Hey guys. Anyone else have the experience of having kids, getting a burst of energy, but of course all that energy goes directly back into the kids and house, and you have absolutely no life for 3-5 years or more? Because my kids are 2 and 4 and so far it's been 4 years of no life, no freelance clients, almost no learning/hobbies, just 35-40 hours a week of working as much as I can at the office and then everything is about the kids. Until everyone goes to bed, then maybe I can think about something interesting to work on for a couple hours before sleeping well less than 7 hours of healthy sleep. Or do you even give that up, and as soon as the kids are in bed it's time for the bedtime routine for yourself?
Just looking for some dads who can relate and maybe give some wisdom on the subject of having young kids and losing your ability to work on something interesting--which to be fair I never did before having kids because I was unmotivated, having not had that burst of energy yet...
It gets better - My kids range from 14 to 9.The 14 year old is hanging out with friends and making jewelry. The 12 year old is sitting in my bedroom, reading. The 9 year old is playing games. I'm coding on personal projects, and my wife is in the basement making blankets. We have an entire day of just all doing whatever we want. Weekdays are busier with school and work, but you the point is that you do get your time back, once the kids are old enough to have some independence and interests of their own.
I'd recommend just enjoying being a parent while they are young. They need you at this age. Play with them, read to them, and all that. Write down ideas you'd like to pursue in a couple years when your free time returns. And you can be confident that it will return.
Thank you for this. My son is 2 and legally blind, so needless to say we have no life outside of him for now, but he is a joy. I would trade none of this for nothing.
Often I feel like I will never again be able to have a life, read a book, finish a project, have an idea. I know that it gets better and that I should cherish the moments we have while he is so young (and I do), but it’s hard to see more than a foot in front of you, so to speak. Thanks.
I can jump in at being just a year apart from GP, mine are 3 and 5 now and it's already starting to get better massively. Having them so close to each other makes for some extremely hard first 2-3 years, but then they can actually relate to each other one and play together, which works out nicely.
Kids tend to be cutest from 3-5, so sit back and enjoy as much as you can, the time will come back — I'll confess I'm mostly enjoying the second one in that age only now, as the stress was too high with the first one.
To be honest, the second best thing about kids rather than themselves and getting to know them is what PG nicely put in the following way:
>> See what I did there? The fact is, most of the freedom I had before kids, I never used. I paid for it in loneliness, but I never used it.
In the end, all these limitations will let you appreciate your freedoms so much more.
Mine are 15 and 16, they’ve been going out on trips with their friends for a couple of years. I will say though, the first years until they are in school full time are absolutely crucial. We reap what we sow in those few years for the rest of our lives, and they are crucial developmental time for the children. I never really knew how to deal with other people’s children much younger than myself, but having my own kids has been wonderful. Hard work, frustrating at times and yes it has to take priority over almost everything else for a long while, but it’s so worth it.
Thanks for this comment. My kids range from 8 to 3 and as I see the changes slowly creeping into our life’s (the occasional evening dinner or even weekend trips) the majority is a constant schedule. Getting up at 6am. Getting them ready for daycare and school (we have no longer time for a shared breakfast ever since my oldest is in school). The getting the younger ones to the daycare and head off to work. Here I get a relaxing morning as most others start two to three hours later. Then at five sharp going home and play with the kids and have dinner. After that the going to bed routine starts which can be, depending on the kids mood and of course oneself mood either be easy going or a terror ritual. I love the former ones. After all kids are in bed my partner and I have time for us. Or do we? There is of course the house and preparations for the next day etc. and the next morning the whole thing starts all over again.
Your kids are at the age before school where they are the hardest to deal with. Once a kid gets to school, magic happens. I mean it.
- They get tired from learning stuff. And the teachers know how to deal with them.
- They learn how to behave in a group. They start having actual friends.
- You get a bunch of friends who are in the same situation as you, and you can use their kids to cancel out yours. (AKA playdates)
- Having friends in the same boat will help your confidence a lot. They can help you directly with the kids, plus some of them will have older kids too, and they can tell you it gets better.
- As for your own time, try to be disciplined about the kids' bedtime. It helps a lot that school is tiring them out, and use that momentum to not let them decide when to go to bed. If you get them asleep before 8pm, how much different is your day really? You had to eat anyway, and you have to keep the house clean regardless. Your real problem is if they keep you up to 11pm each night, then your life is gone, and they end up in a cycle of having not enough sleep. Make them sleep, then code up your side project.
For example my kids started school at 4. I've put them in full time after school care as well, ending at 6pm. Now they're tired but awake when they come home and can eat a meal, then bath, then bedtime. You can read something to put them to sleep, then go and do your own stuff.
--Edit
Forgot to mention, the kid will learn how to read. From there you can give them a book and that will keep them quiet. Remember to teach them how to code as well, so they have proper tools to explore the world.
See this with my LO from going to daycare. Mob mentality is real, at home can't get a nap to save our lives.. at daycare napping at 12pm like clockwork.
Also the book thing is real, when my phone is off limits a book becomes the next fantasy reality for kids. For everyone reading, keep giving your toddlers something to do other than your phone. Everything is a teaching opportunity, and you are teaching them how to keep themselves preoccupied. Books, gadgets, legos, matchbox cars.. whatever, their imagination takes off exponentially once they hit 2
> my kids started school at 4. I've put them in full time after school care as well, ending at 6pm
> you get them asleep before 8pm
> you can give them a book and that will keep them quiet
And then people wonder why kids don't listen to and respect their parents when they grow up. You're basically just giving school teachers full control to raise your kids at age of 4, and they only interact with you for 1-2 hours during the day and don't really know who you are. I guess I am just raised differently but I can't understand this type of parenting.
Why have kids at all, if all you do is try to get away from them and make them not bother you and live separate life especially at such an early age.
Yesterday I fell in the Collatz trap (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21780068). So after a few hours my 7y old son asked what I was doing (what was I doing?!). Explained him how it works and then we did Collatz "by hand" for almost an hour. These sorta random triggered experiences are the best.
I love how inquisitive my 7 year old daughter is. She doesn't want or take a simple explanation and I enjoy teaching her about seemingly mundane topics that she makes exciting for me again.
As a father of 4 year old twins, all I can say is that you have described my life. We also bought a fixer upper when our kids were about 2 years old. I have nothing to contribute other than an upvote, and a plan to read through the comments in this thread.
Life is hard. I feel beat down and depressed a lot. I would also love some words of wisdom. All I can contribute to this discuss is that I can relate.
My kids (and I’m sure yours) are such amazing people. I love them so much. But I fear I have lost the ability to care about or love myself. We do finally have a great house to raise them in after many nights of back breaking labor done after coding all day.
I know so many people have it so much harder than me. Which makes it feel wrong to feel so broken. But there it is. I’ll probably delete this post out of shame but if you read it maybe you’ll know you’re not alone.
You aren’t broken. It’s helpful to remember that suffering is relative, so what other people go through is irrelevant to your current situation. We are all on our own individual paths.
My advice is to do less.
It sounds like you are trying to do too much stuff. Why? You are trading off being in a good head space with your kids when they are young to do what? Fix a house?
It’s not worth it. Nothing is worth it. You can buy a new house, you can’t buy back time with your kids.
Whenever I feel overwhelmed like this I make a list and prioritize it ruthlessly. This happens so often that I make a list daily.
Anything outside of the top 5 or so priorities, I ignore or delegage.
Oh and if you don’t like working on the house then stop doing it. Improving the house is going to have a marginal improvement. Use your time on things that are going to have a bigger impact.
Twin dad here. The struggle is real! This is just my 2c, but kids are designed to take and take until there's nothing left of you. It's not their fault, but that's just how it is. You can still be an engaged parent and have wonderful experiences with them, but you (major emphasis) cannot let your health suffer.
Keeping your mental sanity is as important as not letting them wander into a busy street or play with fire, etc. You are no good to them as an empty, stressed, beat down carcass of your former self. I have all kinds of strategies that I put into play when I find myself tapped out, but n=1 and I doubt it would be useful to others, I just wanted to share that I 100% get you. Take care of yourself, just like you would your kids.
As a father of a 6-year-old I suspect that it will get easier and easier for you from here on in. The kids will start to do so much more independently and so so many things to lift your spirits you weren't even imagining.
Have you considered counselling? Just having someone to talk your thoughts through with can be very helpful.
Stick in there.
A block from our home, a neighbor couple had triplet boys, just a year behind us. One of little guys has special needs. Plus, an older singleton. They're our heroes.
Words of Wisdom: Manage your energy. The car is a great place to take a cat nap. Enjoy the simple pleasure of hanging out in your own backyard.
-Do go on vacations with your kids. You are investing in having them travel with you in the future, and liking it. You can do it! Just give them tasks and treat them with respect.
-Ignore the kids menu. It's shit. Just order off the regular menu and share with your kids.
-Some kids are hard to raise, some are easy. You will probably have both if you many more than 1. C'est la vie.
-If you're like me and value time, get a job you can walk to. Have your kids go to a school you can walk them to. It makes things so much easier.
-Hire a cleaner every few weeks if you need a break.
-Buy used clothing if you can. Same with toys. No need to break the bank.
-Give them space, teach them to be bored on their own.
-Have scheduled electronics free time. Kids careers != Parents careers. They may end up doing things completely unrelated to your career. Let them find it.
-They will push you to the edge of your patience, and you will lose it. It's all good. Just try to keep calm. Even if you lose it once, just try to do better the next time.
-There is no instruction manual for kids - it was forgotten by the doctor inside the mother's womb - for every kid ever born :) So yeah, we're all winging it!
-My kids are 6 and 8. They have given me a new range of emotions that I never knew existed and have made me better for it.
-Kids make you value your time. Learn from that lesson.
I made it clear with my wife that I would need to have some time for my activities before we had kids. Luckily she has some friends that believe the same because she has no hobbies. So we take turns each month giving each other time away from the kids. So she might go out with her girlfriends and I might go golf or kayak.
Also, I don't subscribe to the notion that a parent needs to be playing with their kid every waking minute. My wife is more toward the opposite but getting more flexible. My son plays with Legos and other building toys by himself and I like that. I did the same when I was young. You have two kids so let them play with each other and you and your SO should dedicate more time as partners together. Get your date nights in.
Your kids are getting old enough that they should be playing with each other all day long soon and that will open up your time. Mine are younger than yours so I have a few more years but I hear having multiple is a game-changer for parents.
The other thing I would suggest is to just take your kids with you everywhere you can. I got a hiking backpack and I take him to music festivals, he's flown overseas and traveled around Europe, National Parks, etc. He doesn't make a peep in the hiking backpack and loves being able to see different things outdoors. I highly recommend!
As far as doing a side project, maybe do the planning/strategy for it while hanging out with them but when your kids are playing with each other. I can't code very well with kids around but I can still ideate.
And it’s important for kids to learn to entertain themselves. In this time of YouTube and social media and all the other things that are trying to grab kids time, they still need to learn how to be at peace with themselves.
I have two very young kids (19 and 7 months) and my experience is somewhere between OP and PG. Most of the time, kids feel to me like an endless, grinding to do list. The sleeplessness, sickness, and endless chores/cleaning are hard to power through. My career has definitely slowed down and I find that I already struggle with lower levels of professional ambition. That's not the worst part though: the worst part is the loss of control. Kids make life far less deterministic and most surprises suck. They wake up sick and can't go to daycare and so you don't go to work, you wake up sick and feel like death, they puke in their bed, they poop out of their diaper, they accidentally injure you, etc, etc.
The big redemption in my experience has been that I didn't really expect kids generally and this part of childrearing specifically, to be enjoyable or particularly meaningful. My wife and I agreed before having kids that at least the first 5 years were just gonna suck and we were just going to have to power through. I have still been impressed by how challenging it is, even coming in with that expectation.
On the plus side, I've always viewed having children as unrelated to happiness. If you care primarily about being happy, accomplishing great things professionally, or living an alternative lifestyle (and there's nothing wrong with any of these things) it seems pretty clear that having kids is not a good choice.
For me, I view the experience as a way to grow as a person and connect with something bigger than me. It's a way to become more human, and I'm getting what I came for.
> It's a way to become more human, and I'm getting what I came for.
I appreciate this self introspection. Humanity is a vast mysterious realm to explore and we've spent most of our lives focusing only on the concrete systems, like productivity loops or economics.
Having young kids is like working 80 hour weeks. In fact it basically is that, just at two jobs rather than one. Plus you spend a lot more time keeping house, on top of it.
Most people don't have much left to give working those kinds of hours. Personally, I've had to dramatically cut back on hobbies and keeping up with various media, even, and all but drop some categories (I bet I spend 5% as much time gaming as I used to, for instance, and haven't even bothered to set up my gaming PC since a move about 1.5 years ago). I got a ton of reading done when each kid was young because you can just read them whatever, they don't know the difference, and you spend a lot of time feeding them or watching them in the bath so they don't drown or whatever, but now? Hahaha, so, so little reading.
Mostly I just watch movies or TV or read garbage on the Internet (ahem) because I don't mind as much being interrupted while doing those things.
My wife and I are having a discussion about this very point that has lasted since our first child 14 years ago.
She argue that I may have two jobs where one lasts 8 hours and the other lasts 16 hours whereas she as the one job that lasts 24 hours. The only difference is that I get to change my scenery and work environment, allow a refresh if you will, and allow a stresses to take a break. For her, she stays in the same office without any chance of a change and the stress does not take a break.
It turned my habits around. I worked remote for 6+ years when my daughter arrived. Had a generous 10 weeks of leave of which I took 7 and I stayed up late at night or all night for the feedings which meshed well because I was always a night owl.
That was 21 months ago.
This week I was in bed before 9pm at least 3 nights and up at 7 am with the spawn to take her to day care. I get a shower and get her dropped off and get back home by 9am and immediately start work. I don’t get up from the chair till noon for a quick break and back to it for another 3 hours. My wife and kid get home around 4:30 or 5 and I slap together something frozen and barely healthy for all of us and then my wife does the bath routine and I read slack on my phone and think about how much I didn’t get done. We play for an hour or so and bed time is at 7:30pm. After that I try to wrap up loose ends and make notes for the next day and usually so tired I just go on to bed. I’m stuck in this cycle. It is so hard to stay up after bed time because I know I have to be up and at em first thing in the morning and can’t lay in bed till 8:30 or 9 because I stayed up till 2am.
I would work 2 or 3 side gigs on top of my job previously and now I have no mental room or energy for it. It’s a hard pill to swallow. I put a ton of stuff on my google calendar. Friends want to play a game on Friday night? It gets on the calendar and I usually can’t make it past 10:30pm. It makes me keep the value of my time in the front of my mind. Do I want to play video games or read and play with my daughter? Sometimes I choose the games for my own recharging. I want to start my own thing so bad and I just can’t get the courage to make the jump and don’t have the energy to do it on the side.
Remote work is a double-edged sword
I know that place you are at
Remote work "illness" #1 - failing to separate work and life(free time)
Not a problem when you are single and "on your own"
Heart-attack territory once you have children
Don't think playing a game on a Friday night will recharge your batteries, not that simple, not even if you'd spend the whole weekend doing it You can't escape a burned-out mindset withouth changing your habbits
Most probably,your day job pays for a 8h workday
This translates to 6h of active work time(optimistically speaking)
Wake up at 6am
Work from 9 to 12(3h)
Then take the next 2-3h free, go outside, cook some non-poisonous food, no internet, whatever you do don't think about work
Then work the next slot 15-18 and do a hard stop
Learn how to say "no" - no I can't, no I won't
Some of my projects are over a year late! I could easily spend an extra 2-3h a day just replying the most urgent emails I got within the last hour of my work day - won't do it - if anyone on the other side of the plannet is so brainwashed as to prioritize some corporate slaveowners well-being over his own health .. sorry but the thing you are living is a 21 century version of hell
Buy a stopwatch or repurpose an old smarphone, setup a counter for 6h and work your day job only those 6h
One very good excercise for self-discipline that helped me a lot
3 minute high-intesity workout every day
Time of the day is for you to choose, just make sure its 3 minutes - use a stop watch!
Always tell your self "If I'm not able to keep this f*ng 3min schedule how can I achieve anything else in life"
It'll do miracles
My kids are 8 and 11 now. I just spent the past hour working on my book while they puttered around doing... honestly I don't know what they were doing.
For me, the toddler years were the nadir in terms of having my own time. Babies sleep enough to give you some time. Older kids are independent enough. But toddlers, man, it's like living with a pair of destructive monkeys that you're legally forbidden to cage.
My wife did research for grad school related to this, so we went in to this eyes open.
Her studies showed that people who have a kid 3 or younger were less happy than equally situated peers. Their first smile is nice, but it's a lot of poop and your peers are going to Europe.
If your youngest is 4 or older, there's literally no difference in happiness. Europe is nice. Their first play, them as actual human beings - also nice.
When the _parents_ are north of 60, then happiness _and_ health go up if you have kids, by a rapidly increasing margin with time.
So when we decided to have kids, we just knew that for the first few years... Well, that's going to suck. It's made it easier knowing what we signed up for.
Your wife's research is almost surely correlational, not casual - I'm assuming it's some sort of OLS using the NLSY or some similar dataset.
The fact that happiness and health goes up dramatically when parents are north of 60 just reflects that in the past - if you didn't have kids - it's because you didn't get married. If you didn't get married, it was far more likely to be because you were somehow unviable as a marriage partner than because you didn't want to get married.
So, you're going to get a spurious, strong correlation between happiness/health and the interaction between age > 60 and having kids. If you run the same regression among Americans in 30 or 40 years, that same relationship will not hold, since whether to get married and whether to have kids are to ever-increasing degrees explicit choices.
Young kids go everywhere you go, so you can still go to Europe. It maybe take a cruise, that cash be pretty family friendly while allowing you to see a different city every day.
Knowing what you're getting into and having the rest of your life in order are golden, I guess.
I resent my wife for sort of slowly forcing it on me with promises of "nothing will change, my mother will help", I also resent myself for falling for it, but I wouldn't trade my daughter for anything in the world.
I've come to terms with the duality of being a parent, loving your children and raising them sucking at the same time, something I see non-parents completely unable to understand.
Great moments of being a parent, like 10% of the time, and sucking for the rest of 90% of the time.
Whenever I tell this to non-parents, they take it like "what, then what's the hype of being a parent, you must be broken somehow" or "there, that's another reason for me not to have children" -- both of which are far, far of from any conclusion I would take.
Ages 1-4 were absolutely brutal for me. I'd do it again, but I'd go in giving up any pretense that I was going to maintain anything like a life. I was an at-home parent for those years, and really struggled having no escape from it. I maintained a pretense that I was keeping up on my field and doing various other things, and I did put in a good deal time on that, but it was not well-spent. I should've given up that idea through preschool age. That's what I'd do differently, and I think as a society we'd be better off if we accepted and understood that parenting is an all-in big deal; it's not just another form of housework or chores that we all have to do and that are flexible.
That said, I agree with others that it gets way better. Ages 5-9 with my kids have been great. The stuff they do is actually fun and interesting to me, and since I was such a damn good parent, the kids are dynamic and somewhat responsible for themselves. We have a lot of fun now and I have choices for myself once again.
Warning: I hear the teenage years can be just as daunting at the toddler/preschool years, but for different reasons.
> I'd do it again, but I'd go in giving up any pretense that I was going to maintain anything like a life.
I really think it's best if you just accept that you'll be giving up most of what you used to do. You can find time for some stuff, but if you had a bunch of hobbies and were very social and did tons of side projects before something has to give—probably lots of somethings. There are only so many hours in the day and yours are largely spoken for—no large contiguous blocks of free uninterrupted time, certainly—12 hours a day, 7 days a week, now.
Trying to keep up with all of it is exhausting and frustrating. Gotta make the hard choices and actually choose. "Well, I'm not doing A, B, or C for a few years, seems like, so I'll stop trying, but I can keep doing D and E with the time and attention that frees up".
Good comment and yes, all-in parenting is a big deal. In fact, careers are obviously important because they're needed to survive and provide, but how we raise our children and prepare them for life is, in many ways, far more important than whatever tasks we may be performing at work.
"Warning: I hear the teenage years can be just as daunting at the toddler/preschool years, but for different reasons."
This was not my experience at all and it may not be yours if you've engaged your children in reasoning rather than "because I said so" disciplining; if you've developed a loving relationship with your kids instead of an adversarial one.
> Just looking for some dads who can relate and maybe give some wisdom on the subject of having young kids and losing your ability to work on something interesting--which to be fair I never did before having kids
Your problem is not that your kids have blocked you from interesting work. In fact it sounds like quite the opposite: you are so passionate and rewarded by childcare that it has inspired you like never before.
It just sounds like you need to look for a more interesting day job.
While I get the sentiment, I'd suggest many aren't built this way. Feelers are, and find value in the "feeling" of feeling needed, providing, caretaking. There are groups (of which I am one) who find literally no personal value in that. Childrearing is a series of rote tasks, performed repeatedly, that are performed on billions of humans raised.
If anything, childrearing made me suic-idal for years at the mind-numbing, repetitive, 'useful only to 1' tasks, and made me solely aware of the inefficiency of raising humans. My kids are 6 and 9 now, and things became much better when they're able to take care of themselves.
The funny thing is, I have a pretty interesting day job. I think I have too high expectations to be able to also have, for instance, a side job. And friends. And a healthy marriage. Gotta prioritize, I think.
One of the reasons I'm never having kids is seeing just this pattern. For everyone I can recall right now, it lasts forever. They have more time later but the drive is gone. I've actually seen a few of people with a shared hobby and a toddler be like "kids won't stop me from doing X, in fact it's going to be better with kids to teach/inspire/...!", and then they disappear forever (up to 5 years so far). Or (skiing example, I don't ski in this case but the person as far as I know used to be good) in 10 years they tell you how it's nice to go to a ski resort, ride a couple of simple slopes and watch their kids ride then have a beer.
Same applies to intellectual hobbies like coding (again, from my anecdata).
Nothing wrong with that, just not my cup of tea.
From my experience, this is absolutely true. I figured children wouldn’t interfere with my hobbies because I’d still have evenings and the weekend to do stuff.
Turns out that during the week you are generally too exhausted, and in the weekend you always have to figure out where to leave your child if you won’t want to saddle your partner with them.
You could bring your kids, but people without children (rightly so) quickly tire of this, so you mostly end up interacting with other couples with children, and that’s glorious too, because suddenly there’s 4 instead of 2 qualified adults to pay attention.
On the other hand, I didn’t expect the amount of satisfaction I would get out of children to be this great either, and it was definitely worth the bargain.
Consider that perhaps what they found is actually greater happiness. Not saying it’s true or that everyone should follow the kid path, but I’m experiencing what you describe and can confirm that the hobbies/interests were and still are fun but are turning out to be not the best part of life.
There are folks saying “it gets better.” I have a different experience I’d share- which is it gets different.
I work for a fortune 50 company. I’m about 25 years into my career. Ymmv.
You will hit a point in your career where expectations will increase. You’ll be the person folks look to for guidance. There will never be enough hours in a day, and you will increasingly look at your time as the single most valuable commodity. You will always have to ask- how much impact can I make in this slice of time? Is this thing someone asking me to do the best use of that commodity? Is it more important that I spend that time with my kids?
Conversely, your kids will need a lot of low value time from you as they get older. They need rides to sports, rides to class, they need direction on chores. At a certain point, you’ll realize that self care, so playfully bandied about by zoomers and millennials will literally become a life-or-death priority. You’ll have to make decisions about your time that are best guided by clear knowledge of your values.
I’m a bit surprised by this turn of events. I’d advise folks that are younger to recognize that this is a long process. Make sure you invest time early in figuring out your values, and start investing in them as soon as you have established your foundation. The teens are a time where your parenting gets complex. It may be less physically demanding, but you’ll likely spend a lot of time asking yourself if you are making the best choices possible.
Thanks for this comment. I was just about to close the tab, having read over the comments for the past couple days and finding mainly my age with kids my kids age or younger/childfree comments. Yours was the comment I was looking for and I see myself really asking these questions now about time management now. Actually as I type this out, my kids have converged on me in my office to play with random things around. Building the foundation of my values is something I never really did, or thought about, I always just approached life as a thing I did in the moment. I now see my inability to schedule-in time for exercise as the beginning of "time management" problems I'm already running into. What did you mean by, "values"? What kind of things should I be be figuring out now that my kids are 4 and 2? One thing that has gotten better is my marriage seems to be much more stable now that we're done "making babies", so I feel I am on the right track there--being nice, listening, being helpful beyond what I would do for myself.
There's not a lot you can do except be super mindful about where you spend your time and try to optimize your time management as much as you can. You basically can't waste any time, even the "time breaks" during work I acknowledge as a luxury "stress-free" period and try to make the most of by relaxing, clearing my head and not thinking about anything as much as possible.
I'm fortunate to be able to work from home which saves the time on commuting, but you'll want a private office to avoid interruptions, esp. important for any concentration-intensive work like programming. But there's no getting around it, all kids before school needs to be supervised at all times, either with day care, a full time in-house nanny or as it's now in my case my better half is effectively the full-time nanny during the work day. We're starting to see some light at the tunnel with the eldest just starting school but as our youngest is only 10 days old, it's going to be a long time before they're all in school. At the same time, you're going to miss this time you had when they are this young so you've also got to cherish the journey before the parental reprieve when you get to lock them in the school system during the day :)
The only tip I have for prospective parents is to get all your travelling, hobbies and interests out of the way pre-kids as your life after kids essentially is going to revolve around the kids and family commitments.
Another time saving habit I keep forgetting about (that differentiates from my childhood) since it's been eradicated from our daily lives is not watching TV, we only watch Netflix/Prime À la carte on occasion when we have downtime (i.e. kids are in bed), but the time you save is more productively spent on your interests and hobbies.
>Anyone else have the experience of having kids, getting a burst of energy, but of course all that energy goes directly back into the kids and house, and you have absolutely no life for 3-5 years or more? Because my kids are 2 and 4 and so far it's been 4 years of no life, no freelance clients, almost no learning/hobbies, just 35-40 hours a week of working as much as I can at the office and then everything is about the kids.
So, 35-40 hours of work a week, at an office, and then some family time, and then "at best" a couple hours of free time to work/study whatever you like, plus 7 hours of sleep.
Doesn't it sound better than what 99.9% percent of humanity had to endure for the latest 10,000 years and 80% of humanity still has (including a good 50-70% in the US itself)?
I believe the level of work and childcare you had to do some 8000 years ago to be quite a bit less than what it is now, since basically everything was communual.
Of course, you didn’t really have the same things to study either, so it might still work out positive.
Older guy with advice here. Spend as much time as you can preparing financially for the future. Your kids when they get older will care more about what you have done and what you can do for them and forget the fact that you missed spending time with them for honestly what are trivial events (while that may be true in some cases it's also I feel a myth created by writers and Hollywood and certain 'whiners' where it mattered).
What my kids (grown now) care about? That I can afford to give them money to help pay with their rent and any financial issues and that their Dad is not 'a loser'. Not whether I read them books or went to games or school events. It's all perspective and how you present it to them honestly.
But to your question yes it's a huge energy drain. Not going to get better either. Just try not to get sucked into things 'because that is what you do for kids and if you don't they will resent it and they will be screwed up'. Not true. Ok maybe in some edge cases true but many of us that are older grew up in a era where Dad and Mom were not our friends and we didn't want them to be either.
Just a word of warning here: my dad thinks along similar lines.
He's extremely self-centered. Anything good that happens to him is his doing, and anything bad is someone else's fault. And he has zero empathy.
After he had his third affair and my mother divorced him, my my brothers and I gradually cut ties with him. He is just not pleasant to be around.
He doesn't understand this. He thinks he is "owned" some love, after all the money and time he spent on us. He thinks my mother manipulated us (it's always someone else's fault).
I know this because after 10 years not talking to him, I allowed him back into my life. But it was out of pity and a bit of a sense of duty, so he could meet his grandson. I don't love him and my siblings positively hate him. He doesn't know my nephews, and probably never will.
Yikes.... that is a.... uhhhh.... interesting take on things.
One thing I do agree with is it helps to have your own retirement squared away. It will make it easier on your kids. But all those “trivial events” like reading to your kids... that is what they’ll remember. I remember my dad reading to me and singing me to bed every night. I love that I can pass that down to my kids.
Another older guy here. I can barely wrap my head around how much I disagree with this comment.
Spend your focus on acquiring money for your kids leads to kids who want money from you. Spend your focus on giving love to your kids leads to kids who want love from you.
I'm in the same situation kid-wise but I don't feel like I have no life. I do manage to get some time to myself to exercise and grab coffee with friends now and then.
The key to this is working remotely. Two major advantages that apply here:
1. Not wasting precious time on commuting (even 1 hour makes a huge difference)
2. Being way more flexible so I can run errands and house chores mid-day if I'm feeling unproductive and use the time I earned to catch up on work later.
If working for a distributed company is an option for you - I can highly recommend. If not - from what I see around me it gets way easier and more fun when your youngest is ~3 y/o.
For real. I have a 1 year old daughter, my wife stays home. I work remotely from a very nearby co-work space or from home some days. Life is still a constant challenge though, can't imagine having to be in an office 8+ hours plus commuting. My wife would lose it.
Commuting time is not necessarily wasted, at some point it was the only guaranteed private time I had as a father of 2. Sitting in the train, reading or just staring out the window, thinking.
I only have one kid, but after becoming a parent I'm possibly more productive than before. I've managed to do as much or more learning and work on side projects than without kids. And I readily confess this point was a big fear of mine.
The key for me was learning to actually manage time better. The challenges of having a kid have made me see how little time for other things I have now, which in turn made me manage that time better. Previously, I'd fall into the trap of "there's so much time" that I could easily waste it. A whole evening free, planning to work on a side project? First I do something else, get carried away, then figure it isn't worth working for just two hours, and so waste the whole evening. Now I'm much better at using the time. An hour free? I can do some actual coding. Fifteen minutes free? I won't start coding, but I'll maybe update the SSL certificates on my server or read an article I've been planning to.
Yes, there are periods where that doesn't work. There can be three days where I have less than an hour combined to myself. Or some nights of such bad sleep that my creativity is at a zero. Speaking of sleep, I also made a habit of sleeping more after having a kid, and honestly it's a productivity booster. Sleeping for 7-7.5 hours means I can accomplish more the next day than sleeping for 6 hours. Having the right day job definitely helps. I'm very lucky in that my commute is fifteen minutes door-to-door, and that I have a quiet working environment.
Even in the best case, you have to give up some things - I haven't seen a full length movie in two years, rarely watch any series, and it sure takes me longer to get through a book. But at least in my experience, becoming a parent doesn't have to mean putting all learning and personal/freelance projects on hold for a few years.
Curious about the age of your kid. Mine is 3-4 yrs old, the only one. My life has changed, a lot, over those years. What you describe was the first 18 months for me. The next year was hell with zero productivity. Then 5-day a week pre-K changed everything again. I hear it will change again in a few years even better. Hoping for it.
I read a sentence just before our first son was born that I’m glad I heard. “One day, your parents put you down and never picked you up again”. Every time my son woke me up in the night I would cherish every exhausted second of holding him.
Yep i was there. Picked up bike commuting to work because it replaced time driving, not required more time. I also started drawing because you can do it in short spurts, and you can do it anywhere.
The time commitment has changed for me but not quite enough where i can sit for hours and code something outside of work. My kids are 5 and 7
Guessing by your name that you are a climber. How did having kids affect that part of your life? I am a pretty devoted climber at the moment, to the point that I left my job to pursue it more. Eventually I want kids though. Obviously I know that will affect how much time I can spend climbing but I'm curious to what degree it affects most climbing parents.
My experience is it gets "easier", but it doesn't get "better". Some parents really relate to their kids as they grow up, but it never happened for me. If you've ever seen the movie Rushmore, remember Bill Murray's character and kids? Just, no common interest and he's obviously defeated and burdened by them. That's about what it's like for some of us.
Yep. There’s a refusal to acknowledge this in polite company, as it definitely contravenes the party line. But I can intimately relate as a single parent conscripted into this role by an addict partner. My job hitherto was first and foremost and essentially "provider", and that's what I'm set up for.
> then maybe I can think about something interesting to work on for a couple hours before sleeping
Those "golden hours" in the night or in the morning where I got to read or learn or do what I wanted were precious. As others suggest, getting some alone time by trading with your partner (if possible) is rejuvenating. But it's ok for you to not be as productive as you were before, because you have less time to be productive.
I have older kids and can tell you that it gets better. The kids get more independent. They want to do stuff with their friends. I have friends with teenagers and at that age they rarely want to spend time with you and you can leave them alone at home for hours (or even days).
Whenever I feel overwhelmed by the amount of time needed by my kids, I remind myself that soon enough they'll be teenagers and won't want to have anything to do with me. We're now halfway to that point with our oldest and I can say that with that much hindsight this advice has been spot on so far.
So yes they need lots of time now, but when they don't you'll miss it too.
"I remind myself that soon enough they'll be teenagers and won't want to have anything to do with me."
Is this really what you want? Because it depends on the relationship that you establish with your children. I found it such a pleasure to have teenagers who enjoyed being with me. I've always been kind of shocked by the desire of parents to be rid of their kids.
So, I have one 6-year-old. I will say the number one source of my hobby programming time over these past few years is sacrificed sleep, and while I feel it's been worth it, it's a finite resource. I'm in the back half of my 20's and feeling the age; I can't pull all-nighters like I used to. Thankfully, my son is also a little more self-sufficient now, so I find that if I've got some wholesome activities for him to throw himself into (Legos, visual art, writing, music, occasional movies) then I can find time to do my hobby programming. I also spend a lot of my spare brain cycles at work reading and having/developing ideas over time. Patience is key here - the idea for my current project came to me months ago, and it has taken a combination of reading, planning, waiting, and one all-nighter to get to the point where I can opportunistically use a 1-2 hour burst of energy in the morning / evening to accomplish something concrete. It's still not easy though, because at the end of the day you do need to relax and recuperate. I think I find this project relaxing to work on because I create a lot of pressure on myself to release it. If you don't have that pressure on yourself, you may not feel like it's worth it to use that time to work on a side project.
Excellent point! 2 or 3 times a year my wife offers to let me have a few hours off, but all I want to do is sit or lay down. Which confounds her, but she gets about 40x more work/kid free time than me, so kinda makes sense.
My kids are 7 and 1. I know what you mean about that burst of energy and motivation, and about how it gets plowed right back into the family and it’s needs. Frankly, I do little other than work and kids. And that’s okay. It’s a stage of life, and it will pass (and you’ll probably miss it when it does). It’s important to carve out some time for you and your spouse, for socializing, networking, etc., but be realistic about your expectations.
Dad of three kids + two dependents.
One child special needs, no other income to dependent on.
No degree, started in field at a late age after having two children.
First off, if I can find time anyone can.
I’ll be blunt. Sounds like you just don’t want to do it.
When you want to do something I mean you Really want to do something it will get done. Otherwise it requires discipline. Simple as that. No shame in saying you rather spend time with your family then work on a project.
I got married and had an “instant family” a wife and two sons who all needed my attention.
I made a rule shortly thereafter - no side projects. Anything we can’t afford from my main job, we don’t need. If I can’t learn skills that keep competitive while working 40-45 hours a week, it’s time to change jobs.
They are older now, but I still have the same rule. I spend my time on hobbies - not development side projects either for pay or resume building.
My kid is 2, so I've only had 2 years of this, but my experience is identical. I didn't get started in software until ~a year before she was born, so I definitely feel like I'm behind professionally because I simply don't have the time and energy to do all things it's implied you need to, to stay relevant. Socially, we've largely become outcasts—most parties don't start till 7 or 8 (otherwise known as bedtime for us), and we've only just been able to get our daughter to accept an evening babysitter for a couple hours at a time. I don't mind as much as I'm a fairly solitary person, but it's driving my wife insane. I'm lucky enough that I have a few very different projects to work on at work and enough room to play with them as I see fit to keep that side of my brain somewhat satisfied—if I didn't have that I think I would go insane!
If you are trying to work a full time job and then do side work on top of that, it won't happen with kids. Your full time job is even more important when you have kids because that's all the time you are going to devote to your career. You have to be in a place that's interesting and where learning happens at the office.
As for whether you have no life, well, I think this is life. It's far more fulfilling than when I spent my time outside of the office futzing around on somewhat productive hobbies that were ultimately not life changing.
The hardest part has been staying close with friends. I'm lucky there in that a bunch of my friends had kids at the same time so we all made the transition at once. Suddenly instead of going out to bars we all want to hang out on a Saturday afternoon with our kids. Without that I genuinely don't know how we'd keep our adult social life going.
Dad of a newborn here. I had to adapt. I had to make time for things that I want to learn. When I am on the train, now I take a book or even get work done on my laptop. I had to also cut down my netflix time to zero. I almost have no time left for physical exercise. Planning to fix that by getting a treadmill at home.
One time I was watching some retrospective about the TV show MASH with my dad. I asked him what he thought about the show. He said he wasn't too familiar with it. I was surprised because the retrospective made it seem like MASH was extremely popular and a cultural institution for years. My dad said that, due to raising three young children during the time MASH was on, he missed most of the series since my parents had no time for TV, music, and movies. Later on my dad did get back into popular culture after the children were older.
I am now in a similar place with my own young child. I am totally drained after putting her down for bed and fall asleep within an hour or two. I'm not at a place where it's gotten better for me, but I know it gets better. Hope that helps.
Edit: typing out MASH correctly messes with the formatting on this site!
My kids are 1 and 3 and I feel like I get plenty of work done still. That was my biggest fear as I’m running a startup but don’t feel a significant difference on that front from before. My spouse is very supportive otherwise that would be much harder.
Oh and one of the biggest surprises for me was how much free time there was immediately post baby. I actually got a lot of work done because there was nothing else to do and I was bored out of my mind (both of our kids slept a ton in the weeks after being born)
As for personal activities? Definitely impacted, but only ones that took me out of the house on my own. Otherwise my gaming habits haven’t changed and I fit cycling in by taking my oldest kid to school on bike. Trying to just find new hobbies I can do with my kids instead.
I have a 1 y/o and can see that this is the normal for a long while but it’s where I want my available time spent. I shifted my focus towards managing a remote team to build my ideas instead of building them myself. Truth is I quit giving a damn about knowing the lastest tech stacks long ago. I have more interest in building a business. Programming is not my profession, taught myself as a means to an end. So this shift is a good one that I needed to make. I just have a DIY approach when possible. The best thing is my time commitment is a daily review & feedback email and the other project management tasks. The down side is it comes with a cost; albeit quite affordable due to remote labor cost.
My answer is yes: I give that up, for now. My health —- and thus a proper amount of sleep —- is more important to me than side projects. I intend on o ‘sit this one out’: wait a few years until my kid is old enough so that I have more time again. Before I had a kid,I already prepared myself mentally for this possibility.
This works for me because work is already plenty interesting. Things can always be more interesting, but I have chosen to optimize for my health instead. I also see kids as an investment: raising them takes a lot of energy and pain, but long term return is increased happiness, reduced loneliness. Think about how life would look like when you are 70 and have no kids.
I made a change to go to bed when the kids do, i.e. around 8-8:30 and wake up naturally, which happens around 4-5. This gives me the same number of hours to myself as if I were going to bed later, but: they feel more productive because I am freshly rested, I can sip my coffee, and don't fall to the same distractions as at night. At night I feel my brain is a bit tired and more susceptible to just giving up and watching a bunch of TV or playing games. Also, at night there is no hard stop so I often end up eating into valuable sleeping hours.
Easier said than done though, been meaning to do this for 20 years and only managed to do it now.
I have a 1-and-a-half year old. I'm very lucky because I work from home, my wife doesn't work and I'm in a good work-life balance situation (good company).
The incredible advantage of working at home and being a Software Developer is that I don't need to sit at a computer all the time to do my job. Good chunk of it is thinking through a problem, I can do that while I lay on the floor and let my baby crawl on me ;)
That being said, I can relate. I end up an entire week where all I did was work, get groceries, get other stuff from somewhere else.
I did try to optimize my time though: when I'm in the washroom, sitting on the throne, I read 5-10 pages of a book instead of my RSS feed (I leave that to the moments when I'm too tired). That over the course of 1 years adds up, I almost finished 4 books, which is a lot with a kid!
I got a tablet to stream my PC there, so that I can play a few videogames when in bed, however most of the time I just fall asleep or play 30 minutes at most. I need 10 hour to get decent rest (the baby moves/do stuff during the night. Yes she sleeps with us, otherwise we would get 1 hour of sleep).
Audiobooks have proven very helpful, I listen to those when going to buy groceries, I manage to keep growing while I wait to get back my time.
What I'm missing the most is time with my wife. I mean, we stay all day together, but we rarely get to play something together. We recently made a big purchase: a board game table. This should allow us to play when the baby naps and keep the board game set, so hopefully we can go back to play board games without having to wait 4-5 years.
That's all the "wisdom" I have to offer. I bet you already figured out all of it since you are further in the parenting voyage, but in case you missed it, that's my 2-cents, hope it's of some help.
That being said, I do love my baby. Some weeks I really need that 1 hour of gaming or reading, otherwise I go crazy, but most of the time is either work or kids.
Some weeks I just need 10 minutes hugging with my wife, to recover lack of "us" time
Those years are intense. It gets better after age 6 or so. I remember when I moved into this house and the neighbors across the street had one age 8 and triplets age 5. When I saw Rick across the street in his front yard, that man just always looked tired :) Mine was 2.5 at the time.
Anyway, it gets better, and interaction gets more intellectually stimulating. Do your best to enjoy every day as it comes at you, because all too soon you will be parallel parking between orange cones in a big, empty parking lot, and soon after paying tuition bills to the fanciest school they can get into.
Totally no regrets. And I don't blame anyone for anything. In fact I love my life with the kids and wouldn't trade it for anything. It just feels so surreal sometimes.
A few things helped me
- part time child care/day care
- putting grandparents to work, especially the first few months
- wife cut her work hours
- lots of YouTube as background distraction. I haven't seen any ill effects from screen time.. in fact he actually knows his colors, alphabet and numbers and he's only 18 months
- get as much done during naptimes as you can
It slowly gets better... Definitely a hit on productivity but less wasted time. I'm able to get at least 2-3 3h blocks of time a week to work on projects.
I have twins, they are 4, I do almost nothing other than work and be a dad. I struggled with that fact for a little while, but accepted it over time. It takes 100% of my effort to do my job, be a dad, take care of the house/cars/meals/etc, and fit in workouts and sleep. I typically go to bed immediately after them. My workouts are “dad workouts”, finely tuned brief basement fitness routine to try and stay fit enough to be a dad and somewhat mitigate the effects of a desk job.
If you can afford it, get comfortable with delegating. I also have a two and four year old. I have someone come over and do the dishes, laundry, pick up the toys and clean the house a few times a week. It has been a huge relief and now I get to spend way more one on one time teaching and playing with them. I can't say I understand what it's like to be a working Father. I'm a stay at home Mom with with a debilitating disease that can take up a lot of time and energy.
A good motto with kids is, if you can afford it outsource it. Part of what the US does not do well is provide a basic level of outsourcing (day care) to those who cannot afford to.
You are not alone. I also do have serious imposter syndrome. Not about work but about not being a good enough father. But as with work imposter syndrome, my head knows I am probably ok, it is meant to be hard. But I feel guilty for any time I spend on my computer and not playing with the kids.
However I always wonder how these robot parents do it, those that seem to be able to raise 4 kids, time to volunteer for PTA and kids sports, work full time, go to a gym, have hobbies, socialise, tidy house and look impeccable doing it.
When daughter number 1 came along it was hard. Cut down socialising. Gaming and coding only after 11 pm if not already asleep.
But then number 2 came along and it was near impossible. No socialising, no gaming, no exercise, not enough sleep, and no coding.
Though since I work as a contractor I have often taken a month or two off between contracts to both spend time with my kids and catching up with new tech. And lately not had full-time clients so been able to some personal coding during day time hours. Also if I have a client in London I have some me-time for coding on my hour-long train commute.
Though in September the youngest started school and suddenly the house is so much quieter. And daily routines are so much easier. We may resurface soon.
100% in your exact shoes. With girls that are 9, 4, and 2, it is unquestionably the 4 and 2-year old that zap the vast majority of "extra" time, energy, and attention that could otherwise be going to many other things, such as hobbies, more time to exercise, hang out outside, think, start a company as a side hustle, you name it.
In terms of actual "available" hours to do what I want, it looks a bit like this:
Work ~10 hours (assumes some amount of commuting, getting ready, etc.)
Evening/dinner/cleanup/nighttime routines (~2-3 hrs)
Sleep ~7-8 hours
That leaves around 3-4 hours per day. Weekends are actually similar since that is a team effort of running the household and parenting along with my wife (And she needs a break too!). 3-4 hours sounds like a lot but the problem is that do you want to immediately go from activity to activity with no pause, no recharge time, no time to just "do nothing" and take a break from being around other people, tending to others' needs, work, etc. People need "recharge" time which might include resting, thinking, reading, or otherwise laying down and relaxing, with a spouse or not, or with a movie/show or not.
I can relate! I'm 13 months in with my first and while I love him to pieces and am very happy to be a father, ensuring he's cared for and gets what he needs at all times while also being there for my wife eats up a great deal of time and energy. I don't have any answers yet but hear similar things from friends a few years further ahead. The answer seems to be to just keep muddling along as best we can!
You're not alone. My kids are 4 and 9, and I've got a similar experience. Used to try and take on freelance work, but after missing some commitments, I've stopped doing that now as I don't have the time or energy for it, and take on very little freelance work now.
Still have the desire to build stuff and learn new technologies, and find myself watching random tutorials on YouTube sometimes late at night if I don't feel like watching anything on NetFlix.
It's been a challenge to get my kids into a good bedtime routine, so by the time they are asleep, I've usually got little desire to sit back down in front of the computer and actually work on anything else, including actually working through those tutorials.
Hoping things get easier when they get older and I have more time to myself again (and hopefully more energy) to work on side projects. Combined with working on stuff in my day job that isn't particularly fulfilling either for most of this year, it's a bit of a depressing predicament in some ways.
I'm right there with you. At about 915, after stand up and coffee I have this spike of energy that gets me into work and makes me think 'tonight I'm going to put aside two hours for x'. Where x is side project, exercise, date night, whatever.
By 7:30pm that energy is a vague memory. Often the best I can manage is not falling asleep while I put them to bed.
People talk about crowding out the bad with the good: don't make time for things, just do them and let the world mold around what you love. In this stage of life though, the consequence of don't this can be massively damaging.
Kids this age are relentless, if you push hard for yourself it can be very hard to recover. But in line with other comments, I can feel the change coming. At 2 and 4, the sleep is better and their needs on us are becoming less.
I can see the light at the end of the tunnel and this helps me recognise that right now just isn't the time to push hard.
I have 3 kids, all 4 and under. Exact same situation and I feel that exact same feeling. It's rare my spouse and I to find free time for hobbies. I find myself with a drive to work on things or learn that I never had before I had kids, but hardly anytime to do any of it.
I'm in a fortunate situation of having both my parents and my in-laws so close and that my kids love to have sleep overs with them. Those seem to be the only times where I have a decent amount of time to dive into something, but even then, there are still up-keep responsibilities and a desire to just rest during those times that causes that window of time to disappear faster than I'd like.
I don't have any advice to offer but just an answer to the question on if anyone else is in the situation you described. Just know you're not alone :)
My kid is in that age range and I'm going through the same thing as you.
I wake up at 4AM, walk the dog, get to work before 7 AM (some days as early as 5:30), work until 4 PM, get home at 5 PM, play with kid and eat dinner, get kid ready for bed and read to them, and then I have 30 min - 1 hour before going to bed. By this time I'm exhausted and when I try to do anything technical fall asleep 10 minutes in.
Our weekends revolve around my kid 100%. It is rare for me to be doing something besides playing with them or doing errands with them. I'm starting to see some independence though.
I really enjoy playing with my kid and it is a wonderful experience, but I've gotten out of shape and there are a lot of things I want to work on but never can. No hobbies right now outside of being a parent.
My local gym watches kids for up to 2 hours a day M-Sa. If you have similar options and want to do laptop work on a treadmill you could have an extra 54 hours per month to work or just, sit in a hot tub/sauna and not have to do anything, which is nice.
I have two kids (roughly 3 years apart), though compared to other parents, mine slept pretty well very early on.
I had to scale back on hobbies, but haven't given them up.
I wrote two books while I had small children at home, mostly while they slept and in the subway during commutes. I paused doing my favorite sport (table tennis) for about two years, and resumed afterwards.
It was harder for my wife, who breast fed (and my younger child wouldn't accept anything else). She had a harder time leaving the house on her own.
Wisdom is hard to come by from a sample size of one. I'd just recommend to reserve one evening a week for things you used to like to do, and do even if you don't feel it in the moment. Best to leave the house for it.
This is me now. I’m working on https://losthobbies.com because I think it’s a real problem for people. It’s hard to get back to your hobbies and interests when life gets in the way.
It helps to make friends with other families and then hae pact of "one have all kids one day, other have all kids another day". Possibly with sleep overs.
Plus it will get better. The older they are, the easier it is. 2 and 4 is probably arouns low point.
I have two boys, ages 4 and 7. Here's my take: raising kids is not about you. It is a selfless thing that we do as humans because our DNA tells us so. Like others said, it will get a lot better. Just remember that what you do now builds the platform for your relationship with them in the future.
Believe me, I know how you feel. I have a basement full of half-finished projects that stalled out seven years ago. But, I've replaced those things with two little mini-mes that love football and trucks and travel. Looking back on the last seven years, I wouldn't trade them for the world. It's been awesome and it's getting a lot better.
Sure. That's just how things are when you have kids. You'll get better at management and they'll need less attention overall, but that's it you got your main project running now.
In the other hand, I never had such a fruitful experience. I can teach my kids. I can make them respect my daddy time. And I can let them help with the chores.
It all comes down to honesty. Honesty bro yourself, your partner, and your kids. If a side project is what you want to do. Tell everyone and make a schedule. The thing is, even if kids are the most fragile and beautiful part of a family they are but a part and need to understand that at some point.
It might be more difficult for you as you have 2 kids, but my approach is that there's a lot of interesting stuff to work on and learn that might align with your own kids' interests.
As for myself, just to name a few; I got the opportunity to build big stuff with lego, I learnt how to draw, got to know a lot more about mythology to tell him stories, honed my cooking skills, I even tried golfing (it was boring for both of us).
My kid at this moment is only 5, but I can say that my interests and myself as a human is greater than before. I might have delved deeper into some stuff if I didn't have him, but I think my perspective would be smaller.
Mine are 4 and 5 (with 13 months apart). I'm now BARELY holding my head above water. In terms of time allocation it's getting a bit better in the sense that I have more small time pockets for myself. But on the other hand it's getting more complex also (extra-curricular activities, etc.)
Sleep: it's better in the sense that If I get lucky and they sleep all night in their beds without coming to mine, I sleep for 7 hours, if not, then well, I don't sleep all that well.
Work: it's super hard and I work a few hours after everyone is sleep. I have tried waking up earlier but I'm using that time to try and hit the gym.
I guess the Indian system of living with your family comes to some use here. Kids are entertained and taken care of by their grandparents, cousins, etc. ever so often that parents do get a decent bit of time off.
It might be a similar feeling to getting a burst of energy late at night, right before bed time. Feeling like you're now ready to work on that project, but alas, you need to get up in the morning, so it will have to wait until another day.
The truth is, you weren't going to do that thing anyway. That burst of energy is an illusion. It's a defence mechanism to make you feel like you would be an extremely productive person if it weren't for your obligations. In my experience, if you take away the obligations from that scenario, the burst of energy disappears.
One day you might become a granddad. My socks, that I am wearing right now, have embroidered: "I love my grandpa".
You do have to lose yourself a bit for a while especially when the little loves are very young but there are so many repayments in kind if you notice them. Try and describe the first time your child looked into your eyes and you felt loved ... really, really loved and wanted and the best person in the world ever because you are dad and the little darling is ensuring that if mum is not around then you are the absolute dogs nadgers 8)
My learning / hobbies turned around a bit. I now like to read stuff about kids, their mental development, hoe to stimulate their growth etc. I love it.
Yes, it's very different from the hobbies I used to have, but for my brain, making the kids a hobby/'project' works pretty well.
I do kinda agree with another commenter here that it does somewhat sound like you simply need more challenging / interesting work. My four day workweek is fun / challenging enough that I don't really need to do anything similar (i.e. write software) as a side project.
We have kids of 6, 3 and 0 and that's my experience.
It took some adjustment but now we have.. I really enjoy it. Playing games with my kids is fun, seeing them playing with their friends. Baking.
Our gym has a creche so I can still lift weights, read manga and get enough sleep (when the youngest allows it).
I don't code for fun anymore, but honestly I haven't done that for a long time. I've spent 30 years on computing, I keep up to date via work so my spare time is spent learning in other areas: history, the natural world, math, politics, physiology.. whatever interests me..
Just enjoy the time with them. You being a great dad is the biggest project you will ever work on. I'm not exaggerating. These kids will become adults and the good job you are doing now will pay off big time.
You will get your time back in due time. If you screw this up now, you wont forgive yourself. When you went to college (assuming you did), you probably focused on getting good grades. This is the same. Just get a ~4.0 in parenting, the rewards are massive not only for you but for society as a whole.
I can offer that I, too, have a 4 year old and a 2 year old and I’m often in bed at 9pm because I am completely wiped. I can offer that you are not alone.
The other thing I’ve learned is that all (and I’m banking on) is that none of these stages is forever, because right now I know I can’t keep this up. Like when my first child didn’t sleep through the first 14 months we thought we were going to lose our minds and then...he did. And it all changed.
So at the very least, this part is brutal but it will, at the very least, change.
My daughter will be 1 in a few weeks. It’s exactly that. Long hours at work, and at home nonstop her and house. I have about three to four hours a day, in the evening between 9p and 1am, to do something. That something is talk to / hang out with my wife, work on personal stuff, learn, shower, take a dump, etc. It is what it is, and works only if I have a schedule. I hope it gets better. It’s still definitely worth it, but really hard. Weekends are even worse, schedule-wise.
That is _exactly_ my life. Wake up early, kids, run out of the house, busy office day, get home and it's all kids until everyone is settled in bed and asleep by around 9:00pm (sometimes later). Then I clean up the disaster that was made in the house during the day. Now it's 10:30pm and I spend 1.5 hours trying to do something I want/need to do. Wash up at midnight and start getting to bed. Might be asleep by 1:00am. Rinse and repeat.
AS they get older things might turn up better but yeah, once you have kids you are now only waiting to die while preparing your kids to carry the mantle of future.
My kids are 3, 5, and 7. I feel your situation exactly. Luckily, I’m an early riser and have my creative bursts before most people are even in the office. I’ve learned to make my “me” time a priority but early enough that even on the weekends I’m still present and helping carry my share of the load around the house.
I’m usually up around 4:30 and have the dog walked by 5:30.
Summer in the Pacific Northwest means I’ve got plenty of light by 6 and I go hit the archery range or take the dog for a longer hike through the woods.
In the winter it’s pitch black til 7 so I go to the office earlier.
Go to my office between 5:30-7:30 where I’m going to focus on learning something new, side project, hobby project, etc. til 9:30.
Gym at noon (most days), home by 5:30. I don’t even try and do mentally taxing work after we get the kids to bed (around 7:30). Usually it’s helping cleanup, hanging with the wife, TV, and asleep by 9:30ish.
Because life is life, some mornings I’ve got the dog walked and am in the office by 5, sometimes I’ve got a meeting at 8, or have to take kids to school.
On weekends I do the exact same morning routine except I’ll be on the computer at home and usually no gym.
There are plenty of times where I’ve got a good flow going and my alarm buzzes at 5pm and I just have to tear myself away and get home.
Traveling is what kills me. My morning routine sets up my whole day and gets my head where it needs to be. When I’m traveling for work it’s not so bad because I hit the hotel gym and usually get even more morning time to myself. Traveling with the family (like over the holidays when I’m staying at the in-laws) leaves me jumping out of my skin without the physical and mental exercises I’m used to. I haven’t cracked that nut yet, but I’m really trying to not be such a dick about it to the wife this year.
EDIT:
I forgot to mention the most important part! I’m definitely still working on this, myself. I found that really jumping in and ACTUALLY participating with the kids is a salve for that mental itch that seems to not be getting scratched when I am obsessing over something in the back of my mind. Building LEGO, kicking ass at Guess Who, etc. can still be pretty fun if we just get over ourselves and let go. Or if I REALLY still want to take the dog in the woods, bring the kids with and it’s a whole new adventure.
2 kids here (10 months old and 2 years old). The early morning schedule has been key for me too, it’s the only way I’ve found to get a consistent 8-9 hr workday in while still being around to help with breakfast, preschool dropoff, and dinner. I try to be in bed by 8pm, read for 15 mins to help quiet my mind, and try to be asleep by 8:30pm. I get up around 4:30am and can usually get a solid 1.5-2 hours of focused work time in before the kids get up around 6:30am.
Haven’t found much time for anything other than parenting + work, but I switched to biking for a portion of my commute so that gives me 40 mins/day of exercise every weekday (except when traveling).
Your point about participating with the kids also resonates with me. It’s easy to be grumpy/impatient after a tough week at work followed by a long night of multiple wake ups, but some of the best days I’ve had since my 2nd was born are when I manage to hit the mental reset button in the morning and get myself back into a state of mind where I can still have a good time with my kids.
Edit: also, I’ve found that getting up at least an hour before the kids do, even if I haven’t slept well and in principle should probably keep sleeping, helps me keep my sanity.
I don't have kids. But I have three generations now of friends with kids. What you are going through is completely normal. Small children take everything you can give and then some. You have another couple of years and it'll get a lot easier. First off you won't need to watch them constantly. And then they get friends of their own and you'll get some free time back.
I have a 1 and a three year old and I’m going through the same thing — if you make a good tech salary, a live-in au pair is surprisingly affordable compared to full time day care for two kids and it has helped us so much. Not just for day care while you’re at work, but just little things like watching the kids for a 15 minutes while you run to the store or if you just need a break.
My three kids are now 17, 15, and 12. And yes, of course it gets easier as they get older. They learn to do more and more by themselves, want to enjoy their friends, and grow more independent. By the time they get there, you'll start to miss when they were younger and needed you more! smile
So, just enjoy it while you can. It's one of the BEST parts and you'll be happy you did.
Kids take time away, but it is what it is. Because of family circumstances and the ebb and flow of business I’ve become the primary caregiver of my 3 children, all under 5 years of age.
I’ve put my professional life on hold to kick start my children’s lives. I fought against it until I realized this was an opportunity I’ll experience only once in my life for a relatively short amount of time.
Same for me. Kids are 1.5 and 4. I used to do so much just hacking around, and now it's non-existent.
As far as bedtime/sleep stuff: I pretty much just wind down after the kids go to bed. Meditate if I haven't got that in yet (or maybe do a shorter session if I have and am feeling stressed). Read. Then try to get to bed early enough to give myself an 8-ish hour sleep window.
I have a 5 and an 8, and I can tell you things get better in terms of time savings and enjoyment at a few stages:
-Potty training
-Social play with other kids
-Full time school
-Reading
-Interest in Legos and games
I am still coming out of an eight year productivity valley (and my wife's of course was worse), but as Paul says, it's worth it. For me two fun things are when they beat me at a game for the first time and when they say, "Look what I made!"
I really just look forward to the day when my kid can be unsupervised in another part of the house without an appreciable probability of some stupid coin-swallowing, furniture-toppling or power plug licking death.
Right there with you triangleman. My guess is that PG wouldn’t have written this when his kids were your kids age. A 2 years olds life is 100% dependent on your attention still.
Now I can comfortably look at the tired in a new born parents eyes and say been there. Hopefully I will get to the PG point when my kids are both in school.
You pretty much sum up what I am going through. I'm optimistic things will improve. I think one of the more practical aspects of this essay was about "work finding a way". For me, that means an hour to 2 of quality focused time some evenings to counteract the brain fog during the day that makes me less productive.
I was very happy to be a Dad. Up til around age 8 I was 100% focus on family / work. Side projects, consulting, friends, video games tanked.
It's gotten a bit better. (My daughter just turned 10) It's more like 95%. And each year I get a sliver more back. I think that in a few years more it should shift even more dramatically.
Yep. That’s about it. That feeling of not being able to do something, but not being able to do nothing. I keep imagining that when they grow up and leave home I’ll have an almighty outburst of productivity as I get cracking on all the thoughts and ideas I’ve had that haven’t made it far up the priority list.
Your story is my story. And I am positive the story of most dads. When you have young kids to take care of, you absolutely have no life.
However as my kids grow older and they need less care for daily basic stuff, I find myself get more motivated. I have to provide for them so I am absolutely motivated to be more productive.
For the first few years I spent more time thinking about projects rather than actually implementing them. Often this pays of in the long run as you have a much better design by the end and save all that wasted time when you change part way through a project. Plus it made me feel better.
I have twin babies who are 2 years old. No matter now much you plan, nothing prepares you for life after a child is born. I agree that you do not get time for 2-3 years after they are born, but weekends become better as children become older and are able to play on their own.
Agree completely. Have found that, in addition to the bursts of energy, I've honed my already-refined productivity and organizational habits to the extreme as a result. Hoping these will retain usefulness/accuity after we get through the early childhood years.
Your story is a clone of mine (4 and 3 by now)
I don't tend to hear others with older kids as the only to know it is to live it. So my cent is to wait patiently for the next stage. Until then enjoy this one till disgust, so you will not miss something nice.
I recently saw a study that showed your happiness goes down relative to adults with no kids for most of the 18 years they live with you but then goes up after they leave
There have been a series of studies demonstrating that happiness of parents with l children at home is lower than non-parents.
However, if I remember correctly, parents with children at home also tend to have higher degrees of life satisfaction or meaningfulness, even with lower happiness.
Think about having kids as like starting your own start up which you want to invest in for years to come and will very likely IPO with huge investment one day.
Time passes fast, you will have plenty of time, you would want to spend time with them but they will be busy with their stuff. First 3 years are the busiest.
From my experience, I also had energy before having kids, but otherwise I can relate. Kids are just super high maintenance in their first years of life.
Your kids are more interesting and fulfilling than any work project you'll ever do. If that's not the case, pour that energy into making your kid project more interesting.
Where are you getting this overly broad statement from? Don't imply your own particular experience is what even comes close to being the case in other situations. People are different. What floats your boat or my boat is not universal or even close to that. There are plenty of people doing plenty of interesting things (or for that matter ordinary things) that are way more exciting than 'the kids'. And no the answer is not to pour energy into 'making your kids project more interesting' either. I'd even say it's the opposite. Don't feel you need to hand feed kids the experience. A parent has many responsibilities not just giving 100% to their children (or even close to that) the way I see it (and once again from my experience going through that with children).
Now that said sure if I worked at a job that I didn't enjoy or did unimportant work that was boring I'd probably think it's pretty exciting and find kids very interesting.
I empathize, having been in a very similar position, but it's time for some tough love. You need to grow up and deal with your life as it is now.
You are getting 35-40 hours a week of structured time at the office away from your kids and you're complaining about not having enough time to absorb your "bursts of energy"? Only a "couple hours" to think about something interesting before getting 7 hours of healthy sleep?
You aren't having "absolutely no life". On which planet do people get to have 2 tiny kids, work full time, then have a jam-packed evening full of "freelance clients, learning/hobbies and interesting stuff"? Your expectations are just fabulously off-beam.
The good news is that you're at Peak Kid in terms of how much time they take - in a couple years they'll be at school, and a while later, you'll be looking at them wistfully wishing they needed you to entertain them all evening like they used to. I have 2 kids (13 and 16) and while they are not stereotypical sullen teens, they are almost too capable of entertaining themselves. One of the secrets of parenting is to let yourself enjoy each stage for what it is as far as that's possible (modulo scary events like illnesses and injuries and so on), not sit there waiting impatiently for the Awesome Next Phase of parenting when the workload is lighter or the kids are somehow "better".
I would suggest that if you have the luxury of a structured 35-40 hour work week (who is looking after your kids then, I wonder) that you find a job that can absorb the bulk of those bursts of energy and doesn't leave you thinking you need to work on something interesting for a couple hours. I joined a startup with a fun algorithmic problem and would often think idly about NFA matching and the like while watching the kids in the early AM (my wife called me, mildly exasperated, "notebook guy").
This is something nobody can answer for you. Kids are all different. Some are low maintenance, some are extremely high maintenance, and it's a roll of the dice as to what you can expect. My kid was extremely high maintenance in his first few years, and remains high maintenance for his age to this day (he's 15). So for the first 5 years or so both career and personal life were basically put on hold, and our marriage very nearly fell apart because we felt trapped. I have friends whose kids just do the right things all on their own though, so I know for a fact not all kids are high maintenance.
2 kids (3 and 2months old). Since having our first, combination 3 new jobs, 3 international vacations, countless domestic travel and daytrips, both working and continuing to progress in both careers. My comp has grown ~3x while my wife ~50% (2 mat leaves). We both learn more now than we ever dedicated to before having kids.
I have 3 kids, 1.5 year apart, and I can completely relate. Not sure what kind of wisdom I can give you though... besides getting a baby sitter as often as possible
However, I teach up to 18 hours a day with children of various ages. I've done this for 22 years.
I also have been the de facto babysitter for my family since I was 14. Kids in my home almost constantly.
The #1 thing I've learned is that kids love to help,
. If you are busy and shush them away then they'll cause havoc. Involve them ever so slightly and you can continue your task.
Realizing this was the biggest boon to my productivity that I've had in my life. Sometimes the kids can increase your output by utilizing their curious/helpful minds or attempting to apply your thoughts in their space.
I'm sure this would be different if it were my children, but I constantly see parents making the mistake of thinking that their thoughts/activities and mutually exclusive to their children's thoughts/activities. They're not.
It does take time to learn to engage and frame your thoughts/activities, but children are only a pure attention sucker if you treat them as a distraction.
> kids love to help [ ... ] Involve them ever so slightly and you can continue your task.
I think it can be a mindset or awareness thing, but some people are also resistant to involving anyone else in their stuff.
It requires having an attitude where you believe others might have have something worthwhile to contribute, and it requires exercising faith in that person. And thinking through how they might contribute and/or what reasonable limits are. Some people aren't willing to do that, and they tend to shut people out so they keep control. (This applies to both kids and adults.)
IMHO (as a non-parent), it might actually be way better parenting, too, if you can get this right. People often respond well if you give them a stake in things and responsibility for something (assuming it's not genuinely more than they can handle). You're telling them you believe in them and giving them an opportunity to grow. Many people will take that opportunity. And if you always avoid giving them such opportunities, you're implicitly suggesting you don't think they can handle it. Developmentally, I think a kid needs to have these experiences where they see that they are trusted with things, learn to step up, see that their contributions fit in somewhere, and see how to do more of that. If they don't, they are probably going to go out into the world not really expecting anyone to want their contribution.
I think that's the most succinct way to put it: Give children stake in your interests.
It doesn't even have to be direct. If I'm working on a lesson (I teach technology), I can ask the kid to come up with some ideas, help clean the room, decide on what to have for lunch, help me grade assignments, etc...
At home it's the same. Help clean, ask if they can help me find a mistake I made, ask about food, ask them to comb my hair (funny, but kids 3-10 love doing this for some reason), ask them to put some music on for us, etc...
Of course it doesn't always stick and the kid wants some other attention, but when it _does_ stick I find it to be as beneficial as the time lost.
Great insight and I agree. I would add that you don't need to believe your child have something to contribute to involve him/her.
They are little brats and don't know shit, they get discracted by anything and so clumsy they are dangerous to themselves! I'm talking about 1 to 3 years old.
You have to involve them so they can have a chance to learn and grow. You are the most important, strongest, knowledgeable person in they little world and they want to be part in everything you do. How could one be so heartless to ignore this most basic and pure need and not involve them in everything? :) Part of parenting is dancing on that fine edge where they can excel, want more, able to fail and try again without hurting themselves too much and develop their skills and interest in a safe environment.
I do this often with my little humans and we're doin great. But there are caveats:
1. If you cannot priorize having fun and teaching your children over the actual thing you are doing, you gonna have a bad time. Filling the dishwasher with a 2 yr old? You will spend 45 min on it while laughing 10 times, having a heart attack two times and maybe break a chip off a plate or break a cup now and then. Of course you can do it alone in 15 minutes if you could get rid of him/her... As soon as you get frustrated by the slowness and just want the task done you've lost. There is no task for you other than to teach them and you need to incorporate your daily chores into this task. This is of course fuckin' hard and sometimes impossible and a great source of frustration, shouting and regret.
2. Kids add a time multiplier for everything you do together and for he first 4 years it's gonna be less than one. After that there is an ever incerasing chance for them to be actually useful and reduce the time needed for a task. But the catch is : if you let them empty and fill the dishwasher regularly at 2 yr old and endure the long task they will help later on and you will benefit. If you don't they won't be interested in helping when they are 6,8,12 years old and their help would actually make a difference.
Yes! My kids love me fixing stuff, so I can multiplex minding them, fixing up the house and, in a sense, educate them all at the same time. Obviously it takes longer with them spilling tools everywhere, but chores get done and the kids are happy
Speaking as someone who was raised like that as well, you are doing your kids a great service. I feel pretty comfortable being the handyman in my house all because my dad involved me with his projects from a very young age.
I've noticed this when seeing my sister's kid at her home. Cooking is hard for her because her son constantly wants her attention. For a while (when he was 2ish), he really wanted to help cook. Obviously giving him a kitchen knife or letting him near a hot stove/oven would be a terrible idea, so instead she would give him a big bowl, a spatula, some flour, a used spice shaker that she'd put flour or something colorful in, and have him sit on the floor in the kitchen and "help cook". Sure, he made a bit of a mess, but it wasn't hard to clean up, kept him occupied, and made him feel a part of the action.
> The #1 thing I've learned is that kids love to help
This this this a 1000 times. Feeling needed, learning to help, and being rewarded with happy words and a clear sense of success and achievement is like a hard drug.
Every children will lean towards different activities; involving them will need a slightly different approach; and you will need to learn patience while they learn, so it's not a trivial task, but IME if you work it out, it works wonders even with the most challenged (or challenging) kids.
That's kinda how my parents managed me as well, and it definitely paid off for everyone involved. Holding the flashlight for dad at 5 years old turned into helping build the car port by 10.
My parents got free labor they would have otherwise needed a pricey contractor for, and I got practical skills that have helped me to this day.
So my experience was the opposite. I came in expecting this great "chemical change" where suddenly the world revolved around my kids and their future.
Well the latter part is true: my world now revolves around them and their futures. But chemical change? No. It's just the responsibility I have now. There's never a break.
It's all-encompassing. I mean, it's survivable, I can deal with it, and I do the best I can, but, while it's certainly not PC to say, I regret it. I thought it would be great, and it's not.
What would I be doing so much better with my time had I not had kids? I don't know. Probably nothing. But it doesn't change the fact. I was happier before.
This article made me angry. That's great that Paul has such a wonderful experience. I'm happy for him. But don't act like you can speak for everyone.
Thank you for sharing that. PG doesn't seem to realize there's a tremendous survivorship bias in what you read about kids due to the taboo of saying you regret it.
I know many parents and there is a giant unspoken difference between the ones that truly love it, and the ones that are just hanging on and trying to survive. Thanks for being honest, it is way more refreshing to hear than anything paul had to say.
Indeed. Also, it's important to remember that a lot of these rainbows and unicorns don't apply to people unwillingly forced into single parenthood (my situation). That's a very rare situation for males, so it kind of gets the short shrift on this forum, but, we're out there...
I had this experience too. Being isolated with that amount of responsibility is a huge burden. Not many people actually get it... It's easy to find superficial sympathies, maybe equally easy to find people who discount your struggle, and rare to find those who really get it. Then to find help; nearly impossible.
I didn't regret my son back then, but it felt like the ultimate sin to ever express my stress or pains because they clearly were due in part to his existence. It's wildly unhealthy not to be able to do so. Shit, it's wildly unhealthy to be isolated like that and absurd not to be able to be openly upset about it.
I'm grateful for my son. I have Paul's experience with all of my kids in terms of the good feelings and the desire to have them in my life. But I'd be lying in a bad way if I ever said they weren't a large part of my suffering at different stages of our lives. It's part of it.
Being a male in that situation is also awful because people kind of shrug it off like... Well, you're not a single mom. Whatever. You're a programmer, you make tons of money. You're lucky!
THANK YOU for saying this. Not only is it is service to would-be parents, parents who don't feel the chemicals but do feel guilt, but it's also a service to those of us without kids and without regrets.
...and "you da real MVP" for raising your kids well, without "chemical assistance." Thank you.
I'm gay (male) with no plans to adopt, but instead wish to spend my family budget taking care of aging parents so my siblings with kids don't have to. I also very much use my freedom to travel, take professional risks, and create special moments with friends and loved ones. I'm happy for PG and hopefully we always have parents like him, but the essay was weird and your anger understandable.
Thank you for posting your perspective. As someone who's contemplating having kids in the distant future, I'm wondering if there's a way to predict whether these chemical changes will occur for me or not. Do you have any insights here?
In particular, I'm curious about these questions pertaining to your life prior to having children:
- From 1 to 10, how much did you enjoy helping a friend out when it was a mild inconvenience to yourself?
- From 1 to 10, how positive of an emotional reaction do you get when you see a cute dog?
I have a completely unfounded hypothesis that the 'chemical' changes that PG describes are akin to how our brains react when we see cute pets.
I think it depends on how much you want to have kids. If you feel very strongly about it, then go ahead and have kids. You will probably experience the chemical changes in your brain that will help you cope. But if you are unsure about having kids, then don’t have them. You don’t need to over analyze it. If you feel the need to analyze, overthink and research it, then it seems to me like you don’t have the kind of brain that will make it easy for you to be happy while dealing with all the parenting challenges.
I believe that if you need to carefully analyze whether to have kids, then you will also continue to analyze and think about your decision after you already have kids. And it will make you miserable.
Caveat emptor, it's not all fire and brimstone either. It's been a rough couple weeks on a few fronts so everything I've said is slanted by that. Still, everything stands.
Rather than divulge my psychological profile on a public forum, I'll say the following. Spend some time with kids. Volunteer and do activities involving kids. There's plenty of stuff out there. If you end up enjoying them, then you'll probably like your own kids. If you feel like what the hell am I doing here this is not my cup of tea, then my warning is that activities with your own kids is potentially not so different.
I dgaf at all about cute pets, like -1. But a lot of everyday experiences with our toddler are pretty magical feeling.
One thing I've found, if you're exhausted and just waiting to do something else, the whole thing just sucks. I've definitely done that/had days like that. But if you throw yourself into playing with them, and really try to engage, interact, trick them, tickle them when they don't expect it, etc, it becomes amazing, because he picks up on that and gets really into it too, and he appreciates it so much. Like beaming joy. And that's one of the greatest things I've ever witnessed.
Just a point of anecdata. But it really seems to be one of those things where you get more out when you put more in. I don't know that I got an obvious chemical lightswitch thing, it's been a relationship that's grown more and more over time.
Cuteness is not a good indicator. Both kids and dogs can fast grow out of being cute. Just think about how cute they are when you have to clean up their poop.
OTOH, in my experience, raising a dog is quite comparable to the first two years of raising a kid. Less so with cats, they are too independent whereas a dog relies heavily on you.
Another possible way of finding out if you have it in you being a parent, is to play "The Last Of Us". That might sound strange, but I've seen many people say that they felt very protective of Ellie and had parental feelings towards her.
I'm sorry you feel that way. I was apprehensive about having kids, and it's certainly true that it's been a big change to my life where I now can't do a lot of the things I used to enjoy doing. However, I find that I'm a lot happier when I don't go around focusing on what I can no longer do but on the enjoyable things in my current life.
We all have aspects of our life that are less enjoyable, but focusing on those do nothing but make you less happy. I'd encourage you to look into Stoic philosophy for advice on how to focus on what's good and enjoyable in your life.
I believe there’s research showing that people are on average less happy after having kids, at least for a long period of time.
As a new parent of an 8 month old, I can certainly understand this, even though so far I personally feel much happier than I did before. I think a lot depends on your life situation. With reasonable financial stability, a flexible schedule, and a spouse who (happily) devotes most of her time to the baby, it’s overall a beautiful experience that has given my life a whole new sense of meaning, a depth of love I never knew I could feel, and lots of those peaceful moments pg talks about.
But take away one of those supporting pillars, and I could easily see the stress and responsibilities overwhelming all the positive aspects to the point where it might not be enjoyable anymore.
Thank you for saying that. There's a huge taboo around admitting (even privately!) any regrets around having children, but I imagine there are quite a few people who'd say so if only they weren't too afraid to.
There was no chemical change for me either, but it's weird to think the world revolves around my child. It doesn't. As parents we have responsibilities, and we try to make sure our child lives a balanced and peaceful life, but I don't spend every minute of non-work time doing stuff for my kid. Neither am I unhappier that I have a child to take care of, nor am I enthralled about it. It's just a part of my life man.
Did it get easier to change at all once they were old enough for school?
I'm genuinely glad you said this too. I don't have children and don't really want them. I think it's totally fine if people want to have kids.
Even if there isn't a discernible change in your cognitive and thought processes, human beings still can be happy with the choices we make (and we're actually less happy with reversible choices; see Dan Gilbert's talk on happiness).
Not everybody gets the feels/chemical thing indeed, or not the first time. Some people are just less on the emotional / pathos side and more on the rational / logos, the 'rational' kind of feelings or rather 'impressions', 'convictions', sometimes just this 'clarity' — less feels, more words. Same result, just different brains to get there.
I've felt like this too, I've learned you have to make some time for yourself & your partner. Try to get grandparents to look after the children, or friends to take them away. Definitely hire babysitters and maybe even a nanny. When you see them again you'll be re-energized.
I've seen studies that show it makes you less happy on average, with wealth mitigating the impact. I'm sure having paid full or part-time help makes an enormous difference.
Worth noting that this is a western city- centric view of children. It's much different for people living in small communities or near parents and other family. Children spend way less time near parents when the neighborhood is familiar and safe enough, and instead spend most of their time playing with other kids. Parents today spend twice as much time with their kids than 2 generations ago, and it's probably not because they really really want to, but that there is no other option. I'm also not sure if kids spending so much of their childhood around adults instead of other kids is better.
Of course, in the good/bad old days, sometimes kids just died. My wife talks fondly of free-roaming LA in the 70s, and parenthetically mentions the kid that got molested and the other one that got run over by a car.
In general, in the West at least, folks had bigger families and started earlier (just make a new one!).
A friend of ours from rural China (Dalian province, I think) talked about how all the kids would go out by themselves and teach each other how to swim in the river. We expressed some admiration for that, and she said, "oh, I don't know - a few kids drowned every year". Every year!
In my experience, people who go on about 'helicopter parents' are awfully brave with the welfare of other people's kids.
We're pretty free-roam, but I spent a lot of time worrying about traffic when my youngest was the height that he could be invisible before stepping out from behind a car.
Maybe I'd be more relaxed about this if, for instance, someone blasting through inner-city streets in a SUV while texting, was legally treated as a potential murderer (or an actual one if things go badly).
I grew up in a more rural area east of San Diego. Very free roam. Kids were spread out but we could bike to each other's houses. A couple of kids at my elementary school died. One in a cave-in of a small cave some friends dug in the side of a cliff. Another when he went for a ride in the 4WD of a teenager that flipped over on a hillside. I wonder what the fatality rate was in the old days versus these days.
My parents (who grew up in rural China in 1960s) love to talk about chopping firewood or collecting mushrooms in the forests, alone or with their siblings, when they were 8 or 10 or something. They often give me parenting advices like "don't worry about the kids; they just need one more pair of chopsticks" (as in you feed the kids and they'll take care of themselves).
In part I think it's also the development of greater paranoia and zero risk tolerance (for whatever reason). It seems like nowadays if you let your kid play by themselves, or even if you aren't hovering over them close enough, some other parent will call the cops and you'll get in trouble for being a "negligent parent". When I was a kid (80s/90s), I'd ride my bike around the neighborhood alone or with friends, walk to friends' houses by myself, etc., and that was the norm.
Which is funny because the average neighborhood is safer than ever before. What has gone way down is our tolerance for accidents (which I guess is a good thing, but certainly has its tradeoffs).
Not sure this is the distinction that's important. I agree with what you're saying, but ... I think the difference is that while neighborhoods are "safer", they are less "known". Millennials (I am one) in big cities move around a lot because of high rents and high cost of living, and it's hard to establish permanence in a community. Even if you're a Church-going family that would have social structures to lean on, everyone is facing the same problem.
The struggle of establishing a family here (on the West coast) makes me want to just give up and move back to the Midwest, to be honest. We want to have lots of kids and it's just horribly hard to do that out here.
Edit: My sister just brought up a good anecdote. She babysat for three different families on our block growing up. I can't ever imagine that being possible where I live now. No one has kids, and those that do move out of the city.
I'm not sure that's true, when comparing cities to towns (and parent specifically mentioned this was a city-centric view of kids.)
While there is less crime, there is a lot less space for kids to just run around, mostly because there's cars everywhere, which are obviously extremely unsafe for kids.
Safer in terms of crime, but if you live next to a street where cars are moving at high speed, the older behavior of just letting your kids run outside would likely be unsafe indeed.
I wouldn't conflate it to a western view, but a suburban one.
Most suburbs lack the density to make neighborhood friends. None of my friends from school lived near me; my little neck of the suburbs was occupied by retirees or kids over a decade apart from me. Visiting friends meant parents organizing a play date and a 15 minute one way car ride. There are rare cases where you do have a little neighborhood gang to play with, but it wasn't like when my parents grew up in the 50s-60s when an entire generation was birthed in sync and you could walk to 8 kids houses on a whim. Suburbs used to be only new families, with zero retirees when they began.
Living in LA now, I get to see that urban upbringing I missed. Kids are always walking around with their friends or siblings, visiting parks and rec centers, taking transit, walking to school, going to stores, etc. There are enough people where even though the generations of kids are blurred compared to the massive pulse of the boomer generation, you live among so many people that there will always be a few kids your age nearby that you can play with.
Suburbs or in the city, this rate of having a similar aged neighbor is probably the same, so upping the amount of neighbors makes this outcome almost assured.
I agree with this a lot. I was pretty anti-kid, not in the sense that I didn’t want them ever, but that I didn’t want them “any time soon.” My wife was this way too, until one day she wasn’t. I still felt pretty ambivalent about the whole thing until our first was born.
Children really are interesting, and really do fill life with all kinds of quietly wonderful moments.
We live in San Francisco, which is very hilly. When we drive up and down steep hills, my daughters get so excited. They squeal with glee like they’re riding a roller coaster, and beg us to drive up and down the hills again.
That may sound mundane, but when you’re there, sharing the sheer joy of life with fellow humans, it’s anything but.
Now looking back, the thing that I regret is that the modern world is pretty anti-kid, and makes things harder than they need to be. Cars, in particular, are terrible for kids. The roads are deadly, my number one fear is that they’ll run into the street and get hit. Car seats are also the worst. Long road trips are physically painful for the kids, I’m sure, so we’ve cut back on those. I wish, very much, that I could find a car-free city in North America to move to, but this doesn’t seem to exist.
The car-is-anti-human sentiment is one I can deeply empathize with. Just like oxygen and water, cars and their perils were with our generation since birth, and therefore for most are subconsciously taken for granted in life. But once you spend enough time in urban areas that have consciously rooted them out, you realize that their super loud noises, toxic smelly fumes, and omnipresent fear of death from them are indeed crushing to the human spirit. I’m also looking for cities in the U.S. that really do put “walkability” (and biking, e.g.) first. But the damage is so bad from the 20th century, thanks to the invention and explosive proliferation of the car, and socially the psychology of their existence so deeply rooted in most of our minds (“There could be no other way...”), that I don’t see enough strength to this movement. I’m typing from South Beach in Miami, e.g., which I think would be a perfect home were it not for the (probably, on average by land use in many cities) ~40% ownership by cars. I’ve lived in e.g. Amsterdam where the entire transport system was built around biking, and that from experience was such a liberating mindset to have every day, being able to bike across the city in 15 minutes. Alternatively I do wonder about e.g. Barcelona’s superblocks, about how the livability in small car-less or minimal car neighborhoods may improve (i.e. what small-scale neighborhoods without cars but also with sufficient amenities could be fantastic to live in?). Living on lush college campuses is typically a good example of where a much smaller percent of the land use goes to car transport, and it is expected that people walk and bike more - generally across landscapes with a lot more green than dead concrete.
I’m wondering if there any new urban projects, ideally in the U.S, potentially on the scale of the superblocks or e.g. NYC’s High Line / Atlanta’s Beltline / Miami’s Underline, where ecosystems are emerging beyond the reach of cars?
Actually a pretty old project, but take a look at the Park la Brea development in LA. It's a gated community in the middle of the town taking up two city blocks. They are extending the subway there as we speak.
There's also the village green, where the interior of the development is completely pedestrian only. That place isn't far from the expo light rail and the upcoming lax light rail.
LA has a lot of small bungalow courts that face inward to a courtyard rather than the street, but they aren't nearly to the scale as the above developments.
North America is too big. And many decisions we made in the 40s and 50s put the car at the center of life. Car ownership was an expression of freedom and a growing middle class. The Eisenhower highway system ensured we could drive coast to coast.
In NYC, Robert Moses put the car at the center of his infrastructure build out. That's why Manhattan has two highways up and down it's waterfront... A squandered opportunity to have created a city that was more attune with it's surroundings.
Ultimately you might need to move to Europe to go car free. But most of the cities I'm thinking of were planned a millennia ago.
...most of the freedom I had before kids, I never used. I paid for it in loneliness, but I never used it.
Paul's written a lot of smart stuff, but this might be the smartest.
I took a lot of steps to protect my freedom before getting engaged to my partner, and I realize now that was a shitty tradeoff. Freedom was an unexercised resource I had, which is to say it was largely wasted on me. I spent a lot of time being lonely - not alone, which implies by choice, but lonely - having no steadfast companionship and with no alternative to that.
That statement in the article actually turned me off quite a bit. Loneliness is not the opposite of having kids. Having kids is sort of an "easy mode" for filling your time[0]. So sure, if you don't have kids, and don't have a romantic partner, and and don't have friends, and attempt to go through life expecting that you and only you are necessary for entertaining yourself, yeah, you'll be lonely.
Earlier in life I often considered loneliness to be my biggest fear, but I eventually realized that loneliness isn't something that just happens to you. It's a choice. If you don't want that choice, then you have to put in effort to find and maintain friendships[1], find a hopefully-lifelong romantic partner, etc.
Beyond that, though, there are plenty of elderly people who are profoundly lonely because their children have families and lives of their own and rarely see them. Perhaps if they tried harder to maintain relationships outside their nuclear family, they'd be better off. Not saying all that is easy (especially with kids in the mix), but I certainly think it's worthwhile in the end.
[0] "Easy" in that your time will always be filled, with no searching needed on your part; I'm not suggesting that raising kids is easy.
[1] Being friends with parents (when you are not one) is hard, but it's worthwhile to make the time, and be flexible with your time since theirs often isn't.
I think it's smart in concept, but it feels like its a little too overarching.
Taken literally, it sounds like he's dismissing his relationship/marriage and saying he was lonely while in it, pre-children. I'm not going to try and extrapolate if that's what he truly meant or what the implications of such a statement would mean.
The sentiment, I think, would improve from removing kids and saying "I didn't take advantage of my pre-children freedoms and was lonely because of that."
It also raises an interesting question... If he had maximized those freedoms, how would that have affected his decision to have a child?
Ironically, this essay shows the biggest problem I have with having kids -- especially in the US, people with kids seem to single-mindedly focus on them and can't stop telling you about their kids. What remains of their social lives and all their holidays seem to revolve around the kids. I think pg echoes a bit of this sentiment himself when he says:
> To some extent I'm like a religious cultist telling you that you'll be happy if you join the cult too — but only because joining the cult will alter your mind in a way that will make you happy to be a cult member.
My offhand guess is that this general situation is due to dual-earning families that live separately from the grandparents. This seems to be social experiment started after World War II, and from the point of view of an observer I can tell you it's not going great. I suspect that the traditional large joint family approach is probably best in case you do want to have kids and not have it completely upend your life.
I think it’s the other way around: somehow we tried to build ourselves a civilization without children at all. I think in most human cultures, children are considered an important if not primary concern. Not having children well into adulthood is a modern privilege—one could even characterize modern childless adulthood as merely an extension of our own childhoods. But by starting to normalize childless adulthood, we’ve made the most normal and natural thing human beings do come across as a weird cultish type of social deviancy.
Logistically, extended families are a good idea. But I don’t think they stop people from putting their children first in terms of life priorities. On the contrary, a culture where parenthood rather than childless adulthood is normal is one where talking about your kids is a universal common ground you can share with other adults. (People need to have lots of kids for extended families to be normal—everyone will have grandparents but not necessarily aunts and uncles). Maybe you’re just observing one of these (sub)cultures from the outside.
>Not having children well into adulthood is a modern privilege—one could even characterize modern childless adulthood as merely an extension of our own childhoods.
this.
>Logistically, extended families are a good idea.
My fiancée and I have discussed buying a duplex, and moving her parents or mine (or both) into the other half. Looking into the future of what elder care will look like for them ... it's not pretty. A nursing home in a city I don't live in, staffed mostly with people that aren't even from this country (nothing wrong with that, generally, but it's something to be considered). For them it would be the best option, moving in with us. They get to see their grandkids, and we get to see them as they sunset their lives.
There's a difference between using kid-talk as a way to find common ground and bond with other people, and being literally unable to talk about anything but your kids. That latter bit actually does happen with a disturbingly-significant number of my friends who are parents.
The main commonality among parents I know who are afflicted with this problem is that they have no or few relatives living nearby. Those who have relatives (especially their own parents) nearby seem to be more well adjusted. While they still talk about their kids a lot, they can at least speak about other interests and events unrelated to the kids.
One of my friends who also is able to talk about other things is a freelancer and is not a workaholic. I suspect number of hours worked to be correlated here too.
It's hard not to talk about the most dominant thing in your life, and only a few people have the skill of being genuinely interested in the priorities of other people.
Some people are boring about their hobbies, some are boring about people, some are boring about work, some are boring about their kids.
If you find the conversation boring just remember they are probably just as bored at you droning on about blockchain or whatever it is you are keen to talk about.
This is a fair point. Taking it further, I also think it may just be that people with kids find "kid talk" to be a good default, safe topic of conversation with other people who have kids, so 50% or more of cases it actually makes them more interesting to those other kid-having people they can bond and empathize with.
Whereas I, who am not interested in that stuff, end up mentally putting them all into a single "boring" bucket, while the guy who can't stop talking about his 24-pack of Soylent gets his own separate "boring" bucket.
I don't have kids, but am involved in the lives of young relatives and am generally interested in questions about how to raise a child in ways that lead to them being competent, well adjusted humans. To me, parent talk seems to fall into two broad categories: discussions about raising children in general, and anecdotes about some supposedly funny thing that a particular child did last week. The former I find interesting, and I can engage in these conversations for hours. The latter bores me to death (and when the child being described is present I actively try to derail the conversation, as I hated listening to embarrassing stories about myself as a child and imagine most children feel the same way even if they lack the courage to voice that opinion to their parents). This is the difference between discussing the mechanics of a blockchain and discussing some anecdote about Coinye West rebranding as Coinye. I'm not too knowledgeable about or even particularly interested in cars, but I can listen to a mechanic talk about different types of engines and be genuinely engaged. I can't be genuinely engaged by somebody talking about the new paint job they put on their muscle car last week. I can recognise that others seem more engaged by anecdotal narratives than discussions of underlying systems, but I still think this distinction is different than simply being interested in one broad topic like "children" or "blockchains" over another.
Agreed. I do remember reading somewhere that the average current full time working mother spends more time with her children than a housewife in the 50s. Children used to go outside and play and have more unstructured time. I feel like there is this whole odd child-centric culture in the US. It is bizarre how many young adults I meet nowadays who have not been left without adult supervision for more than 15 minutes their entire childhood.
Most of my friends are from childhood. For the ones who have children, about half of them have turned into uninteresting people who are incapable of carrying a conversation about anything other than their children. And some of them were extremely interesting beforehand. A few have snapped out of it when their kids have turned 3-5, but most seem stuck forever.
When I go to visit family and family friends outside the US, they all have a bunch of kids but none of them have this disease where they can only talk about the kids. But there's also much more family support nearby and societal norms allow the children to be more independent.
> When I go to visit family and family friends outside the US...
I was raised outside the US, and this has been my experience as well. My friends/family outside the US with kids do talk about them sometimes, but it's usually blended with other anecdotes, like "We were going on a trip to this place, and Timmy was well behaved for a change (eyeroll)".
In the US these conversations tend to be more along the lines of "Timmy had underwater basket weaving practice, so we had to drive 5 hours to take him, and he threw in the car on the way there and back. Did I mention he's getting really good with those baskets?"
Agree with CalRobert that this could very well be because of stingy PTO and parental leave policies in the US which seem to have been designed with hard-driving male car salesmen in the 1960s as the target group.
We're American but live outside the US. Honestly our parent friends in the US seem sad and exhausted by comparison- the cult of workaholism is terrible for families, and the (guaranteed month of real pto/decent parental leave/shorter commutes/million other little things that make life less precarious) add up.
While I agree with your later point about having larger families leading to a healthier mix of time spent, I cant agree with your first point.
Yes, most parents talk a lot about their kids and that can be annoying if you don't have kids. Most single people are just as annoying though. You can talk about your kids or you can talk about your vacation, or your job... for the most part people will find it interesting if they relate and boring if they don't. I don't think there's a qualitative difference there between parents and single people, just different audiences that will be receptive to what they're talking about.
I don't know if that's fair. I talk about my kids too much, no doubt, but only one of my (not single, but childless) friends is annoying that way. He likes to smugly point out what he did this weekend that had nothing to do with kids. I make a point of not discussing my kids or family life with him, and he still makes it a discussion point. Most other friends in my circle are pretty relaxed about the kid thing, either because they have kids, or because they know that kids are just people and therefore part of our larger social group, so discussing them is okay.
I agree what you’re saying is a problem, but it isn’t universal. Anecdotally the trend seems to match living preferences: parents in central cities tend to be less myopic about their kids, parents in the suburbs more so.
For my wife and I, the book “Bringing Up Bebe” was really influential in how we thought about kids before and after we had them. It’s a perspective shift kind of like this: your newborn human can’t talk, can’t move, doesn’t have any hobbies, interests, or friends. Rather than bend your life around that, why not invite this child into your life, to join in your hobbies, meet your friends, etc.
That may sound silly but it’s actually a pretty influential idea to latch on to. We don’t have a schedule wrapped around our kids, or weekends wrapped around our kids. We go places we want to go, and do things we want to do, and include the kids and tell them what we’re doing and why and invite them to join the fun. The great thing about kids is they’re pretty much up for anything, so they usually love this and jump in :)
I think, as an adult, you also have to make a conscious choice to keep up your independent life.
Losing your independence is something that happens to people for various reasons - you see it sometimes when people get married, and then they withdraw from all their old social life and kind of retreat into each other. It’s a lot of pressure to be someone’s entire world... I haven’t seen many of those couples stay happy.
I think that’s the part of having kids that’s hardest. Because they do have needs and do have to be accommodated, it can be easy to just worry about taking care of them and give up on everything else because it’s not as easy as it used to be to maintain your independent life. But it’s a choice you make, and in my experience it’s deeply worthwhile.
This is offensive. People talk about what they’re passionate about, and who are you to judge someone who is passionate about parenthood? It’s condescending. You could apply that same logic to anyone who talks about anything to a degree more than you deem it to be worthy of. I hope you someday get some perspective on life and learn how to appreciate people who are different than you are
I try to avoid telling unsolicited stories about my kids, but what else am I supposed to answer when people ask about my weekend? It's not that I'm mistaken about how exciting my kids are, it's that other people are mistaken about how exciting (for them) my weekend could possibly be!
Despite not having children, I like hearing about my coworker's and friend's kids. Complaining about them can get old, but funny stories and things they are proud of are great to hear. I don't think I'm unique in this.
Eh, you’re thinking way too hard about this imo. It’s a biological thing. Having a kid takes you back to a level of animality that probably only sex gets close to—you’re tapping into a bilogical instinct and you’re ruled by instinct—that’s why people talk so much about their kids—there’s really not too many experiences in everyday life that have such a fundamental psychological and biological effect—as soon as you have a kid nature has wired you up to put that kid before everything else —just look at how a mama bear will react when you get between her and her cubs, human parents are not so different, so obviously their intense focus on their kids seep into their social life.
It’s probably not something varianece in social structure will change since it comes from a fundamentally biological place.
Can you elaborate? What exactly is wrong with parents talking to you about their kids? Kids are a big part of our lives. We're telling you about our life.
I think what you're saying is that you want us to be interested in different stuff, more along the lines of what you're interested in, because you're not interested in kids. That doesn't sound so much like a social problem to me as a simple personality mismatch.
> Can you elaborate? What exactly is wrong with parents talking to you about their kids?
I'm not sure I can, but let me try. Some of my coworkers will chat to me for five minutes about watching that new Scorsese movie, and maybe make plans to hang out after work. Let's call this Group A. Some other ones will talk to me for twenty minutes about how their kids are really into Frozen 2, and how they dressed up as Elsa for Halloween. They also never have time to hang out. Let's call this Group B.
It so happens that none of the people in Group A have children, and that's really my problem with it. It's not really that I care whether or not anyone has kids (none of my business, really) -- but it seems like the people I overwhelmingly have no interest in listening to or talking with always end up being the ones that have kids. And so I end up wondering if this divide is inevitable, like of your (hah) sibling comments seems to say.
I didn't even know Paul Graham had kids. I don't recall them playing much of a part in his business, his essays, his creations, etc.
So how exactly does that show the biggest problem you have with kids?
Alternately, for some reason you laser-focus on the topic for some reason and you can't help but let it fill the entirety of your perception. This appears in Facebook a lot where people complain about baby pictures or anecdotes and somehow ignore the 99.99% of absolutely irrelevant inanity that the rest of their feed is ("Oh you ate at a restaurant...wowwweeeee"). It happens in loud restaurants when people filter out enormous volumes of ambient sound to focus on the sounds of a child sixty feet away. When someone has some sort of hangup about children, it's amazing how large it can appear in their perspective.
People who have kids (and people who really want kids) and people who don't (and people who don't want). They can't understand each other and most of one camp think the other camp dull and crazy.
It's just pov, and yeah, I keep distances from people with kids when the kids are around, because very possible they will leave their kids to me to gain a couple of hours to themselves.
> I keep distances from people with kids when the kids are around, because very possible they will leave their kids to me to gain a couple of hours to themselves.
I recognize that you certainly have your unique circle of acquaintances, but in general I find the above statement to be extremely improbable. Not only would I never leave my kids with an unwilling babysitter, it's actually the opposite -- you have to convince me that you are a safe choice.
Note that PG has two incredibly important positive factors that make his experience of parenthood much better: he has a great partner, and he is very wealthy. People who don't have these power-ups might have much more mixed feelings about the experience.
I would actually like to have kids, but from a young age I decided that I would not do so unless I achieved financial independence. The reason is that if I were forced to stay in a job (or other life situation) that I hated for the sake of the kids, I would start to resent them.
100% this for me, but I would go a step further. I don't want to birth kids into this exact situation.
If I have kids now, I'll have to work into old age, and so will my kids. That's a very sad situation in my view.
If I achieve financial independence personally, but I have kids who will have to toil their whole lives, then I'd feel I'm making a selfish choice. How could I explain to my kids, who would see nothing but a relaxed and happy life at home, that they now owe our system 40+ years of labor?
If I can achieve a level of wealth that would ensure my children could follow their dreams, then I'd love to have kids.
It's very hard to find a partner that would be able to say "Well, if we don't have $5M+ by age 40, we'll be childless, and that's fine. If we do make a lot of money, we'd love to have a big family."
I know lots of people here are doing it, but how can you ethically commit your unborn children to a lifetime of work?
And god forbid you have a child with disabilities and don't have a sizable financial buffer...
So you consider your life so far has been only pain, nothing of worth or fulfillment because you've not had a nest of millions-of-dollars to lie in?
You'd rather not have lived? Do you resent your parents having you?
[Questions, not rhetorical statements, genuine curiosity.]
It's certainly an issue for many when considering parenthood - is it fair to raise a child in this situation - but I've not seen it expressed so extremely as you have.
Why do you think your kids will have to toil more than you? Achieving financial independence is more about prioritizing your wants than having a huge income, and that's definitely something you can pass on to your children.
I think it would be a lot healthier to grow up like that than as a child who could have whatever they wanted (monetarily.) Sending the signal to your children that things in life just come for free seems like a great way to ensure they aren't adapted to face adversity.
There are a lot of fulfilled people with jobs. Having someone leave the work force can cause more stress and harm to them, even if economically it is “fine”, so I don’t think a lifetime of working a job your children like is that bad.
Quality of life is also improving generation after generation, so someone working an average job will “have” a lot more now than 50 years ago.
Anyway, your post raises a lot of good points. Thank you for sharing.
Having kids is not that expensive if you have at least a middle class income. You can still advance in your career while having a good work life balance.
Very few are in their ideal situation when having kids and yet they still have positive experiences being a parent.
Those without kids and new parents think they need to be perfect, but in reality, there is no difference between being perfect and being good enough when it comes to raising kids.
Social pressure tends to push parents toward perfection. In fact as income goes up, expenses go up.
A kid in the Bay Area will realistically cost a professional (upper middle class), dual working couple over $1m through college; that certainly is expensive.
>...I decided that I would not do so unless I achieved financial independence.
This, right here, encapsulates what is so wrong with this present iteration of society. Having kids is now something that you do if you're wealthy and can afford it, or if you're extremely poor and cannot afford birth control (or just don't know about it ... before the downvotes come, yes I know there are a lot of factors that influence high birth rates among poorer demographics).
This isn't a sustainable situation, at all. We need a complete realigning of what society - and indeed Civilization - is supposed to be about. Family formation is used as an economic marker today, for a ton of policy proposals. More families means more purchases of stuff. Fewer families means less buying of stuff, and leads to policies that might be tuned to address the economic "problem" but don't really address the societal one.
The "stuff" thing really resonated with me. I value not having a lot of stuff. I prefer less clutter, fewer things to maintain or care about. I hate that our society is often centered around the acquisition of material things, most of which have no practical use, and even dubious aesthetic use. I'm certainly not completely spartan, and do have stuff, but I try to be careful about what I let into my home (and admittedly have a few boxes of things that I really need to go through and probably get rid of). My sister and her husband own more kid-related stuff than I own stuff in total. If I do have kids, I don't want that, but struggle to see how it's possible. The necessities alone are pretty numerous, and I find it hard to believe it's possible to raise a kid without at least some books, toys, etc.
Life decisions and outcomes go through a big calculation engine. Every life scenario has pros and cons, associated probabilities and timeframes.
So, financial independence: obvious pros. Cons: low probability event in short time frame.
Kids: pros: they're awesome. They make you very happy on balance. (I would assign a high probability to that). Obviously a subjective point of view. They are also way lower maintenance (cost) than you think. Cons: they take up a lot of your time.
Also there are interaction effects. Getting kids will reduce your available time needed to work to get financial independence.
So you need to weigh these things out. Point is, money (or lack of it) shouldn't be too much of a deciding factor in the kids decision. IMHO
I would ask yourself how likely this nightmare scenario really is, since you seem to be planning your life around it. Seems super unlikely. I'd invest in selling you insurance at like 4:1 odds that it won't come true that you would ever resent your kids because you were forced to stay in a job that you hated.
I have been a huge fan of PG for 15 years. But early on I realized his advice about starting a company is similarly for people in a different situation. If I had rich supportive parents and no student debt I would certainly have started a company right out of school.
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Just looking for some dads who can relate and maybe give some wisdom on the subject of having young kids and losing your ability to work on something interesting--which to be fair I never did before having kids because I was unmotivated, having not had that burst of energy yet...
I'd recommend just enjoying being a parent while they are young. They need you at this age. Play with them, read to them, and all that. Write down ideas you'd like to pursue in a couple years when your free time returns. And you can be confident that it will return.
Often I feel like I will never again be able to have a life, read a book, finish a project, have an idea. I know that it gets better and that I should cherish the moments we have while he is so young (and I do), but it’s hard to see more than a foot in front of you, so to speak. Thanks.
Kids tend to be cutest from 3-5, so sit back and enjoy as much as you can, the time will come back — I'll confess I'm mostly enjoying the second one in that age only now, as the stress was too high with the first one.
To be honest, the second best thing about kids rather than themselves and getting to know them is what PG nicely put in the following way:
>> See what I did there? The fact is, most of the freedom I had before kids, I never used. I paid for it in loneliness, but I never used it.
In the end, all these limitations will let you appreciate your freedoms so much more.
I have some news for you chap.
- They get tired from learning stuff. And the teachers know how to deal with them.
- They learn how to behave in a group. They start having actual friends.
- You get a bunch of friends who are in the same situation as you, and you can use their kids to cancel out yours. (AKA playdates)
- Having friends in the same boat will help your confidence a lot. They can help you directly with the kids, plus some of them will have older kids too, and they can tell you it gets better.
- As for your own time, try to be disciplined about the kids' bedtime. It helps a lot that school is tiring them out, and use that momentum to not let them decide when to go to bed. If you get them asleep before 8pm, how much different is your day really? You had to eat anyway, and you have to keep the house clean regardless. Your real problem is if they keep you up to 11pm each night, then your life is gone, and they end up in a cycle of having not enough sleep. Make them sleep, then code up your side project.
For example my kids started school at 4. I've put them in full time after school care as well, ending at 6pm. Now they're tired but awake when they come home and can eat a meal, then bath, then bedtime. You can read something to put them to sleep, then go and do your own stuff.
--Edit
Forgot to mention, the kid will learn how to read. From there you can give them a book and that will keep them quiet. Remember to teach them how to code as well, so they have proper tools to explore the world.
See this with my LO from going to daycare. Mob mentality is real, at home can't get a nap to save our lives.. at daycare napping at 12pm like clockwork.
Also the book thing is real, when my phone is off limits a book becomes the next fantasy reality for kids. For everyone reading, keep giving your toddlers something to do other than your phone. Everything is a teaching opportunity, and you are teaching them how to keep themselves preoccupied. Books, gadgets, legos, matchbox cars.. whatever, their imagination takes off exponentially once they hit 2
Is that even possible?(my daughter is almost 2 and not yet in daycare, which means she never goes to her night sleeps before 11pm).
> you get them asleep before 8pm
> you can give them a book and that will keep them quiet
And then people wonder why kids don't listen to and respect their parents when they grow up. You're basically just giving school teachers full control to raise your kids at age of 4, and they only interact with you for 1-2 hours during the day and don't really know who you are. I guess I am just raised differently but I can't understand this type of parenting.
Why have kids at all, if all you do is try to get away from them and make them not bother you and live separate life especially at such an early age.
Last night I explained quicksort to one kid.
Now we are designing cards to laser cut.
The kids get interesting and independent quicker than you might imagine.
The days are long, but the years are fast.
Yesterday I fell in the Collatz trap (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21780068). So after a few hours my 7y old son asked what I was doing (what was I doing?!). Explained him how it works and then we did Collatz "by hand" for almost an hour. These sorta random triggered experiences are the best.
I meditate on this idea quite a bit.
https://blog.samaltman.com/the-days-are-long-but-the-decades...
So true!
Nicely put. That's going into my "how to explain parenting" quotes right alongside "it doesn't get easier, just a different kind of difficult"
Life is hard. I feel beat down and depressed a lot. I would also love some words of wisdom. All I can contribute to this discuss is that I can relate.
My kids (and I’m sure yours) are such amazing people. I love them so much. But I fear I have lost the ability to care about or love myself. We do finally have a great house to raise them in after many nights of back breaking labor done after coding all day.
I know so many people have it so much harder than me. Which makes it feel wrong to feel so broken. But there it is. I’ll probably delete this post out of shame but if you read it maybe you’ll know you’re not alone.
My advice is to do less.
It sounds like you are trying to do too much stuff. Why? You are trading off being in a good head space with your kids when they are young to do what? Fix a house?
It’s not worth it. Nothing is worth it. You can buy a new house, you can’t buy back time with your kids.
Whenever I feel overwhelmed like this I make a list and prioritize it ruthlessly. This happens so often that I make a list daily.
Anything outside of the top 5 or so priorities, I ignore or delegage.
Oh and if you don’t like working on the house then stop doing it. Improving the house is going to have a marginal improvement. Use your time on things that are going to have a bigger impact.
Keeping your mental sanity is as important as not letting them wander into a busy street or play with fire, etc. You are no good to them as an empty, stressed, beat down carcass of your former self. I have all kinds of strategies that I put into play when I find myself tapped out, but n=1 and I doubt it would be useful to others, I just wanted to share that I 100% get you. Take care of yourself, just like you would your kids.
A block from our home, a neighbor couple had triplet boys, just a year behind us. One of little guys has special needs. Plus, an older singleton. They're our heroes.
Words of Wisdom: Manage your energy. The car is a great place to take a cat nap. Enjoy the simple pleasure of hanging out in your own backyard.
Is it a house that needs renovation?
-Ignore the kids menu. It's shit. Just order off the regular menu and share with your kids.
-Some kids are hard to raise, some are easy. You will probably have both if you many more than 1. C'est la vie.
-If you're like me and value time, get a job you can walk to. Have your kids go to a school you can walk them to. It makes things so much easier.
-Hire a cleaner every few weeks if you need a break.
-Buy used clothing if you can. Same with toys. No need to break the bank.
-Give them space, teach them to be bored on their own.
-Have scheduled electronics free time. Kids careers != Parents careers. They may end up doing things completely unrelated to your career. Let them find it.
-They will push you to the edge of your patience, and you will lose it. It's all good. Just try to keep calm. Even if you lose it once, just try to do better the next time.
-There is no instruction manual for kids - it was forgotten by the doctor inside the mother's womb - for every kid ever born :) So yeah, we're all winging it!
-My kids are 6 and 8. They have given me a new range of emotions that I never knew existed and have made me better for it.
-Kids make you value your time. Learn from that lesson.
Dead Comment
Also, I don't subscribe to the notion that a parent needs to be playing with their kid every waking minute. My wife is more toward the opposite but getting more flexible. My son plays with Legos and other building toys by himself and I like that. I did the same when I was young. You have two kids so let them play with each other and you and your SO should dedicate more time as partners together. Get your date nights in.
Your kids are getting old enough that they should be playing with each other all day long soon and that will open up your time. Mine are younger than yours so I have a few more years but I hear having multiple is a game-changer for parents.
The other thing I would suggest is to just take your kids with you everywhere you can. I got a hiking backpack and I take him to music festivals, he's flown overseas and traveled around Europe, National Parks, etc. He doesn't make a peep in the hiking backpack and loves being able to see different things outdoors. I highly recommend!
As far as doing a side project, maybe do the planning/strategy for it while hanging out with them but when your kids are playing with each other. I can't code very well with kids around but I can still ideate.
The big redemption in my experience has been that I didn't really expect kids generally and this part of childrearing specifically, to be enjoyable or particularly meaningful. My wife and I agreed before having kids that at least the first 5 years were just gonna suck and we were just going to have to power through. I have still been impressed by how challenging it is, even coming in with that expectation.
On the plus side, I've always viewed having children as unrelated to happiness. If you care primarily about being happy, accomplishing great things professionally, or living an alternative lifestyle (and there's nothing wrong with any of these things) it seems pretty clear that having kids is not a good choice.
For me, I view the experience as a way to grow as a person and connect with something bigger than me. It's a way to become more human, and I'm getting what I came for.
I appreciate this self introspection. Humanity is a vast mysterious realm to explore and we've spent most of our lives focusing only on the concrete systems, like productivity loops or economics.
Most people don't have much left to give working those kinds of hours. Personally, I've had to dramatically cut back on hobbies and keeping up with various media, even, and all but drop some categories (I bet I spend 5% as much time gaming as I used to, for instance, and haven't even bothered to set up my gaming PC since a move about 1.5 years ago). I got a ton of reading done when each kid was young because you can just read them whatever, they don't know the difference, and you spend a lot of time feeding them or watching them in the bath so they don't drown or whatever, but now? Hahaha, so, so little reading.
Mostly I just watch movies or TV or read garbage on the Internet (ahem) because I don't mind as much being interrupted while doing those things.
She argue that I may have two jobs where one lasts 8 hours and the other lasts 16 hours whereas she as the one job that lasts 24 hours. The only difference is that I get to change my scenery and work environment, allow a refresh if you will, and allow a stresses to take a break. For her, she stays in the same office without any chance of a change and the stress does not take a break.
That was 21 months ago.
This week I was in bed before 9pm at least 3 nights and up at 7 am with the spawn to take her to day care. I get a shower and get her dropped off and get back home by 9am and immediately start work. I don’t get up from the chair till noon for a quick break and back to it for another 3 hours. My wife and kid get home around 4:30 or 5 and I slap together something frozen and barely healthy for all of us and then my wife does the bath routine and I read slack on my phone and think about how much I didn’t get done. We play for an hour or so and bed time is at 7:30pm. After that I try to wrap up loose ends and make notes for the next day and usually so tired I just go on to bed. I’m stuck in this cycle. It is so hard to stay up after bed time because I know I have to be up and at em first thing in the morning and can’t lay in bed till 8:30 or 9 because I stayed up till 2am.
I would work 2 or 3 side gigs on top of my job previously and now I have no mental room or energy for it. It’s a hard pill to swallow. I put a ton of stuff on my google calendar. Friends want to play a game on Friday night? It gets on the calendar and I usually can’t make it past 10:30pm. It makes me keep the value of my time in the front of my mind. Do I want to play video games or read and play with my daughter? Sometimes I choose the games for my own recharging. I want to start my own thing so bad and I just can’t get the courage to make the jump and don’t have the energy to do it on the side.
For me, the toddler years were the nadir in terms of having my own time. Babies sleep enough to give you some time. Older kids are independent enough. But toddlers, man, it's like living with a pair of destructive monkeys that you're legally forbidden to cage.
It will get better.
In the same vain as "What you can't say", is there any solution to this problem that is ethical (at least under consequentialist morality) but taboo?
Her studies showed that people who have a kid 3 or younger were less happy than equally situated peers. Their first smile is nice, but it's a lot of poop and your peers are going to Europe.
If your youngest is 4 or older, there's literally no difference in happiness. Europe is nice. Their first play, them as actual human beings - also nice.
When the _parents_ are north of 60, then happiness _and_ health go up if you have kids, by a rapidly increasing margin with time.
So when we decided to have kids, we just knew that for the first few years... Well, that's going to suck. It's made it easier knowing what we signed up for.
The fact that happiness and health goes up dramatically when parents are north of 60 just reflects that in the past - if you didn't have kids - it's because you didn't get married. If you didn't get married, it was far more likely to be because you were somehow unviable as a marriage partner than because you didn't want to get married.
So, you're going to get a spurious, strong correlation between happiness/health and the interaction between age > 60 and having kids. If you run the same regression among Americans in 30 or 40 years, that same relationship will not hold, since whether to get married and whether to have kids are to ever-increasing degrees explicit choices.
I resent my wife for sort of slowly forcing it on me with promises of "nothing will change, my mother will help", I also resent myself for falling for it, but I wouldn't trade my daughter for anything in the world.
I've come to terms with the duality of being a parent, loving your children and raising them sucking at the same time, something I see non-parents completely unable to understand.
Great moments of being a parent, like 10% of the time, and sucking for the rest of 90% of the time.
Whenever I tell this to non-parents, they take it like "what, then what's the hype of being a parent, you must be broken somehow" or "there, that's another reason for me not to have children" -- both of which are far, far of from any conclusion I would take.
That said, I agree with others that it gets way better. Ages 5-9 with my kids have been great. The stuff they do is actually fun and interesting to me, and since I was such a damn good parent, the kids are dynamic and somewhat responsible for themselves. We have a lot of fun now and I have choices for myself once again.
Warning: I hear the teenage years can be just as daunting at the toddler/preschool years, but for different reasons.
I really think it's best if you just accept that you'll be giving up most of what you used to do. You can find time for some stuff, but if you had a bunch of hobbies and were very social and did tons of side projects before something has to give—probably lots of somethings. There are only so many hours in the day and yours are largely spoken for—no large contiguous blocks of free uninterrupted time, certainly—12 hours a day, 7 days a week, now.
Trying to keep up with all of it is exhausting and frustrating. Gotta make the hard choices and actually choose. "Well, I'm not doing A, B, or C for a few years, seems like, so I'll stop trying, but I can keep doing D and E with the time and attention that frees up".
"Warning: I hear the teenage years can be just as daunting at the toddler/preschool years, but for different reasons."
This was not my experience at all and it may not be yours if you've engaged your children in reasoning rather than "because I said so" disciplining; if you've developed a loving relationship with your kids instead of an adversarial one.
Your problem is not that your kids have blocked you from interesting work. In fact it sounds like quite the opposite: you are so passionate and rewarded by childcare that it has inspired you like never before.
It just sounds like you need to look for a more interesting day job.
If anything, childrearing made me suic-idal for years at the mind-numbing, repetitive, 'useful only to 1' tasks, and made me solely aware of the inefficiency of raising humans. My kids are 6 and 9 now, and things became much better when they're able to take care of themselves.
Turns out that during the week you are generally too exhausted, and in the weekend you always have to figure out where to leave your child if you won’t want to saddle your partner with them.
You could bring your kids, but people without children (rightly so) quickly tire of this, so you mostly end up interacting with other couples with children, and that’s glorious too, because suddenly there’s 4 instead of 2 qualified adults to pay attention.
On the other hand, I didn’t expect the amount of satisfaction I would get out of children to be this great either, and it was definitely worth the bargain.
After I'm dead, my kids can continue my work better than I could do it myself.
I work for a fortune 50 company. I’m about 25 years into my career. Ymmv.
You will hit a point in your career where expectations will increase. You’ll be the person folks look to for guidance. There will never be enough hours in a day, and you will increasingly look at your time as the single most valuable commodity. You will always have to ask- how much impact can I make in this slice of time? Is this thing someone asking me to do the best use of that commodity? Is it more important that I spend that time with my kids?
Conversely, your kids will need a lot of low value time from you as they get older. They need rides to sports, rides to class, they need direction on chores. At a certain point, you’ll realize that self care, so playfully bandied about by zoomers and millennials will literally become a life-or-death priority. You’ll have to make decisions about your time that are best guided by clear knowledge of your values.
I’m a bit surprised by this turn of events. I’d advise folks that are younger to recognize that this is a long process. Make sure you invest time early in figuring out your values, and start investing in them as soon as you have established your foundation. The teens are a time where your parenting gets complex. It may be less physically demanding, but you’ll likely spend a lot of time asking yourself if you are making the best choices possible.
I'm fortunate to be able to work from home which saves the time on commuting, but you'll want a private office to avoid interruptions, esp. important for any concentration-intensive work like programming. But there's no getting around it, all kids before school needs to be supervised at all times, either with day care, a full time in-house nanny or as it's now in my case my better half is effectively the full-time nanny during the work day. We're starting to see some light at the tunnel with the eldest just starting school but as our youngest is only 10 days old, it's going to be a long time before they're all in school. At the same time, you're going to miss this time you had when they are this young so you've also got to cherish the journey before the parental reprieve when you get to lock them in the school system during the day :)
The only tip I have for prospective parents is to get all your travelling, hobbies and interests out of the way pre-kids as your life after kids essentially is going to revolve around the kids and family commitments.
Another time saving habit I keep forgetting about (that differentiates from my childhood) since it's been eradicated from our daily lives is not watching TV, we only watch Netflix/Prime À la carte on occasion when we have downtime (i.e. kids are in bed), but the time you save is more productively spent on your interests and hobbies.
So, 35-40 hours of work a week, at an office, and then some family time, and then "at best" a couple hours of free time to work/study whatever you like, plus 7 hours of sleep.
Doesn't it sound better than what 99.9% percent of humanity had to endure for the latest 10,000 years and 80% of humanity still has (including a good 50-70% in the US itself)?
Of course, you didn’t really have the same things to study either, so it might still work out positive.
What my kids (grown now) care about? That I can afford to give them money to help pay with their rent and any financial issues and that their Dad is not 'a loser'. Not whether I read them books or went to games or school events. It's all perspective and how you present it to them honestly.
But to your question yes it's a huge energy drain. Not going to get better either. Just try not to get sucked into things 'because that is what you do for kids and if you don't they will resent it and they will be screwed up'. Not true. Ok maybe in some edge cases true but many of us that are older grew up in a era where Dad and Mom were not our friends and we didn't want them to be either.
He's extremely self-centered. Anything good that happens to him is his doing, and anything bad is someone else's fault. And he has zero empathy.
After he had his third affair and my mother divorced him, my my brothers and I gradually cut ties with him. He is just not pleasant to be around.
He doesn't understand this. He thinks he is "owned" some love, after all the money and time he spent on us. He thinks my mother manipulated us (it's always someone else's fault).
I know this because after 10 years not talking to him, I allowed him back into my life. But it was out of pity and a bit of a sense of duty, so he could meet his grandson. I don't love him and my siblings positively hate him. He doesn't know my nephews, and probably never will.
One thing I do agree with is it helps to have your own retirement squared away. It will make it easier on your kids. But all those “trivial events” like reading to your kids... that is what they’ll remember. I remember my dad reading to me and singing me to bed every night. I love that I can pass that down to my kids.
There is way way more to life than money.
Spend your focus on acquiring money for your kids leads to kids who want money from you. Spend your focus on giving love to your kids leads to kids who want love from you.
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The key to this is working remotely. Two major advantages that apply here:
1. Not wasting precious time on commuting (even 1 hour makes a huge difference)
2. Being way more flexible so I can run errands and house chores mid-day if I'm feeling unproductive and use the time I earned to catch up on work later.
If working for a distributed company is an option for you - I can highly recommend. If not - from what I see around me it gets way easier and more fun when your youngest is ~3 y/o.
The key for me was learning to actually manage time better. The challenges of having a kid have made me see how little time for other things I have now, which in turn made me manage that time better. Previously, I'd fall into the trap of "there's so much time" that I could easily waste it. A whole evening free, planning to work on a side project? First I do something else, get carried away, then figure it isn't worth working for just two hours, and so waste the whole evening. Now I'm much better at using the time. An hour free? I can do some actual coding. Fifteen minutes free? I won't start coding, but I'll maybe update the SSL certificates on my server or read an article I've been planning to.
Yes, there are periods where that doesn't work. There can be three days where I have less than an hour combined to myself. Or some nights of such bad sleep that my creativity is at a zero. Speaking of sleep, I also made a habit of sleeping more after having a kid, and honestly it's a productivity booster. Sleeping for 7-7.5 hours means I can accomplish more the next day than sleeping for 6 hours. Having the right day job definitely helps. I'm very lucky in that my commute is fifteen minutes door-to-door, and that I have a quiet working environment.
Even in the best case, you have to give up some things - I haven't seen a full length movie in two years, rarely watch any series, and it sure takes me longer to get through a book. But at least in my experience, becoming a parent doesn't have to mean putting all learning and personal/freelance projects on hold for a few years.
The time commitment has changed for me but not quite enough where i can sit for hours and code something outside of work. My kids are 5 and 7
My experience is it gets "easier", but it doesn't get "better". Some parents really relate to their kids as they grow up, but it never happened for me. If you've ever seen the movie Rushmore, remember Bill Murray's character and kids? Just, no common interest and he's obviously defeated and burdened by them. That's about what it's like for some of us.
Those "golden hours" in the night or in the morning where I got to read or learn or do what I wanted were precious. As others suggest, getting some alone time by trading with your partner (if possible) is rejuvenating. But it's ok for you to not be as productive as you were before, because you have less time to be productive.
I have older kids and can tell you that it gets better. The kids get more independent. They want to do stuff with their friends. I have friends with teenagers and at that age they rarely want to spend time with you and you can leave them alone at home for hours (or even days).
So yes they need lots of time now, but when they don't you'll miss it too.
Is this really what you want? Because it depends on the relationship that you establish with your children. I found it such a pleasure to have teenagers who enjoyed being with me. I've always been kind of shocked by the desire of parents to be rid of their kids.
First off, if I can find time anyone can.
I’ll be blunt. Sounds like you just don’t want to do it.
When you want to do something I mean you Really want to do something it will get done. Otherwise it requires discipline. Simple as that. No shame in saying you rather spend time with your family then work on a project.
I made a rule shortly thereafter - no side projects. Anything we can’t afford from my main job, we don’t need. If I can’t learn skills that keep competitive while working 40-45 hours a week, it’s time to change jobs.
They are older now, but I still have the same rule. I spend my time on hobbies - not development side projects either for pay or resume building.
As for whether you have no life, well, I think this is life. It's far more fulfilling than when I spent my time outside of the office futzing around on somewhat productive hobbies that were ultimately not life changing.
The hardest part has been staying close with friends. I'm lucky there in that a bunch of my friends had kids at the same time so we all made the transition at once. Suddenly instead of going out to bars we all want to hang out on a Saturday afternoon with our kids. Without that I genuinely don't know how we'd keep our adult social life going.
I am now in a similar place with my own young child. I am totally drained after putting her down for bed and fall asleep within an hour or two. I'm not at a place where it's gotten better for me, but I know it gets better. Hope that helps.
Edit: typing out MASH correctly messes with the formatting on this site!
Oh and one of the biggest surprises for me was how much free time there was immediately post baby. I actually got a lot of work done because there was nothing else to do and I was bored out of my mind (both of our kids slept a ton in the weeks after being born)
As for personal activities? Definitely impacted, but only ones that took me out of the house on my own. Otherwise my gaming habits haven’t changed and I fit cycling in by taking my oldest kid to school on bike. Trying to just find new hobbies I can do with my kids instead.
Be careful how liberally you express this sentiment. Many babies don't.
This works for me because work is already plenty interesting. Things can always be more interesting, but I have chosen to optimize for my health instead. I also see kids as an investment: raising them takes a lot of energy and pain, but long term return is increased happiness, reduced loneliness. Think about how life would look like when you are 70 and have no kids.
Easier said than done though, been meaning to do this for 20 years and only managed to do it now.
I have a 1-and-a-half year old. I'm very lucky because I work from home, my wife doesn't work and I'm in a good work-life balance situation (good company). The incredible advantage of working at home and being a Software Developer is that I don't need to sit at a computer all the time to do my job. Good chunk of it is thinking through a problem, I can do that while I lay on the floor and let my baby crawl on me ;)
That being said, I can relate. I end up an entire week where all I did was work, get groceries, get other stuff from somewhere else.
I did try to optimize my time though: when I'm in the washroom, sitting on the throne, I read 5-10 pages of a book instead of my RSS feed (I leave that to the moments when I'm too tired). That over the course of 1 years adds up, I almost finished 4 books, which is a lot with a kid!
I got a tablet to stream my PC there, so that I can play a few videogames when in bed, however most of the time I just fall asleep or play 30 minutes at most. I need 10 hour to get decent rest (the baby moves/do stuff during the night. Yes she sleeps with us, otherwise we would get 1 hour of sleep).
Audiobooks have proven very helpful, I listen to those when going to buy groceries, I manage to keep growing while I wait to get back my time.
What I'm missing the most is time with my wife. I mean, we stay all day together, but we rarely get to play something together. We recently made a big purchase: a board game table. This should allow us to play when the baby naps and keep the board game set, so hopefully we can go back to play board games without having to wait 4-5 years.
That's all the "wisdom" I have to offer. I bet you already figured out all of it since you are further in the parenting voyage, but in case you missed it, that's my 2-cents, hope it's of some help.
That being said, I do love my baby. Some weeks I really need that 1 hour of gaming or reading, otherwise I go crazy, but most of the time is either work or kids.
Some weeks I just need 10 minutes hugging with my wife, to recover lack of "us" time
Anyway, it gets better, and interaction gets more intellectually stimulating. Do your best to enjoy every day as it comes at you, because all too soon you will be parallel parking between orange cones in a big, empty parking lot, and soon after paying tuition bills to the fanciest school they can get into.
However I always wonder how these robot parents do it, those that seem to be able to raise 4 kids, time to volunteer for PTA and kids sports, work full time, go to a gym, have hobbies, socialise, tidy house and look impeccable doing it.
When daughter number 1 came along it was hard. Cut down socialising. Gaming and coding only after 11 pm if not already asleep.
But then number 2 came along and it was near impossible. No socialising, no gaming, no exercise, not enough sleep, and no coding.
Though since I work as a contractor I have often taken a month or two off between contracts to both spend time with my kids and catching up with new tech. And lately not had full-time clients so been able to some personal coding during day time hours. Also if I have a client in London I have some me-time for coding on my hour-long train commute.
Though in September the youngest started school and suddenly the house is so much quieter. And daily routines are so much easier. We may resurface soon.
In terms of actual "available" hours to do what I want, it looks a bit like this:
Work ~10 hours (assumes some amount of commuting, getting ready, etc.) Evening/dinner/cleanup/nighttime routines (~2-3 hrs) Sleep ~7-8 hours
That leaves around 3-4 hours per day. Weekends are actually similar since that is a team effort of running the household and parenting along with my wife (And she needs a break too!). 3-4 hours sounds like a lot but the problem is that do you want to immediately go from activity to activity with no pause, no recharge time, no time to just "do nothing" and take a break from being around other people, tending to others' needs, work, etc. People need "recharge" time which might include resting, thinking, reading, or otherwise laying down and relaxing, with a spouse or not, or with a movie/show or not.
Still have the desire to build stuff and learn new technologies, and find myself watching random tutorials on YouTube sometimes late at night if I don't feel like watching anything on NetFlix.
It's been a challenge to get my kids into a good bedtime routine, so by the time they are asleep, I've usually got little desire to sit back down in front of the computer and actually work on anything else, including actually working through those tutorials.
Hoping things get easier when they get older and I have more time to myself again (and hopefully more energy) to work on side projects. Combined with working on stuff in my day job that isn't particularly fulfilling either for most of this year, it's a bit of a depressing predicament in some ways.
By 7:30pm that energy is a vague memory. Often the best I can manage is not falling asleep while I put them to bed.
People talk about crowding out the bad with the good: don't make time for things, just do them and let the world mold around what you love. In this stage of life though, the consequence of don't this can be massively damaging.
Kids this age are relentless, if you push hard for yourself it can be very hard to recover. But in line with other comments, I can feel the change coming. At 2 and 4, the sleep is better and their needs on us are becoming less.
I can see the light at the end of the tunnel and this helps me recognise that right now just isn't the time to push hard.
I'm in a fortunate situation of having both my parents and my in-laws so close and that my kids love to have sleep overs with them. Those seem to be the only times where I have a decent amount of time to dive into something, but even then, there are still up-keep responsibilities and a desire to just rest during those times that causes that window of time to disappear faster than I'd like.
I don't have any advice to offer but just an answer to the question on if anyone else is in the situation you described. Just know you're not alone :)
I wake up at 4AM, walk the dog, get to work before 7 AM (some days as early as 5:30), work until 4 PM, get home at 5 PM, play with kid and eat dinner, get kid ready for bed and read to them, and then I have 30 min - 1 hour before going to bed. By this time I'm exhausted and when I try to do anything technical fall asleep 10 minutes in.
Our weekends revolve around my kid 100%. It is rare for me to be doing something besides playing with them or doing errands with them. I'm starting to see some independence though.
I really enjoy playing with my kid and it is a wonderful experience, but I've gotten out of shape and there are a lot of things I want to work on but never can. No hobbies right now outside of being a parent.
I had to scale back on hobbies, but haven't given them up.
I wrote two books while I had small children at home, mostly while they slept and in the subway during commutes. I paused doing my favorite sport (table tennis) for about two years, and resumed afterwards.
It was harder for my wife, who breast fed (and my younger child wouldn't accept anything else). She had a harder time leaving the house on her own.
Wisdom is hard to come by from a sample size of one. I'd just recommend to reserve one evening a week for things you used to like to do, and do even if you don't feel it in the moment. Best to leave the house for it.
Plus it will get better. The older they are, the easier it is. 2 and 4 is probably arouns low point.
Believe me, I know how you feel. I have a basement full of half-finished projects that stalled out seven years ago. But, I've replaced those things with two little mini-mes that love football and trucks and travel. Looking back on the last seven years, I wouldn't trade them for the world. It's been awesome and it's getting a lot better.
In the other hand, I never had such a fruitful experience. I can teach my kids. I can make them respect my daddy time. And I can let them help with the chores.
It all comes down to honesty. Honesty bro yourself, your partner, and your kids. If a side project is what you want to do. Tell everyone and make a schedule. The thing is, even if kids are the most fragile and beautiful part of a family they are but a part and need to understand that at some point.
As for myself, just to name a few; I got the opportunity to build big stuff with lego, I learnt how to draw, got to know a lot more about mythology to tell him stories, honed my cooking skills, I even tried golfing (it was boring for both of us).
My kid at this moment is only 5, but I can say that my interests and myself as a human is greater than before. I might have delved deeper into some stuff if I didn't have him, but I think my perspective would be smaller.
Sleep: it's better in the sense that If I get lucky and they sleep all night in their beds without coming to mine, I sleep for 7 hours, if not, then well, I don't sleep all that well.
Work: it's super hard and I work a few hours after everyone is sleep. I have tried waking up earlier but I'm using that time to try and hit the gym.
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The truth is, you weren't going to do that thing anyway. That burst of energy is an illusion. It's a defence mechanism to make you feel like you would be an extremely productive person if it weren't for your obligations. In my experience, if you take away the obligations from that scenario, the burst of energy disappears.
You do have to lose yourself a bit for a while especially when the little loves are very young but there are so many repayments in kind if you notice them. Try and describe the first time your child looked into your eyes and you felt loved ... really, really loved and wanted and the best person in the world ever because you are dad and the little darling is ensuring that if mum is not around then you are the absolute dogs nadgers 8)
You are dad. You'll be fine.
Yes, it's very different from the hobbies I used to have, but for my brain, making the kids a hobby/'project' works pretty well.
I do kinda agree with another commenter here that it does somewhat sound like you simply need more challenging / interesting work. My four day workweek is fun / challenging enough that I don't really need to do anything similar (i.e. write software) as a side project.
It took some adjustment but now we have.. I really enjoy it. Playing games with my kids is fun, seeing them playing with their friends. Baking.
Our gym has a creche so I can still lift weights, read manga and get enough sleep (when the youngest allows it).
I don't code for fun anymore, but honestly I haven't done that for a long time. I've spent 30 years on computing, I keep up to date via work so my spare time is spent learning in other areas: history, the natural world, math, politics, physiology.. whatever interests me..
You will get your time back in due time. If you screw this up now, you wont forgive yourself. When you went to college (assuming you did), you probably focused on getting good grades. This is the same. Just get a ~4.0 in parenting, the rewards are massive not only for you but for society as a whole.
The other thing I’ve learned is that all (and I’m banking on) is that none of these stages is forever, because right now I know I can’t keep this up. Like when my first child didn’t sleep through the first 14 months we thought we were going to lose our minds and then...he did. And it all changed.
So at the very least, this part is brutal but it will, at the very least, change.
Feels like just an impossible combination of things. Can't turn off the kids. Can't turn off the ambition.
I’m usually up around 4:30 and have the dog walked by 5:30.
Summer in the Pacific Northwest means I’ve got plenty of light by 6 and I go hit the archery range or take the dog for a longer hike through the woods.
In the winter it’s pitch black til 7 so I go to the office earlier.
Go to my office between 5:30-7:30 where I’m going to focus on learning something new, side project, hobby project, etc. til 9:30.
Gym at noon (most days), home by 5:30. I don’t even try and do mentally taxing work after we get the kids to bed (around 7:30). Usually it’s helping cleanup, hanging with the wife, TV, and asleep by 9:30ish.
Because life is life, some mornings I’ve got the dog walked and am in the office by 5, sometimes I’ve got a meeting at 8, or have to take kids to school.
On weekends I do the exact same morning routine except I’ll be on the computer at home and usually no gym.
There are plenty of times where I’ve got a good flow going and my alarm buzzes at 5pm and I just have to tear myself away and get home.
Traveling is what kills me. My morning routine sets up my whole day and gets my head where it needs to be. When I’m traveling for work it’s not so bad because I hit the hotel gym and usually get even more morning time to myself. Traveling with the family (like over the holidays when I’m staying at the in-laws) leaves me jumping out of my skin without the physical and mental exercises I’m used to. I haven’t cracked that nut yet, but I’m really trying to not be such a dick about it to the wife this year.
EDIT: I forgot to mention the most important part! I’m definitely still working on this, myself. I found that really jumping in and ACTUALLY participating with the kids is a salve for that mental itch that seems to not be getting scratched when I am obsessing over something in the back of my mind. Building LEGO, kicking ass at Guess Who, etc. can still be pretty fun if we just get over ourselves and let go. Or if I REALLY still want to take the dog in the woods, bring the kids with and it’s a whole new adventure.
Haven’t found much time for anything other than parenting + work, but I switched to biking for a portion of my commute so that gives me 40 mins/day of exercise every weekday (except when traveling).
Your point about participating with the kids also resonates with me. It’s easy to be grumpy/impatient after a tough week at work followed by a long night of multiple wake ups, but some of the best days I’ve had since my 2nd was born are when I manage to hit the mental reset button in the morning and get myself back into a state of mind where I can still have a good time with my kids.
Edit: also, I’ve found that getting up at least an hour before the kids do, even if I haven’t slept well and in principle should probably keep sleeping, helps me keep my sanity.
So, just enjoy it while you can. It's one of the BEST parts and you'll be happy you did.
I’ve put my professional life on hold to kick start my children’s lives. I fought against it until I realized this was an opportunity I’ll experience only once in my life for a relatively short amount of time.
Enjoy the ride.
As far as bedtime/sleep stuff: I pretty much just wind down after the kids go to bed. Meditate if I haven't got that in yet (or maybe do a shorter session if I have and am feeling stressed). Read. Then try to get to bed early enough to give myself an 8-ish hour sleep window.
-Potty training
-Social play with other kids
-Full time school
-Reading
-Interest in Legos and games
I am still coming out of an eight year productivity valley (and my wife's of course was worse), but as Paul says, it's worth it. For me two fun things are when they beat me at a game for the first time and when they say, "Look what I made!"
It's gotten a bit better. (My daughter just turned 10) It's more like 95%. And each year I get a sliver more back. I think that in a few years more it should shift even more dramatically.
However as my kids grow older and they need less care for daily basic stuff, I find myself get more motivated. I have to provide for them so I am absolutely motivated to be more productive.
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However, if I remember correctly, parents with children at home also tend to have higher degrees of life satisfaction or meaningfulness, even with lower happiness.
Think that’s your problem right there. Kids can and should learn to entertain themselves.
Now that said sure if I worked at a job that I didn't enjoy or did unimportant work that was boring I'd probably think it's pretty exciting and find kids very interesting.
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You are getting 35-40 hours a week of structured time at the office away from your kids and you're complaining about not having enough time to absorb your "bursts of energy"? Only a "couple hours" to think about something interesting before getting 7 hours of healthy sleep?
You aren't having "absolutely no life". On which planet do people get to have 2 tiny kids, work full time, then have a jam-packed evening full of "freelance clients, learning/hobbies and interesting stuff"? Your expectations are just fabulously off-beam.
The good news is that you're at Peak Kid in terms of how much time they take - in a couple years they'll be at school, and a while later, you'll be looking at them wistfully wishing they needed you to entertain them all evening like they used to. I have 2 kids (13 and 16) and while they are not stereotypical sullen teens, they are almost too capable of entertaining themselves. One of the secrets of parenting is to let yourself enjoy each stage for what it is as far as that's possible (modulo scary events like illnesses and injuries and so on), not sit there waiting impatiently for the Awesome Next Phase of parenting when the workload is lighter or the kids are somehow "better".
I would suggest that if you have the luxury of a structured 35-40 hour work week (who is looking after your kids then, I wonder) that you find a job that can absorb the bulk of those bursts of energy and doesn't leave you thinking you need to work on something interesting for a couple hours. I joined a startup with a fun algorithmic problem and would often think idly about NFA matching and the like while watching the kids in the early AM (my wife called me, mildly exasperated, "notebook guy").
Thank you. I will try to enjoy these moments as a parent more.
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Let me know if you want to chat offline.
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However, I teach up to 18 hours a day with children of various ages. I've done this for 22 years.
I also have been the de facto babysitter for my family since I was 14. Kids in my home almost constantly.
The #1 thing I've learned is that kids love to help, . If you are busy and shush them away then they'll cause havoc. Involve them ever so slightly and you can continue your task.
Realizing this was the biggest boon to my productivity that I've had in my life. Sometimes the kids can increase your output by utilizing their curious/helpful minds or attempting to apply your thoughts in their space.
I'm sure this would be different if it were my children, but I constantly see parents making the mistake of thinking that their thoughts/activities and mutually exclusive to their children's thoughts/activities. They're not.
It does take time to learn to engage and frame your thoughts/activities, but children are only a pure attention sucker if you treat them as a distraction.
I think it can be a mindset or awareness thing, but some people are also resistant to involving anyone else in their stuff.
It requires having an attitude where you believe others might have have something worthwhile to contribute, and it requires exercising faith in that person. And thinking through how they might contribute and/or what reasonable limits are. Some people aren't willing to do that, and they tend to shut people out so they keep control. (This applies to both kids and adults.)
IMHO (as a non-parent), it might actually be way better parenting, too, if you can get this right. People often respond well if you give them a stake in things and responsibility for something (assuming it's not genuinely more than they can handle). You're telling them you believe in them and giving them an opportunity to grow. Many people will take that opportunity. And if you always avoid giving them such opportunities, you're implicitly suggesting you don't think they can handle it. Developmentally, I think a kid needs to have these experiences where they see that they are trusted with things, learn to step up, see that their contributions fit in somewhere, and see how to do more of that. If they don't, they are probably going to go out into the world not really expecting anyone to want their contribution.
It doesn't even have to be direct. If I'm working on a lesson (I teach technology), I can ask the kid to come up with some ideas, help clean the room, decide on what to have for lunch, help me grade assignments, etc...
At home it's the same. Help clean, ask if they can help me find a mistake I made, ask about food, ask them to comb my hair (funny, but kids 3-10 love doing this for some reason), ask them to put some music on for us, etc...
Of course it doesn't always stick and the kid wants some other attention, but when it _does_ stick I find it to be as beneficial as the time lost.
They are little brats and don't know shit, they get discracted by anything and so clumsy they are dangerous to themselves! I'm talking about 1 to 3 years old.
You have to involve them so they can have a chance to learn and grow. You are the most important, strongest, knowledgeable person in they little world and they want to be part in everything you do. How could one be so heartless to ignore this most basic and pure need and not involve them in everything? :) Part of parenting is dancing on that fine edge where they can excel, want more, able to fail and try again without hurting themselves too much and develop their skills and interest in a safe environment.
1. If you cannot priorize having fun and teaching your children over the actual thing you are doing, you gonna have a bad time. Filling the dishwasher with a 2 yr old? You will spend 45 min on it while laughing 10 times, having a heart attack two times and maybe break a chip off a plate or break a cup now and then. Of course you can do it alone in 15 minutes if you could get rid of him/her... As soon as you get frustrated by the slowness and just want the task done you've lost. There is no task for you other than to teach them and you need to incorporate your daily chores into this task. This is of course fuckin' hard and sometimes impossible and a great source of frustration, shouting and regret.
2. Kids add a time multiplier for everything you do together and for he first 4 years it's gonna be less than one. After that there is an ever incerasing chance for them to be actually useful and reduce the time needed for a task. But the catch is : if you let them empty and fill the dishwasher regularly at 2 yr old and endure the long task they will help later on and you will benefit. If you don't they won't be interested in helping when they are 6,8,12 years old and their help would actually make a difference.
This this this a 1000 times. Feeling needed, learning to help, and being rewarded with happy words and a clear sense of success and achievement is like a hard drug.
Every children will lean towards different activities; involving them will need a slightly different approach; and you will need to learn patience while they learn, so it's not a trivial task, but IME if you work it out, it works wonders even with the most challenged (or challenging) kids.
My parents got free labor they would have otherwise needed a pricey contractor for, and I got practical skills that have helped me to this day.
Well the latter part is true: my world now revolves around them and their futures. But chemical change? No. It's just the responsibility I have now. There's never a break. It's all-encompassing. I mean, it's survivable, I can deal with it, and I do the best I can, but, while it's certainly not PC to say, I regret it. I thought it would be great, and it's not.
What would I be doing so much better with my time had I not had kids? I don't know. Probably nothing. But it doesn't change the fact. I was happier before.
This article made me angry. That's great that Paul has such a wonderful experience. I'm happy for him. But don't act like you can speak for everyone.
I didn't regret my son back then, but it felt like the ultimate sin to ever express my stress or pains because they clearly were due in part to his existence. It's wildly unhealthy not to be able to do so. Shit, it's wildly unhealthy to be isolated like that and absurd not to be able to be openly upset about it.
I'm grateful for my son. I have Paul's experience with all of my kids in terms of the good feelings and the desire to have them in my life. But I'd be lying in a bad way if I ever said they weren't a large part of my suffering at different stages of our lives. It's part of it.
Being a male in that situation is also awful because people kind of shrug it off like... Well, you're not a single mom. Whatever. You're a programmer, you make tons of money. You're lucky!
Ugh. Hard times.
...and "you da real MVP" for raising your kids well, without "chemical assistance." Thank you.
In particular, I'm curious about these questions pertaining to your life prior to having children:
- From 1 to 10, how much did you enjoy helping a friend out when it was a mild inconvenience to yourself?
- From 1 to 10, how positive of an emotional reaction do you get when you see a cute dog?
I have a completely unfounded hypothesis that the 'chemical' changes that PG describes are akin to how our brains react when we see cute pets.
I believe that if you need to carefully analyze whether to have kids, then you will also continue to analyze and think about your decision after you already have kids. And it will make you miserable.
Rather than divulge my psychological profile on a public forum, I'll say the following. Spend some time with kids. Volunteer and do activities involving kids. There's plenty of stuff out there. If you end up enjoying them, then you'll probably like your own kids. If you feel like what the hell am I doing here this is not my cup of tea, then my warning is that activities with your own kids is potentially not so different.
One thing I've found, if you're exhausted and just waiting to do something else, the whole thing just sucks. I've definitely done that/had days like that. But if you throw yourself into playing with them, and really try to engage, interact, trick them, tickle them when they don't expect it, etc, it becomes amazing, because he picks up on that and gets really into it too, and he appreciates it so much. Like beaming joy. And that's one of the greatest things I've ever witnessed.
Just a point of anecdata. But it really seems to be one of those things where you get more out when you put more in. I don't know that I got an obvious chemical lightswitch thing, it's been a relationship that's grown more and more over time.
OTOH, in my experience, raising a dog is quite comparable to the first two years of raising a kid. Less so with cats, they are too independent whereas a dog relies heavily on you.
Another possible way of finding out if you have it in you being a parent, is to play "The Last Of Us". That might sound strange, but I've seen many people say that they felt very protective of Ellie and had parental feelings towards her.
We all have aspects of our life that are less enjoyable, but focusing on those do nothing but make you less happy. I'd encourage you to look into Stoic philosophy for advice on how to focus on what's good and enjoyable in your life.
As a new parent of an 8 month old, I can certainly understand this, even though so far I personally feel much happier than I did before. I think a lot depends on your life situation. With reasonable financial stability, a flexible schedule, and a spouse who (happily) devotes most of her time to the baby, it’s overall a beautiful experience that has given my life a whole new sense of meaning, a depth of love I never knew I could feel, and lots of those peaceful moments pg talks about.
But take away one of those supporting pillars, and I could easily see the stress and responsibilities overwhelming all the positive aspects to the point where it might not be enjoyable anymore.
It's too bad I couldn't pick my kids by personality. The random draw has been mixed.
I'm genuinely glad you said this too. I don't have children and don't really want them. I think it's totally fine if people want to have kids.
Even if there isn't a discernible change in your cognitive and thought processes, human beings still can be happy with the choices we make (and we're actually less happy with reversible choices; see Dan Gilbert's talk on happiness).
Not everybody gets the feels/chemical thing indeed, or not the first time. Some people are just less on the emotional / pathos side and more on the rational / logos, the 'rational' kind of feelings or rather 'impressions', 'convictions', sometimes just this 'clarity' — less feels, more words. Same result, just different brains to get there.
It seems very difficult to say these things and I’m sure it makes other parents who might have regrets feel a bit better/less lonely at least.
Also remember that people on average become less happy until their 40s or 50s after that their happiness increases again.
Then again, that's statistics and how does that help you if you're an outlier or just at the edge of the normal distribution?
I've felt like this too, I've learned you have to make some time for yourself & your partner. Try to get grandparents to look after the children, or friends to take them away. Definitely hire babysitters and maybe even a nanny. When you see them again you'll be re-energized.
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https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2017/11/27/parents-...
In general, in the West at least, folks had bigger families and started earlier (just make a new one!).
A friend of ours from rural China (Dalian province, I think) talked about how all the kids would go out by themselves and teach each other how to swim in the river. We expressed some admiration for that, and she said, "oh, I don't know - a few kids drowned every year". Every year!
In my experience, people who go on about 'helicopter parents' are awfully brave with the welfare of other people's kids.
We're pretty free-roam, but I spent a lot of time worrying about traffic when my youngest was the height that he could be invisible before stepping out from behind a car.
Maybe I'd be more relaxed about this if, for instance, someone blasting through inner-city streets in a SUV while texting, was legally treated as a potential murderer (or an actual one if things go badly).
The struggle of establishing a family here (on the West coast) makes me want to just give up and move back to the Midwest, to be honest. We want to have lots of kids and it's just horribly hard to do that out here.
Edit: My sister just brought up a good anecdote. She babysat for three different families on our block growing up. I can't ever imagine that being possible where I live now. No one has kids, and those that do move out of the city.
While there is less crime, there is a lot less space for kids to just run around, mostly because there's cars everywhere, which are obviously extremely unsafe for kids.
Most suburbs lack the density to make neighborhood friends. None of my friends from school lived near me; my little neck of the suburbs was occupied by retirees or kids over a decade apart from me. Visiting friends meant parents organizing a play date and a 15 minute one way car ride. There are rare cases where you do have a little neighborhood gang to play with, but it wasn't like when my parents grew up in the 50s-60s when an entire generation was birthed in sync and you could walk to 8 kids houses on a whim. Suburbs used to be only new families, with zero retirees when they began.
Living in LA now, I get to see that urban upbringing I missed. Kids are always walking around with their friends or siblings, visiting parks and rec centers, taking transit, walking to school, going to stores, etc. There are enough people where even though the generations of kids are blurred compared to the massive pulse of the boomer generation, you live among so many people that there will always be a few kids your age nearby that you can play with.
Suburbs or in the city, this rate of having a similar aged neighbor is probably the same, so upping the amount of neighbors makes this outcome almost assured.
https://likewise.am/2016/05/08/why-suburbia-sucks/
Children really are interesting, and really do fill life with all kinds of quietly wonderful moments.
We live in San Francisco, which is very hilly. When we drive up and down steep hills, my daughters get so excited. They squeal with glee like they’re riding a roller coaster, and beg us to drive up and down the hills again.
That may sound mundane, but when you’re there, sharing the sheer joy of life with fellow humans, it’s anything but.
Now looking back, the thing that I regret is that the modern world is pretty anti-kid, and makes things harder than they need to be. Cars, in particular, are terrible for kids. The roads are deadly, my number one fear is that they’ll run into the street and get hit. Car seats are also the worst. Long road trips are physically painful for the kids, I’m sure, so we’ve cut back on those. I wish, very much, that I could find a car-free city in North America to move to, but this doesn’t seem to exist.
I’m wondering if there any new urban projects, ideally in the U.S, potentially on the scale of the superblocks or e.g. NYC’s High Line / Atlanta’s Beltline / Miami’s Underline, where ecosystems are emerging beyond the reach of cars?
https://culdesac.com
There's also the village green, where the interior of the development is completely pedestrian only. That place isn't far from the expo light rail and the upcoming lax light rail.
LA has a lot of small bungalow courts that face inward to a courtyard rather than the street, but they aren't nearly to the scale as the above developments.
They're the number 1 killer of children in the US. They are objectively terrible for kids.
In NYC, Robert Moses put the car at the center of his infrastructure build out. That's why Manhattan has two highways up and down it's waterfront... A squandered opportunity to have created a city that was more attune with it's surroundings.
Ultimately you might need to move to Europe to go car free. But most of the cities I'm thinking of were planned a millennia ago.
Paul's written a lot of smart stuff, but this might be the smartest.
I took a lot of steps to protect my freedom before getting engaged to my partner, and I realize now that was a shitty tradeoff. Freedom was an unexercised resource I had, which is to say it was largely wasted on me. I spent a lot of time being lonely - not alone, which implies by choice, but lonely - having no steadfast companionship and with no alternative to that.
Earlier in life I often considered loneliness to be my biggest fear, but I eventually realized that loneliness isn't something that just happens to you. It's a choice. If you don't want that choice, then you have to put in effort to find and maintain friendships[1], find a hopefully-lifelong romantic partner, etc.
Beyond that, though, there are plenty of elderly people who are profoundly lonely because their children have families and lives of their own and rarely see them. Perhaps if they tried harder to maintain relationships outside their nuclear family, they'd be better off. Not saying all that is easy (especially with kids in the mix), but I certainly think it's worthwhile in the end.
[0] "Easy" in that your time will always be filled, with no searching needed on your part; I'm not suggesting that raising kids is easy.
[1] Being friends with parents (when you are not one) is hard, but it's worthwhile to make the time, and be flexible with your time since theirs often isn't.
Taken literally, it sounds like he's dismissing his relationship/marriage and saying he was lonely while in it, pre-children. I'm not going to try and extrapolate if that's what he truly meant or what the implications of such a statement would mean.
The sentiment, I think, would improve from removing kids and saying "I didn't take advantage of my pre-children freedoms and was lonely because of that."
It also raises an interesting question... If he had maximized those freedoms, how would that have affected his decision to have a child?
> To some extent I'm like a religious cultist telling you that you'll be happy if you join the cult too — but only because joining the cult will alter your mind in a way that will make you happy to be a cult member.
My offhand guess is that this general situation is due to dual-earning families that live separately from the grandparents. This seems to be social experiment started after World War II, and from the point of view of an observer I can tell you it's not going great. I suspect that the traditional large joint family approach is probably best in case you do want to have kids and not have it completely upend your life.
Logistically, extended families are a good idea. But I don’t think they stop people from putting their children first in terms of life priorities. On the contrary, a culture where parenthood rather than childless adulthood is normal is one where talking about your kids is a universal common ground you can share with other adults. (People need to have lots of kids for extended families to be normal—everyone will have grandparents but not necessarily aunts and uncles). Maybe you’re just observing one of these (sub)cultures from the outside.
this.
>Logistically, extended families are a good idea.
My fiancée and I have discussed buying a duplex, and moving her parents or mine (or both) into the other half. Looking into the future of what elder care will look like for them ... it's not pretty. A nursing home in a city I don't live in, staffed mostly with people that aren't even from this country (nothing wrong with that, generally, but it's something to be considered). For them it would be the best option, moving in with us. They get to see their grandkids, and we get to see them as they sunset their lives.
The main commonality among parents I know who are afflicted with this problem is that they have no or few relatives living nearby. Those who have relatives (especially their own parents) nearby seem to be more well adjusted. While they still talk about their kids a lot, they can at least speak about other interests and events unrelated to the kids.
One of my friends who also is able to talk about other things is a freelancer and is not a workaholic. I suspect number of hours worked to be correlated here too.
Some people are boring about their hobbies, some are boring about people, some are boring about work, some are boring about their kids.
If you find the conversation boring just remember they are probably just as bored at you droning on about blockchain or whatever it is you are keen to talk about.
Whereas I, who am not interested in that stuff, end up mentally putting them all into a single "boring" bucket, while the guy who can't stop talking about his 24-pack of Soylent gets his own separate "boring" bucket.
Most of my friends are from childhood. For the ones who have children, about half of them have turned into uninteresting people who are incapable of carrying a conversation about anything other than their children. And some of them were extremely interesting beforehand. A few have snapped out of it when their kids have turned 3-5, but most seem stuck forever.
When I go to visit family and family friends outside the US, they all have a bunch of kids but none of them have this disease where they can only talk about the kids. But there's also much more family support nearby and societal norms allow the children to be more independent.
I was raised outside the US, and this has been my experience as well. My friends/family outside the US with kids do talk about them sometimes, but it's usually blended with other anecdotes, like "We were going on a trip to this place, and Timmy was well behaved for a change (eyeroll)".
In the US these conversations tend to be more along the lines of "Timmy had underwater basket weaving practice, so we had to drive 5 hours to take him, and he threw in the car on the way there and back. Did I mention he's getting really good with those baskets?"
Agree with CalRobert that this could very well be because of stingy PTO and parental leave policies in the US which seem to have been designed with hard-driving male car salesmen in the 1960s as the target group.
Yes, most parents talk a lot about their kids and that can be annoying if you don't have kids. Most single people are just as annoying though. You can talk about your kids or you can talk about your vacation, or your job... for the most part people will find it interesting if they relate and boring if they don't. I don't think there's a qualitative difference there between parents and single people, just different audiences that will be receptive to what they're talking about.
I don't know if that's fair. I talk about my kids too much, no doubt, but only one of my (not single, but childless) friends is annoying that way. He likes to smugly point out what he did this weekend that had nothing to do with kids. I make a point of not discussing my kids or family life with him, and he still makes it a discussion point. Most other friends in my circle are pretty relaxed about the kid thing, either because they have kids, or because they know that kids are just people and therefore part of our larger social group, so discussing them is okay.
For my wife and I, the book “Bringing Up Bebe” was really influential in how we thought about kids before and after we had them. It’s a perspective shift kind of like this: your newborn human can’t talk, can’t move, doesn’t have any hobbies, interests, or friends. Rather than bend your life around that, why not invite this child into your life, to join in your hobbies, meet your friends, etc.
That may sound silly but it’s actually a pretty influential idea to latch on to. We don’t have a schedule wrapped around our kids, or weekends wrapped around our kids. We go places we want to go, and do things we want to do, and include the kids and tell them what we’re doing and why and invite them to join the fun. The great thing about kids is they’re pretty much up for anything, so they usually love this and jump in :)
I think, as an adult, you also have to make a conscious choice to keep up your independent life.
Losing your independence is something that happens to people for various reasons - you see it sometimes when people get married, and then they withdraw from all their old social life and kind of retreat into each other. It’s a lot of pressure to be someone’s entire world... I haven’t seen many of those couples stay happy.
I think that’s the part of having kids that’s hardest. Because they do have needs and do have to be accommodated, it can be easy to just worry about taking care of them and give up on everything else because it’s not as easy as it used to be to maintain your independent life. But it’s a choice you make, and in my experience it’s deeply worthwhile.
Dead Comment
It’s probably not something varianece in social structure will change since it comes from a fundamentally biological place.
I think what you're saying is that you want us to be interested in different stuff, more along the lines of what you're interested in, because you're not interested in kids. That doesn't sound so much like a social problem to me as a simple personality mismatch.
I'm not sure I can, but let me try. Some of my coworkers will chat to me for five minutes about watching that new Scorsese movie, and maybe make plans to hang out after work. Let's call this Group A. Some other ones will talk to me for twenty minutes about how their kids are really into Frozen 2, and how they dressed up as Elsa for Halloween. They also never have time to hang out. Let's call this Group B.
It so happens that none of the people in Group A have children, and that's really my problem with it. It's not really that I care whether or not anyone has kids (none of my business, really) -- but it seems like the people I overwhelmingly have no interest in listening to or talking with always end up being the ones that have kids. And so I end up wondering if this divide is inevitable, like of your (hah) sibling comments seems to say.
So how exactly does that show the biggest problem you have with kids?
Alternately, for some reason you laser-focus on the topic for some reason and you can't help but let it fill the entirety of your perception. This appears in Facebook a lot where people complain about baby pictures or anecdotes and somehow ignore the 99.99% of absolutely irrelevant inanity that the rest of their feed is ("Oh you ate at a restaurant...wowwweeeee"). It happens in loud restaurants when people filter out enormous volumes of ambient sound to focus on the sounds of a child sixty feet away. When someone has some sort of hangup about children, it's amazing how large it can appear in their perspective.
People who have kids (and people who really want kids) and people who don't (and people who don't want). They can't understand each other and most of one camp think the other camp dull and crazy.
It's just pov, and yeah, I keep distances from people with kids when the kids are around, because very possible they will leave their kids to me to gain a couple of hours to themselves.
I recognize that you certainly have your unique circle of acquaintances, but in general I find the above statement to be extremely improbable. Not only would I never leave my kids with an unwilling babysitter, it's actually the opposite -- you have to convince me that you are a safe choice.
I would actually like to have kids, but from a young age I decided that I would not do so unless I achieved financial independence. The reason is that if I were forced to stay in a job (or other life situation) that I hated for the sake of the kids, I would start to resent them.
If I have kids now, I'll have to work into old age, and so will my kids. That's a very sad situation in my view.
If I achieve financial independence personally, but I have kids who will have to toil their whole lives, then I'd feel I'm making a selfish choice. How could I explain to my kids, who would see nothing but a relaxed and happy life at home, that they now owe our system 40+ years of labor?
If I can achieve a level of wealth that would ensure my children could follow their dreams, then I'd love to have kids.
It's very hard to find a partner that would be able to say "Well, if we don't have $5M+ by age 40, we'll be childless, and that's fine. If we do make a lot of money, we'd love to have a big family."
I know lots of people here are doing it, but how can you ethically commit your unborn children to a lifetime of work?
And god forbid you have a child with disabilities and don't have a sizable financial buffer...
You'd rather not have lived? Do you resent your parents having you?
[Questions, not rhetorical statements, genuine curiosity.]
It's certainly an issue for many when considering parenthood - is it fair to raise a child in this situation - but I've not seen it expressed so extremely as you have.
I think it would be a lot healthier to grow up like that than as a child who could have whatever they wanted (monetarily.) Sending the signal to your children that things in life just come for free seems like a great way to ensure they aren't adapted to face adversity.
Quality of life is also improving generation after generation, so someone working an average job will “have” a lot more now than 50 years ago.
Anyway, your post raises a lot of good points. Thank you for sharing.
Very few are in their ideal situation when having kids and yet they still have positive experiences being a parent.
Those without kids and new parents think they need to be perfect, but in reality, there is no difference between being perfect and being good enough when it comes to raising kids.
A kid in the Bay Area will realistically cost a professional (upper middle class), dual working couple over $1m through college; that certainly is expensive.
This, right here, encapsulates what is so wrong with this present iteration of society. Having kids is now something that you do if you're wealthy and can afford it, or if you're extremely poor and cannot afford birth control (or just don't know about it ... before the downvotes come, yes I know there are a lot of factors that influence high birth rates among poorer demographics).
This isn't a sustainable situation, at all. We need a complete realigning of what society - and indeed Civilization - is supposed to be about. Family formation is used as an economic marker today, for a ton of policy proposals. More families means more purchases of stuff. Fewer families means less buying of stuff, and leads to policies that might be tuned to address the economic "problem" but don't really address the societal one.
So, financial independence: obvious pros. Cons: low probability event in short time frame.
Kids: pros: they're awesome. They make you very happy on balance. (I would assign a high probability to that). Obviously a subjective point of view. They are also way lower maintenance (cost) than you think. Cons: they take up a lot of your time.
Also there are interaction effects. Getting kids will reduce your available time needed to work to get financial independence.
So you need to weigh these things out. Point is, money (or lack of it) shouldn't be too much of a deciding factor in the kids decision. IMHO