The author of the post is working nice hours a day so one can spend three hours with his daughter, it's a pretty big stretch to say he's "child-centered".

You bemoan the lack of manners of today's youth. When, prey tell, are children going to learn proper behavior from their parents if they're spending only an hour a day with them? Where else will they learn manners? At school or day-care? Good luck with that.

You're a fan of Louis CK so I'll paraphrase him to denounce your disgusting call for more figurative or literal smacking. You have a physically and emotionally weak being who trusts you implicitly and they end up being the only people you're allowed to hit. Sounds like a recipe for a well adjusted kid to me!

"a little neglect never hurt anybody", but a lot hurts everybody. Children today are so neglected they fill their time with TV, video games, and junk food. As a result of this they will be the first generation in eons who are less healthy than their parents (and we'll pick up the tab be it Obamacare or private insurance).

Unless you're Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg your tombstone isn't going to read "Hacker Extraordinar", if you're lucky it'll say "Loving and devoted Father". No matter what it says you're children will be the only people on this earth who will remember you. The least you can do is spend a couple extra hours a week with them.

I respect the sentiment of your post, but you posit a false dichotomy between either the type of all-consuming "helicopter parenting" gruseom is inveighing against on the one hand, or antisocial behaviour, TV, video games, junk food, and early death on the other. If that's really the choice, well, how can anyone disagree with you?

See my sibling post; I strongly feel there is a third way.

I don't think the above comment is positing a false dichotomy. Then again, the highest-rated comment here literally advocates violence against children — because supposedly other mammals do it, so we should be violent animals too and inflict premeditated pain on the weakest — and everything else pales in comparison. "Disgusting" is quite an understatement. (And it's not so much the fellow advocating child abuse who's disturbing, but those supporting this advocacy here with upvotes and agreement.)

Obviously I'm not advocating violence against children. Nobody does that, not even those who practice it.

I was referring to nature films we've all seen where a bunch of adorable cubs are crawling over a mother lion and one of them crosses a line somehow and she swipes it with a paw. What I'm advocating, which I think was pretty obvious, is quick, clear, and loving boundary-setting in response to bad behavior. How one does this is beside the point; that's why I said "figuratively". The point is that we ought to do it, children need it (have you never seen a child calm down after being stopped like this? they need it for their own security), but parents who identify with their children tend not to do it.

Violence is all about the emotion of the violent one - trying to relieve a feeling of rage or whatever. Discipline is about giving the child something they need. It's impossible to do that when in a violent state oneself, so in fact these two things are mutually exclusive. It's possible to be violent to a child without any physical contact. That's our preferred form of violence nowadays.

On the whole, it's better for people not to hit their kids than to be as brutal as past generations often were. But to turn that into a virtue, as we have, is self-righteous.

Man this is so true. Violence is a state of mind.

"what any ordinary mammal does when their offspring goes too far - smack them. Figuratively if you prefer."

I'd call that advocating discipline, not necessarily violence.

I agree. It's easy to be seduced by all sorts of justifications to be incompetent at your job, an incompetent parent, whatever. These failure-justifying perspectives are so elaborate, it's hard to even know where to start untangling them.

In particular with such a skewed demographic (for example, overwhelmingly male), which is obviously symptomatic of something.

How did you get this rant from that article? This is about a guy who wants to block off time every night to spend with his daughter. How is that so offensive? (especially when she is so young)

Your rant about parenting is way off topic. After all, you can't "parent" if you're at work all the time.

Parenting is off topic in a thread about family responding to a post about parenting? I don't think so.

Actually, I was reacting more to the triteness of the thread than to the OP. But it's pretty clear that the OP is imbued with much the same values. In fact, the author is making a case for them. Why else call it a "manifesto"? The thing is, the case is -- as it always is -- lined up on the side of love, nurturing, and what-really-matters-in-life. Stuff nobody could reasonably oppose. Which means that, whatever the argument is, there must be something wrong with it. If it were correct, it wouldn't exist.

It's off topic because the post wasn't about parenting, it was about scheduling your work life. Your post was talking about parenting styles (child-centric, etc...). He didn't mention a thing about how he was raising his daughter, just that he was scheduling the time to do so.

For example, I can block off 3-4 hours a day for my kids where I don't work/check email/etc... That has nothing to do with how I am raising them.

The point that I took away from the original post was that taking time for your kids[1] is good for your work. It was a counter-intuitive discovery for him, but he felt that the dedicated time away from work helped to make him more productive.

[1] For him it was your kids, for you it could be your dog, your spouse, or building ships in bottles...

Thank you for putting it so succinctly. The fact that you got mostly emotional responses from supposedly levelheaded hackers shows how much you hit the nail on the head.

I noticed that too, but in fairness, it's worsened by the poverty of the medium (online forum discussion) which doesn't provide for emotional calibration. Our brains tend immediately to snap into a binary formation in response to what's presented. Since what I said on this (pretty charged) subject was provocative, it must mean that I oppose nurturing children and favor abusing them. Rationally that's absurd, but emotionally it's quite logical.

But in person, it wouldn't as likely come to that, because we could use many tools to calibrate - tone of voice, personal warmth, listening, etc. - and mitigate the extremes. Or we'd efficiently detect that a discussion can't get anywhere right now and save ourselves the trouble.

Anybody who figures out a technical solution to this problem is in a position to make a major contribution. Unfortunately, it may not be possible short of teleportation. We are wired for physical proximity.

p.s. For what it's worth, I have found every bit of effort toward becoming aware of this binary dynamic in oneself to pay off a thousandfold.

don't worry! my daughter is getting a healthy dose of neglect from me during the 21 hours in the day i'm not with her.

I agree with many of your sentiments about rude kids, or kids with no manners and that's part of what drove my choice. I don't take the time with her so that I can be her best friend. I take the time so that i can be the best parent I can be. I love to play with her, but if she misbehaves or isn't listening to us then she is punished. Timeouts work pretty well with our daughter as a punishment so there's no need for the smacking.

I think I would have been a lot more of a helicopter parent if it weren't for my wife (who by trade is a special education teacher.) She is the one who can take most of the credit for the fact that my daughter is well mannered, well adjusted, and has lots of friends.

Also -- to be fair, i never said that i spend those hours alone in the house every night. Sometimes we go to the park with other dad's, and at least once a week I try to go out with her to do a class where she mostly interacts with other kids (my wife stays home with her and does a lot more of this with playgroups etc. She won't start school until next year.)

Thanks for your comment, its always nice to see the other side of the coin.

My comment got a bit distorted by this subthread moving to the top of the page. When I said "this is getting unctuous" I meant this thread, not your post. I was responding to the comments that were on this page when I saw it, certainly not criticizing you personally. My fault for not making that clear.

I'd never let loose like that on anybody personally (well... almost never!) I'm criticizing our culture. Since our culture isn't a person, I figure it's ok to be rude to it.

No worries. I didn't take it that way. I agree w/ you about the culture of over-parenting and needing to be your kids best friend.

You are conflating two completely separate issues. The amount of time you spend with your child has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not your child is spoiled, undisciplined, pampered, sheltered, etc.

Bad parenting (for lack of a better phase) is what causes these issues, not spending time with your child.

You are trying to make a connection between the two ideas, but I you are just recklessly generalizing your own personal observations of bad parenting.

As a counter example, I spend as much time with my daughter as I can (which is really only a 2-3 hours a day during the week due to work schedule and bed time) and she is absolutely respectful, not spoiled, and has plenty of friends.

I'm sure I'm biased regarding my own daughter; you'll just have to take my word for it.

His point isn't that spending too much time with children causes them to be spoiled.

People should spend every possible moment with their children. They should also spend every possible moment learning about the world, and every possible moment trying new experiences and getting out of their comfort zone. There aren't enough moments, so you need balance. Lack of balance in one direction is correlated with spoiled children. I think that's all he's saying.

(Personally I think it's hard to cause irreversible damage by spoiling children; it's amazing what they'll outgrow.)

Generalizing? Sure. Recklessly? I don't know. If you take your point literally, it's impossible to make any social observations at all. That can't be right. An observation needn't be true of everyone (you, for instance, or the OP) to have value.

As for "two completely separate issues", they're not completely separate. They're connected not by necessity but by a model of parenting that is common in our culture.

I agree (mostly), and while it's important for me to "be around" (my office hours are very similar to the author's), my kids spend a good chunk of their time playing with one another and with other kids. I like to be around, because sometimes they say "hey dad, let's play _something_," but mostly my wife and I stay out of the way.

There's a fine line, however, between being a good parent who doesn't hover and "arrange" their kids' lives to death, and a parent who is literally never around to see their kids. The whole "arrangement" thing also goes for parents who schedule every minute of their kids' days so they don't have to be around the house.

Personally, we enjoy spending time together as a family. Most weekends in the summer and fall are spent rock climbing and camping. We do, however, spend many of those days with others (and other families), so our kids are generally off in the woods doing what kids do. But, we also spend a good bit of time together, and I think it's meaningful to have activities that _are_ family-centered every so often.

Another cultural shift you don't take into account is the growing fear we (in the U.S., at least) have that our kids are simply going to be whisked away while we aren't looking. Many parents would never even consider allowing their kids (I'm thinking under ten years old) to wander around the neighbor, or simply walk over to a friend's house and see if they are around.

I do, however, think you bit too harsh on the idea of being a "Good Parent." There's also a fine line between giving your kids enough rope (and freedom) and being the drunk who only yells at his kids to get him another beer (yes, that's a bit of an overstatement). There are plenty of nights when I come home from work, we eat dinner as a family, and then my kids disappear to play. I won't see them again 'til bedtime. But I feel as a parent, I need to be available for them when they want me, too.

But there is not a "fine line" between these things. In fact there is a great expanse between them. This is binary thinking. You can see a lot of this in the responses to what I wrote. (e.g. the ones saying that I advocate child abuse. How likely is that?)

As for the "growing fear ... that our kids are simply going to be whisked away while we aren't looking", I do take this into account. It's utterly foolish and irrational, not to mention childish, and to assuage it we are depriving our children of the simplest and healthiest freedoms. So as to give ourselves the feeling that we're protecting them against this (essentially imaginary) bogeyman, we're actually depriving them in reality. That is a poor and neurotic tradeoff. (Edit: and it's a really good example of what I wrote about downthread, that we act out our own unresolved personal issues through our kids. What's really driving us here is our own fear. But we call it "protecting the children" so as to make it a virtue. Fear is not a virtue.)

George Carlin has a marvelously sharp piece called "Fuck the Children" which is all about this. I'd post it, but people would accuse me of advocating child molestation.

Thank you. Good to know that I'm not alone...

Unfortunately, whether it's due to the societal environment or maybe some of my guilt for not feeling like the perfect Dad that desperately wishes to spend every waking seconds with his kids is transpiring but my 5-yo son floored me today.

When I kindly refused to play with him on the computer, explaining that I was tired after a very long day and that, beside, we were heading out in the next 10 minutes he replied with a tone clearly aimed at inspiring guilt: "But Daddy, you're supposed to take care of your kids..."

Let me add right now that I do spend a healthy amount of time with my kids, just like any reasonably involved parent of 2 in a family of 2 working adults.

His plea was not a cry for attention, I assure you.

5 years of age.

Stuff like that is quite awesome - children showing that they know how to manipulate others from a young age on. At a very young age it seems to be an instinct (e.g., crying for attention); but throughout their child years most of western society tries to 'educate' that out of them; and then those who do have to re-learn it (albeit in other terms) in their student or early career years to get ahead.

If not a cry for attention, what was it? A call for your attendance?

Yes. After having failed to obtain it using the most frontal approach (asking me), he naturally resorted to a more subtle approach that appealed to my (apparently obvious) insecurities as a parent. Or it could have been a trial balloon to evaluate those insecurities. In any case, my statement about not being a CRT for attention was meant to emphasize the "cry" part in the desperate sense of the term. It was simply a calculated move.

>Children ought to be running around outside playing with other children and depending on nice-but-otherly (not pseudo-peer) adults to keep their world secure and stable and fix things when they cry.

My son is 20 months old. He started going to nursery 9 to 5 when he was 9 months. He spends plenty of time playing around with other children and be ensured that he enjoys those 3-4 hours he spends with both his parents at home. Small children need guidance and examples that only adults can give, not other toddlers.

I am not american and while I agree with you that the american culture is very retrograde by many counts (relationship with religion, early marriages, sexual puritanism... ) I don't see anything wrong with cutting some hours at work to spend more time with children. In fact, quite au contrair.

I certainly did not say that about American culture. God Bless America.

As an ex-Soviet immigrant, this is one of the things that was most striking about Americans to me, early on. Adults seem to make a very big deal about their children; they have an awful lot of displacement. From what I remember in Moscow, people just had children rather matter-of-factly, and generally stayed out of their way.

It's not an apples-to-oranges comparison, of course; in our culture there was a great deal of supporting infrastructure in the form of grandparents often in the same city, an effective network of neighbours, the environment was not suburban, there was a free state-sponsored daycare/kindergarten available from a very young age, etc. Still, it seems that there is a great deal of anxiety about having children here because of the self-fulfilling expectation is that children are going to be extremely disruptive to one's incumbent lifestyle.

I don't think that necessarily needs to be the case. Yes, children introduce changes, no doubt about it, especially when they're really young. But at the end of the day, you are still you. You still have your identity, you still have your individuality, you still have your profession, your passions, your interests, your friends, etc. I don't see why people have to resign themselves to "see you in 20 years".

The suburban pattern of development strikes me as being far more responsible for this than people give it credit for. A big part of the reason why "play dates" have to be arranged is because in these vast tracts of suburban expanse, children substantially rely on being driven to "activities" by their parents in order to do anything outside the house at all, immediate neighbours notwithstanding. From what I can see, exurban subdivisions are getting larger, with houses being spaced farther and farther apart. And of course, the inefficiencies that inhere in all this, the enormous drags on parents' time, in turn fulfills the prophecy: if you're going to be an "involved" parent, you really are up to your ears in obsessive logistics.

I was lucky enough to have avoided a lot of these pitfalls because I spent many of my formative years in an unusually communal setting in the US (a married graduate student housing complex), the likes of which I have not encountered since, even in nominally analogous parental career situations. It had a high population of children and many adults who were constantly around keeping watch in some way, making for a safe place for dozens of us to run around and play at all hours. It was a very practical nod to "it takes a village".

It was not until we moved on that I got to appreciate how much I had--the same stuff I took for granted as a little boy in Russia--that other middle-class kids here lacked. Chiefly, it was the ability to spontaneously organise my socialisation with other kids more or less as I wanted. I learned the overwhelming preponderance of what there was to learn about life on the playground, especially given my latchkey situation. If I wanted to go hang out with my friend, I'd walk over to his apartment and knock.

I turned out just fine (cue for laughter). More importantly, I don't get the impression that this kind of thing, which I take for practically a God-given human right, is a common option for the average suburbanite today. The entire locus of possibilities is described by unconscienable distances of freeway, mediated by the cursed automobile. You can't really run around anymore. Where? With whom?

And for all this wondrous hospitality, which was so instrumental in my formative years and my coming of age, so inextricably bound up in who I am today, with so many friendships and experiences that continue to endure, to forever be fixtures of my fond reminiscing and my imagination, my parents and their peers routinely got harassment from the state department of family and children's services. Supposedly we were being "neglected". Bollocks to that; we were being allowed to actually live, not to suffocate silently in the cul-de-sac at the end of the driveway in that neighbourhood that's a "nice place to raise kids", and with all the soul of a funeral parlour. Damn them all to hell! As you say, a little neglect never hurt anybody. Quite the contrary!

The other syndromes are more widely understood and don't bear extensive repetition here: (1) culture of obsessive "safety"--the intense, burning conviction that being out and about physically exploring the world is innately in conflict with almighty "safety"; (2) the Baby Einstein pathology, which postulates that your child is a budding musical/artistic/athletic/etc. genius, but this genius will go unrealised unless s/he is shuttled all over creation in a dizzying itinerary of (possibly extracurricular) "activities" and "programs" that leave them little to no time to spontaneously indulge their curiosities or whims.

I agree with you on many of these things, and certainly the isolation and lack of freedom for children in the US these days seems like a very bleak existence compared to how I grew up in Sweden.

But these things seem kind of orthogonal to the OP's argument. Holding all those things constant (since it's a systemic problem with American society that's not easy to change for an individual) do you really think a child whose parents work all the time is better off than one whose parents spend some time with them? (Especially when they are very young, which seems to be the case with the OP.) I don't have any hard statistics about this, but my impression is that there are far more kids in the US whose parents work all the time than have parents that neglect their jobs for their children.

"Damn them all to hell!"

A true Russian!

That's a good point about the suburbs. Indeed a major part of it. I've seen grad student family residences like you describe, too. They were great. Kids running around randomly all over the place.

My eight-year old niece lives across an alley from her school, but isn't allowed to walk to school. There might be a car going down the alley! The irony is that she is a brilliant strategic and tactical thinker about whom the running joke is that she's already engaged in a project of world domination. As my wife put it: this kid could organize the assault on Dieppe, how can she not cross an alley?

I think you're 100% right about over-parenting. Hence the need for something like this:

https://freerangekids.wordpress.com/

But I don't think the author of the article is (necessarily) there. I suspect the author is already pretty close to the middle ground you're proposing. I think the responses you've gotten on this have a lot more to do with people feeling bad for how you seem to be treating the author (though you didn't specifically say anything about him) than they do with people disagreeing with you.

Yeah, I feel a little bad about that (see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3005079) since I wasn't responding to the author in particular but impersonally to the pattern in the comments. I have no idea of where the author falls on this spectrum; quite possibly he's resolved these issues better than I have. A blog post isn't nearly enough information to make any judgment. The cultural pattern, on the other hand - that I've been observing closely for years. In myself as much as in anybody!

You make a series of good points, but I think there is a distinction which should be made esp. in the case of a very young child (< 2 y/o). Parents should not shelter or keep their kids from exploring, being with other kids, or generally operating independently on an impromptu basis. It should be noted, however, that this may be more applicable for an older toddler/child/teenager than it would be to a newborn/infant.

Well I'm sorry for your future/actual kids.

Do you mind elaborating? Drive-by judgements rarely add much to an intelligent conversation.

It's his kid -- not yours. It's his choice -- not yours. Sit down and go neglect your loved ones elsewhere.

You didn't get that I was not talking about the original author? That suggests you didn't read my original comment very carefully, nor my subsequent ones at all. I was talking about a common pattern in our culture right now (over the last two or three decades). It's interesting that although some people found what I wrote objectionable, no one actually disagreed with me about this.

Perhaps I should let you in on a secret: I don't really believe children should be neglected. That use of the term was ironic. What I believe is that we, as a culture, have redefined the healthy autonomy of children as "neglect" in order to justify our belief that they need parental attention all the time, for reasons that have little to do with children's real needs and a lot to do with us. My guess is that this is because we haven't grown up ourselves. Emotionally, in some important way, we're still children, and this causes us to think of our children as peers. Ironically, this means we're actually failing to fulfill the parental role for them even as we make parenting the central meaning of our lives.

By the way, all these ideas come from my own struggle to understand what it means to be a good parent, something I by no means claim to have mastered. I do believe that to do it well, it is vital to distinguish one's own fantasies about parenting (which are always self-centered) from the real requirements of the job.

Thank you for the thoughtful response, but you reached your original comment because of the author's post.

In spite of your reasoning (some of which I agree with), my point is that we're guilty of another thing -- parental judgmentalism, in which we impart the thoughts of what we as parents ought to do in the general sense, but try to apply it on an individual basis. And we impart these thoughts onto other parents, which is both presumptive and unrealistic.

With sincerity, I would caution about projecting your individual thoughts onto others (i.e., we haven't grown up ourselves). I for one won't claim to have mastered parenting, but I don't feel that I'm a parental failure either.

Doesn't mean the overall societal comments you make aren't valid, just that suggesting the tome for all parents is bad ju-ju.

Oh, come on. I agree that "play dates" (a consequence of suburbia, where the Calvin and Hobbes childhood is impossible because space is cut up by 45-mph roads) and helicopter parents and $35,000-per-year-fucking-preschools are a sign of something sick in our society. No question there. But wanting to leave work after a 9-hour day to be available to his children is not "organizing [his] life around [his] children". If you have kids, they become a major part of your life.

This doesn't mean he's forcing his presence on his children for three hours per day. It means that if his daughter needs him for help on homework or his wife wants some time to relax, he's available.

The problem in many workplaces is that results are difficult to measure while sacrifice and pain are obvious. Most teams at most companies are cemented together by the loyalty and camaraderie associated with shared misery, and a person who goes home at 5:00 (even if he's been working since 6:30 am) is cut out of that and finds himself pushed into the "out crowd". It's an extremely dysfunctional arrangement (see: investment banking, where the actual workload is only 40-50 hours per week but in a dysfunctional arrangement that produces 80+ hours of in-office time) but it's also very common.

People, in general, are terrible at measuring others' productivity and contribution but have an intuitive knack (or think they do) for emotional currents of loyalty and sacrifice. The problem in most work environments is that the latter is what actually drives reputations, social fluidity, and often decisions about whom to promote and (if things get bad) whom to let go.

Let me take a wild guess: you don't have kids, do you?

"Adults' time is taken up with the sacred family-ness we all must bow before. Children's time is taken up by their parents. I remember how hard it used to be to arrange for my son to play with a classmate after school. (Arrange! When such a thing need to be arranged in the first place, we're already losers. This whole subject really needs a Louis CK to do it justice.)"

Heh, I initially had the same reaction, but he's talking a lot of sense. It needs to be read a couple of times.

Way too many peoples' lives are utterly dominated by their children, essentially because children can be allowed to exist in this world for even a minute without supervision.

This is very much not how it was for me as a child. Benign neglect would be putting it nicely.

Your last paragraph (if I'm reading it correctly) leads to a point I've often mulled over. We tend as parents to overcompensate for what happened to us as children. I think this happens at the social-historical level too. Traditional child-rearing was something between harsh and brutal. Physical and emotional violence was common. We have rightly come to abhor that. But, typically human, we (or at least the educated white North American middle class) have merely flipped a bit and gone to the opposite extreme of elevating our children to little gods. This can't be good for the little buggers, deceive ourselves and adore our own virtue though we may. (Side note to the indignant: I like children. Including my own!)

Back to how, as parents, we overcompensate for what happened to ourselves in the past: we do this unconsciously, so it's hard to know that we're doing it. And it's a bad thing, because almost inevitably we end up creating a mirror image of the old mistakes. But there is a way out of this dilemma: personal healing and growth. To the extent that one can integrate one's own experience, feel one's own feelings, etc., one becomes free of the compulsion to resolve them through one's child and able to behold the child as an independent being.

> We tend as parents to overcompensate for what happened to us as children

It happens at all levels. It's a common criticism of militaries that are equipped to fight the last war, not the next one.

You guessed wrong:

> I remember how hard it used to be to arrange for my son to play with a classmate after school

No guessing needed. You could have just read his comment to find the answer.