I suspect that this is one of the places we've lost out by splitting off to nuclear families with a small number of closely spaced children. Childcare is a job that, while difficult and stressful at times, is not particularly intellectually challenging, nor does it require very much expertise or physical strength. It's also relatively parallelizeable (the added effort of taking care of an extra simultaneous child is sublinear). Those characteristics make it a perfect job for both past-working-age people and older children.
We still utilize this dynamic some through grandparents and babysitters, but it's not nearly as prevalent as it would have been in an earlier era where multiple generations (and familial leaves) lived in a single household, with a wide range of children.
There is no real feminism with this traditional system in place. Even with the modern setup, women take care of children more _even if they don't want to_, simply because nursing takes a lot of time.
Empowering means: "make (someone) stronger and more confident, especially in controlling their life and claiming their rights". Having child does not really make that and I dont see how it should make that.
I don't think there's a real argument to be made that the nuclear household developed because of feminism. The New Deal and post-WWII policies that gave returning vets and their families cheap mortgages in sprawly suburbs appears to have had more to do with it (an era that was notably accompanied by an expansion of household technologies whose goals were to enable a single person to care for an entire household).
Also, full time childcare is quite tiring for older people, grandparents who are strong enough are typically employed.
Full-time, sure. But what about flexibly available when necessary?
Also, traditional household provides too little privacy, but living within 10 minutes walking distance is fantastic.
There are all these situations like "grandma, I need to go shopping, could you please take care of the kids for about 30 minutes? maybe later if it is more convenient for you" where having good social infrastructure is awesome, and I cannot imagine how more difficult life would be without it.
Seems to me that as a society we went from one extreme to the other, skipping over the point where things could work really great.
There are fun bits later, and some people will insist childrearing is 'fun', but I don't think so.
It's loads of work, but fulfilling, interesting work, getting to know a new person. It is full of joy. Fun / contentment? Not so much. The amount of work decreases as the kids get older, but the complexities of the problems that present themselves increase, too.
In some ways, you could view it as an increased opportunity for individuality. You're not just doing you anymore, but creating your own miniature culture around you. You're choosing who you are and how you're going to pass it on to a new generation. Hopefully, you start to take a really intentional view of the structure of your life at this point, too.
I'm not really looking forward to my kids growing up and having my individuality back. Though I do sure wish there was a chance to take a couple weeks vacation each year. ;)
We were going to have two of them go away to Johns Hopkins-CTY this summer, but it didn't happen (for obvious reasons).
Maybe summer 2021 I'll get a week or two partially off :D
My kids are asleep by 830 or 9pm, I'm not sure why this person feels they don't have free time until 11pm, that seems like an exaggeration to me.
Even when they are awake, they rarely occupy both my wife and I full time, unless we're choosing to spend quality time with them. Sometimes just one of us watches them while the other one had time to relax or catch up on work.
It's not like my wife and I were globetrotting before kids anyway. Having kids is far more interesting than the same old, same old routine. I don't really feel like I'm missing out on things I would have been doing before kids.
I'm not going to pretend like I don't miss having 5-11 PM for myself, or the fact that weekends tend to be quite busy. But I've done the "all non-work time is _my_ time" for my previous 38 years. And I've also come to understand that the luxury of time I had previously I was also quite adept at BS'ing myself about: "I'll start that tomorrow! never starts it"
If I don't work on a side project, I understand very clearly now it is because I didn't sit down and actually do it.
It's not my son's fault, it's my own.
The 5 year old is in his "big boy bed" and we use a color-changing nightlight on a timer that is a soft red when he needs to stay in his room and turns blue when he can come out. The 3 year old is still in his crib for another few weeks, then we will transition him to the same setup.
Apart from the predictable times here and there where the older one sneaks out of bed to see what we're up to, it's worked out really well and gives us our sanity back from around 745pm to whenever we go to bed.
That said, I agree more with you, because as much as I like to say, "oh I could be doing x or y if I weren't caring for my kids," in reality, I probably wouldn't be doing much differently. Maybe I'd go out a few more times a month, but oops pandemic.
If I don't get a solid 2 hours a day I get very unhappy, very fast. So long as I get that, I'm good. But that's about all I can manage these days.
It's worth mentioning that sleep routine discipline for the kids is worth working towards. Not being free until 11pm is just crazy. We have friends who sit/lie beside their kids for an hour or more until they get to sleep - insane.
Our kids are usually in bed at 7:30 and more often than not, we walk out after saying goodnight and don't hear from them until the morning. If the eldest struggles to get to sleep, he goes out to the living room to read for half an hour and then goes back, but it's nothing that would stop us watching TV elsewhere, working, doing dishes, etc. If the youngest sulks about sleep, being responsive/attentive and caving to demands will not help you in the future.
Doing dishes as you cook is worth it. Cooking more so you have leftovers for the next night is worth it. Combining routine with play (kids help cook, help clean, etc) is useful. Those little helpful things add up and buy you time.
Another one is, if date nights are difficult to schedule (or babysitting expensive), work from home on the same day as your partner or work a four day week, and then go out for lunch while the kids are in school/childcare.
I've always known I wanted kids, but knew I wasn't ready through my entire 20s. I have older siblings with kids of their own, and I'm on the younger side of the extended family, so I was around a lot of kids regardless, watching the different dynamics.
I was conceptually well aware of the hard work it involved, the priorities needed etc, and to the best of my abilities set my own bar for that.
We had our first kid a few years into our 30s, very much by choice. I think it's very difficult to conceptualize it through others kids. I was never really good with kids in general, but I believe (and have no reason not to) that I'm very good with my kids (in general, there will always be bad days behind the photo ops).
I can't shut myself in my office for 8 hours doing a project, gaming, watching movies or just nap.
I obviously miss that on some level, but the reason I can't do that (at least until they're old enough not to want to hang out with me) is of such value that I don't mind really. And that part is something at least I had no way of conceptualizing before having kids.
Absolutely don't have kids if you don't want to. I like to imagine I have a finely tuned radar to spot those families instantly, and it's not about a love thing, because I think most parents do regardless, but about patience/acceptance that this was your choice, and all of the great parts make up for it thousandfold.
I'm not a different person now, I'm just a person with baggier eyes, who frets a little less about things that don't really matter. That can be done with or without kids, I think it's merely that the latter forces the issue.
But I still binged Queen's Gambit with our youngest using me as a glorified crib.
Not sure this rant had a point, but try to shut out friends, society, biology and just ask yourself whether you want kids. If you do it'll be great, and if not that'll be great too.
I can finish my work in 2h of my 8h workday. Just let me leave at 11am. I’ll have plenty time to learn new things, play with kids, get enough sleep, maintain a healthy social life.
TBH current covid situation is like a blessing for me. I don’t have to “be there”, my work is still done and I can finally spend some time with family.
Working at home, instead of wasting time socializing at coffee with the same people every day, I can use my breaks to go shopping, cook, have a lunch together with my family, do the dishes, exercise, pick up kids' toys, etc. I am not taking more breaks than in the office; I just do something useful during the breaks, and it probably makes me relax better than reading web.
I wish we could have 6-hour workdays, or 4-day workweeks, or both, in the 21st century. The productivity is supposed to be so much higher than 100 years ago that we really could afford a bit more free time.
Until then, I will enjoy the benefits brought by the COVID situation, and dread the moment it will all revert to the usual 8-hour prison time. (Or even worse, business trips, when you have to be 24 hours a day without your family, just because someone couldn't explain something over video.)
When "work + family" is too much work, the proper solution isn't to give up having kids. That's insane.
Nope.. It's great that you are making an informed decision and really thinking about it. People have different experiences. Mine is that as a baby you are just really into it, the whole baby thing and don't really worry about individualism. As they get a bit older you think about that again - your career, maybe travel etc. and realize it is constraining having kids, and 90% of that is because of cost of living (IMO). I.e. if I had millions that'd fix it, ha ha! (maybe it wouldn't!) but money does help - you can buy time with it by getting help like cleaners, working less, and can afford holidays etc.
If you're seriously considering the question, you owe it to yourself to seek out parents who specifically enjoy and thrive with parenting.
There's a serious imbalance in conversation about children. Most of the internet comments you read about raising children will sound negative or burdensome. Why is that? It's because they're venting, or wanting to discuss a challenging situation.
Meanwhile, you're likely surrounded by countless parents who simply don't talk about their experience. No one wants to hear endless "I love my children" stories, so we just keep quiet. As you get older, you also realize that many people want children but struggle to conceive, so we refrain from child talk around non-parents out of caution and sensitivity.
Chances are good that the majority of parents in your community, office, or social circle are actually very happy most of the time. There's just not much to talk about because being happy with your family is the boring, normal state.
It also helps to keep in mind that the infant and toddler phases are relatively short. It's only 4 years, relative to your expected lifespan of around 80 years. If you're in your early 20s and just barely out of college, spending 4 years raising a child past the toddler age probably feels like an eternity. When you're in your late 30s and 40s, you realize that it's merely a blip on the radar. 5% of your life.
Look at this way: If you walked into an Ivy League university library around finals time and started asking sleep deprived students cramming for tests if they're enjoying their decision to enroll, you wouldn't get an accurate picture of the lifelong benefits of an Ivy League degree. Ask them if it was worth it in their 40s or 50s and you'll get a very different answer. Asking parents in the middle of the most difficult few childraising years if a lifetime of child raising makes sense isn't going to give you an accurate picture, either.
> I’m sure you’re biased and it’s culturally unacceptable (to say the least) to say that you’d rather not have had kids, but I wonder how often you think about that loss of individuality?
It's actually an extremely common question from my non-parent friends. I was afraid of it myself before having kids. The truth is that your old self doesn't disappear when you have kids. Free time still exists. Time management and efficiency becomes vastly more important. When I first had kids, it would take me hours to handle feeding, bathing, prepping for bed, and so on. We made a deliberate effort to streamline our workflows and now we can get it all done quickly and get on with having fun. Believe it or not, dinner time and bath time can actually be fun.
If you approach everything as a miserable chore that you have to slog through before you can get back to wasting time on the internet, you're going to have a bad time. If you lean into it and make an effort to make things fun, it's way better than messing around online.
And don't forget that after a few years they feed and bathe themselves. After 18 years they're off to college and you're back to you. People seem to forget that children grow up quickly.
Frankly, having kids helped me improve some aspects of my individuality and social life. I'm more likely to take the kids for a hike or schedule a meetup with fellow parents. I meet new friends through community functions. And this won't make sense to non-parents, but I actually enjoy spending time my kids.
Slightly off-topic, but this isn't limited to parenting feedback, it's true of nearly any topic online.
Some forums are full of people venting, some forums are full of people showing off how great their lives are.
It's very difficult to get an accurate view of an average person's experience with X (and maybe it's not even relevant to you—what you really want is a picture of your experience with X, which may depend a lot on your socioeconomic circumstances).
I've found anecdotes from friends to significantly outperform online anecdotes in predicting my personal experience.
On the topic of children, someone can spend their entire life around coworkers, extended family, and friends who are happy parents without thinking twice about it. Yet as soon as they read some comments online about someone struggling with their children, they have an "I knew it!" reaction.
As a parent, I don't try to push other people to have children. I do, however, roll my eyes at how out of touch the anti-child rhetoric on the internet has become. It's almost as if young people are convinced that all parents are actually secretly miserable but we're all collectively lying about enjoying it out of a sense of societal obligation.
I guess it depends where you look, but here on HN comments seem to lean towards being pro-children - which makes sense, since most people want them and have them.
The most interesting kind of comments, to me, are the ones that try to convey how having kids is great and worth it, and yet - upon reading them - all I can think of is "wow, that sounds horrible". There is one example that is kind of like that in this thread [0].
I know it's because it's much easier to convey in words how annoying or boring something is compared to how it brings this deep, unspeakable (and perhaps, for some readers, yet unexperienced) joy. It's still a bit funny.
Why? I think not having kids is generally seen as the most responsible course of action. I adore my two but the planet is likely to be worse off, ecologically at least, for their existence.
Our planet is already on the tail end of its lifespan, in terms of how long it will be able to support advanced life before the sun gets too hot and cooks everything.
Ours is, as best we can tell, the first and only species to arise that has enough intelligence to be able to do something about it.
If we expired as a species tomorrow, the chance of another one rising to the challenge before things wind down is (probably) very low.
We need smart, motivated people to work on the problem, and we need these people to have kids and pass on the same pro-education, pro-problem-solving cultural habits to the next generation.
In my opinion, that's worth far, far more than the extra eco burden one additional human life adds.
Its a unique part of life that no other part of life will really offer you. Its a trade-off in that respect.
I don't think it's for everyone, and that's ok. At hard as it is it also has it's upside.
I’m sure you’re biased and it’s culturally unacceptable (to say the least) to say that you’d rather not have had kids, but I wonder how often you think about that loss of individuality? Maybe it’s that what you’d do were you to have the time wouldn’t be as “productive” in a broad, undefinable “life” sense? Or that intellectualizing “take away this kid” is too emotionally fraught to even consider?
It feels amoral to ask these questions, but as I reach the time when friends are having kids and the biological clock of partners becomes a real factor, I’m not sure how to know.