Before kids it was easy to judge bad parents. Then one day with child I found myself due to circumstances in a store way past my child’s bedtime. She was screaming and crying, because it was way past her bedtime.
Then I realized… I was now “the bad parent” I had so easily judged.
Then it was easy to judge parents with children younger than mine.
Until I learned that not all children have the same issues in the same order.
I still judge parents, because I compare them to other parents.
Good parents = kids not 100% glued to phones/tablets, social around friends and family, not throwing tantrums at 8-16 yrs old.
Bad parents = kids always throwing tantrums, kids basically always getting their way because they've learned parents will always give in, parents and kids 100% ignoring each other.
One set of friends - I go to visit, I play with their kids - we go out to dinner, we interact with both adults and kids
Another set of friends - I go to visit, they sent their kids to their room - we go out to dinner, they give the kids tablets and they're entirely ignored for the whole time.
All kids are different, my second has about 20 tantrums a day. I've no idea why. It's getting really hard to deal with. But it will pass.
Honestly the only certainty is that unless you have been 100 percent responsible for a very young child for more a few days, you have no idea what you are talking about. I don't mean that directed at you. Just my own generalisation based own experience and the opinion of every other parent I know.
Life as a parent is completely different than life before.
I saw a woman completely lose her shit in a museum with her kid. Before I became a parent I would have judged. But when it happened I just thought "poor woman, I know how it feels, just giving it her all and she's got nothing left to give right now, how many times have I felt like that, how many times have I failed to live up to my own ideals as a parent".
It's difficult to translate what you're saying. You say "go to visit" which implies you don't see your friends with kids very often. If true you're in a poor position to make these judgements even by your own standards.
Everything you're observing is even more likely to occur if you don't see them that often. Your friends probably want to spend more time focusing on you. The kids are not that familiar with you and are less likely to engage with you. Which also makes the parents more likely to want to distract them with something else.
Whether or not you're bringing children with you matters too. It sounds like you don't because you're focusing on child-adult interactions. If someone has kids the kids run around and be kids with their loudness, and child-adult interactions are going to be much more likely. If you're not bringing kids in tow my kids are much more likely to just go off and do their own thing.
Much of what you're pointing out can also be down to individual child temperment. Which changes as children age. By your standards many parents turn into a bad parent once their kids become a teenager.
That is not to say that your observations are 100% wrong. But just that there's so many variables, most of which I didn't even mention here, makes trying to analyze your statement make my head spin.
Not to lean too much on anecdotes, but I have a friend who has extremely well behaved kids. He has said a couple times that he feels like he has placed too many adult responsibilities on his kids. Is he a good parent? Based upon outside observation, he seems good. But he seems to be questioning some of his own choices. Maybe that alone makes him a good parent? I don't know, who am I to judge?
I mean, not judging other parents doesn’t come from thinking that all other parents are doing a great job, it comes from knowing that you’re doing a terrible job in your own, special ways.
Parenting children is impossible, therefore all parenting lies on a spectrum from terrible to catastrophic, and it’s hard to know how you did until they grow up (if ever) because there’s a lot of sensitivity and subtle emotional stuff, especially at very young ages, which are the most important and the ones you remember the least. I’m certain there are screen-free parents who are worse for their kids than a good chunk of tablet-hander-outers
But sometimes there are legit behavioral issues that are extremely challenging, and are not the parent's fault. Sometimes what looks like a "tantrum" on the outside can actually be autistic overwhelm and meltdown, which can happen with even the best parents. Not to mention stuff like Intermittent Explosive Disorder.
All this to say...if you see a kid in public throwing a "tantrum", you still shouldn't judge the parents without knowing the full picture.
There is a difference between kids using bad behavior to get attention or blackmail parents vs kids who have actual behavioral problems they are working through.
The first is an actual problem stemming from bad parenting and as a society we should indeed shame parents who raise spoiled kids who expect everything to be given to them.
I mean, do you even know the full story at a friend's house? I guess it depends on how closely you know them, and whether they've confided any developmental issues they're children are dealing with.
Yes, when you have a toddler undergoing a public meltdown, it is easy to see who around you is an experienced parent, and who is not. Just by the look on their faces.
> Then I learned it’s easier not to judge at all.
A skill we should all cultivate, IMO. Life is happier when you do not waste it constantly judging.
I smile a bit and give a chuckle when a toddler is giving a parent a hard time. It reminds me of simpler times. The problems and consequences are so much smaller than teenage problems.
Badly behaved kids I am more understanding of now (at least the younger ones). But there are defintely easy ways out of problems some parents take that are not good for children.
Yeah, with a kid I still judge. I'd rather see kids running around and playing and being kids in public than on a tablet. Even grocery shopping I see toddlers on tablets sitting in the cart.
My son has been actively involved with meal planning since he as a a year and a half old. "What type of bread today? What type of fruit in your yogurt tomorrow?"
I won't judge kid's behavior, so long as they are acting like kids. Sometimes that means they act out, that is normal.
But, damnit, let them live in the real world and not just try to distract them with shiny things all the time.
I remember going to restaurants in the 90s and early 2000s and kids would be running around playing with each other between tables. That is kids being kids, and it is perfectly acceptable (heck desirable!)
The only thing I'll add is that you never know what people are going through. Both of my children have pretty intense ADHD, and when I went through my divorce I definitely leaned into too much screen time for a while. It wasn't permanent though, and I managed to get back closer to the ideal you speak of (but as a single parent, it took a lot of processing of guilt to find a balance that worked).
I've decided it's safer to just never judge, that parent you see pushing the toddler around in the cart might indeed be a terrible parent, or they might be going through grief and at their breaking point.
> I've decided it's safer to just never judge, that parent you see pushing the toddler around in the cart might indeed be a terrible parent, or they might be going through grief and at their breaking point.
Agreed, I should have clarified that I'm speaking more about friends and family, people's whose situation can be spoken to directly.
I have friends with neurotypical kids who still hand the kids tablets at restaurants instead of actually teaching the kid how to take turns in a conversation, or how to actually go through a menu and order!
Like I get it, it is tiring, but we all signed for the work when we chose to have kids. (At least in my social circle where kids are very well planned for in advance).
I've been detained by police under suspicion of "kidnapping" for taking my kid to the park (my kid is a different "race" as me so it was "suspicious"). On another occasion my kid was interrogated because they were walking home from school on our own property, and someone wondered "why they were alone."
On the other hand, no one has ever called the police on me for handing the kid a tablet and melting their brain inside.
When I was a kid either of those people would be practically thrown in a loony bin for saying anything, let alone taken serious by the authorities. Now the CPS investigates almost every accusation and is legally barred from even telling you who made it, so these anonymous shitstains can exercise their cowardice behind a curtain as much as they like with no risk to themselves but every risk to you.
It's difficult to let them live in the real world not because some evil guy with a white van is waiting to offer "free candy" but that the evil person in a white van is actually the Karen who sees a kid on the street or the park as an inconvenience for her or an unacceptable risk and they can be the coward they are and make an anonymous complaint and cause weeks of harassments by CPS with the cell phone they have next to them at the ready wherever they might see a child.
> I've been detained by police under suspicion of "kidnapping" for taking my kid to the park (my kid is a different "race" as me so it was "suspicious"). On another occasion my kid was interrogated because they were walking home from school on our own property, and someone wondered "why they were alone."
And this is why I pay an arm and a leg to live in Seattle.
Kids here are running around outside playing soccer in the streets with parents watching guard for cars at the ends of the block.
Mixed race is not even noteworthy here.
Kids walk to/from school (up to a mile) all the time. Huge groups of kids walk together every day.
Plenty of truly bad parents shrug responsibility off by making the "technically correct" claim that all kids throw tantrums, therefore they're not a bad parent. They then proceed to provide an unstable environment to raise their kids and the tantrums don't end until well into adulthood.
Before kids, you take a look around a diner or a store or a playground and you see little ones happily eating some chips or browsing the foodstuffs or playing on a slide.
You think that this is what kids are like. They sit there, they walk a little, they giggle on the playground, they look cute as all get out, etc.
Then you have kids and you know.
You know.
Those kids sitting there in the booth sipping on their milk quietly while mom and dad happily eat their lunch? Those are the top 5% most calm kids out there. The other 95% of kids are with their adults screaming and throwing fits and covered in who knows what.
Life lied to you. It did it directly to your face, unashamed. The bias is real.
That's not the impression I hear from my many intentionally childless friends. They take the negative behavior - the screaming, tantrums, chaos - as the norm.
It sounds like you always wanted kids. I don't say this to criticize - it's great that those who want to start families do so - but I don't think your experience is universal.
Before having kids, I expected it to be this huge life changing thing. That it would effectively end the part of my life where I was free to do whatever I wanted, and start the part where I was just Daddy, doing nothing except serving my childrens' needs.
But that didn't happen. We just carried on being Jason and his partner, but with a baby in tow.
I had spent most of my 30s cramming in as much "living" as possible, to make sure I'd stocked away a lifetime supply of it. After all, I'd probably never get another chance to travel for long periods, keep up with climbing, and all that other stuff that Independent Jason could do.
But it was all for naught. We just packed the kid along and went traveling anyway. He had eleven stamps in his passport by his first birthday.
Life is just as much fun as ever. But now we have some kids to play with.
> Before having kids, I expected it to be this huge life changing thing. That it would effectively end the part of my life where I was free to do whatever I wanted, and start the part where I was just Daddy, doing nothing except serving my childrens' needs.
There are some huge changes.
The largest is a lack of the mental downtime where deep thought and problem solving could occur.
I can't get off work, hop on my car, and drive around for an hour mulling over technical work. I can't stay an hour past with coworkers and noodle solutions on a white board. I can't get up at 2 am to try something out that just popped into my head.
I need to be in bed by 10pm every day. I have to get up at 7am every day. On weekdays 2 meals a day need to be planned, on weekends 3 meals a day. I can't try experimenting with some random new recipe that may fail, my kid needs to eat lunch on time not 2 hours late.
Yes it is a lot of fun (theme parks! Trick or treating!), but I'm thankful I did a ton of amazing engineering work before I had a kid because there is no way I can dedicate the absurd amount of time to innovating/solving hard problems, that I used to.
> Before having kids, I expected it to be this huge life changing thing. That it would effectively end the part of my life where I was free to do whatever I wanted, and start the part where I was just Daddy, doing nothing except serving my childrens' needs.
Had a very similar feeling. When my wife told me the "getting pregnant" worked I mourned a little bit. I recognize we were exceedingly lucky to have had such a wonderful kid, and it has worked out very well.
For the first 6 mos. a lot did change, but after that things seemed to skew back to a new "normal".
It will be 13 years in May since we had our daughter. I'm so glad we did it.
I know that it could have gone a lot differently, though. I'd never suggest that it'll be great for everybody.
My kids are both in their 20's now. One has graduated from a comp sci program and has just started in a new job and the other is in grad school. I don't see them as much as I would like because they are very busy and far away (in another country actually). They are both great people and we have a good relationship, but I miss them terribly.
It's given me plenty of time to think about my dadness and boy do I have regrets. I can't help but think about all the things I would do differently if I could do it again and I know that if I ever have grandkids, I'm going to be a way better grandparent than I ever was parent.
Your daughter is 13? For us that was a time of great change. It was when the dependence / independence balance really started moving.
It happened to me and now, after more than 8 years, I find myself still in the situation where I am serving my children's needs and not having time to satisfy my personal ones.
They go to bed when I am also tired. Trying to having an hobby past their bed time means sacrifying sleep time.
Travelling is also a challenge, since they lack interesting in seeing something new, but just want to have fun playing, especially playgrounds.
> He had eleven stamps in his passport by his first birthday.
I was raised overseas (Dad[0] in the CIA).
Both good and bad. First, if it's just "traveling," and not "living" overseas, I suspect that it's not so bad, but military brats have common quirks, for a reason. Our lives get torn up and replanted regularly. It's hard to make friends, and we often end up having a difficult time, retaining long-term relationships, later in life.
But, man, the life story that it gives you. There's few cures for xenophobia, better than immersion.
> We just packed the kid along and went traveling anyway. He had eleven stamps in his passport by his first birthday.
How do you keep a baby happy and quiet on long international flights? I currently have no kids but I may find myself in this situation in the next couple years. I'm dreading being the guy with a screaming infant on a 13-hour trans-Pacific flight that keeps everyone from sleeping.
Babies want nothing more than to sit on your lap snoozing and feeding. It's more or less what you do at home anyway. The hardest part about flying with a baby is dealing with the added luggage (stroller, carseat, overpacked diaper bag, etc).
It's only once they're old enough to have more sophisticated feelings (like boredom) but not old enough to communicate them (except by screaming) you get in trouble.
First two years they can fly for free, but they have to ride in an adult’s lap and that gets tiring. Don’t believe the bassinet offerings - as soon as a plane gets turbulence, you have to get the sleeping baby out of the wall bassinet and good luck appeasing them. Age 1-2 is hardest for travel, so you can skip it. The only thing that worked was getting their own seat with the cosco scenera next car seat (or their own if they like it, but that one is $50 and light to carry). They would sleep nicely for large chunks and you get to enjoy travel again. After age 3 it’s much easier (they can ipad if that’s the only ipad time they ever get).
Don't go straight to screens in this situation. You can introduce novelty by purchasing a number of cheap toys, even from the dollar store, which they have never seen before. Keep them hidden until the flight.
I'm 6 months in and it has definitely ended my life as it was and nothing is the same. I'm pretty lucky that my wife gives me almost 16 hours of free time daily, from which 8 I work and 8 is for sleep. If I want to work out or do something else I need to steal it from the sleep time.
It's pretty early though so I might be looking back in a few years and think that it was not that bad actually :)
That doesn't appear to be a common story. I now have to schedule phone calls with my retired mother because between my sister and her partner who both work, and her, with 2 kids - one small but active that needs constant minding and one that needs chaperoning to activities - she often doesn't have one uninterrupted hour in the evening for an entire week.
Nearly everyone I know with kids is more similar to this story than yours.. to each their own but it's certainly not for me:)
Absolutely. Also, kids end up helping you focus on the travel, experiences and things that are truly worthwhile. You drop a lot of activities and TV and other activities that was frankly a waste of time anyways.
Good on you. We were 'one and done'. Two sounds more than 100% more difficult, if only just because the number of edges in the relationship graph going up.
My parents managed four kids, albeit for most of that time there were only 3 living in the home at a time (13 years between the oldest and youngest).
A friend of mine had eleven (!!!) siblings. That horrifies me. Cliques could form in that size population! Utter craziness.
I think people struggle with losing their identity when they no longer get long periods of focus time or can participate in their hobbies with the dedication they would like.
Yeah mine was colicky and every time getting him to sleep involved rocking him for an hour+ while he screamed in my ear. And he woke up so easily. So I spent about 2 hours a day rocking and patting for the first year or so, not checking off a dozen countries on my passport.
I’m curious what made you conclude that he was colicky as opposed to something else?
I was labeled colicky as a baby and my own children turned out to have some digestive issues with certain common foods that make them cry a ton when they or their mother eat them (and they get it via the milk). If I hadn’t debugged the food issues I might have labeled them “colicky”, but when we avoid those foods religiously they only cry when it makes sense and when the issue is solved they stop. I’m guessing I had a similar issue as a baby, my parents definitely didn’t attempt to debug it.
No judgement by the way I’m just curious if you tried debugging things like that as I imagine “colicky” could encompass issues that aren’t possible to debug also, and it’s also understandable if you couldn’t put in the resources to debug it as in my case it’s been a gigantic and expensive pain in the ass.
Well when you go to every specialist and try every type of milk and every diet change imaginable it gets there through a diagnosis of exclusion.
Trust me, the debugging is a big part of the trouble. Everyone is telling you to debug, but that is actually the thing you have to learn to stop doing. Your brain is telling you to debug. But it can't be debugged. I watched multiple women have mental breakdowns trying to debug a baby with a 6 month streak of colic. Eventually their brain just goes psychotic because a baby screaming 6+ months non-stop with nothing wrong while people frantically try to solve the problem is basically sever mental torture. It is not the hours, or days, or even weeks of screaming that get to you, it is the months of never ending ear-pearcing torture that nothing will fix, and they will not fucking sleep because they just want to scream for all of their sleep as well and naturally the caregivers won't be sleeping either due to this. And you cannot rely on crying to figure out when to feed, when to change a diaper, when the baby needs sleep, or some gentle motion -- all of your indicators are worthless.
It is a hell for the baby and it is a hell for the parent. People struggling with this generally do not have any more children. Any other stage past baby for such child is 99% easier, I laugh when people say babies are the easiest stage.
Our first was colicky for the first 18 months or so. A nightmare, really, just like you described. Back arched, face red, for hours every day, no comforting.
We went on to have more kids. They were all quiet and easy. We sometimes wondered if there was something wrong with them.
I often wonder in these threads what proportion of the commenters is male. HN skews heavily male, and statistically speaking, fathers are spared a huge chunk of the physical and mental burdens of pregnancy, birth, and parenting. Being a mom and being a dad are not equivalent, and I have a feeling that not many male HNers would readily swap places if such thing were possible.
I don't mean to inject politics, but there's a huge mental burden on fathers with more conservative values that take their role seriously.
Unfortunately, there's no way to elaborate what I mean on HN or much of the web without stirring up a ton of pointless argument. People will just get defensive and refuse to consider perspectives they can't agree with.
That huge mental burden is entirely self-inflicted, though. It's not a fair comparison to the physical burden that is unavoidable.
Growing up in a more conservative society, I've seen many people with that parenting style, who often pop a proverbial blood vessel trying to ensure that their children are more like army cadets that perfectly reflect their worldviews and don't take an unapproved step in any direction. Their rationalizations ranged from real safety concerns to arbitrary opinions like what religion is right (and exactly how someone needs to act at all times, with no limits on specificity or ridiculousness) or what large groups of people are evil (nationality, religion, identity - any group is fair game, just pick one and wall off your child from ever knowing about them). Regardless of motivation, ideology is a choice, and they could've relieved a whole lot of this burden on their own at any point.
Yeah, I agree, if you’re talking about the role of the patriarch as a stoic provider who isn’t allowed to be a vulnerable man with his own emotional needs.
It has been encouraging to see how much more men now seem to desire being engaged and nurturing in their children’s lives (even among those who otherwise consider themselves conservative or traditionalist).
Caveat emptor. I am a grandparent now, so I think I have some perspective on this.
Of course we love our kids, and we had (and still have) a lot of good times with them. But kids can really break your life and marriage, too - amongst my peers I can't tell you how many have a struggling young adult kid or two (with relatively serious mental or physical health problems), with no resolution in sight.
So stay lucky - having a child is a wild act of optimism. And if you want kids, don't wait too long. There is never really a good time to have a kid (just different trade-offs), so for the best chances for health, be as young a parent as possible. And men have a biological clock, too: e.g.: https://neurosciencenews.com/genetics-sperm-mutation-neurode...
The serious mental and physical health problems are real and a societal concern. Everyone "notices" the trends, but maybe it's not you so you just think there's nothing you can do about it and do your best to stay healthy.
Then you have a child and you are suddenly hyper-aware of everything going into the body and brain. Everything they eat, every doctor visit, every time they get sick and what could have exposed them, every word spoken on TV, every friend they have and how they act or how that friend passes along their parents influences, etc.
And suddenly you're very concerned about societal level macro influences on food, medical, etc because those influences are going to affect your child's life.
There's definitely a balance here. Not giving a shit, which seems to have been the tradition I was raised in, is not great. Recognizing problems is good. Acting on all of them is bad. You need to raise grounded kids who can grow into resilience so by the time they're adults they're able to navigate this strange world.
Especially trying to control who their friends are and what they hear. Questionable behavior from friends at younger ages can actually be a good thing: it lets you plant the seed early when your kids still listen to you.
This is one of my favourites from PG, not least because it's a bit antithetical to what I perceive as a growing trend among smart, ambitious people (for whom children might represent friction, inconvenience, etc)... as well as folks for whom COL is making the question irrelevant due to practical concerns.
Actually, it's really striking that even in America -- the developed country with the #1 highest birthrate -- still falls below the replacement rate. What is it that's inversely correlated between growing wealth and having children? Especially since it was likely to opposite for most of human history? (i.e. large families were a sign of wealth and power).
PS - I can't resist offering my own experience as a parent - what a treasure to have discovered that I'm capable of such love, and to get to watch this love transform me into a better person than who I was before. This kind of love demands everything of you, but through it you discover a truer and stronger version of yourself too.
More wealth and education gives people the option to choose which I think is a good thing. People who don't want kids shouldn't be forced to have them. Before, people had kids because they needed them to work on their farm or it's what was expected of them as a housewife. Now that we have a choice, less people want to commit to taking care of a human for 18+ years. It's great so many people want to be parents but having a kid doesn't automatically make someone a great parent.
Due to the extremely competitive nature of the US economy, a lot of people have to choose between career success (having money) and starting a family (which is expensive). I know a lot of women who want to have a family, but have struggled to get to a comfortable economic position where they can actually do it. Compounded by the wage stagnation, which makes it hard for most people to support a family on a single income. We have hollowed out our third spaces, so its difficult for people to relax and socialize. Even vibing ends up being a kind of competition because of the high costs. Not to mention the perverse incentives in the housing market.
I think the two-income household (two full-time paying jobs, specifically) is a lot of it, and seems to go along with "rich" countries.
Having all the stuff that could happen during the day if it were (if you will) someone's full-time job, instead get crammed into evenings and weekends when you're trying to also do non-chore stuff with your kids (or, for god's sake, maybe get just one measly hour to do something you want to do, alone... or spend time with your spouse, without kids...) and take care of things that have to happen each evening (dinner, bed time stuff) really, really sucks.
Not having chores piling up through the week to ambush you both on the weekend would be amazing. I can hardly even imagine how much more free we'd feel. With two working parents it's like neither ever gets any actual time off that they're not carving out by neglecting something they really ought to be doing (usually several somethings)
> Actually, it's really striking that even in America -- the developed country with the #1 highest birthrate -- still falls below the replacement rate. What is it that's inversely correlated between growing wealth and having children?
I think a lot of people miss the simple fact that some people just don't want kids and are unable to reconcile their personal experience with anyone else's.
My partner and I are both wealthy enough that we could both afford children and we can afford to not have children. But neither of us think our lives would be improved by having them.
I think that's really, really hard to understand for a lot of parents and people who want to be parents: being (relatively) wealthy creates choice, and that a growing number of people are choosing different things now that they have the ability to do so.
Kids cost time, not money. So the wealthier you are, the more difficult it is because you probably have less free time. You can pay someone else to raise your kids (daycare/etc.) but then you lose a lot of the value of having kids.
This bullshit excuse that somebody can't afford to have kids is proven wrong by the fact that poorer people have more kids than rich people. You can even be unemployed. Gone are the days of destitute single mothers having to give up their child to the church and work in the poorhouse. We have social welfare for that.
Maybe the fact that poor people can have lots of kids has taken away their value as a status symbol for wealth?
Um, wtf is this rambling statement that doesn't seem to be based in any kind of truth at all?
In the past both poor and rich tended to have tons of kids, this is because kids tended to die young regardless of being rich or poor.
Then you're trying to compare massive social changes in the west that occurred around the same time. For example womens suffrage, women being allowed to work, sexual revolutions and birth control.
If you look at countries that tended to develop later, the rate of childbirth tends to drop with accessibility to birth control and education.
I’ve always wanted kids, ever since I was a kid myself, but I was never really sure what it would be like to be a parent.
Turns out it’s quite strange, because my kids bring me more joy than anything else. I’ll sit there for hours watching them play. You may think “that’s not strange—tons of parents say that”, but for my sort of personality, it’s very strange. I’ve always thought of myself as sort of overly analytical, detached, ambitious, and a bit obsessive. Not the sort of touchy-feely person who chases a two year old around with a smile on my face and likes watching videos of cute babies. Yet here I am. I enjoy it so much I’ve even tried to figure out if there’s a way I can take a sabbatical from work to spend the last two years with my youngest at home before he goes off to school (seems unlikely given how questions about a random two year gap on my resume might affect my long-term career).
It’s funny that as a kid I always wanted to work at a tech company for the interesting tech, but now as an adult my favorite thing about it has been the 4 months of parental leave I was able to have with each newborn.
You just write "spent two years raising my youngest kid [building tree houses and whatnot]". If you keep a bit up with tech, why would anyone think twice about that? They wouldn't where I live.
Reading the post and >100 comments I've just realized there are differences between dad and mom mental experience.
Looks like many dads are changing mentally when their first child is born or a bit later. Mine changed somewhere during the second trimester.
Bonding is also almost automatic for mothers (especially who breastfeed), whilst it's delayed or never happens at the same level for fathers. My first child has never been close to father because he worked "9-9-6" and got 2 day leave. He could never really calm down crying baby or put her to bed. With the second child, thanks to large corp policy, he got 15 weeks bonding leave and it was a very different experience for father and child - baby didn't care on whose lap to fall asleep.
My problem with that wording is that it comes across a bit arrogant or "I know better". I think many people _do_ understand what you mean even if they don't have kids, they're just not that interested in those parts of life, which also should be fair.
At one of my earliest jobs (I must have been 19), I had a boss who was incredulous that I didn't drink alcohol and said that I would when I was 21 because it was "part of being an adult". I was pretty sure that making my own decisions rather than letting myself get pressured by others into what they assumed was best for me was a more important part of being an adult, and over a decade later I still don't drink.
Comments like the parent one (pun semi-intended) basically sound the same to me as what my boss had said to me that day. Assuming that your own experience is universal is a flawed way to view the world, even if your experience is relatively common. If there are exceptions, it's not going to be easy to see them if you have an assumption already about it being universal, and if the people in the majority are loud enough and annoying enough about it, those who aren't will be even more incentivized not to share their experiences with you; I'd argue that people who regret having kids will potentially be reluctant to publicly say so. Most importantly, doing something because of societal pressure rather than genuine desire is going to greatly reduce the chance that someone truly finds it fulfilling, and there's an emotional cost for children who are raised by parents who basically regret having them.
It's totally reasonable to say "I never truly understood how much I'd enjoy having kids until I did, and I suspect it's the same for a lot of other parents". There's no reason to go further than that unless you're pushing an idealogy rather than actually trying to say something you know is correct.
My problem with that problem is that, well, people who have kids definitionally know (better?) about having them. Like being able to experience a book in its original version vs a translation.
It's okay if you don't want to learn Spanish, but when people discuss the struggles and delights of reading Cien Años de Soledad they're not necessarily being arrogant, just stating their lived experience.
But do you also go around and claim everyone that hasn't read that book in Spanish is losing out in life, or do you also recognize it's just not for everyone?
Each one's a reverse-lottery-ticket, though. Get the wrong draw and it's not a gift. Can easily massively reduce the QOL for everyone around, including other siblings.
Mostly due to chronic illnesses, of either the physical or mental variety.
There is significant suffering in the world. You and everyone else are drawing lottery tickets everyday. Kids are far from its only source or cause. I'm ill equipped to unpack the meaning of life, but I am certain that suffering is fundamental--your comment is probing at this idea.
This is a very difficult subject since there exists un-imaginable suffering and it's hard to reconcile that. That life is a gift under the umbrella of un-imaginable suffering. Perhaps, that's what spirituality tries to do, I don't know.
I think a lot of folks don't consider that each child comes with a high-enough-to-worry-about risk of negatively affecting the life of everyone in your family to a level on par with one of the adults in your family becoming permanently and severely disabled relatively early in life.
Yeah sure we also risk some micromorts and the life-altering-disability equivalent every time we drive a car or get a sunburn, all right.
A good friend of mine holds the belief that "having friends with kids is better than having kids of your own", and I definitely feel the "can't explain" part - there is an unexplainable reality when you have kids of your own.
Great way of putting it. It's the sort of thing you just have to trust others and jump into. If you think about it too much it just doesn't make sense.
My big learning from having a kid, was that there was more maturing and growing up for me to do (A ton to be honest). Once there was somebody else I had to keep alive and care for and think about I learned to better de-center myself in the universe. I am sure you can get to this perspective many other ways, but having children seems to be the easy mode for getting into the mindset of "it's not about me any more."
I also had kids, and while I love my kids I haven’t loved spending time with my kids. This will hopefully change as they age, but the first six years have so far been very much a drag on my life and productivity, and not much else. They haven’t provided fulfilment, and they haven’t provided satisfaction. Some joy is there from time to time, definitely, but nothing in the way the author describes. Happiness for me typically starts after my kids are in bed or when I can escape them during work hours. My wife finds great happiness in our children, and I find happiness in that, but I’m desperately waiting for my kids to be old enough that I only need to spend time with them instead of constantly caring for them. Sorry if this is a bit of a dark comment, but I just wanted to say it’s not always the experience this author had, even if it seems common. Edit: Generally, I regret having kids (because of the impact on my life, not the kids themselves), but I also can’t change that decision and I would never back away from my choice - that’s completely unfair to them, as well as my wife. Such is life. I try to keep looking forward to when they’re older as a way of staying positive.
I truly do give my kids my all though, and they have a wonderful life and are loved and cared for in all senses of those words. They’re great kids and I give them everything necessary to be a great dad.
The curse of parenting is that when they're small you can't wait for them to grow up so you can get more time for you, and when they grow up you're nostalgic of their childhood when they were willing to spend more time with you.
So my advice is: find activities to do with them that you would both enjoy. Maybe going to parks, museums, have them help you on house chores... You only have a few years left under they get to middle school and start becoming more distant.
I can definitely relate. There's nights my wife and I get to bed and sorta just look at eachother and go "what the hell was that". Those days are hard.
I find the days that I forget myself and throw myself into trying to be a good dad are the days I find joy in fatherhood. Weekends especially I try to forget the stresses of work and productivity and everything else and try to spend as much time with them as possible. Playing, teaching, and learning with them.
Not saying it's universal. Just a datapoint from me.
If it makes you feel any better, you're not the only one that feels that way. I don't think it's said very often because it almost feels taboo to say it.
Sometimes I feel like there is this sense that you are a bad parent if you ever express that there are times you might wish you weren’t a parent, even if the feeling is much more “I wish I didn’t have to be a parent RIGHT NOW”. You can even see in this thread that people are expressing how they feel sorry for the commenter’s children because he feels regret sometimes about being a parent.
I wanted to be a dad more than anything in the world, and I absolutely love my kids and I love being a dad.
Most of the time.
There is a TON of things you have to do as a parent that objectively sucks, and you have to do it no matter how you are feeling and no matter what else you also have to do. It is impossible not to feel trapped, at times, by the understanding that it never ends, that you are a parent 24/7/365.25 and that your kids dominate your life. I don’t care how much you love your kids, you are going to feel that sometimes (or you are so strongly into the self-denial that you force yourself to pretend you always like it).
That doesn’t mean you aren’t a good parent, or even that you made the right choice to be a parent. Most of the best things in life involve sacrifice, and doing things you don’t want to have to do, and powering through even when you want to give up. It’s cliche, but the struggle makes the rewards even sweeter. Doesn’t mean the struggle doesn’t suck sometimes, and you might want to give up, and you have to use all your self-control tricks to maintain.
I feel even worse for parents who did IVF or other fertility treatments, or who adopt. In my conversations with some close friends who are in those situations, they talk about how much pressure they feel to never complain when it is hard. They spent a ton of money and effort and used insurance money and many doctors and procedures (or all the interviews and inspections and money for adoption) so they could have kids, and now they want to complain about being a parent? Of course, they still have all the same struggles and pains and nostalgia for their before life, no matter how much this is what they want.
Anyway, I am not sure what my point is. I just want people to be honest with themselves, and other parents and future parents, about what the entire parenting experience really is. Sometimes I think parents don’t want to scare potential parents off of being parents, which I think is understandable but overstated. There is simply no way to convey to non-parents what it is actually like to be a parent, and this applies to both the good and bad things. I thought my wife and I were prepared and knowledgeable and ready, and we were to the extent we could be. But so many things we imagined about what it would be like is not the reality at all, but even if we had a Time Machine I couldn’t explain to my previous self what it is actually like. You just have to experience it… if you want to. I would never tell people they should have kids, because it is such an all-encompassing thing that everyone has to decide for themselves… all without knowing what it will actually be like.
I would like to hear in what sense you love your kids, given that "he first six years have so far been very much a drag on my life and productivity, and not much else. They haven’t provided fulfilment, and they haven’t provided satisfaction. (...) Happiness for me typically starts after my kids are in bed or when I can escape them during work hours."
Do you say "I love my kids" because that's what everybody says, or is there any truth in it?
EDIT: Just to be 100% clear: I mean absolutely no judgement. I'm not going to tell you off or try to change your mind. I ask out of pure curiosity.
I go above and beyond to give them a great life - to care about providing them with a rich education, as well as a wide variety of life experiences, to immerse them in quality time with friends and family, to travel with them and spend time amongst various cultures and amongst nature. I’m there for them whenever they need me, and also when they don’t. I take the time to give genuine answers, to feed their curiosity, to make them great people. I give them the tools to explore things on their own and foster their independence. I also encourage risk taking while supporting them when it doesn’t work out.
Critically: I give them my full attention.
I could choose to spend all that mental effort on myself, but I choose to spend it on them. That’s as good a demonstration of love as any, in my book anyway.
Edit: no offence taken! I didn’t interpret it that way at all.
You are overdoing it. Don't know who is your role model, but that behavior is IMO what leads to that outcome.
Show mostly by example, not by direct mentoring.
What rich education and various cultures for 6-year-olds (or less)? That is simply irrelevant at that age and logistics of it just makes you hate everything. Do you even take your kids to dozen of arbitrary chosen classes?
Tone it down, everybody will feel better and you won't have to fake it. Happy parent is more important for family than robo parent.
It's you who are being rude by not allowing opinions. I am trying to help. I might be right or wrong or somewhere in between (which is all perfectly OK) but its on OP to judge it by himself if my words have any meaning for him. I said them because I noticed the pattern around me. Please stop with the drama.
It’s not forced, and we do show by example. I also disagree that they’re too young to be immersed in a love for education, culture, and people. Oh and music too. We listen to a lot of music (for fun!).
My family and friends are multi-cultural so they’re naturally exposed to several cultures, for example. It’s also important to my wife and I as the world itself is multi-cultural, so having an appreciation that different people live their lives differently is important. We lead by example simply by living in a multi-cultural life and embracing it.
Take that same approach and apply it across the rest of the points I made. Nothing is forced, I promise.
> Do you say "I love my kids" because that's what everybody says, or is there any truth in it?
It is true that some people are not really cut out to be parents. But unfortunately it is difficult to tell whether that will be you or not. I see people looking at comments in threads like this and then chiming in with sentiments along the lines of "see, this is why I never wanted to be a parent." There is no way to know that, and such statements strike me as cope. Becoming a parent changes you, but you won't know how until you do it. There is a lot of biology and psychology in play, for certain.
As I tell my own kids, however, be careful because you only get to become a parent one time. Cannot blame someone for opting out of the risk, even if the counterfactual is that they would have been amazing parents with amazing children and been much happier.
Interesting, my experience has been the opposite. Before getting kids, I thought that I would only enjoy having kids once they were the age where you could have conversations with them, etc., that the first one or two years were more something that mothers would like. But for me it was not like that at all, aside from some sleepless nights, it's so cool to be part of them discovering the world.
have so far been very much a drag on my life and productivity, and not much else
At some point when our kid was still young, I started working 4/5 FTE, taking the afternoons off after ~14:00. I feel like that provided a lot of mental space. Since I was working part-time, I did not feel bad/guilty about not working the afternoons and I would be focused on being very productive from 8:30 to 14:00. The free hours were for doing stuff together or accommodating their playdates (picking up from school, ensuring the house doesn't get torn down).
Now they are an age where they want to do things without parents, so I am working full-time again, but do miss those early days where she would be with me in her seat on my bike and we'd cycle to the city and she'd be singing aloud from joy.
But every person is different and I think that there are also parents that start enjoying having kids more when they are older. So, your years may still come :).
dark comment
My dark comment would be: we are all learning on the job and I feel like I could do some things better with the experience I have now.
I have a few kids, raising them is a mix of good and bad, like everything else. it took a toll on my career, pushed my temper to the edge, and stressed me out all these 20+ years, but I also enjoyed many moments. it does not go away when they got older by the way, it's a life long strong bond, at different phases there are different challenges.
If I have a second life, I don't know what to do though, I probably will first make enough money before having kids at least.
I probably will first make enough money before having kids at least.
I think you’ve hit the key difference.
I waited until I was 40 before having kids, and it just feels like I’m doing it on easy mode.
We had time and money sorted out, and tons of free baby stuff donated from all our friends who had done it already.
It’s still lots of work, but you’re at a place in life where you can handle it. I can’t imagine trying to raise kids in my 20s, with my crappy stressful office job and no money in my little studio apartment.
On the flip side, you'll still have a 20yo university student to take care of at age 60, while all your friends will have an independent adult child earlier...
While I have always loved being a dad, I can certainly relate to the things you describe.
I will say that a lot of those issues have gotten better as they have gotten older (they are now 10 and almost 7). They don’t require the same level of constant attention that they used to, they are getting more and more interesting to talk to, and have developed interesting personalities and senses of humor.
I’m glad to hear that - it backs up what I’m hoping/expecting will happen. I think I’ll enjoy time with them much more as they age, especially once they’re 7+.
I think it's important to share the difficult / hard experiences of having kids as much as the good ones. I've noticed that there is a huge bias towards only sharing the good moments and white-washing all of the bad as something you can "laugh about later." To be frank, not enough people were honest with me about what it would be like having kids before I had them - and I was incredibly upset when I realized that (several years into being a parent).
I now make it a point to be honest with people when they ask "Should we have kids?" and tell them about how hard it can be, etc. Most importantly, I tell people that they shouldn't have kids unless they would still want to do it if their experience doesn't land in the middle of the bell curve. We tend to romanticize the decision, and expect that everything "just gets even better" with kids. There are all sorts of ways your experience can be less than ideal. Unless you're evaluating your decision with those potential outcomes in mind, you're doing yourself, your partner, and even your future children a disservice.
Thank you for posting this. It’s totally understandable and believable that you simultaneously love them and regret some things about it. There’s this insane pressure in our society to never acknowledge the toll that kids have and to never speak out about this. I remember when this article was first posted and how I received it, like I was wrong for not being sure about kids, and that some change would come over me when I had them. Truth is, that doesn’t happen with everyone. Then the world tries to gaslight those people who don’t feel that way into feeling like they’re broken somehow.
I’m sure you love your kids and take great care of them, and it’s not your fault that you feel this way.
It would benefit all of us if this taboo was lifted, so that we could speak truthfully about the impact of kids on families, and maybe then we’d have to provide more support and encouragement to convince people to have them. Not everyone has free daycare from their grandparents or a large social network to babysit or the finances that make having a child less of a burden.
Everyone is different, and even though I don't share your experience, I don't view yours as either good or bad, it just is what it is. My experience is different but I'm not planning on ever telling anyone "Oh don't worry about it just have kids it'll be the best experience of your life" in blind faith.
I can't wait to play with my 3 year old and 1 year old. I get so mad at work when I have an odd late meeting because it is keeping me from them.
My three year old helps me build furniture (he gets screws started, counts out parts, helps apply glue). I love showing him synths and instruments and seeing his face light up.
My one year old is a cuddle monster who likes listening to jazz with me. She also really enjoys when the cat climbs up on our lap and she gets to pet it.
I don't know your situation, but most miserable parents I know see their kid as something to manage, like some kind of annoying work underling.
I see my kids as little detectives.
My goal isn't to solve their case or even help them approach it in the right way. It's to give them an occasional hint (or step stool), keep them from danger, and help them discover the correct way to behave.
Having kids becomes a lot easier if you can do the things you enjoy with them. For me that includes all sorts of stuff such as D&D, warhammer, painting miniatures, drawing, magic the gathering, board games, etc. I also include them when I have to fix something around the house or some random electronic device that broke.
If the only thing you can enjoy is adult stuff or working then you might have a rougher time at it if you don't find joy in the pure act of raising a kid. For me the first few months were meh, but once they started to get a personality I found it more entertaining.
Many of those are things I greatly enjoy, as well as many other things from a very diverse range of hobbies. My kids aren’t old enough to join in on those things yet (6 and 4), so I only find time to do those things once every few months, as opposed to once or twice a week pre-kids. It’s improving as they get older though, hence my hopefulness.
It's mysterious to me that you write all this _and_ that you do truly love your kids and are great. If I was in your position I'd at least concede that people do deserve parents that don't regret them. Do their thoughts toward it even matter?
The reason isn't because it is more difficult or people enjoy having kids less (like the parent). Its because children used to be a way to provide security for your family and community. More hands to help or sent off to earn money younger for example.
Now with smaller family units and less community interaction they represent a risk to security, mainly financially.
Given the post you’re replying to, it seems you’re implying a specific reason, but what if it’s a different one? How about “I love children but having kids is super expensive”?
Every mouth to feed costs more. Baby formula seems like a racket. Diapers are expensive.
My oldest will need a laptop for school next year. It isn't optional or provided.
Maybe you need a bigger car because car seats take up a lot of room.
What if your kid decides they want to join a sports team? A friend of a friend told me they did the math on a year of competitive swimming. It was $10,000 by the time they were done with equipment and travel.
A trip to the dentist for my family of four is about $1000 for just cleanings. Braces for my oldest were $3000 if I could pay cash or $4000 to finance. You could skip dental care, but some might consider that neglect.
What if the school tells you to get your child tested? That costs about $3000 in my part of the world. Half of the kids on my block are neurodivergent somehow. What do you do?
In a less well off part of the world, most of these "concerns" probably disappear. I think we have pretty high expectations of parents that aren't poor.
Your arguments (explanations?) would seem way more relevant if they didn't go 100% counter to observation.
I don't know why you're trying to explain an outcome that is opposite of the observed outcome.
Are you saying that while more money is correlated with less fertility (the fact), that somehow even more money will reverse the trend and start going the other way?
Based on observed data, one could almost make the case that if only billionaires start stealing from the poor even more, then birth rates should go up.
It wasn't really supposed to be about money vs fertility rates. I was trying to provide some observed examples of why having more money might mean more expensive kids. Or how being poor means the cost and expectations are lower.
I've always believed that it isn't money itself, but access to healthcare and education that lower fertility rates. Money correlates really strongly with access to healthcare and education.
Having good education and healthcare leads to birth control and maybe an abortion if the BC fails.
When a family of three is making $15K a year, do you believe baby four, five and six were planned out in agonizing detail? Or do you think maybe they weren't planned at all?
And I do believe more money going around would help. If the perspective is "I can't afford it", those who are doing OK will not have children if they can help it.
The highest income you have, the more pressured you are to give them an expensive education, activities, etc. Everyone want their kids to do at least as well as themselves.
So it's expensive no matter what income bracket you're in.
Do not despair, I felt the same. Mine are halfway to 18, still feel the same, unsure if it changes. I love them, just not the experience. I have friends who feel the same, so I/we are not alone.
I tell others not to do it unless they are prepared to suffer. You won't know if its for you until you've already gone through the one way door. I wish others luck. For the unlucky, I wish grit and stoicism.
Would be interesting to see if there is other personality overlap with people that feel this way, which people could use as a pre-test for whether or not they would enjoy the experience of having kids.
I wonder if there would be something identifiable in common if we fMRI'd your brains, as while you are definitely not alone it does seem like a pretty strong exception that makes the rule.
Sure, give me a verified badge on dating marketplace apps (Feeld, Fetlife in my case) based on my fMRI imaging interpretation. Use it as input for the matching algo. Way more useful than simply putting "neurodivergent" in a profile imho. Adjacent to "If your policy doesn't exist in code, it doesn't exist."
Please don't ever, ever let them know this, or even allow them to figure it out. Especially before they're at least ~30 and able to begin to understand.
I would never let them think I regret them - that’s such a cruel thing to inflict upon them, and it’s certainly not their fault. I also don’t regret the joy it’s brought my wife.
I regret the loss of my mental energy and personal time, but not them, if that makes sense.
For me it helped to realize that the things I would have done with the extra time and energy would not have been that great. Some occasional dopamine bursts for a very mediocre outcome. Having kids is a better investment, but a less fun one.
I have a ~6 years old boy and I'm quite neutral about that -- that is, if I somehow go back to a few years ago, I may or may not go forth for a kid -- which was my attitude back then anyway.
There are some upside, but they are...tangible. The downside is concrete and solid. From hindsight, having a kid has nothing to do with my long-term objectives, but since I can’t dial back in time, I'll try to be at least a median good father -- I have gotten the financials covered, and I'm pretty sure in that part I'm better than the median, but for the focus part I'm not sure.
My 2c is that it is not 'joy' or 'happiness' that kids bring to parents universally (although they might bring those things for some parents), but 'meaning'. Meaning is harder to define than joy/happiness, perhaps because it is less objective and more subjective.
I would really like to have kids, but I don’t have my act together. I also feel like my partner is not suitable or capable of properly taking care of our kids. Feels pretty awful and am scared to not have any kids as I grow older. I worked hard to get a good relationship with my partner, and now that we have one I worry kids will only ruin what we have now
I hope you’re in a position where you can have an honest conversation about it with your partner. I’ve come to realise over time that honest and open communication is the most critical thing in any relationship. I really hope it works out for you both!
This is an easy perspective to have if you are of the generation that got into a home purchase before they went out of control. Gen Z is being priced out of creating families.
Hacker news has a bias because most people here are working in software and probably make more than the median household income (solo).
Kudos to you! I have one and it's been the hardest thing I've ever done and it has broken us entirely. We can never imagine having more than one given the difficulty, and are now finished at one 100%. Very huge admiration for parents of > 1. It's 10x the work and not just 2x the work
I'm in the thick of it right now as a serial founder with a 5 and a 1 year old. One thing I'm surprised paulg didn't touch on is how much it can evolve your relationship with your partner (for the better!).
Watching my wife have special moments with our kids fills my heart like nothing else.
Seeing her be an amazing mom is like watching your cofounder take on a completely new role outside of their previous experience and crush it. Except it's even better since you're in love with them and have all these biological/chemical signals to help kick that in high gear.
I see a lot of different opinions here, from very positive to very negative.
I think the answer is, it's both.
When I was an employee sometimes I was happy, like when a promotion was lurking, and sometimes I was unhappy and stressed, when getting fired, when facing deadlines, ....
But when I started working for myself the amplitude of emotions became way stronger, every week I would fluctuate between feeling doomed forever or feeling like a genius.
Life with and without kids is the same: The emotional highs of having kids are way higher than anything I experienced without kids, but sometimes the lows are very low.
People can also have very different experiences because kids can be very different.
My kids have been really easy, no big problems, but sometimes I see other parents dealing with really serious issues with their kids.
It starts with babies, some of them sleep easily while other cry all the time, to teenagers who can be nice kids with no problem at school to being called to the director's office all the time and have to seriously worry about their future.
While there are always those lows, when the kids are sick, scream, have tantrums, do something stupid, I would not trade a second of that away. A lot of happiness and laughs as well, along the way.
They grow and you're privileged to live with them for a while. Also you'll grow with them.
100%. I had to drop about half my interests and hobbies after having kids, to remain sane (trying to continue juggling all of them was plainly just going to lead to never doing anything, really), and adjust all the others to fit better with kid-having.
If you can't hire "help", it's like losing 20 waking hours from your week, at least, just for the not-at-all fun or "quality time" parts of having a kid (extra housekeeping [so... very much more], extra shopping, taxiing the kids places, extra household planning, basic hygiene stuff, et c). And on top of that you need to spend "fun" time with them, too, like that part may be more enjoyable but it's non-optional and a lot of stuff an adult might want to do or accomplish doesn't integrate well with it.
Slice ~30-40 hours off the waking hours of both adults in the household, on top of 45-50 hours of work and other stuff necessary for work (commute, et c.) and... yeah this is just bullshit if you can't hire help.
[EDIT] Oh, this reminds me of a certain genre of LinkedIn post that I especially hate: the CEO bragging about how they find time for family despite having five jobs. The real answer to this mystery is that zero of those jobs are actually full-time work, and, the part they never mention, is that they pay others to do tens of hours of work per week that normal people have to do themselves, like lawn care, housekeeping, fixing broken shit in their house, shopping, keeping track of and making appointments and such, et c.
This. Don't forget that HN is extremely biased towards High income/net worth viewpoints. The reality for a lot of parents is much worse than most commenters here
I wish there was a way to make this decision rationally. My wife and I are coming up to the point of no return. We either do it now, or never.
Now let's try to figure this out: Do we have enough money? Yes, probably. We could survive 10 years without making another dime. I don't know what kind of safety net is recommended, but people do it with a lot less. We live in a country with free health care, so illness won't end our lives like it does in the USA.
With that out of the way, let's get to all the other points:
How much do I want children? Personally, I don't get it. If my wife wasn't dead-certain she _must_ have at least one child, I would never, ever consider it. I hate noise and chaos. I even find co-habitation challenging.
I was an only child and I think I'm mildly autistic. To me, 'alone time' and 'quiet time' are sacred and required for my sanity. Well, I know that goes out the window with children. My wife is the opposite: Many siblings, has always been around noise and chaos. Loves giving love. To me, the dog, to anyone. And that is why she seems to have this need. So, the decision is: Do I give up what I want, to make her happy?
Her happiness is about as important to me as my own. So that's a stalemate. She keeps saying how worried she is that it will ruin my life. But I also don't want us to split up over this, knowing that I have 'taken' her fertile years. She won't have a kid except with me. So that's also a stalemate.
I have had a pretty terrible childhood. So I know I'm biased. I don't want to let fear dictate my life.
Almost any occasion where I've stepped outside my comfort zone or done things I didn't want to do out of fear turned out to be things I was grateful to have done.
I can also see how raising children could be very rewarding. Even my therapist said it can be very healing to have children. It's an opportunity to do better than my parents. That's valuable, for sure.
And then I think of the state of the world. Awful. I wouldn't want to bring children into this. I'd even probably say to my own mother 'don't bother' if she'd come to consult me about whether to have me first. But then I spoke to my granddad, who was a teenager during the 2nd world war. He is also probably mildly autistic. He said it was the best thing he ever did. Had multiple kids.
If I look at my wife's family, they are all happy, successful, harmonious people (now). I look at my wife's parents and think "what a blessing". The richness of life they get to experience is just magical. If I could somehow guarantee that it'd go that way for me as well, then I'd have kids already.
But there are no guarantees, just uncertainty. Uncertainty of the "life changes forever, irrevocably" kind. That is brutal and scary.
The last time I made a similar decision was when starting a business. I knew I went down a road that would require stability and dedication. I'm a volatile person who quickly gets bored of things and wants to move on to other things.
Thanks to my wife I've done a bunch of things I never thought I'd do, because they require dedication and consistency. Something I don't really have. Renovating houses, starting businesses. I surprised myself with what I was capable of. All thanks to my wife.
I also think it's basically a crime to not let her raise a human being. I am certain anyone raised by her would be a net positive to society.
But then there's me and my issues. I don't know how I'll deal with it. I don't know what will happen. There's a chance I can't do it. And what then? Divorce? Repeat the cycle of putting children into the world and abandoning them, like my parents did, because they also couldn't handle it?
They were very young and had no money or support. Their relationship was also broken. My wife and I are 'old' and we have money and we have been an unbeatable team for well over a decade. We also have support. Grand-parents are basically next door and dying to help with raising a kid. So we are in a privileged position.
But my fear of taking this step is not going away. And I won't know what it'll be like. Parents look so tired. Many of my friends are parents. They all seem to offer the same advice "it's hell on earth, I hate every moment of it, it's the best thing I've ever done".
Awesome. What am I supposed to do with that? It's useless advice. It seems nobody can really tell you whether to do it or not.
Any people here who were equally fearful and then did it, NOT regretting it? And I mean truly. I don't want to hear the "I love my kids"-mantra. It's an automated thing everyone has to say. I mean truly.
Haha, agreed. Like I alluded to in my post, many of the best things in my life have come from just being thrown into the deep end. If standing at the edge of a pool and ruminating over whether to jump or not, one may never do it. If the choice is made for you, well, then there's no ruminating.
But we're too old for accidents now, this is going to happen with intention, or not at all. Which is also fine, but I am interested in hearing other people's experiences.
You can talk to the foremost mango growers on cultivating mango trees and learn everything there is to know about making mangoes. You can consult with the best chefs about how to make the best mango dishes and desserts and learn the absolute best way to prepare and eat mangoes. You can learn from the masters of how to paint a mango so lifelike that you'd think the painting was real. Etc. You can learn and truly master everything surrounding the act of eating a mango.
But until you sink your teeth into a mango and actually eat it, you've no idea what you're talking about.
So, until you actually have the kid, all this worrying is for naught.
You will be just fine, the kid will be just fine (they have their own agency too, you know), the world will keep turning and you have the agency to put a person in it and teach them what they need to know.
The real question is if you want to eat a mango or not.
There is a politically correct thing to say about having kids. It is wonderful, I love them, it made me want to be a better person. That's all true.
I'm not going to be politically correct. I'm going to be honest. For some of us, it is a hard reality check.
As children, many of us had various kinds of hard experiences. You can get a rough idea of how hard your background likely was by tallying up the different kinds of Adverse Childhood Experiences that you had. The result is your ACE score, and it is a standard risk assessment tool. You can find the list near the end of https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/symptoms/24875-adverse....
My ACE score is 9/10. Most of you won't have had that level of challenge, but a lot of you had problems. I've done a lot to deal with my background, work on my mental health, and so on. I swore to break the cycle, to give my children a better start than I had.
I mostly succeeded. Only mostly. The impact of my failures became obvious when COVID turned many homes into hothouses for mental illness. My kids were not unique in their struggles. But within their peer group, it was my kids that were hit first and hardest. And then I did not cope well with the result. As a result I, also, have been having mental health problems.
For people like me, I recommend a long and hard think before having children. If you do have children, you will naturally try to do your best. I certainly did. You are extremely unlikely to succeed as well as you'd like. I certainly didn't. And so you should also prepare to give yourself grace for the ways in which you might fail. If I had done better on that, then I would have been better able to carry on and try to pick up the pieces when the shit hit the fan.
To everyone who is beginning on this journey, I wish you luck. Cherish what you have. Do your best.
And if your best did not turn out to be as good as you wanted, you have my sympathy.
I'm 36, and unlikely to ever have kids. I'm both very grateful for the freedom that's afforded me in life, and occasionally feel grief for parts of the human experience I'll never feel.
I have a kid and it's the greatest joy ever but I am very lucky. It's totally okay to grieve that, but I often tell other childfree folks: there are many things you can do to feel a similar kind of joy. Mentoring, volunteering, caring for friends etc. Having the joy of working for others and emotionally investing doesn't have to be exclusive.
I once had neighbors above me whose kids yelled all the time. all the time. and sometimes they were sick of the yelling and they put their girls outside of the apartment door. and she was just punching hard the door over and over and yelling “MAMAAAA!”.
Sure I feel sorry for the kids being distressed for one reason or another. but these guys did literally nothing.
There just has to exist someone on the planet for which the title “shit parents” does objectively apply no matter how you look at it.
> The fact is, most of the freedom I had before kids, I never used.
That just seems like close to the definition of freedom. I have the freedom to go outside right now and eat dirt. I've never used it.
If you didn't do something then I guess you didn't want to, more than the things you did choose to do instead.
The only way you'd have enough life to do "most" of the things you'd be free to do, is if you're not free to do but a tiny thing.
> See what I did there?
Yup. Made no sense at all, is what. A UAE passport makes you free to visit 181 countries either visa free or visa-on-arrival. It's still freedom even if you don't take the time to visit all 181 countries.
It's not even an interesting paradox. It's just an obvious part of freedom.
Most people don't visit more than 35 countries. An Afghanistan passport gives you access to 35 countries.
> people who choose to be child free are not complete human beings
Hmm, this seems pretty condescending, but hopefully it is just in jest.
With four kids I understand there is a unique set of skills and emotions that come along with it and I am personally grateful for, but there are also a lot skills and emotions you won't have and experience if you never go to war, never become a leader, never experience losing a parent when you are young, never win a gold medal in a team sport, never live in a different culture, never volunteer, etc. It seems short sighted to claim someone is an incomplete person if they can't experience one of those things, because likely no single person can.
There is a great tapestry of human experience and we can only experience most of it second or third hand (and probably not even that in most cases).
I think having kids connects you to humanity in a deeply personal way and connection to humanity is at the higher level than anecdotal example of various human experiences we’ll never experience first hand.
I think there are many ways to connect deeply to humanity and you are being dismissive of those other experiences. Yours is just another anecdote amongst the ones I presented. Would you dismiss your kids experiences if they decide not to have kids? I would not.
There is nothing more narcissistic and selfish than having kids. There is nothing noble about fulfilling your biological imperative to leave a descendant. Quite the opposite, really, it's a rather primitive egoistical desire to somehow continue oneself after death.
As a 52 year old I specifically avoided having kids.
For decades I have been convinced that we are speed-running into a global environmental crisis that we will continue to ignore until it is far too late and this will result in associated resources wars and I never wanted to doom other people into having to live through that.
I sincerely hope for the sake of those of you who made a different choice that I turn out to have been overly doomerist, but watching the Trump 2.0 years play out I now think that I wasn't doomerist enough.
Before kids it was easy to judge bad parents. Then one day with child I found myself due to circumstances in a store way past my child’s bedtime. She was screaming and crying, because it was way past her bedtime.
Then I realized… I was now “the bad parent” I had so easily judged.
Then it was easy to judge parents with children younger than mine.
Until I learned that not all children have the same issues in the same order.
Then I learned it’s easier not to judge at all.
I still judge parents, because I compare them to other parents.
Good parents = kids not 100% glued to phones/tablets, social around friends and family, not throwing tantrums at 8-16 yrs old.
Bad parents = kids always throwing tantrums, kids basically always getting their way because they've learned parents will always give in, parents and kids 100% ignoring each other.
One set of friends - I go to visit, I play with their kids - we go out to dinner, we interact with both adults and kids
Another set of friends - I go to visit, they sent their kids to their room - we go out to dinner, they give the kids tablets and they're entirely ignored for the whole time.
All kids are different, my second has about 20 tantrums a day. I've no idea why. It's getting really hard to deal with. But it will pass.
Honestly the only certainty is that unless you have been 100 percent responsible for a very young child for more a few days, you have no idea what you are talking about. I don't mean that directed at you. Just my own generalisation based own experience and the opinion of every other parent I know.
Life as a parent is completely different than life before.
I saw a woman completely lose her shit in a museum with her kid. Before I became a parent I would have judged. But when it happened I just thought "poor woman, I know how it feels, just giving it her all and she's got nothing left to give right now, how many times have I felt like that, how many times have I failed to live up to my own ideals as a parent".
Trust me. Don’t judge.
Even if you compare to other parents, you are judging the reference-parents.
If you have data over time you can draw conclusions on things you want to try as a parent.
It's difficult to translate what you're saying. You say "go to visit" which implies you don't see your friends with kids very often. If true you're in a poor position to make these judgements even by your own standards.
Everything you're observing is even more likely to occur if you don't see them that often. Your friends probably want to spend more time focusing on you. The kids are not that familiar with you and are less likely to engage with you. Which also makes the parents more likely to want to distract them with something else.
Whether or not you're bringing children with you matters too. It sounds like you don't because you're focusing on child-adult interactions. If someone has kids the kids run around and be kids with their loudness, and child-adult interactions are going to be much more likely. If you're not bringing kids in tow my kids are much more likely to just go off and do their own thing.
Much of what you're pointing out can also be down to individual child temperment. Which changes as children age. By your standards many parents turn into a bad parent once their kids become a teenager.
That is not to say that your observations are 100% wrong. But just that there's so many variables, most of which I didn't even mention here, makes trying to analyze your statement make my head spin.
Not to lean too much on anecdotes, but I have a friend who has extremely well behaved kids. He has said a couple times that he feels like he has placed too many adult responsibilities on his kids. Is he a good parent? Based upon outside observation, he seems good. But he seems to be questioning some of his own choices. Maybe that alone makes him a good parent? I don't know, who am I to judge?
I mean, not judging other parents doesn’t come from thinking that all other parents are doing a great job, it comes from knowing that you’re doing a terrible job in your own, special ways.
Parenting children is impossible, therefore all parenting lies on a spectrum from terrible to catastrophic, and it’s hard to know how you did until they grow up (if ever) because there’s a lot of sensitivity and subtle emotional stuff, especially at very young ages, which are the most important and the ones you remember the least. I’m certain there are screen-free parents who are worse for their kids than a good chunk of tablet-hander-outers
> Bad parents = kids always throwing tantrums
But sometimes there are legit behavioral issues that are extremely challenging, and are not the parent's fault. Sometimes what looks like a "tantrum" on the outside can actually be autistic overwhelm and meltdown, which can happen with even the best parents. Not to mention stuff like Intermittent Explosive Disorder.
All this to say...if you see a kid in public throwing a "tantrum", you still shouldn't judge the parents without knowing the full picture.
There is a difference between kids using bad behavior to get attention or blackmail parents vs kids who have actual behavioral problems they are working through.
The first is an actual problem stemming from bad parenting and as a society we should indeed shame parents who raise spoiled kids who expect everything to be given to them.
The point is that if you just see a kid on the street throwing a tantrum, you don't know which of those situations you're actually looking at
OP was referring to observations at friend's houses. Presumably they'd be aware of any underlying issues.
Judging random people on the street isn't wise. Judge your friends and loved ones instead! :D
I mean, do you even know the full story at a friend's house? I guess it depends on how closely you know them, and whether they've confided any developmental issues they're children are dealing with.
I was the worlds best parent...before I had kids.
Thanks for making me laugh - great poetry :D and so true. I can‘t stand people w/o kids complaining about their parents.
Yes, when you have a toddler undergoing a public meltdown, it is easy to see who around you is an experienced parent, and who is not. Just by the look on their faces.
> Then I learned it’s easier not to judge at all.
A skill we should all cultivate, IMO. Life is happier when you do not waste it constantly judging.
I smile a bit and give a chuckle when a toddler is giving a parent a hard time. It reminds me of simpler times. The problems and consequences are so much smaller than teenage problems.
Louis C.K had a routine about this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cr1aAYOhFsQ
I can relate. Thank you.
Badly behaved kids I am more understanding of now (at least the younger ones). But there are defintely easy ways out of problems some parents take that are not good for children.
Yeah, with a kid I still judge. I'd rather see kids running around and playing and being kids in public than on a tablet. Even grocery shopping I see toddlers on tablets sitting in the cart.
My son has been actively involved with meal planning since he as a a year and a half old. "What type of bread today? What type of fruit in your yogurt tomorrow?"
I won't judge kid's behavior, so long as they are acting like kids. Sometimes that means they act out, that is normal.
But, damnit, let them live in the real world and not just try to distract them with shiny things all the time.
I remember going to restaurants in the 90s and early 2000s and kids would be running around playing with each other between tables. That is kids being kids, and it is perfectly acceptable (heck desirable!)
The only thing I'll add is that you never know what people are going through. Both of my children have pretty intense ADHD, and when I went through my divorce I definitely leaned into too much screen time for a while. It wasn't permanent though, and I managed to get back closer to the ideal you speak of (but as a single parent, it took a lot of processing of guilt to find a balance that worked).
I've decided it's safer to just never judge, that parent you see pushing the toddler around in the cart might indeed be a terrible parent, or they might be going through grief and at their breaking point.
> I've decided it's safer to just never judge, that parent you see pushing the toddler around in the cart might indeed be a terrible parent, or they might be going through grief and at their breaking point.
Agreed, I should have clarified that I'm speaking more about friends and family, people's whose situation can be spoken to directly.
I have friends with neurotypical kids who still hand the kids tablets at restaurants instead of actually teaching the kid how to take turns in a conversation, or how to actually go through a menu and order!
Like I get it, it is tiring, but we all signed for the work when we chose to have kids. (At least in my social circle where kids are very well planned for in advance).
I've been detained by police under suspicion of "kidnapping" for taking my kid to the park (my kid is a different "race" as me so it was "suspicious"). On another occasion my kid was interrogated because they were walking home from school on our own property, and someone wondered "why they were alone."
On the other hand, no one has ever called the police on me for handing the kid a tablet and melting their brain inside.
When I was a kid either of those people would be practically thrown in a loony bin for saying anything, let alone taken serious by the authorities. Now the CPS investigates almost every accusation and is legally barred from even telling you who made it, so these anonymous shitstains can exercise their cowardice behind a curtain as much as they like with no risk to themselves but every risk to you.
It's difficult to let them live in the real world not because some evil guy with a white van is waiting to offer "free candy" but that the evil person in a white van is actually the Karen who sees a kid on the street or the park as an inconvenience for her or an unacceptable risk and they can be the coward they are and make an anonymous complaint and cause weeks of harassments by CPS with the cell phone they have next to them at the ready wherever they might see a child.
> I've been detained by police under suspicion of "kidnapping" for taking my kid to the park (my kid is a different "race" as me so it was "suspicious"). On another occasion my kid was interrogated because they were walking home from school on our own property, and someone wondered "why they were alone."
And this is why I pay an arm and a leg to live in Seattle.
Kids here are running around outside playing soccer in the streets with parents watching guard for cars at the ends of the block.
Mixed race is not even noteworthy here.
Kids walk to/from school (up to a mile) all the time. Huge groups of kids walk together every day.
Yes the park thing happened to me while visiting a white suburb of a very racially segregated city.
I'm glad you at least determined the root cause.
Plenty of truly bad parents shrug responsibility off by making the "technically correct" claim that all kids throw tantrums, therefore they're not a bad parent. They then proceed to provide an unstable environment to raise their kids and the tantrums don't end until well into adulthood.
Before kids, you take a look around a diner or a store or a playground and you see little ones happily eating some chips or browsing the foodstuffs or playing on a slide.
You think that this is what kids are like. They sit there, they walk a little, they giggle on the playground, they look cute as all get out, etc.
Then you have kids and you know.
You know.
Those kids sitting there in the booth sipping on their milk quietly while mom and dad happily eat their lunch? Those are the top 5% most calm kids out there. The other 95% of kids are with their adults screaming and throwing fits and covered in who knows what.
Life lied to you. It did it directly to your face, unashamed. The bias is real.
That's not the impression I hear from my many intentionally childless friends. They take the negative behavior - the screaming, tantrums, chaos - as the norm.
It sounds like you always wanted kids. I don't say this to criticize - it's great that those who want to start families do so - but I don't think your experience is universal.
Oh then it's even worse! As again, only the more well behaved kids are going out in public.
Uhm, who walks around believing kids are well behaved?
lol. Kids are animals. Parents have to teach them manners and behaviors
Before having kids, I expected it to be this huge life changing thing. That it would effectively end the part of my life where I was free to do whatever I wanted, and start the part where I was just Daddy, doing nothing except serving my childrens' needs.
But that didn't happen. We just carried on being Jason and his partner, but with a baby in tow.
I had spent most of my 30s cramming in as much "living" as possible, to make sure I'd stocked away a lifetime supply of it. After all, I'd probably never get another chance to travel for long periods, keep up with climbing, and all that other stuff that Independent Jason could do.
But it was all for naught. We just packed the kid along and went traveling anyway. He had eleven stamps in his passport by his first birthday.
Life is just as much fun as ever. But now we have some kids to play with.
> Before having kids, I expected it to be this huge life changing thing. That it would effectively end the part of my life where I was free to do whatever I wanted, and start the part where I was just Daddy, doing nothing except serving my childrens' needs.
There are some huge changes.
The largest is a lack of the mental downtime where deep thought and problem solving could occur.
I can't get off work, hop on my car, and drive around for an hour mulling over technical work. I can't stay an hour past with coworkers and noodle solutions on a white board. I can't get up at 2 am to try something out that just popped into my head.
I need to be in bed by 10pm every day. I have to get up at 7am every day. On weekdays 2 meals a day need to be planned, on weekends 3 meals a day. I can't try experimenting with some random new recipe that may fail, my kid needs to eat lunch on time not 2 hours late.
Yes it is a lot of fun (theme parks! Trick or treating!), but I'm thankful I did a ton of amazing engineering work before I had a kid because there is no way I can dedicate the absurd amount of time to innovating/solving hard problems, that I used to.
> Before having kids, I expected it to be this huge life changing thing. That it would effectively end the part of my life where I was free to do whatever I wanted, and start the part where I was just Daddy, doing nothing except serving my childrens' needs.
Had a very similar feeling. When my wife told me the "getting pregnant" worked I mourned a little bit. I recognize we were exceedingly lucky to have had such a wonderful kid, and it has worked out very well.
For the first 6 mos. a lot did change, but after that things seemed to skew back to a new "normal".
It will be 13 years in May since we had our daughter. I'm so glad we did it.
I know that it could have gone a lot differently, though. I'd never suggest that it'll be great for everybody.
My kids are both in their 20's now. One has graduated from a comp sci program and has just started in a new job and the other is in grad school. I don't see them as much as I would like because they are very busy and far away (in another country actually). They are both great people and we have a good relationship, but I miss them terribly.
It's given me plenty of time to think about my dadness and boy do I have regrets. I can't help but think about all the things I would do differently if I could do it again and I know that if I ever have grandkids, I'm going to be a way better grandparent than I ever was parent.
Your daughter is 13? For us that was a time of great change. It was when the dependence / independence balance really started moving.
It happened to me and now, after more than 8 years, I find myself still in the situation where I am serving my children's needs and not having time to satisfy my personal ones.
They go to bed when I am also tired. Trying to having an hobby past their bed time means sacrifying sleep time.
Travelling is also a challenge, since they lack interesting in seeing something new, but just want to have fun playing, especially playgrounds.
> He had eleven stamps in his passport by his first birthday.
I was raised overseas (Dad[0] in the CIA).
Both good and bad. First, if it's just "traveling," and not "living" overseas, I suspect that it's not so bad, but military brats have common quirks, for a reason. Our lives get torn up and replanted regularly. It's hard to make friends, and we often end up having a difficult time, retaining long-term relationships, later in life.
But, man, the life story that it gives you. There's few cures for xenophobia, better than immersion.
[0] https://cmarshall.com/miscellaneous/MikeMarshall.htm
> We just packed the kid along and went traveling anyway. He had eleven stamps in his passport by his first birthday.
How do you keep a baby happy and quiet on long international flights? I currently have no kids but I may find myself in this situation in the next couple years. I'm dreading being the guy with a screaming infant on a 13-hour trans-Pacific flight that keeps everyone from sleeping.
Babies want nothing more than to sit on your lap snoozing and feeding. It's more or less what you do at home anyway. The hardest part about flying with a baby is dealing with the added luggage (stroller, carseat, overpacked diaper bag, etc).
It's only once they're old enough to have more sophisticated feelings (like boredom) but not old enough to communicate them (except by screaming) you get in trouble.
First two years they can fly for free, but they have to ride in an adult’s lap and that gets tiring. Don’t believe the bassinet offerings - as soon as a plane gets turbulence, you have to get the sleeping baby out of the wall bassinet and good luck appeasing them. Age 1-2 is hardest for travel, so you can skip it. The only thing that worked was getting their own seat with the cosco scenera next car seat (or their own if they like it, but that one is $50 and light to carry). They would sleep nicely for large chunks and you get to enjoy travel again. After age 3 it’s much easier (they can ipad if that’s the only ipad time they ever get).
Don't go straight to screens in this situation. You can introduce novelty by purchasing a number of cheap toys, even from the dollar store, which they have never seen before. Keep them hidden until the flight.
I'm 6 months in and it has definitely ended my life as it was and nothing is the same. I'm pretty lucky that my wife gives me almost 16 hours of free time daily, from which 8 I work and 8 is for sleep. If I want to work out or do something else I need to steal it from the sleep time. It's pretty early though so I might be looking back in a few years and think that it was not that bad actually :)
A lot of gyms will watch your kids while you work out. Great opportunity to give both of you a break.
That doesn't appear to be a common story. I now have to schedule phone calls with my retired mother because between my sister and her partner who both work, and her, with 2 kids - one small but active that needs constant minding and one that needs chaperoning to activities - she often doesn't have one uninterrupted hour in the evening for an entire week.
Nearly everyone I know with kids is more similar to this story than yours.. to each their own but it's certainly not for me:)
Absolutely. Also, kids end up helping you focus on the travel, experiences and things that are truly worthwhile. You drop a lot of activities and TV and other activities that was frankly a waste of time anyways.
You have just the one kid, right?
We were the same ;-)
Two now. That’s still manageable.
Good on you. We were 'one and done'. Two sounds more than 100% more difficult, if only just because the number of edges in the relationship graph going up.
My parents managed four kids, albeit for most of that time there were only 3 living in the home at a time (13 years between the oldest and youngest).
A friend of mine had eleven (!!!) siblings. That horrifies me. Cliques could form in that size population! Utter craziness.
Travel with a baby isn't that bad.
I think people struggle with losing their identity when they no longer get long periods of focus time or can participate in their hobbies with the dedication they would like.
Depends on the baby. Some are nightmarish.
That’s the main thing - each family and each child are different, so it’s kind of hard to base your decision on what you see and hear from others.
Yeah mine was colicky and every time getting him to sleep involved rocking him for an hour+ while he screamed in my ear. And he woke up so easily. So I spent about 2 hours a day rocking and patting for the first year or so, not checking off a dozen countries on my passport.
Never had a second for some reason.
I’m curious what made you conclude that he was colicky as opposed to something else?
I was labeled colicky as a baby and my own children turned out to have some digestive issues with certain common foods that make them cry a ton when they or their mother eat them (and they get it via the milk). If I hadn’t debugged the food issues I might have labeled them “colicky”, but when we avoid those foods religiously they only cry when it makes sense and when the issue is solved they stop. I’m guessing I had a similar issue as a baby, my parents definitely didn’t attempt to debug it.
No judgement by the way I’m just curious if you tried debugging things like that as I imagine “colicky” could encompass issues that aren’t possible to debug also, and it’s also understandable if you couldn’t put in the resources to debug it as in my case it’s been a gigantic and expensive pain in the ass.
Well when you go to every specialist and try every type of milk and every diet change imaginable it gets there through a diagnosis of exclusion.
Trust me, the debugging is a big part of the trouble. Everyone is telling you to debug, but that is actually the thing you have to learn to stop doing. Your brain is telling you to debug. But it can't be debugged. I watched multiple women have mental breakdowns trying to debug a baby with a 6 month streak of colic. Eventually their brain just goes psychotic because a baby screaming 6+ months non-stop with nothing wrong while people frantically try to solve the problem is basically sever mental torture. It is not the hours, or days, or even weeks of screaming that get to you, it is the months of never ending ear-pearcing torture that nothing will fix, and they will not fucking sleep because they just want to scream for all of their sleep as well and naturally the caregivers won't be sleeping either due to this. And you cannot rely on crying to figure out when to feed, when to change a diaper, when the baby needs sleep, or some gentle motion -- all of your indicators are worthless.
It is a hell for the baby and it is a hell for the parent. People struggling with this generally do not have any more children. Any other stage past baby for such child is 99% easier, I laugh when people say babies are the easiest stage.
Our first was colicky for the first 18 months or so. A nightmare, really, just like you described. Back arched, face red, for hours every day, no comforting.
We went on to have more kids. They were all quiet and easy. We sometimes wondered if there was something wrong with them.
Sure, the default for travel shouldn't be it'll be a nightmare though or impossible.
IME babies are the very easiest for almost everything.
It's way more work to travel with a 10-year-old than a 1-year-old. Then quadruple that difficulty for each additional kid of roughly that age...
I often wonder in these threads what proportion of the commenters is male. HN skews heavily male, and statistically speaking, fathers are spared a huge chunk of the physical and mental burdens of pregnancy, birth, and parenting. Being a mom and being a dad are not equivalent, and I have a feeling that not many male HNers would readily swap places if such thing were possible.
I don't mean to inject politics, but there's a huge mental burden on fathers with more conservative values that take their role seriously.
Unfortunately, there's no way to elaborate what I mean on HN or much of the web without stirring up a ton of pointless argument. People will just get defensive and refuse to consider perspectives they can't agree with.
That huge mental burden is entirely self-inflicted, though. It's not a fair comparison to the physical burden that is unavoidable.
Growing up in a more conservative society, I've seen many people with that parenting style, who often pop a proverbial blood vessel trying to ensure that their children are more like army cadets that perfectly reflect their worldviews and don't take an unapproved step in any direction. Their rationalizations ranged from real safety concerns to arbitrary opinions like what religion is right (and exactly how someone needs to act at all times, with no limits on specificity or ridiculousness) or what large groups of people are evil (nationality, religion, identity - any group is fair game, just pick one and wall off your child from ever knowing about them). Regardless of motivation, ideology is a choice, and they could've relieved a whole lot of this burden on their own at any point.
Yeah, I agree, if you’re talking about the role of the patriarch as a stoic provider who isn’t allowed to be a vulnerable man with his own emotional needs.
It has been encouraging to see how much more men now seem to desire being engaged and nurturing in their children’s lives (even among those who otherwise consider themselves conservative or traditionalist).
Caveat emptor. I am a grandparent now, so I think I have some perspective on this.
Of course we love our kids, and we had (and still have) a lot of good times with them. But kids can really break your life and marriage, too - amongst my peers I can't tell you how many have a struggling young adult kid or two (with relatively serious mental or physical health problems), with no resolution in sight.
So stay lucky - having a child is a wild act of optimism. And if you want kids, don't wait too long. There is never really a good time to have a kid (just different trade-offs), so for the best chances for health, be as young a parent as possible. And men have a biological clock, too: e.g.: https://neurosciencenews.com/genetics-sperm-mutation-neurode...
The serious mental and physical health problems are real and a societal concern. Everyone "notices" the trends, but maybe it's not you so you just think there's nothing you can do about it and do your best to stay healthy.
Then you have a child and you are suddenly hyper-aware of everything going into the body and brain. Everything they eat, every doctor visit, every time they get sick and what could have exposed them, every word spoken on TV, every friend they have and how they act or how that friend passes along their parents influences, etc.
And suddenly you're very concerned about societal level macro influences on food, medical, etc because those influences are going to affect your child's life.
There's definitely a balance here. Not giving a shit, which seems to have been the tradition I was raised in, is not great. Recognizing problems is good. Acting on all of them is bad. You need to raise grounded kids who can grow into resilience so by the time they're adults they're able to navigate this strange world.
Especially trying to control who their friends are and what they hear. Questionable behavior from friends at younger ages can actually be a good thing: it lets you plant the seed early when your kids still listen to you.
This is one of my favourites from PG, not least because it's a bit antithetical to what I perceive as a growing trend among smart, ambitious people (for whom children might represent friction, inconvenience, etc)... as well as folks for whom COL is making the question irrelevant due to practical concerns.
Actually, it's really striking that even in America -- the developed country with the #1 highest birthrate -- still falls below the replacement rate. What is it that's inversely correlated between growing wealth and having children? Especially since it was likely to opposite for most of human history? (i.e. large families were a sign of wealth and power).
PS - I can't resist offering my own experience as a parent - what a treasure to have discovered that I'm capable of such love, and to get to watch this love transform me into a better person than who I was before. This kind of love demands everything of you, but through it you discover a truer and stronger version of yourself too.
More wealth and education gives people the option to choose which I think is a good thing. People who don't want kids shouldn't be forced to have them. Before, people had kids because they needed them to work on their farm or it's what was expected of them as a housewife. Now that we have a choice, less people want to commit to taking care of a human for 18+ years. It's great so many people want to be parents but having a kid doesn't automatically make someone a great parent.
Due to the extremely competitive nature of the US economy, a lot of people have to choose between career success (having money) and starting a family (which is expensive). I know a lot of women who want to have a family, but have struggled to get to a comfortable economic position where they can actually do it. Compounded by the wage stagnation, which makes it hard for most people to support a family on a single income. We have hollowed out our third spaces, so its difficult for people to relax and socialize. Even vibing ends up being a kind of competition because of the high costs. Not to mention the perverse incentives in the housing market.
None of this is conducive to starting a family.
I think the two-income household (two full-time paying jobs, specifically) is a lot of it, and seems to go along with "rich" countries.
Having all the stuff that could happen during the day if it were (if you will) someone's full-time job, instead get crammed into evenings and weekends when you're trying to also do non-chore stuff with your kids (or, for god's sake, maybe get just one measly hour to do something you want to do, alone... or spend time with your spouse, without kids...) and take care of things that have to happen each evening (dinner, bed time stuff) really, really sucks.
Not having chores piling up through the week to ambush you both on the weekend would be amazing. I can hardly even imagine how much more free we'd feel. With two working parents it's like neither ever gets any actual time off that they're not carving out by neglecting something they really ought to be doing (usually several somethings)
When someone asks me if starting a family is worth it, I borrow words from Agent K and tell them, "Yes, if you are strong enough"...
But as you say, I suppose everyone ends up becoming strong. Because there is no other way...
Oh, if you read some of the headlines in the news... no, not everyone.
> Actually, it's really striking that even in America -- the developed country with the #1 highest birthrate -- still falls below the replacement rate. What is it that's inversely correlated between growing wealth and having children?
I think a lot of people miss the simple fact that some people just don't want kids and are unable to reconcile their personal experience with anyone else's.
My partner and I are both wealthy enough that we could both afford children and we can afford to not have children. But neither of us think our lives would be improved by having them.
I think that's really, really hard to understand for a lot of parents and people who want to be parents: being (relatively) wealthy creates choice, and that a growing number of people are choosing different things now that they have the ability to do so.
I think a lot of people are also pessimistic about the future.
It's fairly obvious the world will be very different and much less pleasant place by 2050. A lot of people don't want their kids to live through that.
It's possible aliens will arrive before then and fix all our problems, or some other Salvatio Ex Machina, but it's not exactly a high-odds bet.
Kids cost time, not money. So the wealthier you are, the more difficult it is because you probably have less free time. You can pay someone else to raise your kids (daycare/etc.) but then you lose a lot of the value of having kids.
This bullshit excuse that somebody can't afford to have kids is proven wrong by the fact that poorer people have more kids than rich people. You can even be unemployed. Gone are the days of destitute single mothers having to give up their child to the church and work in the poorhouse. We have social welfare for that.
Maybe the fact that poor people can have lots of kids has taken away their value as a status symbol for wealth?
Um, wtf is this rambling statement that doesn't seem to be based in any kind of truth at all?
In the past both poor and rich tended to have tons of kids, this is because kids tended to die young regardless of being rich or poor.
Then you're trying to compare massive social changes in the west that occurred around the same time. For example womens suffrage, women being allowed to work, sexual revolutions and birth control.
If you look at countries that tended to develop later, the rate of childbirth tends to drop with accessibility to birth control and education.
> Kids cost time, not money.
There's a well known aphorism about this...
I’ve always wanted kids, ever since I was a kid myself, but I was never really sure what it would be like to be a parent.
Turns out it’s quite strange, because my kids bring me more joy than anything else. I’ll sit there for hours watching them play. You may think “that’s not strange—tons of parents say that”, but for my sort of personality, it’s very strange. I’ve always thought of myself as sort of overly analytical, detached, ambitious, and a bit obsessive. Not the sort of touchy-feely person who chases a two year old around with a smile on my face and likes watching videos of cute babies. Yet here I am. I enjoy it so much I’ve even tried to figure out if there’s a way I can take a sabbatical from work to spend the last two years with my youngest at home before he goes off to school (seems unlikely given how questions about a random two year gap on my resume might affect my long-term career).
It’s funny that as a kid I always wanted to work at a tech company for the interesting tech, but now as an adult my favorite thing about it has been the 4 months of parental leave I was able to have with each newborn.
You just write "spent two years raising my youngest kid [building tree houses and whatnot]". If you keep a bit up with tech, why would anyone think twice about that? They wouldn't where I live.
Reading the post and >100 comments I've just realized there are differences between dad and mom mental experience.
Looks like many dads are changing mentally when their first child is born or a bit later. Mine changed somewhere during the second trimester.
Bonding is also almost automatic for mothers (especially who breastfeed), whilst it's delayed or never happens at the same level for fathers. My first child has never been close to father because he worked "9-9-6" and got 2 day leave. He could never really calm down crying baby or put her to bed. With the second child, thanks to large corp policy, he got 15 weeks bonding leave and it was a very different experience for father and child - baby didn't care on whose lap to fall asleep.
Having kids is a gift. But this is one of these kinds of knowledge that once you know you immediately can't explain to others who don't.
My problem with that wording is that it comes across a bit arrogant or "I know better". I think many people _do_ understand what you mean even if they don't have kids, they're just not that interested in those parts of life, which also should be fair.
At one of my earliest jobs (I must have been 19), I had a boss who was incredulous that I didn't drink alcohol and said that I would when I was 21 because it was "part of being an adult". I was pretty sure that making my own decisions rather than letting myself get pressured by others into what they assumed was best for me was a more important part of being an adult, and over a decade later I still don't drink.
Comments like the parent one (pun semi-intended) basically sound the same to me as what my boss had said to me that day. Assuming that your own experience is universal is a flawed way to view the world, even if your experience is relatively common. If there are exceptions, it's not going to be easy to see them if you have an assumption already about it being universal, and if the people in the majority are loud enough and annoying enough about it, those who aren't will be even more incentivized not to share their experiences with you; I'd argue that people who regret having kids will potentially be reluctant to publicly say so. Most importantly, doing something because of societal pressure rather than genuine desire is going to greatly reduce the chance that someone truly finds it fulfilling, and there's an emotional cost for children who are raised by parents who basically regret having them.
It's totally reasonable to say "I never truly understood how much I'd enjoy having kids until I did, and I suspect it's the same for a lot of other parents". There's no reason to go further than that unless you're pushing an idealogy rather than actually trying to say something you know is correct.
My problem with that problem is that, well, people who have kids definitionally know (better?) about having them. Like being able to experience a book in its original version vs a translation.
It's okay if you don't want to learn Spanish, but when people discuss the struggles and delights of reading Cien Años de Soledad they're not necessarily being arrogant, just stating their lived experience.
But do you also go around and claim everyone that hasn't read that book in Spanish is losing out in life, or do you also recognize it's just not for everyone?
Each one's a reverse-lottery-ticket, though. Get the wrong draw and it's not a gift. Can easily massively reduce the QOL for everyone around, including other siblings.
Mostly due to chronic illnesses, of either the physical or mental variety.
There is significant suffering in the world. You and everyone else are drawing lottery tickets everyday. Kids are far from its only source or cause. I'm ill equipped to unpack the meaning of life, but I am certain that suffering is fundamental--your comment is probing at this idea.
This is a very difficult subject since there exists un-imaginable suffering and it's hard to reconcile that. That life is a gift under the umbrella of un-imaginable suffering. Perhaps, that's what spirituality tries to do, I don't know.
I think a lot of folks don't consider that each child comes with a high-enough-to-worry-about risk of negatively affecting the life of everyone in your family to a level on par with one of the adults in your family becoming permanently and severely disabled relatively early in life.
Yeah sure we also risk some micromorts and the life-altering-disability equivalent every time we drive a car or get a sunburn, all right.
A good friend of mine holds the belief that "having friends with kids is better than having kids of your own", and I definitely feel the "can't explain" part - there is an unexplainable reality when you have kids of your own.
I'm also told that being a grandparent is a lot better than being a parent - you can give them back.
I understand the idea but I take issue with the wording.
I CAN explain to others who don't. It's just that most of the time others aren't interested in hearing.
Great way of putting it. It's the sort of thing you just have to trust others and jump into. If you think about it too much it just doesn't make sense.
Love. Kids. Marriage. Divorce. Heartbreak. Death of a close partner.
Things you can’t explain to other people. But others with the experience just know.
Having kids is a 4 billion year old life function (instinct). Simultaneously it is a highly sofisticated behaviour with multiple dimensions (raising).
Genetics play a decisive role in kid's behaviour and powers/weaknesses. Next comes the mother, next the father and later the society.
Let's not forget that parents are "kids" of the society that heavily influence their behaviour that eventually shapes their kids.
My big learning from having a kid, was that there was more maturing and growing up for me to do (A ton to be honest). Once there was somebody else I had to keep alive and care for and think about I learned to better de-center myself in the universe. I am sure you can get to this perspective many other ways, but having children seems to be the easy mode for getting into the mindset of "it's not about me any more."
Having kids may not be for everyone, but it is the best thing that I have ever done in my life.
Love seinfield's quote about kids -
"One of the nice things God does, is that he doesn't let people who don't have kids know what they're missing"
One of the nice things about not having teenage daughters is you don't have to worry about Jerry Seinfeld hanging around.
Before having kids, you think everything will change forever.
After having kids, you realise that things only appear different for a while, and you simply flow into the new reality.
Everything really changed forever, but not as drastically as you might have thought.
Remember how everything changed when you got or lost a job? Yeah. Well, maybe not exactly, but you get the point.
I also had kids, and while I love my kids I haven’t loved spending time with my kids. This will hopefully change as they age, but the first six years have so far been very much a drag on my life and productivity, and not much else. They haven’t provided fulfilment, and they haven’t provided satisfaction. Some joy is there from time to time, definitely, but nothing in the way the author describes. Happiness for me typically starts after my kids are in bed or when I can escape them during work hours. My wife finds great happiness in our children, and I find happiness in that, but I’m desperately waiting for my kids to be old enough that I only need to spend time with them instead of constantly caring for them. Sorry if this is a bit of a dark comment, but I just wanted to say it’s not always the experience this author had, even if it seems common. Edit: Generally, I regret having kids (because of the impact on my life, not the kids themselves), but I also can’t change that decision and I would never back away from my choice - that’s completely unfair to them, as well as my wife. Such is life. I try to keep looking forward to when they’re older as a way of staying positive.
I truly do give my kids my all though, and they have a wonderful life and are loved and cared for in all senses of those words. They’re great kids and I give them everything necessary to be a great dad.
The curse of parenting is that when they're small you can't wait for them to grow up so you can get more time for you, and when they grow up you're nostalgic of their childhood when they were willing to spend more time with you.
So my advice is: find activities to do with them that you would both enjoy. Maybe going to parks, museums, have them help you on house chores... You only have a few years left under they get to middle school and start becoming more distant.
I can definitely relate. There's nights my wife and I get to bed and sorta just look at eachother and go "what the hell was that". Those days are hard.
I find the days that I forget myself and throw myself into trying to be a good dad are the days I find joy in fatherhood. Weekends especially I try to forget the stresses of work and productivity and everything else and try to spend as much time with them as possible. Playing, teaching, and learning with them.
Not saying it's universal. Just a datapoint from me.
If it makes you feel any better, you're not the only one that feels that way. I don't think it's said very often because it almost feels taboo to say it.
Apparently there are even private Facebook groups dedicated to this purpose.
Sometimes I feel like there is this sense that you are a bad parent if you ever express that there are times you might wish you weren’t a parent, even if the feeling is much more “I wish I didn’t have to be a parent RIGHT NOW”. You can even see in this thread that people are expressing how they feel sorry for the commenter’s children because he feels regret sometimes about being a parent.
I wanted to be a dad more than anything in the world, and I absolutely love my kids and I love being a dad.
Most of the time.
There is a TON of things you have to do as a parent that objectively sucks, and you have to do it no matter how you are feeling and no matter what else you also have to do. It is impossible not to feel trapped, at times, by the understanding that it never ends, that you are a parent 24/7/365.25 and that your kids dominate your life. I don’t care how much you love your kids, you are going to feel that sometimes (or you are so strongly into the self-denial that you force yourself to pretend you always like it).
That doesn’t mean you aren’t a good parent, or even that you made the right choice to be a parent. Most of the best things in life involve sacrifice, and doing things you don’t want to have to do, and powering through even when you want to give up. It’s cliche, but the struggle makes the rewards even sweeter. Doesn’t mean the struggle doesn’t suck sometimes, and you might want to give up, and you have to use all your self-control tricks to maintain.
I feel even worse for parents who did IVF or other fertility treatments, or who adopt. In my conversations with some close friends who are in those situations, they talk about how much pressure they feel to never complain when it is hard. They spent a ton of money and effort and used insurance money and many doctors and procedures (or all the interviews and inspections and money for adoption) so they could have kids, and now they want to complain about being a parent? Of course, they still have all the same struggles and pains and nostalgia for their before life, no matter how much this is what they want.
Anyway, I am not sure what my point is. I just want people to be honest with themselves, and other parents and future parents, about what the entire parenting experience really is. Sometimes I think parents don’t want to scare potential parents off of being parents, which I think is understandable but overstated. There is simply no way to convey to non-parents what it is actually like to be a parent, and this applies to both the good and bad things. I thought my wife and I were prepared and knowledgeable and ready, and we were to the extent we could be. But so many things we imagined about what it would be like is not the reality at all, but even if we had a Time Machine I couldn’t explain to my previous self what it is actually like. You just have to experience it… if you want to. I would never tell people they should have kids, because it is such an all-encompassing thing that everyone has to decide for themselves… all without knowing what it will actually be like.
It is a hell of an adventure, though.
I would like to hear in what sense you love your kids, given that "he first six years have so far been very much a drag on my life and productivity, and not much else. They haven’t provided fulfilment, and they haven’t provided satisfaction. (...) Happiness for me typically starts after my kids are in bed or when I can escape them during work hours."
Do you say "I love my kids" because that's what everybody says, or is there any truth in it?
EDIT: Just to be 100% clear: I mean absolutely no judgement. I'm not going to tell you off or try to change your mind. I ask out of pure curiosity.
I go above and beyond to give them a great life - to care about providing them with a rich education, as well as a wide variety of life experiences, to immerse them in quality time with friends and family, to travel with them and spend time amongst various cultures and amongst nature. I’m there for them whenever they need me, and also when they don’t. I take the time to give genuine answers, to feed their curiosity, to make them great people. I give them the tools to explore things on their own and foster their independence. I also encourage risk taking while supporting them when it doesn’t work out.
Critically: I give them my full attention.
I could choose to spend all that mental effort on myself, but I choose to spend it on them. That’s as good a demonstration of love as any, in my book anyway.
Edit: no offence taken! I didn’t interpret it that way at all.
You are overdoing it. Don't know who is your role model, but that behavior is IMO what leads to that outcome.
Show mostly by example, not by direct mentoring.
What rich education and various cultures for 6-year-olds (or less)? That is simply irrelevant at that age and logistics of it just makes you hate everything. Do you even take your kids to dozen of arbitrary chosen classes?
Tone it down, everybody will feel better and you won't have to fake it. Happy parent is more important for family than robo parent.
What a rude thing to say. Different people raise their kids differently. There's nothing wrong with that answer.
It's you who are being rude by not allowing opinions. I am trying to help. I might be right or wrong or somewhere in between (which is all perfectly OK) but its on OP to judge it by himself if my words have any meaning for him. I said them because I noticed the pattern around me. Please stop with the drama.
You're the one making drama. "nooo kids don't need a robot parent" lol
It’s not forced, and we do show by example. I also disagree that they’re too young to be immersed in a love for education, culture, and people. Oh and music too. We listen to a lot of music (for fun!).
My family and friends are multi-cultural so they’re naturally exposed to several cultures, for example. It’s also important to my wife and I as the world itself is multi-cultural, so having an appreciation that different people live their lives differently is important. We lead by example simply by living in a multi-cultural life and embracing it.
Take that same approach and apply it across the rest of the points I made. Nothing is forced, I promise.
> Do you say "I love my kids" because that's what everybody says, or is there any truth in it?
It is true that some people are not really cut out to be parents. But unfortunately it is difficult to tell whether that will be you or not. I see people looking at comments in threads like this and then chiming in with sentiments along the lines of "see, this is why I never wanted to be a parent." There is no way to know that, and such statements strike me as cope. Becoming a parent changes you, but you won't know how until you do it. There is a lot of biology and psychology in play, for certain.
As I tell my own kids, however, be careful because you only get to become a parent one time. Cannot blame someone for opting out of the risk, even if the counterfactual is that they would have been amazing parents with amazing children and been much happier.
Interesting, my experience has been the opposite. Before getting kids, I thought that I would only enjoy having kids once they were the age where you could have conversations with them, etc., that the first one or two years were more something that mothers would like. But for me it was not like that at all, aside from some sleepless nights, it's so cool to be part of them discovering the world.
have so far been very much a drag on my life and productivity, and not much else
At some point when our kid was still young, I started working 4/5 FTE, taking the afternoons off after ~14:00. I feel like that provided a lot of mental space. Since I was working part-time, I did not feel bad/guilty about not working the afternoons and I would be focused on being very productive from 8:30 to 14:00. The free hours were for doing stuff together or accommodating their playdates (picking up from school, ensuring the house doesn't get torn down).
Now they are an age where they want to do things without parents, so I am working full-time again, but do miss those early days where she would be with me in her seat on my bike and we'd cycle to the city and she'd be singing aloud from joy.
But every person is different and I think that there are also parents that start enjoying having kids more when they are older. So, your years may still come :).
dark comment
My dark comment would be: we are all learning on the job and I feel like I could do some things better with the experience I have now.
I have a few kids, raising them is a mix of good and bad, like everything else. it took a toll on my career, pushed my temper to the edge, and stressed me out all these 20+ years, but I also enjoyed many moments. it does not go away when they got older by the way, it's a life long strong bond, at different phases there are different challenges.
If I have a second life, I don't know what to do though, I probably will first make enough money before having kids at least.
I probably will first make enough money before having kids at least.
I think you’ve hit the key difference.
I waited until I was 40 before having kids, and it just feels like I’m doing it on easy mode.
We had time and money sorted out, and tons of free baby stuff donated from all our friends who had done it already.
It’s still lots of work, but you’re at a place in life where you can handle it. I can’t imagine trying to raise kids in my 20s, with my crappy stressful office job and no money in my little studio apartment.
Hats off to anybody who can do that.
On the flip side, you'll still have a 20yo university student to take care of at age 60, while all your friends will have an independent adult child earlier...
I see no issues with that. I don't think that your friends should decide your parenting plans.
That's funny becasue if I could do it again I'd have my kids younger.
I think this is a fairly common experience but many people are afraid to admit it.
While I have always loved being a dad, I can certainly relate to the things you describe.
I will say that a lot of those issues have gotten better as they have gotten older (they are now 10 and almost 7). They don’t require the same level of constant attention that they used to, they are getting more and more interesting to talk to, and have developed interesting personalities and senses of humor.
I’m glad to hear that - it backs up what I’m hoping/expecting will happen. I think I’ll enjoy time with them much more as they age, especially once they’re 7+.
I enjoyed much more the first 6 years than the following 6 ones.
Seeing them grow was fun, seeing them turning teenagers is a pain.
I think it's important to share the difficult / hard experiences of having kids as much as the good ones. I've noticed that there is a huge bias towards only sharing the good moments and white-washing all of the bad as something you can "laugh about later." To be frank, not enough people were honest with me about what it would be like having kids before I had them - and I was incredibly upset when I realized that (several years into being a parent).
I now make it a point to be honest with people when they ask "Should we have kids?" and tell them about how hard it can be, etc. Most importantly, I tell people that they shouldn't have kids unless they would still want to do it if their experience doesn't land in the middle of the bell curve. We tend to romanticize the decision, and expect that everything "just gets even better" with kids. There are all sorts of ways your experience can be less than ideal. Unless you're evaluating your decision with those potential outcomes in mind, you're doing yourself, your partner, and even your future children a disservice.
Thank you for posting this. It’s totally understandable and believable that you simultaneously love them and regret some things about it. There’s this insane pressure in our society to never acknowledge the toll that kids have and to never speak out about this. I remember when this article was first posted and how I received it, like I was wrong for not being sure about kids, and that some change would come over me when I had them. Truth is, that doesn’t happen with everyone. Then the world tries to gaslight those people who don’t feel that way into feeling like they’re broken somehow.
I’m sure you love your kids and take great care of them, and it’s not your fault that you feel this way.
It would benefit all of us if this taboo was lifted, so that we could speak truthfully about the impact of kids on families, and maybe then we’d have to provide more support and encouragement to convince people to have them. Not everyone has free daycare from their grandparents or a large social network to babysit or the finances that make having a child less of a burden.
The quip I keep going back to is: "All joy, no fun."
Everyone is different, and even though I don't share your experience, I don't view yours as either good or bad, it just is what it is. My experience is different but I'm not planning on ever telling anyone "Oh don't worry about it just have kids it'll be the best experience of your life" in blind faith.
Your experience is the opposite of mine.
I can't wait to play with my 3 year old and 1 year old. I get so mad at work when I have an odd late meeting because it is keeping me from them.
My three year old helps me build furniture (he gets screws started, counts out parts, helps apply glue). I love showing him synths and instruments and seeing his face light up.
My one year old is a cuddle monster who likes listening to jazz with me. She also really enjoys when the cat climbs up on our lap and she gets to pet it.
I don't know your situation, but most miserable parents I know see their kid as something to manage, like some kind of annoying work underling.
I see my kids as little detectives.
My goal isn't to solve their case or even help them approach it in the right way. It's to give them an occasional hint (or step stool), keep them from danger, and help them discover the correct way to behave.
The single folk envy the married and the married envy the singles. Life is suffering either way.
Having kids becomes a lot easier if you can do the things you enjoy with them. For me that includes all sorts of stuff such as D&D, warhammer, painting miniatures, drawing, magic the gathering, board games, etc. I also include them when I have to fix something around the house or some random electronic device that broke.
If the only thing you can enjoy is adult stuff or working then you might have a rougher time at it if you don't find joy in the pure act of raising a kid. For me the first few months were meh, but once they started to get a personality I found it more entertaining.
Many of those are things I greatly enjoy, as well as many other things from a very diverse range of hobbies. My kids aren’t old enough to join in on those things yet (6 and 4), so I only find time to do those things once every few months, as opposed to once or twice a week pre-kids. It’s improving as they get older though, hence my hopefulness.
It's mysterious to me that you write all this _and_ that you do truly love your kids and are great. If I was in your position I'd at least concede that people do deserve parents that don't regret them. Do their thoughts toward it even matter?
I think people deserve parents that give a damn. And I do give a damn. Several in fact. It just doesn’t make me happy.
I mean, the birth rate is decreasing everywhere for a reason.
The reason isn't because it is more difficult or people enjoy having kids less (like the parent). Its because children used to be a way to provide security for your family and community. More hands to help or sent off to earn money younger for example.
Now with smaller family units and less community interaction they represent a risk to security, mainly financially.
“A” reason?
Given the post you’re replying to, it seems you’re implying a specific reason, but what if it’s a different one? How about “I love children but having kids is super expensive”?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility
> There is generally an inverse correlation between monetary income and the total fertility rate within and between nations.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-fam...
> In 2021, the birth rate in the United States was highest in families that had under 10,000 U.S. dollars in income per year
And a few thousands more links.
> How about “I love children but having kids is super expensive”?
always surprises me when ppl say this when they clearly observe the opposite in action. whats going on here.
Every mouth to feed costs more. Baby formula seems like a racket. Diapers are expensive.
My oldest will need a laptop for school next year. It isn't optional or provided.
Maybe you need a bigger car because car seats take up a lot of room.
What if your kid decides they want to join a sports team? A friend of a friend told me they did the math on a year of competitive swimming. It was $10,000 by the time they were done with equipment and travel.
A trip to the dentist for my family of four is about $1000 for just cleanings. Braces for my oldest were $3000 if I could pay cash or $4000 to finance. You could skip dental care, but some might consider that neglect.
What if the school tells you to get your child tested? That costs about $3000 in my part of the world. Half of the kids on my block are neurodivergent somehow. What do you do?
In a less well off part of the world, most of these "concerns" probably disappear. I think we have pretty high expectations of parents that aren't poor.
Your arguments (explanations?) would seem way more relevant if they didn't go 100% counter to observation.
I don't know why you're trying to explain an outcome that is opposite of the observed outcome.
Are you saying that while more money is correlated with less fertility (the fact), that somehow even more money will reverse the trend and start going the other way?
Based on observed data, one could almost make the case that if only billionaires start stealing from the poor even more, then birth rates should go up.
It wasn't really supposed to be about money vs fertility rates. I was trying to provide some observed examples of why having more money might mean more expensive kids. Or how being poor means the cost and expectations are lower.
I've always believed that it isn't money itself, but access to healthcare and education that lower fertility rates. Money correlates really strongly with access to healthcare and education.
Having good education and healthcare leads to birth control and maybe an abortion if the BC fails.
When a family of three is making $15K a year, do you believe baby four, five and six were planned out in agonizing detail? Or do you think maybe they weren't planned at all?
And I do believe more money going around would help. If the perspective is "I can't afford it", those who are doing OK will not have children if they can help it.
The highest income you have, the more pressured you are to give them an expensive education, activities, etc. Everyone want their kids to do at least as well as themselves.
So it's expensive no matter what income bracket you're in.
Yeah, I don't envy the 30 year olds who can't buy an house because it's become unaffordable, made even harder by many only getting freelance jobs.
Also: having many children used to be an insurance policy, but as countries become more developed it's less necessary.
Do not despair, I felt the same. Mine are halfway to 18, still feel the same, unsure if it changes. I love them, just not the experience. I have friends who feel the same, so I/we are not alone.
I tell others not to do it unless they are prepared to suffer. You won't know if its for you until you've already gone through the one way door. I wish others luck. For the unlucky, I wish grit and stoicism.
Would be interesting to see if there is other personality overlap with people that feel this way, which people could use as a pre-test for whether or not they would enjoy the experience of having kids.
I wonder if there would be something identifiable in common if we fMRI'd your brains, as while you are definitely not alone it does seem like a pretty strong exception that makes the rule.
That could be something to put on Tinder profile.
Sure, give me a verified badge on dating marketplace apps (Feeld, Fetlife in my case) based on my fMRI imaging interpretation. Use it as input for the matching algo. Way more useful than simply putting "neurodivergent" in a profile imho. Adjacent to "If your policy doesn't exist in code, it doesn't exist."
I admire your frank honesty
> Generally, I regret having kids
Please don't ever, ever let them know this, or even allow them to figure it out. Especially before they're at least ~30 and able to begin to understand.
I would never let them think I regret them - that’s such a cruel thing to inflict upon them, and it’s certainly not their fault. I also don’t regret the joy it’s brought my wife.
I regret the loss of my mental energy and personal time, but not them, if that makes sense.
For me it helped to realize that the things I would have done with the extra time and energy would not have been that great. Some occasional dopamine bursts for a very mediocre outcome. Having kids is a better investment, but a less fun one.
> that’s such a cruel thing to inflict upon them
It certainly is. Speaking from personal experience. And he let me know in a very direct and cruel way.
I’m genuinely sorry to hear that.
I make sure my kids know I love them in many, many ways.
Kids aren’t for everyone. Please don’t guilt-trip people for not having them. (I know this article isn’t doing that.)
https://wearechildfree.com/
Disclosure: Zoë is my cousin.
Of course people are free not to have kids... But I've always find it weird to "celebrates childfree lives".
And I'm frankly annoyed by the growing activism to ban kids from public places in the name of "adults quietness".
many adults nowadays are less resilient than my baby
> Tired of doing this alone?
That's some pretty ironic copy xD
I have a ~6 years old boy and I'm quite neutral about that -- that is, if I somehow go back to a few years ago, I may or may not go forth for a kid -- which was my attitude back then anyway.
There are some upside, but they are...tangible. The downside is concrete and solid. From hindsight, having a kid has nothing to do with my long-term objectives, but since I can’t dial back in time, I'll try to be at least a median good father -- I have gotten the financials covered, and I'm pretty sure in that part I'm better than the median, but for the focus part I'm not sure.
My 2c is that it is not 'joy' or 'happiness' that kids bring to parents universally (although they might bring those things for some parents), but 'meaning'. Meaning is harder to define than joy/happiness, perhaps because it is less objective and more subjective.
I would really like to have kids, but I don’t have my act together. I also feel like my partner is not suitable or capable of properly taking care of our kids. Feels pretty awful and am scared to not have any kids as I grow older. I worked hard to get a good relationship with my partner, and now that we have one I worry kids will only ruin what we have now
I hope you’re in a position where you can have an honest conversation about it with your partner. I’ve come to realise over time that honest and open communication is the most critical thing in any relationship. I really hope it works out for you both!
your world will change in that hospital room the first day or two together with the new person in your family. it really is seismic.
You'll never feel ready but you will always be ready. One of my biggest regrets is not having kids sooner
just go for it. there is never a really good time to have a kid.
This is an easy perspective to have if you are of the generation that got into a home purchase before they went out of control. Gen Z is being priced out of creating families.
Hacker news has a bias because most people here are working in software and probably make more than the median household income (solo).
As a father of 3, nothing is more satisfying than raising kids.
Kudos to you! I have one and it's been the hardest thing I've ever done and it has broken us entirely. We can never imagine having more than one given the difficulty, and are now finished at one 100%. Very huge admiration for parents of > 1. It's 10x the work and not just 2x the work
Father of three here as well, amen to that. Soo hard, but oh so amazing.
As a father of 2, that really depends on a few factors.
I'd wager that you picked a good wife and that your kids are healthy and bright.
Things can go from satisfying to draining real quick.
I'm in the thick of it right now as a serial founder with a 5 and a 1 year old. One thing I'm surprised paulg didn't touch on is how much it can evolve your relationship with your partner (for the better!).
Watching my wife have special moments with our kids fills my heart like nothing else.
Seeing her be an amazing mom is like watching your cofounder take on a completely new role outside of their previous experience and crush it. Except it's even better since you're in love with them and have all these biological/chemical signals to help kick that in high gear.
I see a lot of different opinions here, from very positive to very negative.
I think the answer is, it's both.
When I was an employee sometimes I was happy, like when a promotion was lurking, and sometimes I was unhappy and stressed, when getting fired, when facing deadlines, ....
But when I started working for myself the amplitude of emotions became way stronger, every week I would fluctuate between feeling doomed forever or feeling like a genius.
Life with and without kids is the same: The emotional highs of having kids are way higher than anything I experienced without kids, but sometimes the lows are very low.
People can also have very different experiences because kids can be very different.
My kids have been really easy, no big problems, but sometimes I see other parents dealing with really serious issues with their kids.
It starts with babies, some of them sleep easily while other cry all the time, to teenagers who can be nice kids with no problem at school to being called to the director's office all the time and have to seriously worry about their future.
The great thing about kids is that just when you start to miss their toddler temper tantrums, they start having teenage temper tantrums!
While there are always those lows, when the kids are sick, scream, have tantrums, do something stupid, I would not trade a second of that away. A lot of happiness and laughs as well, along the way.
They grow and you're privileged to live with them for a while. Also you'll grow with them.
Having kids was my best decision ever. Thrice.
Parents were uncool, but surely Paul Graham has always been uncool too?
My favorite part is how pg says how kids made him less ambitious, but then:
“On the other hand, what kind of wimpy ambition do you have if it won't survive having kids? Do you have so little to spare?”
It’s called having kid while rich so you can hire nannies, tho
100%. I had to drop about half my interests and hobbies after having kids, to remain sane (trying to continue juggling all of them was plainly just going to lead to never doing anything, really), and adjust all the others to fit better with kid-having.
If you can't hire "help", it's like losing 20 waking hours from your week, at least, just for the not-at-all fun or "quality time" parts of having a kid (extra housekeeping [so... very much more], extra shopping, taxiing the kids places, extra household planning, basic hygiene stuff, et c). And on top of that you need to spend "fun" time with them, too, like that part may be more enjoyable but it's non-optional and a lot of stuff an adult might want to do or accomplish doesn't integrate well with it.
Slice ~30-40 hours off the waking hours of both adults in the household, on top of 45-50 hours of work and other stuff necessary for work (commute, et c.) and... yeah this is just bullshit if you can't hire help.
[EDIT] Oh, this reminds me of a certain genre of LinkedIn post that I especially hate: the CEO bragging about how they find time for family despite having five jobs. The real answer to this mystery is that zero of those jobs are actually full-time work, and, the part they never mention, is that they pay others to do tens of hours of work per week that normal people have to do themselves, like lawn care, housekeeping, fixing broken shit in their house, shopping, keeping track of and making appointments and such, et c.
This. Don't forget that HN is extremely biased towards High income/net worth viewpoints. The reality for a lot of parents is much worse than most commenters here
I wish there was a way to make this decision rationally. My wife and I are coming up to the point of no return. We either do it now, or never.
Now let's try to figure this out: Do we have enough money? Yes, probably. We could survive 10 years without making another dime. I don't know what kind of safety net is recommended, but people do it with a lot less. We live in a country with free health care, so illness won't end our lives like it does in the USA.
With that out of the way, let's get to all the other points:
How much do I want children? Personally, I don't get it. If my wife wasn't dead-certain she _must_ have at least one child, I would never, ever consider it. I hate noise and chaos. I even find co-habitation challenging.
I was an only child and I think I'm mildly autistic. To me, 'alone time' and 'quiet time' are sacred and required for my sanity. Well, I know that goes out the window with children. My wife is the opposite: Many siblings, has always been around noise and chaos. Loves giving love. To me, the dog, to anyone. And that is why she seems to have this need. So, the decision is: Do I give up what I want, to make her happy?
Her happiness is about as important to me as my own. So that's a stalemate. She keeps saying how worried she is that it will ruin my life. But I also don't want us to split up over this, knowing that I have 'taken' her fertile years. She won't have a kid except with me. So that's also a stalemate. I have had a pretty terrible childhood. So I know I'm biased. I don't want to let fear dictate my life.
Almost any occasion where I've stepped outside my comfort zone or done things I didn't want to do out of fear turned out to be things I was grateful to have done.
I can also see how raising children could be very rewarding. Even my therapist said it can be very healing to have children. It's an opportunity to do better than my parents. That's valuable, for sure.
And then I think of the state of the world. Awful. I wouldn't want to bring children into this. I'd even probably say to my own mother 'don't bother' if she'd come to consult me about whether to have me first. But then I spoke to my granddad, who was a teenager during the 2nd world war. He is also probably mildly autistic. He said it was the best thing he ever did. Had multiple kids.
If I look at my wife's family, they are all happy, successful, harmonious people (now). I look at my wife's parents and think "what a blessing". The richness of life they get to experience is just magical. If I could somehow guarantee that it'd go that way for me as well, then I'd have kids already.
But there are no guarantees, just uncertainty. Uncertainty of the "life changes forever, irrevocably" kind. That is brutal and scary.
The last time I made a similar decision was when starting a business. I knew I went down a road that would require stability and dedication. I'm a volatile person who quickly gets bored of things and wants to move on to other things.
Thanks to my wife I've done a bunch of things I never thought I'd do, because they require dedication and consistency. Something I don't really have. Renovating houses, starting businesses. I surprised myself with what I was capable of. All thanks to my wife.
I also think it's basically a crime to not let her raise a human being. I am certain anyone raised by her would be a net positive to society.
But then there's me and my issues. I don't know how I'll deal with it. I don't know what will happen. There's a chance I can't do it. And what then? Divorce? Repeat the cycle of putting children into the world and abandoning them, like my parents did, because they also couldn't handle it?
They were very young and had no money or support. Their relationship was also broken. My wife and I are 'old' and we have money and we have been an unbeatable team for well over a decade. We also have support. Grand-parents are basically next door and dying to help with raising a kid. So we are in a privileged position.
But my fear of taking this step is not going away. And I won't know what it'll be like. Parents look so tired. Many of my friends are parents. They all seem to offer the same advice "it's hell on earth, I hate every moment of it, it's the best thing I've ever done".
Awesome. What am I supposed to do with that? It's useless advice. It seems nobody can really tell you whether to do it or not.
Any people here who were equally fearful and then did it, NOT regretting it? And I mean truly. I don't want to hear the "I love my kids"-mantra. It's an automated thing everyone has to say. I mean truly.
the easiest way to bypass all that existential anxiety is to have it happen on accident :)
Haha, agreed. Like I alluded to in my post, many of the best things in my life have come from just being thrown into the deep end. If standing at the edge of a pool and ruminating over whether to jump or not, one may never do it. If the choice is made for you, well, then there's no ruminating. But we're too old for accidents now, this is going to happen with intention, or not at all. Which is also fine, but I am interested in hearing other people's experiences.
Having kids is like eating a mango.
You can talk to the foremost mango growers on cultivating mango trees and learn everything there is to know about making mangoes. You can consult with the best chefs about how to make the best mango dishes and desserts and learn the absolute best way to prepare and eat mangoes. You can learn from the masters of how to paint a mango so lifelike that you'd think the painting was real. Etc. You can learn and truly master everything surrounding the act of eating a mango.
But until you sink your teeth into a mango and actually eat it, you've no idea what you're talking about.
So, until you actually have the kid, all this worrying is for naught.
You will be just fine, the kid will be just fine (they have their own agency too, you know), the world will keep turning and you have the agency to put a person in it and teach them what they need to know.
The real question is if you want to eat a mango or not.
Thank you for the perspective. This is a good way of framing the dilemma.
There is a politically correct thing to say about having kids. It is wonderful, I love them, it made me want to be a better person. That's all true.
I'm not going to be politically correct. I'm going to be honest. For some of us, it is a hard reality check.
As children, many of us had various kinds of hard experiences. You can get a rough idea of how hard your background likely was by tallying up the different kinds of Adverse Childhood Experiences that you had. The result is your ACE score, and it is a standard risk assessment tool. You can find the list near the end of https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/symptoms/24875-adverse....
My ACE score is 9/10. Most of you won't have had that level of challenge, but a lot of you had problems. I've done a lot to deal with my background, work on my mental health, and so on. I swore to break the cycle, to give my children a better start than I had.
I mostly succeeded. Only mostly. The impact of my failures became obvious when COVID turned many homes into hothouses for mental illness. My kids were not unique in their struggles. But within their peer group, it was my kids that were hit first and hardest. And then I did not cope well with the result. As a result I, also, have been having mental health problems.
For people like me, I recommend a long and hard think before having children. If you do have children, you will naturally try to do your best. I certainly did. You are extremely unlikely to succeed as well as you'd like. I certainly didn't. And so you should also prepare to give yourself grace for the ways in which you might fail. If I had done better on that, then I would have been better able to carry on and try to pick up the pieces when the shit hit the fan.
To everyone who is beginning on this journey, I wish you luck. Cherish what you have. Do your best.
And if your best did not turn out to be as good as you wanted, you have my sympathy.
I'm 36, and unlikely to ever have kids. I'm both very grateful for the freedom that's afforded me in life, and occasionally feel grief for parts of the human experience I'll never feel.
I have a kid and it's the greatest joy ever but I am very lucky. It's totally okay to grieve that, but I often tell other childfree folks: there are many things you can do to feel a similar kind of joy. Mentoring, volunteering, caring for friends etc. Having the joy of working for others and emotionally investing doesn't have to be exclusive.
Taking drugs is great too. But I know not everyone will do it. You won't get to experience everything so just be glad about the things you do get to.
I'm so glad I've avoided kids.
I once had neighbors above me whose kids yelled all the time. all the time. and sometimes they were sick of the yelling and they put their girls outside of the apartment door. and she was just punching hard the door over and over and yelling “MAMAAAA!”.
Sure I feel sorry for the kids being distressed for one reason or another. but these guys did literally nothing.
There just has to exist someone on the planet for which the title “shit parents” does objectively apply no matter how you look at it.
How come this article by PG is trending today?
there was a twitter exchange (I don't have a link) where someone said the YC mindset is to not have kids and PG replied with this essay
“most of the freedom I had before kids, I never used. I paid for it in loneliness, but I never used it.”
I will add to this that the first five years are tough, but it is great after that
he is coping so hard
It's a well written post, but this:
> The fact is, most of the freedom I had before kids, I never used.
That just seems like close to the definition of freedom. I have the freedom to go outside right now and eat dirt. I've never used it.
If you didn't do something then I guess you didn't want to, more than the things you did choose to do instead.
The only way you'd have enough life to do "most" of the things you'd be free to do, is if you're not free to do but a tiny thing.
> See what I did there?
Yup. Made no sense at all, is what. A UAE passport makes you free to visit 181 countries either visa free or visa-on-arrival. It's still freedom even if you don't take the time to visit all 181 countries.
It's not even an interesting paradox. It's just an obvious part of freedom.
Most people don't visit more than 35 countries. An Afghanistan passport gives you access to 35 countries.
having kids and raising them unlocks completely new human skill trees that were previously hidden from you
people who choose to be child free are not complete human beings
> people who choose to be child free are not complete human beings
Hmm, this seems pretty condescending, but hopefully it is just in jest.
With four kids I understand there is a unique set of skills and emotions that come along with it and I am personally grateful for, but there are also a lot skills and emotions you won't have and experience if you never go to war, never become a leader, never experience losing a parent when you are young, never win a gold medal in a team sport, never live in a different culture, never volunteer, etc. It seems short sighted to claim someone is an incomplete person if they can't experience one of those things, because likely no single person can.
There is a great tapestry of human experience and we can only experience most of it second or third hand (and probably not even that in most cases).
I think having kids connects you to humanity in a deeply personal way and connection to humanity is at the higher level than anecdotal example of various human experiences we’ll never experience first hand.
I think there are many ways to connect deeply to humanity and you are being dismissive of those other experiences. Yours is just another anecdote amongst the ones I presented. Would you dismiss your kids experiences if they decide not to have kids? I would not.
name one that would make me care about what happens to earth after I depart?
Are you capable of empathy only for people related to you?
Sounds like you could use a soul
i used to not think this, but then i had a kid and realized it's very true
a friend once described having kids as passing through the singularity, you can’t really know or understand it until you’ve crossed through
What a sad and egotistical thing to say.
> having kids and raising them unlocks completely new human skill trees that were previously hidden from you
Holy mother of autism. “my life is like a video game”. Please tell me you don’t have kids. They’re doomed if so.
what a silly definition of complete :)
I am am so scared of losing my job in tech due to ai and not being able to support my family.
Take a deep breath and just learn whatever you need to learn. AI or otherwise.
You'll be fine. Being responsible for someone else gives you quite a bit of boost.
lets be real we are gonna lose our jobs to these kids
> And while having kids may be warping my present judgement, it hasn't overwritten my memory. I remember perfectly well what life was like before.
It's funny that he actually believes this.
There is nothing more narcissistic and selfish than having kids. There is nothing noble about fulfilling your biological imperative to leave a descendant. Quite the opposite, really, it's a rather primitive egoistical desire to somehow continue oneself after death.
haha okay you definitely couldn't hack it
Probably good you are taking yourself out of the gene pool
If idiocracy is good then yes.
Talking to a psychotherapist or reading fiction might help you feel more at ease. It's a crazy, contradictory world. I wish you well.
As a 52 year old I specifically avoided having kids.
For decades I have been convinced that we are speed-running into a global environmental crisis that we will continue to ignore until it is far too late and this will result in associated resources wars and I never wanted to doom other people into having to live through that.
I sincerely hope for the sake of those of you who made a different choice that I turn out to have been overly doomerist, but watching the Trump 2.0 years play out I now think that I wasn't doomerist enough.