Re:Maybe you should do less 'work'
by nostrademons on Monday March 28, 2022 @12:21PM
(#30832183)
It's the same calculus, it's just the kids need to figure into it once you have them.
I made a number of choices differently once I had kids. I folded up a startup and took steady employment at a company with good work/life balance. I bought a house in a good school district rather than renting and taking the risk that rising rents would force them away from their grandparents. I make a choice to drop the work at 4:30 so I can go walk to pick the older one up from pre-school rather than get an extra 20 minutes of work in.
But all of these are still choices - they're weighing the things important to me and deciding that I'm going to allocate my labor and capital in different ways. Once you start getting into the economics of pricelessness, when you must do this for your kids or you're a bad parent, bad things often happen. You lose the ability to make rational trade-offs, and your kids often sense that and never learn the ability to make rational trade-offs.
I made a number of choices differently once I had kids. I folded up a startup and took steady employment at a company with good work/life balance. I bought a house in a good school district rather than renting and taking the risk that rising rents would force them away from their grandparents. I make a choice to drop the work at 4:30 so I can go walk to pick the older one up from pre-school rather than get an extra 20 minutes of work in.
But all of these are still choices - they're weighing the things important to me and deciding that I'm going to allocate my labor and capital in different ways. Once you start getting into the economics of pricelessness, when you must do this for your kids or you're a bad parent, bad things often happen. You lose the ability to make rational trade-offs, and your kids often sense that and never learn the ability to make rational trade-offs.