Being a parent is the greatest joy I've ever known, but the joyful parts are the punctuation on the mind-numbing toil. That toil is only bearable because of the fun bits, but it's still there.
Being a parent is very important work, and can bring great joy, but it's possible to both love the joy and hate the toil in between.
What is the nature of this toil?
The girl has no internal monologue. She has to run every thought in her head by you. Most of them are pointless and incoherent, but you have to humor her. She will say "um..." just to keep warmed up for the next thing she might want to say. She requires constant attention and affirmation. She wants you to watch her do a cartwheel--identical the previous million cartwheels--and respond enthusiastically. She won't eat her vegetables. We have a rule that we eat vegetables before we eat the rest of the meal. Every meal becomes a bitter war of attrition where she fights to eat green beans as slowly as possible, hoping you will give up. (Between boy and girl, eating a meal peacefully is impossible.)
Meals--when I was single I once went three months eating a turkey sandwich every day for lunch. Your kids will not put up with this.
Getting them ready to go out is a huge effort. They have a million accessories (bottles, diapers, toys, etc.). They have no sense of urgency. You are trying to get to church on time while girl is starting a craft project.
They generate huge amounts of clutter. Markers, crayons, paper, toys, etc. Taking a hard line on toys is little help, because their school sends them home with piles of art, crafts projects, etc.
They are very rewarding. When they're sleepy and both snuggling on the couch, I hug them and think "I will never do anything better than this." My wife and I will look at the older one playing with the younger one and say: "this is the best part of life, it'll just go downhill from here." The only reason we don't have a third yet is accounting for private school tuition. At the same time, my wife and I relish going to work every Monday so we can deal with angry opposing counsel instead of picking up after the kids.
Your 7 year old would not be asking for you to endlessly watch her cartwheel and interact with her out of bordem. They would be out playing 24/7 in the local forest, come back for food and boo-boos, be back before dark and be in bed a couple of hours after dinner / night time with an 8 or 9pm sleep time and a 6am wake time.
Kids were not meant to be a lot of work, our society makes them a lot of work.
It's much safer to be a kid now than when I was growing up, but the news makes it seem like it isn't. I would let my seven year old walk to the park by herself, 1/2 a mile away, if I wasn't afraid of having the cops show up.
When I take her to the park now, I let her play on the structure about 100 yards away, within my line of sight. And still adults will come up to her and ask her where her mommy and daddy are.
My nephew is not yet four years old, so he's probably still too young to be outside playing on his own, but I fear he'll be in the same boat as your daughter in a few years, unable to do anything outside of his parents' line of sight.
I think you’re right: in the past, each kid was much less work than they are today. The difference is that you also used to have 6 of them, and used to expect that not all of them might survive to adulthood. This is clearly not acceptable approach in today’s society.
Around the 70s the workload ratchet started going up, with each decade adding more and more restrictions. Look at stranger things, today it's a bit iffy to let 12 year olds go out biking by themselves to see their friends. In the 80s you could!
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/02/reader-center/free-range-...
And each extra kid bumps up the difficulty & time factors to some degree.
It was really cool yesterday to teach my kid long addition. It was a major slog to respond to "dad look at this" or "dad, I have a question" every five minutes because she lacks an internal monologue.
That doesn't change the fact that the day to day is hard. Getting my toddler to eat anything healthy is hard. Getting her to sleep is hard. Cleaning up messes they make is hard. Getting them ready when they don't want to go is hard.
Just because something is really hard doesn't mean it isn't worth doing. Raising kids is way up there on both measures; really hard and really worth it. However, the day to day is relentless, and the rewards are not felt with the same relentlessness that the work comes at you. I don't feel rewarded during the moment that I am cleaning my sick kids vomit, but I have to do it anyway.
I think attitudes toward parenting are completely impossible to rationalize, so your puzzlement isn't at all surprising.
Consider that many (most?) people who have kids don't do so out of a 100% independent choice, with 100% foreknowledge as to what it will entail and be like.
People have kids because their parents pressure them to give them grandchildren. People have kids because their peer group is having them. People have kids because their religion wants them to. People have kids because they don't know enough about contraception to avoid getting pregnant, and then their religion or moral code prohibits an abortion.
People have kids because they really really do want to have kids. But they vastly underestimate the work required to raise a kid, and feel completely natural amounts of regret, even if they truly love their kids and want the best for them. But it's still a bit of a taboo to suggest out loud any regrets about becoming a parent, so they keep it bottled up.
So just remember that every parent arrived there due to different circumstances. And regardless, every person -- parent or not -- has different likes, dislikes, desires, and levels of patience. What gives you a sense of purpose could easily be someone else's tedious drudgery. That shouldn't diminish your happiness, or demonize their boredom; it just means that you and some other people are different. Which is basically what being human is about, no?
But I think there's a danger of indifferentism here:
> What gives you a sense of purpose could easily be someone else's tedious drudgery. That shouldn't diminish your happiness, or demonize their boredom; it just means that you and some other people are different.
I don't deny that there are different strokes for different folks, and I understand that not everybody is going to make the same choices as a parent as I do.
But from the point of view of the welfare of the child, I think it's pretty clear that having a loving, stable, attached relationship with an engaged parent is going to be better for that child's overall well-being and future success than a relationship with a parent who loves them but can really only stand being around them in small doses.
I'm painting an extreme there, and I'm not suggesting that a person who drops their kid off at daycare and breathes a sight of relief must be a bad parent or a disengaged parent.
But I do think that rather than treating engaged parents and disengaged parents as just normal human variations of likes, dislikes, desires, etc. we should recognize that it is better for the child to help the disengaged parent become more engaged. And fortunately, there are a wide variety of ways we can do that!
Absolutely agree! And from the outside looking in, it makes me really sad to see -- for example -- parents who'd rather be buried in their phone all day than engaging with their kid.
But I think maybe that's where there's a slight disconnect between what you and I are saying... I personally don't feel like it constitutes lack of engagement for a parent to derive no joy out of doing something like cleaning up a kid's messes. I can't imagine a context where I'd have any positive feelings about cleaning up a paint spill on a carpet, even if it had nothing to do with a kid of my own.
Some of the other things that the original poster you replied to are maybe a bit borderline questionable. If it gets to the point where you'd much rather be at work than spending time with your kid, that's really bad for the kid, and the family as a whole. Not saying that poster actually feels that way; obviously we have only a teeny tiny bit of knowledge about their life. But I think if sometimes you just get so tired and drained where you feel like you need a break from being around your kid all the time, and your job is an escape from that feeling, that's just normal human needs and behavior... as long as that's the exception, and not the norm, I don't see anything red-flag-y about that.
> It is NOT enjoying life to stay home with toddlers.
> I was so happy to be able to go back to work
> the weekends are way more stressful than the weekdays
I have to say, this kind of perspective on being a parent puzzles me, even though it's pretty widely held. Honestly, many parents I encounter seem almost as if they'd prefer to be their child's aunt or uncle than their mom or dad. Certainly not in title, but possibly in terms of responsibilities.
I get it, raising kids is HARD. But the sense of purpose I feel about writing code that helps my company's investors become slightly richer is totally unlike the sense of purpose I feel about teaching my child about the alphabet, even if many days it feels like a slog.
I like this quote from G.K. Chesterton about the importance of this work. Chesterton is talking specifically about a mother, but I think it holds true whether the primary caregiver is a father or a mother:
> To be Queen Elizabeth within a definite area, deciding sales, banquets, labors and holidays; to be Whiteley within a certain area, providing toys, boots, sheets, cakes. and books, to be Aristotle within a certain area, teaching morals, manners, theology, and hygiene; I can understand how this might exhaust the mind, but I cannot imagine how it could narrow it. How can it be a large career to tell other people’s children about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one’s own children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone, and narrow to be everything to someone? No; a woman’s function is laborious, but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute. I will pity Mrs. Jones for the hugeness of her task; I will never pity her for its smallness.