Then I realized… I was now “the bad parent” I had so easily judged.
Then it was easy to judge parents with children younger than mine.
Until I learned that not all children have the same issues in the same order.
Then I learned it’s easier not to judge at all.
Good parents = kids not 100% glued to phones/tablets, social around friends and family, not throwing tantrums at 8-16 yrs old.
Bad parents = kids always throwing tantrums, kids basically always getting their way because they've learned parents will always give in, parents and kids 100% ignoring each other.
One set of friends - I go to visit, I play with their kids - we go out to dinner, we interact with both adults and kids
Another set of friends - I go to visit, they sent their kids to their room - we go out to dinner, they give the kids tablets and they're entirely ignored for the whole time.
Even if you compare to other parents, you are judging the reference-parents.
If you have data over time you can draw conclusions on things you want to try as a parent.
Everything you're observing is even more likely to occur if you don't see them that often. Your friends probably want to spend more time focusing on you. The kids are not that familiar with you and are less likely to engage with you. Which also makes the parents more likely to want to distract them with something else.
Whether or not you're bringing children with you matters too. It sounds like you don't because you're focusing on child-adult interactions. If someone has kids the kids run around and be kids with their loudness, and child-adult interactions are going to be much more likely. If you're not bringing kids in tow my kids are much more likely to just go off and do their own thing.
Much of what you're pointing out can also be down to individual child temperment. Which changes as children age. By your standards many parents turn into a bad parent once their kids become a teenager.
That is not to say that your observations are 100% wrong. But just that there's so many variables, most of which I didn't even mention here, makes trying to analyze your statement make my head spin.
Not to lean too much on anecdotes, but I have a friend who has extremely well behaved kids. He has said a couple times that he feels like he has placed too many adult responsibilities on his kids. Is he a good parent? Based upon outside observation, he seems good. But he seems to be questioning some of his own choices. Maybe that alone makes him a good parent? I don't know, who am I to judge?
Honestly the only certainty is that unless you have been 100 percent responsible for a very young child for more a few days, you have no idea what you are talking about. I don't mean that directed at you. Just my own generalisation based own experience and the opinion of every other parent I know.
Life as a parent is completely different than life before.
I saw a woman completely lose her shit in a museum with her kid. Before I became a parent I would have judged. But when it happened I just thought "poor woman, I know how it feels, just giving it her all and she's got nothing left to give right now, how many times have I felt like that, how many times have I failed to live up to my own ideals as a parent".
I'm beyond fortunate that she's fully into being a mother, calm, patient but knows where the boundaries are. And that's reflected into our kid. He's so incredibly easy to parent, it's insane.
I look at his friends - all good kids. Boisterous, outgoing, a bit wild and uncontrollable, but fundamentally good kids. They fight with their siblings, and they're learning how to navigate the world.
And then I go shopping. We live in lower socio-econimic area, and it's genuinely just saddening to see what goes on. The number of parents that are actively, in public, swearing out their kids and just having the kids stand there quietly shrinking away is heartbreaking.
I don't know what's going on in the parent's lives, and I know being a parent is immensely difficut, and none of us are equipped from the outset to really become one... but yelling at your kid for being a f*ck in the middle of a shopping center? I fail to see how any of that is OK because of 'circumstances'. At some point you have to grow up and be an adult. You put this kid here. You need to take responsibility. It doesn't mean it's easy, but if you can't self reflect enough to know that's not OK, then you're a big part of the reason the kid is how they are.
Parenting children is impossible, therefore all parenting lies on a spectrum from terrible to catastrophic, and it’s hard to know how you did until they grow up (if ever) because there’s a lot of sensitivity and subtle emotional stuff, especially at very young ages, which are the most important and the ones you remember the least. I’m certain there are screen-free parents who are worse for their kids than a good chunk of tablet-hander-outers
But sometimes there are legit behavioral issues that are extremely challenging, and are not the parent's fault. Sometimes what looks like a "tantrum" on the outside can actually be autistic overwhelm and meltdown, which can happen with even the best parents. Not to mention stuff like Intermittent Explosive Disorder.
All this to say...if you see a kid in public throwing a "tantrum", you still shouldn't judge the parents without knowing the full picture.
The first is an actual problem stemming from bad parenting and as a society we should indeed shame parents who raise spoiled kids who expect everything to be given to them.
Judging random people on the street isn't wise. Judge your friends and loved ones instead! :D
> Then I learned it’s easier not to judge at all.
A skill we should all cultivate, IMO. Life is happier when you do not waste it constantly judging.
My son has been actively involved with meal planning since he as a a year and a half old. "What type of bread today? What type of fruit in your yogurt tomorrow?"
I won't judge kid's behavior, so long as they are acting like kids. Sometimes that means they act out, that is normal.
But, damnit, let them live in the real world and not just try to distract them with shiny things all the time.
I remember going to restaurants in the 90s and early 2000s and kids would be running around playing with each other between tables. That is kids being kids, and it is perfectly acceptable (heck desirable!)
I've decided it's safer to just never judge, that parent you see pushing the toddler around in the cart might indeed be a terrible parent, or they might be going through grief and at their breaking point.
Agreed, I should have clarified that I'm speaking more about friends and family, people's whose situation can be spoken to directly.
I have friends with neurotypical kids who still hand the kids tablets at restaurants instead of actually teaching the kid how to take turns in a conversation, or how to actually go through a menu and order!
Like I get it, it is tiring, but we all signed for the work when we chose to have kids. (At least in my social circle where kids are very well planned for in advance).
On the other hand, no one has ever called the police on me for handing the kid a tablet and melting their brain inside.
When I was a kid either of those people would be practically thrown in a loony bin for saying anything, let alone taken serious by the authorities. Now the CPS investigates almost every accusation and is legally barred from even telling you who made it, so these anonymous shitstains can exercise their cowardice behind a curtain as much as they like with no risk to themselves but every risk to you.
It's difficult to let them live in the real world not because some evil guy with a white van is waiting to offer "free candy" but that the evil person in a white van is actually the Karen who sees a kid on the street or the park as an inconvenience for her or an unacceptable risk and they can be the coward they are and make an anonymous complaint and cause weeks of harassments by CPS with the cell phone they have next to them at the ready wherever they might see a child.
And this is why I pay an arm and a leg to live in Seattle.
Kids here are running around outside playing soccer in the streets with parents watching guard for cars at the ends of the block.
Mixed race is not even noteworthy here.
Kids walk to/from school (up to a mile) all the time. Huge groups of kids walk together every day.
You think that this is what kids are like. They sit there, they walk a little, they giggle on the playground, they look cute as all get out, etc.
Then you have kids and you know.
You know.
Those kids sitting there in the booth sipping on their milk quietly while mom and dad happily eat their lunch? Those are the top 5% most calm kids out there. The other 95% of kids are with their adults screaming and throwing fits and covered in who knows what.
Life lied to you. It did it directly to your face, unashamed. The bias is real.
It sounds like you always wanted kids. I don't say this to criticize - it's great that those who want to start families do so - but I don't think your experience is universal.
Plenty of truly bad parents shrug responsibility off by making the "technically correct" claim that all kids throw tantrums, therefore they're not a bad parent. They then proceed to provide an unstable environment to raise their kids and the tantrums don't end until well into adulthood.
I don't know, it seems like parenthood asks for a lot to be given up. Younger people like myself are already struggling to live on their own where I am. There's not a lot that can be spared by most of us.
To me, having a child means heavily straining your financial safety - here, care for this other person that can't do anything and has some of the most expensive needs in society. Not only that, but you need to be sure that you can provide for the child for the next 5, 10, 15 years. Who has that sort of confidence? Then there's the part where all your free time is sacrificed to care for the child. The time burden decreases, but it's always a lot of time. And you always have to be extremely risk-averse - if you were just responsible for yourself before, now you have someone you need to take into account for every thing you do in life. Moves, job changes, major risks or investments, career changes, taking on additional responsibilities. All of these things probably become much less doable for parents. And this is a one-way road with no backing out, you commit to it and are stuck with that choice for several decades. By the time your child lives on their own, you've already spent a large portion of your adult life. And there's no guarantees that your child is someone you like, or that your parenthood isn't soured by something else. There's plenty of parents who are stuck in parenthood and hate it.
The thought of having a child scares me. I'm happy that the author is content with how his life turned out, but I'm okay with just watching from the sidelines. Maybe the biological instinct (forced coping mechanism?) is so strong as to justify living through the horrors above in exchange for watching your kids play and participating in similar things. But I don't want to learn what that's like.
I’m a child of Soviet Era and our parents did not think twice if they can afford children with their meager salaries. I remember going to a kindergarten as soon as I could walk.
The reality is that a family can always make choices that enable them to care for a kid, but there are of course trade offs.
Public daycare would mitigate one of those trade offs
I could not imagine an emptier life, than one without children.
I couldn't imagine an emptier life than one where the only thing that matters is procreation. We're not Pacific Salmon.
For example, I wonder how many monks or priests would agree with you.
But that didn't happen. We just carried on being Jason and his partner, but with a baby in tow.
I had spent most of my 30s cramming in as much "living" as possible, to make sure I'd stocked away a lifetime supply of it. After all, I'd probably never get another chance to travel for long periods, keep up with climbing, and all that other stuff that Independent Jason could do.
But it was all for naught. We just packed the kid along and went traveling anyway. He had eleven stamps in his passport by his first birthday.
Life is just as much fun as ever. But now we have some kids to play with.
There are some huge changes.
The largest is a lack of the mental downtime where deep thought and problem solving could occur.
I can't get off work, hop on my car, and drive around for an hour mulling over technical work. I can't stay an hour past with coworkers and noodle solutions on a white board. I can't get up at 2 am to try something out that just popped into my head.
I need to be in bed by 10pm every day. I have to get up at 7am every day. On weekdays 2 meals a day need to be planned, on weekends 3 meals a day. I can't try experimenting with some random new recipe that may fail, my kid needs to eat lunch on time not 2 hours late.
Yes it is a lot of fun (theme parks! Trick or treating!), but I'm thankful I did a ton of amazing engineering work before I had a kid because there is no way I can dedicate the absurd amount of time to innovating/solving hard problems, that I used to.
Had a very similar feeling. When my wife told me the "getting pregnant" worked I mourned a little bit. I recognize we were exceedingly lucky to have had such a wonderful kid, and it has worked out very well.
For the first 6 mos. a lot did change, but after that things seemed to skew back to a new "normal".
It will be 13 years in May since we had our daughter. I'm so glad we did it.
I know that it could have gone a lot differently, though. I'd never suggest that it'll be great for everybody.
I was raised overseas (Dad[0] in the CIA).
Both good and bad. First, if it's just "traveling," and not "living" overseas, I suspect that it's not so bad, but military brats have common quirks, for a reason. Our lives get torn up and replanted regularly. It's hard to make friends, and we often end up having a difficult time, retaining long-term relationships, later in life.
But, man, the life story that it gives you. There's few cures for xenophobia, better than immersion.
They go to bed when I am also tired. Trying to having an hobby past their bed time means sacrifying sleep time.
Travelling is also a challenge, since they lack interesting in seeing something new, but just want to have fun playing, especially playgrounds.
How do you keep a baby happy and quiet on long international flights? I currently have no kids but I may find myself in this situation in the next couple years. I'm dreading being the guy with a screaming infant on a 13-hour trans-Pacific flight that keeps everyone from sleeping.
It's only once they're old enough to have more sophisticated feelings (like boredom) but not old enough to communicate them (except by screaming) you get in trouble.
Nearly everyone I know with kids is more similar to this story than yours.. to each their own but it's certainly not for me:)
We were the same ;-)
My parents managed four kids, albeit for most of that time there were only 3 living in the home at a time (13 years between the oldest and youngest).
A friend of mine had eleven (!!!) siblings. That horrifies me. Cliques could form in that size population! Utter craziness.
I think people struggle with losing their identity when they no longer get long periods of focus time or can participate in their hobbies with the dedication they would like.
Not the kids fault, but last time I travelled, there was a couple travelling with a child that was crying, hysterically the entire trip. This was a 20 hour trip all up, from NZ to SA, crossing NZ to AU then to SA, and they were with us all the way. The kid was going for the entire thing - I watched the parents take turns to look after her, standing near the toilets. I feel sorry for them having to deal with that, and for the girl being that upset (presumably sore ears? dunno), but that would not have been fun for the people around them either.
I was always super wary of travelling with ours in case that happened. We were lucky that they just slept through all the flights, but it could have easily gone the other way. I would have felt pretty stink subjecting the surrounding 40+ people to a very upset child.
That’s the main thing - each family and each child are different, so it’s kind of hard to base your decision on what you see and hear from others.
Never had a second for some reason.
I was labeled colicky as a baby and my own children turned out to have some digestive issues with certain common foods that make them cry a ton when they or their mother eat them (and they get it via the milk). If I hadn’t debugged the food issues I might have labeled them “colicky”, but when we avoid those foods religiously they only cry when it makes sense and when the issue is solved they stop. I’m guessing I had a similar issue as a baby, my parents definitely didn’t attempt to debug it.
No judgement by the way I’m just curious if you tried debugging things like that as I imagine “colicky” could encompass issues that aren’t possible to debug also, and it’s also understandable if you couldn’t put in the resources to debug it as in my case it’s been a gigantic and expensive pain in the ass.
Trust me, the debugging is a big part of the trouble. Everyone is telling you to debug, but that is actually the thing you have to learn to stop doing. Your brain is telling you to debug. But it can't be debugged. I watched multiple women have mental breakdowns trying to debug a baby with a 6 month streak of colic. Eventually their brain just goes psychotic because a baby screaming 6+ months non-stop with nothing wrong while people frantically try to solve the problem is basically sever mental torture. It is not the hours, or days, or even weeks of screaming that get to you, it is the months of never ending ear-pearcing torture that nothing will fix, and they will not fucking sleep because they just want to scream for all of their sleep as well and naturally the caregivers won't be sleeping either due to this. And you cannot rely on crying to figure out when to feed, when to change a diaper, when the baby needs sleep, or some gentle motion -- all of your indicators are worthless.
It is a hell for the baby and it is a hell for the parent. People struggling with this generally do not have any more children. Any other stage past baby for such child is 99% easier, I laugh when people say babies are the easiest stage.
We went on to have more kids. They were all quiet and easy. We sometimes wondered if there was something wrong with them.
It's way more work to travel with a 10-year-old than a 1-year-old. Then quadruple that difficulty for each additional kid of roughly that age...
There are 2 further points:
1. I'd say the ideal setting is for both parents to work and hire a sitter even though it might financially net the same (or affordably negative) as having one stay-at-home parent. Because a human needs community and diverse things to do, not just one thing over and over everyday for years. Both of the parents will be much happier.
2. When people say taking care of baby/toddler is difficult, it's almost always about not eating well and/or not sleep well. Eating would take an hour of spoon-feeding because the kid wouldn't eat by themselves. Kids wouldn't be able to sleep by themselves. You must focus on solving these 2 areas first. Once they are solved, it gets a lot easier to take care of a baby/toddler.
It's such a tragedy that one might feel compelled to weigh the burdens of motherhood vs fatherhood as if either side had a choice in the matter or as if there is some kind of competition to be won.
(I'm a dad, who does do half of everything with the kids. It is possible, it's just a lot of stuff to do.)
Unfortunately, there's no way to elaborate what I mean on HN or much of the web without stirring up a ton of pointless argument. People will just get defensive and refuse to consider perspectives they can't agree with.
Growing up in a more conservative society, I've seen many people with that parenting style, who often pop a proverbial blood vessel trying to ensure that their children are more like army cadets that perfectly reflect their worldviews and don't take an unapproved step in any direction. Their rationalizations ranged from real safety concerns to arbitrary opinions like what religion is right (and exactly how someone needs to act at all times, with no limits on specificity or ridiculousness) or what large groups of people are evil (nationality, religion, identity - any group is fair game, just pick one and wall off your child from ever knowing about them). Regardless of motivation, ideology is a choice, and they could've relieved a whole lot of this burden on their own at any point.
It has been encouraging to see how much more men now seem to desire being engaged and nurturing in their children’s lives (even among those who otherwise consider themselves conservative or traditionalist).
Ironically, the pointless arguments you so despise (and refuse to invite) offer more than whatever utility this comment has.
Actually, it's really striking that even in America -- the developed country with the #1 highest birthrate -- still falls below the replacement rate. What is it that's inversely correlated between growing wealth and having children? Especially since it was likely to opposite for most of human history? (i.e. large families were a sign of wealth and power).
PS - I can't resist offering my own experience as a parent - what a treasure to have discovered that I'm capable of such love, and to get to watch this love transform me into a better person than who I was before. This kind of love demands everything of you, but through it you discover a truer and stronger version of yourself too.
None of this is conducive to starting a family.
Having all the stuff that could happen during the day if it were (if you will) someone's full-time job, instead get crammed into evenings and weekends when you're trying to also do non-chore stuff with your kids (or, for god's sake, maybe get just one measly hour to do something you want to do, alone... or spend time with your spouse, without kids...) and take care of things that have to happen each evening (dinner, bed time stuff) really, really sucks.
Not having chores piling up through the week to ambush you both on the weekend would be amazing. I can hardly even imagine how much more free we'd feel. With two working parents it's like neither ever gets any actual time off that they're not carving out by neglecting something they really ought to be doing (usually several somethings)
But as you say, I suppose everyone ends up becoming strong. Because there is no other way...
I think a lot of people miss the simple fact that some people just don't want kids and are unable to reconcile their personal experience with anyone else's.
My partner and I are both wealthy enough that we could both afford children and we can afford to not have children. But neither of us think our lives would be improved by having them.
I think that's really, really hard to understand for a lot of parents and people who want to be parents: being (relatively) wealthy creates choice, and that a growing number of people are choosing different things now that they have the ability to do so.
It's fairly obvious the world will be very different and much less pleasant place by 2050. A lot of people don't want their kids to live through that.
It's possible aliens will arrive before then and fix all our problems, or some other Salvatio Ex Machina, but it's not exactly a high-odds bet.
This bullshit excuse that somebody can't afford to have kids is proven wrong by the fact that poorer people have more kids than rich people. You can even be unemployed. Gone are the days of destitute single mothers having to give up their child to the church and work in the poorhouse. We have social welfare for that.
Maybe the fact that poor people can have lots of kids has taken away their value as a status symbol for wealth?
There's a well known aphorism about this...
In the past both poor and rich tended to have tons of kids, this is because kids tended to die young regardless of being rich or poor.
Then you're trying to compare massive social changes in the west that occurred around the same time. For example womens suffrage, women being allowed to work, sexual revolutions and birth control.
If you look at countries that tended to develop later, the rate of childbirth tends to drop with accessibility to birth control and education.
Of course we love our kids, and we had (and still have) a lot of good times with them. But kids can really break your life and marriage, too - amongst my peers I can't tell you how many have a struggling young adult kid or two (with relatively serious mental or physical health problems), with no resolution in sight.
So stay lucky - having a child is a wild act of optimism. And if you want kids, don't wait too long. There is never really a good time to have a kid (just different trade-offs), so for the best chances for health, be as young a parent as possible. And men have a biological clock, too: e.g.: https://neurosciencenews.com/genetics-sperm-mutation-neurode...
Then you have a child and you are suddenly hyper-aware of everything going into the body and brain. Everything they eat, every doctor visit, every time they get sick and what could have exposed them, every word spoken on TV, every friend they have and how they act or how that friend passes along their parents influences, etc.
And suddenly you're very concerned about societal level macro influences on food, medical, etc because those influences are going to affect your child's life.
Especially trying to control who their friends are and what they hear. Questionable behavior from friends at younger ages can actually be a good thing: it lets you plant the seed early when your kids still listen to you.
Turns out it’s quite strange, because my kids bring me more joy than anything else. I’ll sit there for hours watching them play. You may think “that’s not strange—tons of parents say that”, but for my sort of personality, it’s very strange. I’ve always thought of myself as sort of overly analytical, detached, ambitious, and a bit obsessive. Not the sort of touchy-feely person who chases a two year old around with a smile on my face and likes watching videos of cute babies. Yet here I am. I enjoy it so much I’ve even tried to figure out if there’s a way I can take a sabbatical from work to spend the last two years with my youngest at home before he goes off to school (seems unlikely given how questions about a random two year gap on my resume might affect my long-term career).
It’s funny that as a kid I always wanted to work at a tech company for the interesting tech, but now as an adult my favorite thing about it has been the 4 months of parental leave I was able to have with each newborn.
Looks like many dads are changing mentally when their first child is born or a bit later. Mine changed somewhere during the second trimester.
Bonding is also almost automatic for mothers (especially who breastfeed), whilst it's delayed or never happens at the same level for fathers. My first child has never been close to father because he worked "9-9-6" and got 2 day leave. He could never really calm down crying baby or put her to bed. With the second child, thanks to large corp policy, he got 15 weeks bonding leave and it was a very different experience for father and child - baby didn't care on whose lap to fall asleep.
And just in general, giving guidance and seeing that look on their faces that means they're just waiting for you to stop talking so they can go on with their lives.
Comments like the parent one (pun semi-intended) basically sound the same to me as what my boss had said to me that day. Assuming that your own experience is universal is a flawed way to view the world, even if your experience is relatively common. If there are exceptions, it's not going to be easy to see them if you have an assumption already about it being universal, and if the people in the majority are loud enough and annoying enough about it, those who aren't will be even more incentivized not to share their experiences with you; I'd argue that people who regret having kids will potentially be reluctant to publicly say so. Most importantly, doing something because of societal pressure rather than genuine desire is going to greatly reduce the chance that someone truly finds it fulfilling, and there's an emotional cost for children who are raised by parents who basically regret having them.
It's totally reasonable to say "I never truly understood how much I'd enjoy having kids until I did, and I suspect it's the same for a lot of other parents". There's no reason to go further than that unless you're pushing an idealogy rather than actually trying to say something you know is correct.
It's okay if you don't want to learn Spanish, but when people discuss the struggles and delights of reading Cien Años de Soledad they're not necessarily being arrogant, just stating their lived experience.
Mostly due to chronic illnesses, of either the physical or mental variety.
This is a very difficult subject since there exists un-imaginable suffering and it's hard to reconcile that. That life is a gift under the umbrella of un-imaginable suffering. Perhaps, that's what spirituality tries to do, I don't know.
Yeah sure we also risk some micromorts and the life-altering-disability equivalent every time we drive a car or get a sunburn, all right.
I CAN explain to others who don't. It's just that most of the time others aren't interested in hearing.
Things you can’t explain to other people. But others with the experience just know.
After having kids, you realise that things only appear different for a while, and you simply flow into the new reality.
Everything really changed forever, but not as drastically as you might have thought.
Remember how everything changed when you got or lost a job? Yeah. Well, maybe not exactly, but you get the point.
"One of the nice things God does, is that he doesn't let people who don't have kids know what they're missing"
Genetics play a decisive role in kid's behaviour and powers/weaknesses. Next comes the mother, next the father and later the society.
Let's not forget that parents are "kids" of the society that heavily influence their behaviour that eventually shapes their kids.
Disclosure: Zoë is my cousin.
And I'm frankly annoyed by the growing activism to ban kids from public places in the name of "adults quietness".
That's some pretty ironic copy xD
I truly do give my kids my all though, and they have a wonderful life and are loved and cared for in all senses of those words. They’re great kids and I give them everything necessary to be a great dad.
They find enough there to keep themselves entertained. It’s amazing how much interest deer poop can generate.
Men haven't evolved to be overly attached to babies or small kids like mothers did - that'd have been a weakness in the survival race. Men skills were completely different, usually related to being away from the kids most of the time.
Translate to modern day, that is men not really wanting to have kids (sometimes just going along with the wife's biological clock), and pretty much "feeling nothing" when the kids are born. There's a million documented examples of that.
However, once kids leave the "little puppy" phase and grow beyond the basic needs care that mothers provide, it's when the fathers start to really relate to them.
If your older kid is maybe 5-6 you're about to start that new phase. That's what happened to me, and I find (maybe not so extreme) examples of that on almost every guy I talk to.
Give it a second chance, maybe having kids is just not for you. But don't assume it's already the case, you may miss out whole new world.
I find the days that I forget myself and throw myself into trying to be a good dad are the days I find joy in fatherhood. Weekends especially I try to forget the stresses of work and productivity and everything else and try to spend as much time with them as possible. Playing, teaching, and learning with them.
Not saying it's universal. Just a datapoint from me.
So my advice is: find activities to do with them that you would both enjoy. Maybe going to parks, museums, have them help you on house chores... You only have a few years left under they get to middle school and start becoming more distant.
I wanted to be a dad more than anything in the world, and I absolutely love my kids and I love being a dad.
Most of the time.
There is a TON of things you have to do as a parent that objectively sucks, and you have to do it no matter how you are feeling and no matter what else you also have to do. It is impossible not to feel trapped, at times, by the understanding that it never ends, that you are a parent 24/7/365.25 and that your kids dominate your life. I don’t care how much you love your kids, you are going to feel that sometimes (or you are so strongly into the self-denial that you force yourself to pretend you always like it).
That doesn’t mean you aren’t a good parent, or even that you made the right choice to be a parent. Most of the best things in life involve sacrifice, and doing things you don’t want to have to do, and powering through even when you want to give up. It’s cliche, but the struggle makes the rewards even sweeter. Doesn’t mean the struggle doesn’t suck sometimes, and you might want to give up, and you have to use all your self-control tricks to maintain.
I feel even worse for parents who did IVF or other fertility treatments, or who adopt. In my conversations with some close friends who are in those situations, they talk about how much pressure they feel to never complain when it is hard. They spent a ton of money and effort and used insurance money and many doctors and procedures (or all the interviews and inspections and money for adoption) so they could have kids, and now they want to complain about being a parent? Of course, they still have all the same struggles and pains and nostalgia for their before life, no matter how much this is what they want.
Anyway, I am not sure what my point is. I just want people to be honest with themselves, and other parents and future parents, about what the entire parenting experience really is. Sometimes I think parents don’t want to scare potential parents off of being parents, which I think is understandable but overstated. There is simply no way to convey to non-parents what it is actually like to be a parent, and this applies to both the good and bad things. I thought my wife and I were prepared and knowledgeable and ready, and we were to the extent we could be. But so many things we imagined about what it would be like is not the reality at all, but even if we had a Time Machine I couldn’t explain to my previous self what it is actually like. You just have to experience it… if you want to. I would never tell people they should have kids, because it is such an all-encompassing thing that everyone has to decide for themselves… all without knowing what it will actually be like.
It is a hell of an adventure, though.
Do you say "I love my kids" because that's what everybody says, or is there any truth in it?
EDIT: Just to be 100% clear: I mean absolutely no judgement. I'm not going to tell you off or try to change your mind. I ask out of pure curiosity.
Critically: I give them my full attention.
I could choose to spend all that mental effort on myself, but I choose to spend it on them. That’s as good a demonstration of love as any, in my book anyway.
Edit: no offence taken! I didn’t interpret it that way at all.
Show mostly by example, not by direct mentoring.
What rich education and various cultures for 6-year-olds (or less)? That is simply irrelevant at that age and logistics of it just makes you hate everything. Do you even take your kids to dozen of arbitrary chosen classes?
Tone it down, everybody will feel better and you won't have to fake it. Happy parent is more important for family than robo parent.
My family and friends are multi-cultural so they’re naturally exposed to several cultures, for example. It’s also important to my wife and I as the world itself is multi-cultural, so having an appreciation that different people live their lives differently is important. We lead by example simply by living in a multi-cultural life and embracing it.
Take that same approach and apply it across the rest of the points I made. Nothing is forced, I promise.
It is true that some people are not really cut out to be parents. But unfortunately it is difficult to tell whether that will be you or not. I see people looking at comments in threads like this and then chiming in with sentiments along the lines of "see, this is why I never wanted to be a parent." There is no way to know that, and such statements strike me as cope. Becoming a parent changes you, but you won't know how until you do it. There is a lot of biology and psychology in play, for certain.
As I tell my own kids, however, be careful because you only get to become a parent one time. Cannot blame someone for opting out of the risk, even if the counterfactual is that they would have been amazing parents with amazing children and been much happier.
have so far been very much a drag on my life and productivity, and not much else
At some point when our kid was still young, I started working 4/5 FTE, taking the afternoons off after ~14:00. I feel like that provided a lot of mental space. Since I was working part-time, I did not feel bad/guilty about not working the afternoons and I would be focused on being very productive from 8:30 to 14:00. The free hours were for doing stuff together or accommodating their playdates (picking up from school, ensuring the house doesn't get torn down).
Now they are an age where they want to do things without parents, so I am working full-time again, but do miss those early days where she would be with me in her seat on my bike and we'd cycle to the city and she'd be singing aloud from joy.
But every person is different and I think that there are also parents that start enjoying having kids more when they are older. So, your years may still come :).
dark comment
My dark comment would be: we are all learning on the job and I feel like I could do some things better with the experience I have now.
If I have a second life, I don't know what to do though, I probably will first make enough money before having kids at least.
I think you’ve hit the key difference.
I waited until I was 40 before having kids, and it just feels like I’m doing it on easy mode.
We had time and money sorted out, and tons of free baby stuff donated from all our friends who had done it already.
It’s still lots of work, but you’re at a place in life where you can handle it. I can’t imagine trying to raise kids in my 20s, with my crappy stressful office job and no money in my little studio apartment.
Hats off to anybody who can do that.
I will say that a lot of those issues have gotten better as they have gotten older (they are now 10 and almost 7). They don’t require the same level of constant attention that they used to, they are getting more and more interesting to talk to, and have developed interesting personalities and senses of humor.
Seeing them grow was fun, seeing them turning teenagers is a pain.
I now make it a point to be honest with people when they ask "Should we have kids?" and tell them about how hard it can be, etc. Most importantly, I tell people that they shouldn't have kids unless they would still want to do it if their experience doesn't land in the middle of the bell curve. We tend to romanticize the decision, and expect that everything "just gets even better" with kids. There are all sorts of ways your experience can be less than ideal. Unless you're evaluating your decision with those potential outcomes in mind, you're doing yourself, your partner, and even your future children a disservice.
I’m sure you love your kids and take great care of them, and it’s not your fault that you feel this way.
It would benefit all of us if this taboo was lifted, so that we could speak truthfully about the impact of kids on families, and maybe then we’d have to provide more support and encouragement to convince people to have them. Not everyone has free daycare from their grandparents or a large social network to babysit or the finances that make having a child less of a burden.
I can't wait to play with my 3 year old and 1 year old. I get so mad at work when I have an odd late meeting because it is keeping me from them.
My three year old helps me build furniture (he gets screws started, counts out parts, helps apply glue). I love showing him synths and instruments and seeing his face light up.
My one year old is a cuddle monster who likes listening to jazz with me. She also really enjoys when the cat climbs up on our lap and she gets to pet it.
I don't know your situation, but most miserable parents I know see their kid as something to manage, like some kind of annoying work underling.
I see my kids as little detectives.
My goal isn't to solve their case or even help them approach it in the right way. It's to give them an occasional hint (or step stool), keep them from danger, and help them discover the correct way to behave.
If the only thing you can enjoy is adult stuff or working then you might have a rougher time at it if you don't find joy in the pure act of raising a kid. For me the first few months were meh, but once they started to get a personality I found it more entertaining.
I tell others not to do it unless they are prepared to suffer. You won't know if its for you until you've already gone through the one way door. I wish others luck. For the unlucky, I wish grit and stoicism.
I wonder if there would be something identifiable in common if we fMRI'd your brains, as while you are definitely not alone it does seem like a pretty strong exception that makes the rule.
Now with smaller family units and less community interaction they represent a risk to security, mainly financially.
Having children for yourself provides more security for all the other families but barely anymore for your own. Meanwhile you bear most the costs and everyone else bears very little. So the incentives are totally reversed, and even worse the coupling between investment in children and payoff is cut which means the people in the best position to help their kids be successful are the least incentivized to do so.
Given the post you’re replying to, it seems you’re implying a specific reason, but what if it’s a different one? How about “I love children but having kids is super expensive”?
> There is generally an inverse correlation between monetary income and the total fertility rate within and between nations.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-fam...
> In 2021, the birth rate in the United States was highest in families that had under 10,000 U.S. dollars in income per year
And a few thousands more links.
always surprises me when ppl say this when they clearly observe the opposite in action. whats going on here.
My oldest will need a laptop for school next year. It isn't optional or provided.
Maybe you need a bigger car because car seats take up a lot of room.
What if your kid decides they want to join a sports team? A friend of a friend told me they did the math on a year of competitive swimming. It was $10,000 by the time they were done with equipment and travel.
A trip to the dentist for my family of four is about $1000 for just cleanings. Braces for my oldest were $3000 if I could pay cash or $4000 to finance. You could skip dental care, but some might consider that neglect.
What if the school tells you to get your child tested? That costs about $3000 in my part of the world. Half of the kids on my block are neurodivergent somehow. What do you do?
In a less well off part of the world, most of these "concerns" probably disappear. I think we have pretty high expectations of parents that aren't poor.
I don't know why you're trying to explain an outcome that is opposite of the observed outcome.
Are you saying that while more money is correlated with less fertility (the fact), that somehow even more money will reverse the trend and start going the other way?
Based on observed data, one could almost make the case that if only billionaires start stealing from the poor even more, then birth rates should go up.
I've always believed that it isn't money itself, but access to healthcare and education that lower fertility rates. Money correlates really strongly with access to healthcare and education.
Having good education and healthcare leads to birth control and maybe an abortion if the BC fails.
When a family of three is making $15K a year, do you believe baby four, five and six were planned out in agonizing detail? Or do you think maybe they weren't planned at all?
And I do believe more money going around would help. If the perspective is "I can't afford it", those who are doing OK will not have children if they can help it.
So it's expensive no matter what income bracket you're in.
Also: having many children used to be an insurance policy, but as countries become more developed it's less necessary.
> Generally, I regret having kids
Please don't ever, ever let them know this, or even allow them to figure it out. Especially before they're at least ~30 and able to begin to understand.
I regret the loss of my mental energy and personal time, but not them, if that makes sense.
It certainly is. Speaking from personal experience. And he let me know in a very direct and cruel way.
I make sure my kids know I love them in many, many ways.
Yes you definitely should try that.
This is stated as some sort of universal truth.
It is not. Please don’t make OP feel bad, whether you mean to or not.
Example: it took us an hour to walk the mile home from preschool together together. It's astounding to me to think that someone could be fulfilled and engaged for every minute of every day of that walk. That there's nowhere else they'd rather be. That some days it wouldn't just feel _slow_.
Being present for your kids can be hard work, and it sucks to be judged for putting in that work even when you don't enjoy it. I wish people would stop thinking they're better parents just because they _like_ spending a higher percentage of their time with their kids. All that means is that it's easier for them.
Celebrate the parents who put the work in, even when it's hard.
My kids miss out on nothing, don’t worry. There’s zero reason to pity them - they’re amazing and they have an amazing life. I purely regret my loss of mental energy and personal time.
There are some upside, but they are...tangible. The downside is concrete and solid. From hindsight, having a kid has nothing to do with my long-term objectives, but since I can’t dial back in time, I'll try to be at least a median good father -- I have gotten the financials covered, and I'm pretty sure in that part I'm better than the median, but for the focus part I'm not sure.
Hacker news has a bias because most people here are working in software and probably make more than the median household income (solo).
I'd wager that you picked a good wife and that your kids are healthy and bright.
Things can go from satisfying to draining real quick.
Watching my wife have special moments with our kids fills my heart like nothing else.
Seeing her be an amazing mom is like watching your cofounder take on a completely new role outside of their previous experience and crush it. Except it's even better since you're in love with them and have all these biological/chemical signals to help kick that in high gear.
I think the answer is, it's both.
When I was an employee sometimes I was happy, like when a promotion was lurking, and sometimes I was unhappy and stressed, when getting fired, when facing deadlines, ....
But when I started working for myself the amplitude of emotions became way stronger, every week I would fluctuate between feeling doomed forever or feeling like a genius.
Life with and without kids is the same: The emotional highs of having kids are way higher than anything I experienced without kids, but sometimes the lows are very low.
My kids have been really easy, no big problems, but sometimes I see other parents dealing with really serious issues with their kids.
It starts with babies, some of them sleep easily while other cry all the time, to teenagers who can be nice kids with no problem at school to being called to the director's office all the time and have to seriously worry about their future.
They grow and you're privileged to live with them for a while. Also you'll grow with them.
Having kids was my best decision ever. Thrice.
“On the other hand, what kind of wimpy ambition do you have if it won't survive having kids? Do you have so little to spare?”
If you can't hire "help", it's like losing 20 waking hours from your week, at least, just for the not-at-all fun or "quality time" parts of having a kid (extra housekeeping [so... very much more], extra shopping, taxiing the kids places, extra household planning, basic hygiene stuff, et c). And on top of that you need to spend "fun" time with them, too, like that part may be more enjoyable but it's non-optional and a lot of stuff an adult might want to do or accomplish doesn't integrate well with it.
Slice ~30-40 hours off the waking hours of both adults in the household, on top of 45-50 hours of work and other stuff necessary for work (commute, et c.) and... yeah this is just bullshit if you can't hire help.
[EDIT] Oh, this reminds me of a certain genre of LinkedIn post that I especially hate: the CEO bragging about how they find time for family despite having five jobs. The real answer to this mystery is that zero of those jobs are actually full-time work, and, the part they never mention, is that they pay others to do tens of hours of work per week that normal people have to do themselves, like lawn care, housekeeping, fixing broken shit in their house, shopping, keeping track of and making appointments and such, et c.
Now let's try to figure this out: Do we have enough money? Yes, probably. We could survive 10 years without making another dime. I don't know what kind of safety net is recommended, but people do it with a lot less. We live in a country with free health care, so illness won't end our lives like it does in the USA.
With that out of the way, let's get to all the other points:
How much do I want children? Personally, I don't get it. If my wife wasn't dead-certain she _must_ have at least one child, I would never, ever consider it. I hate noise and chaos. I even find co-habitation challenging.
I was an only child and I think I'm mildly autistic. To me, 'alone time' and 'quiet time' are sacred and required for my sanity. Well, I know that goes out the window with children. My wife is the opposite: Many siblings, has always been around noise and chaos. Loves giving love. To me, the dog, to anyone. And that is why she seems to have this need. So, the decision is: Do I give up what I want, to make her happy?
Her happiness is about as important to me as my own. So that's a stalemate. She keeps saying how worried she is that it will ruin my life. But I also don't want us to split up over this, knowing that I have 'taken' her fertile years. She won't have a kid except with me. So that's also a stalemate. I have had a pretty terrible childhood. So I know I'm biased. I don't want to let fear dictate my life.
Almost any occasion where I've stepped outside my comfort zone or done things I didn't want to do out of fear turned out to be things I was grateful to have done.
I can also see how raising children could be very rewarding. Even my therapist said it can be very healing to have children. It's an opportunity to do better than my parents. That's valuable, for sure.
And then I think of the state of the world. Awful. I wouldn't want to bring children into this. I'd even probably say to my own mother 'don't bother' if she'd come to consult me about whether to have me first. But then I spoke to my granddad, who was a teenager during the 2nd world war. He is also probably mildly autistic. He said it was the best thing he ever did. Had multiple kids.
If I look at my wife's family, they are all happy, successful, harmonious people (now). I look at my wife's parents and think "what a blessing". The richness of life they get to experience is just magical. If I could somehow guarantee that it'd go that way for me as well, then I'd have kids already.
But there are no guarantees, just uncertainty. Uncertainty of the "life changes forever, irrevocably" kind. That is brutal and scary.
The last time I made a similar decision was when starting a business. I knew I went down a road that would require stability and dedication. I'm a volatile person who quickly gets bored of things and wants to move on to other things.
Thanks to my wife I've done a bunch of things I never thought I'd do, because they require dedication and consistency. Something I don't really have. Renovating houses, starting businesses. I surprised myself with what I was capable of. All thanks to my wife.
I also think it's basically a crime to not let her raise a human being. I am certain anyone raised by her would be a net positive to society.
But then there's me and my issues. I don't know how I'll deal with it. I don't know what will happen. There's a chance I can't do it. And what then? Divorce? Repeat the cycle of putting children into the world and abandoning them, like my parents did, because they also couldn't handle it?
They were very young and had no money or support. Their relationship was also broken. My wife and I are 'old' and we have money and we have been an unbeatable team for well over a decade. We also have support. Grand-parents are basically next door and dying to help with raising a kid. So we are in a privileged position.
But my fear of taking this step is not going away. And I won't know what it'll be like. Parents look so tired. Many of my friends are parents. They all seem to offer the same advice "it's hell on earth, I hate every moment of it, it's the best thing I've ever done".
Awesome. What am I supposed to do with that? It's useless advice. It seems nobody can really tell you whether to do it or not.
Any people here who were equally fearful and then did it, NOT regretting it? And I mean truly. I don't want to hear the "I love my kids"-mantra. It's an automated thing everyone has to say. I mean truly.
You can talk to the foremost mango growers on cultivating mango trees and learn everything there is to know about making mangoes. You can consult with the best chefs about how to make the best mango dishes and desserts and learn the absolute best way to prepare and eat mangoes. You can learn from the masters of how to paint a mango so lifelike that you'd think the painting was real. Etc. You can learn and truly master everything surrounding the act of eating a mango.
But until you sink your teeth into a mango and actually eat it, you've no idea what you're talking about.
So, until you actually have the kid, all this worrying is for naught.
You will be just fine, the kid will be just fine (they have their own agency too, you know), the world will keep turning and you have the agency to put a person in it and teach them what they need to know.
The real question is if you want to eat a mango or not.
I'm not going to be politically correct. I'm going to be honest. For some of us, it is a hard reality check.
As children, many of us had various kinds of hard experiences. You can get a rough idea of how hard your background likely was by tallying up the different kinds of Adverse Childhood Experiences that you had. The result is your ACE score, and it is a standard risk assessment tool. You can find the list near the end of https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/symptoms/24875-adverse....
My ACE score is 9/10. Most of you won't have had that level of challenge, but a lot of you had problems. I've done a lot to deal with my background, work on my mental health, and so on. I swore to break the cycle, to give my children a better start than I had.
I mostly succeeded. Only mostly. The impact of my failures became obvious when COVID turned many homes into hothouses for mental illness. My kids were not unique in their struggles. But within their peer group, it was my kids that were hit first and hardest. And then I did not cope well with the result. As a result I, also, have been having mental health problems.
For people like me, I recommend a long and hard think before having children. If you do have children, you will naturally try to do your best. I certainly did. You are extremely unlikely to succeed as well as you'd like. I certainly didn't. And so you should also prepare to give yourself grace for the ways in which you might fail. If I had done better on that, then I would have been better able to carry on and try to pick up the pieces when the shit hit the fan.
To everyone who is beginning on this journey, I wish you luck. Cherish what you have. Do your best.
And if your best did not turn out to be as good as you wanted, you have my sympathy.
I'm so glad I've avoided kids.
Sure I feel sorry for the kids being distressed for one reason or another. but these guys did literally nothing.
There just has to exist someone on the planet for which the title “shit parents” does objectively apply no matter how you look at it.
> The fact is, most of the freedom I had before kids, I never used.
That just seems like close to the definition of freedom. I have the freedom to go outside right now and eat dirt. I've never used it.
If you didn't do something then I guess you didn't want to, more than the things you did choose to do instead.
The only way you'd have enough life to do "most" of the things you'd be free to do, is if you're not free to do but a tiny thing.
> See what I did there?
Yup. Made no sense at all, is what. A UAE passport makes you free to visit 181 countries either visa free or visa-on-arrival. It's still freedom even if you don't take the time to visit all 181 countries.
It's not even an interesting paradox. It's just an obvious part of freedom.
Most people don't visit more than 35 countries. An Afghanistan passport gives you access to 35 countries.
I will add to this that the first five years are tough, but it is great after that
It's funny that he actually believes this.
For decades I have been convinced that we are speed-running into a global environmental crisis that we will continue to ignore until it is far too late and this will result in associated resources wars and I never wanted to doom other people into having to live through that.
I sincerely hope for the sake of those of you who made a different choice that I turn out to have been overly doomerist, but watching the Trump 2.0 years play out I now think that I wasn't doomerist enough.
people who choose to be child free are not complete human beings
Hmm, this seems pretty condescending, but hopefully it is just in jest.
With four kids I understand there is a unique set of skills and emotions that come along with it and I am personally grateful for, but there are also a lot skills and emotions you won't have and experience if you never go to war, never become a leader, never experience losing a parent when you are young, never win a gold medal in a team sport, never live in a different culture, never volunteer, etc. It seems short sighted to claim someone is an incomplete person if they can't experience one of those things, because likely no single person can.
There is a great tapestry of human experience and we can only experience most of it second or third hand (and probably not even that in most cases).
Holy mother of autism. “my life is like a video game”. Please tell me you don’t have kids. They’re doomed if so.