandoned my third or fourth new moms group that I began to consider the possibility that I might be the problem."). And I mean mothers: as a father I was clearly not welcome (this was back in the late 1990s). At the park I was definitely viewed with suspicion by the other mothers even though I was a regular, and none would really talk to me (that's OK, I had EE times and the NYRB). Back then I was the only father pushing a pram around downtown Palo Alto in the middle of the day, and certain segments of the population clearly treated me with scorn. After the 2000 crash I saw more fathers doing this and I hope this has changed to some extent.
Interestingly at a party this phenomenon didn't appear, which I feel was due to context: if I was carrying a baby I believe the presumption was this was a dad being cute and "helping out" and that the rest of the child rearing was done by the mother (in fact she did a lot but had no patience for the American baby rituals). I saw this play out in other countries when I had the baby (and later child).
I don't agree that the child controls the process, but rather the child is a big responsibility, and that controls the process. Frankly owning a home is a lot of responsibility too, but the home is not in control.