A few years ago (children must have been 5ish and 7ish?) my sitter cancelled last minute. So instead, I told my kids 'if you can play all morning, without fighting and screaming so loud that I can hear you, and not interrupting me, I'll pay you what I normally would have paid the baby sitter'. It was the first time they could make their own money, and it worked perfectly. I tried again a few days later and it failed and haven't had to try since. Maybe an idea for all those that now work from home the first time?
Examples of nonobvious consequences of parenthood include:
- Parents of pre-teens tend to be constantly late for everything. That's not because of lack of organization, but because the kid will randomly soil their clothes or do something else that needs to be taken care of immediately.
- Parents are also constantly interrupted. Especially with the first kid, it seems everything is a life-threatening emergency, so the moment it even looks at you funny, you'll start calling your spouse at work to consult or coordinate a doctor's appointment. Some workplaces accommodate that (mostly those staffed by other parents), some don't. It becomes a question you start asking about on the interviews.
- Say your company offers to send you to a conference or a training seminar. You'd probably jump at the occasion (yay, free education and zero responsibility, all on paid company time!), but you might be wondering why your coworkers all refuse to go, and don't even show any excitement about it. It's probably not because they're lazy, or just dispassionate 9-5 workers. It's likely because they're parents, and you can't just go to a conference as a parent. It's a huge logistical challenge.
- Parents like big cars because of storage space. Going up and down the stairs with stuff gets tiring really fast, so you end up e.g. storing trolley and surplus diapers in the car. If you didn't want a car before, you'll start to want one now. This goes against the general trend of environmentally-conscious living.
- If you aren't addicted to coffee yet you will be after having a child. You'll also learn that polyphasic sleep is a real thing (if it wasn't, nobody would survive the first months of parenthood).
- You'll start talking about shit with other people. And I mean literal shit.
- You'll bankrupt yourself if you try to buy everything new for the kid; you'll likely and out of a sudden become super frugal and very aware of all local clothes/items exchange/giveaway groups.
- A babysitter isn't a luxury, it's mental healthcare in the city.
I could go on and on, but it's late and my kid will wake up in about 5 hours. I'll be drinking an extra coffee tomorrow.
Without child care or some place for the children to go, it's absolutely impossible to work from the office either, so I'm not sure what this means.
That last part was something I didn't internalize until I became a father myself. There's no "you do your stuff, and I'll be looking to make sure you won't hurt yourself" with small kids. They won't just do their stuff, they want you to do it with them. On top of that, once they learn to move (even just by rolling around the room), it's always 5 seconds from "everything is fine" to "the kid is trying to lick the electrical outlet".
Kind of frowned upon now.
Nowadays someone needs a minimum of four years of college to be able to do anything. You can't start contributing to society until you're 20. Everything easy has been automated or outsourced.
One year is nothing, really. As a farmer, the work I do required about a decade of study before I could be productive on my own, and I'm still working on mastering it. In the days of yore, farm kids had to start engaging with their teachers as soon as they could as it was the only way they were going to be able to be capable of attempting the practice once they reached adulthood.
> Nowadays someone needs a minimum of four years of college to be able to do anything.
Well, you need four years of college to get past the gatekeeping. Gatekeeping that is setup because the work has become so much more accessible, necessitating means to cull competition. You don't have to start as a young child nowadays like the farm kids used to have to. You can easily coast into adulthood without even thinking about a career.
School and college is pretty much just to waste your time. None of the things you learn transfer well into work life.
I wouldn't call it impossible, and I've been working from home on and off for quite some time. And no, my kid isn't traumatized.
It does take some juggling with time, the 9 to 5 schedule no longer applies as you have to spend time during the day with your kid, but it's no worse than the random and useless meetings and conversations you have at work. And you have to be patient and expect interruptions.
It can be done with some discipline. You shouldn't generalize.
when we moved from communal intergenerational lifestyles to the insular nuclear family. David brooks wrote a great piece about it.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/03/the-nuc...
This falls under the same category. Without child care or some place for the children to go, it's absolutely impossible to work from home. If only one parent works it can be done, but if both parents have to telework it's a no-go.
Non-parents don't get it. It's impossible to get anything done with kids around. The only way I can imagine it to be possible is if you were to abuse and traumatize your kids so they'd leave you alone because they're afraid of you. Maybe that's what some of our ancestors did.