"One great thing about having small children is that they make you spend time on things that matter: them. They grab your sleeve as you're staring at your phone and say "will you play with me?" And odds are that is in fact the bullshit-minimizing option."
This may be true, but this is not the majority of your life - unless you’re on some mission to repopulate the earth, you’ll have maybe 8-10 years when you have children who aren’t babies who want to play with you. Apparently people become magically wise during those years and then quickly forget these wisdom after. If that’s not true then you should be seeing a glut of extremely wise people who’ve been “corrected” by their child raising experience decades ago.
The reality is, kids trigger happiness centers in our lizard brains. Enjoy the short time with them, but let’s not fool ourselves that children fundamentally change your life view in any way. If anything the person you should be working to prioritize is your partner, who if you do it right will be with you fairly unchanged all your life. Given the divorce rates though, most people don’t seem to have gotten that memo however.
+1 based on (n=1) having two kids and being married 15 years. Being with your kids is a flash in the pan compared to decades with a partner. Don’t neglect your kids, but the evidence is strong they’re mostly on rails you don’t control and as long as you care, that’s most of where the effort needs to be. Finding good partners is hard. Keeping them is work. Losing them can be catastrophic (emotionally, logistically, financially) and leave you in a place it can be difficult to come back from. Operate accordingly.
Most of the time, the things that are screaming for our attention are not the truly important things, so it's easy to get distracted and waste time. When we have little kids, they happen to be both important and screaming for our attention, which makes it much easier for us to focus on what's important. That's the point he was making.
I actually observed this in my life a week ago. We just moved our toddler from the crib to a bed and he's been waking up in the middle of the night asking for attention. When this happened, my first instinct was like "ugh. I have to go lay down w him rather than doing advent of code". Then I realized that laying down w my 2 year old is so much cooler and meaningful than anything else I could be doing w that time.
I heard the phrase sometimes "you don't have to do this, you get to do this". That's what I think the quote is about.
I’d argue you misunderstood it. I’m hypothesizing that your lizard brain forces this “kids are important” attitude on you and is artificial and ephemeral. Not what truly makes you happy long term.
First, I was just explaining what I thought the author meant. I guess you are making a parallel point.
Second, I haven't met many people who are "happy long term" who don't have children front and center in their lives. Have you? What is the thing that is giving your life meaning that during your days and on your death bed you will feel great about?
There is also something powerful to have kids who want to spend time with you on holidays and so on, because they had a good relationship with you. Kids are not just the time you raise them, even if they are mostly active in 20 year span of your life. And if you care about your children, treat them and raise them well, in some ways they will be the most stable relationship you ever have.
A lot of relationships go sour, and IMO I think it's fairly difficult for even the married-forevers to say if their relationship stays good. There is also more conflicts of interest with your spousal partner than there are with children in many ways. Your partner is major, but so is your friends, your kids, your family and there isn't a silver bullet for any of them.
> Apparently people become magically wise during those years and then quickly forget these wisdom after.
Sample size of 1, but there is a noticeable difference in my friend and family group between people with kids and without kids. Particularly around “having it together.” Children are little logistical nightmares, more so the younger they are. From scheduling around the kids schedules (I.e when they wake up, have dinner, swimming lessons, when the bedtime routine starts, etc) to being prepared to leave the house for mundane things like grocery shopping (is the diaper bag packed, do we have milk, will we be gone long enough to need to pump, etc.). There is also much less agency as a parent, a good portion of every day is on the rails dictated by your kids schedule. You are also chronically sleep deprived for a window of 6-24 months around each pregnancy and the mother has a tonne of discomfort, weight, and a new balance of hormones for a large window around the pregnancy. You’re operating in this degraded state and have to juggle the logistics of parenthood on top of the family budget because you still have bills to pay. Your kids finally go to bed, but you can’t leave them at home alone (morally or legally) so unless you pay someone to sit on your couch for the night or find a relative who can pitch in, you are literally trapped in the house and can’t leave until they wake up.
People without kids say “thank god it’s Friday!” at the office, people with large families call the weekend two days without child care. People without kids mention going to the movies, people with kids haven’t been to the movies since their first kid was born unless they scheduled it a week in advance with their grandparents, and that movie had to be weighed against every other possible option for date night because you might not get to go out together again for months.
I don’t know how this _couldn’t_ impact a human’s behavior. To conflate it with “wisdom” might be incorrect but, at least from my personal observations, parents operate VERY differently in their day to day lives than their counterparts without children.
To your point of that having a lasting impact, it’s clear grandparents to these families have forgotten a lot of what it meant to be parents. Often suggesting unreasonable things in the face of the logistics of parenthood (like staying up late for a social gathering - as if they’ve forgotten what an over tired 20 month old is like).
It sounds like the parents, quite understandably, develop common traits specific to the circumstances they share (that is, "raising human offspring"). To conflate those role-specific adaptations with any innate or generalised "superiority" or "special class" in any wider sense would be a mistake, I think.
We're all relative experts in the specific roles of our individual lives, and the very complex journeys they take us on.
As a parent we can only truly compare ourselves to our own past self. That is not the same thing as comparing ourselves to other people, who are on quite different, but similarly complex journeys. It's important to recognise the difference.
You don’t sell a pretty picture of child rearing and it’s purported benefits. “But it’s all worth it!” Doesn’t keep staying persuasive at some point you know!
Reg. Your grandparents forgetting the problems you have, consider that maybe they never had your problems to begin with! It’s a known fact that parenting has become a self inflicting masochistic venture in the recent generations, compounded by the increasingly nuclear nature of family structures.
I would still like to have kids but sincerely hope to not screw up my life in that endeavor (saving up for a night nanny and hoping to have our parents around to help out).
Be careful about the rosy picture he's painting for himself and others here. When he wrote this he was probably already rich and into the pontification phase of his career. I'm going to go ahead and bet had plenty of ways to escape his kids when desired, plenty of help with childcare, etc. If you are really just looking at your phone while you're at home, great, but if you are (like many people here , I'd guess) interested in doing creative or focus-intensive, non-kid things while at home, those things are seriously going to suffer when you have kids.
You will miss these interactions as they outgrow you. No one looks back at their time when their kids were little, to miss that didn't tap more in their screen
That mostly happens when they feel they don't get enough attention from you. Sometimes you really are busy with something else, like trying to prepare food for them or answering messages from your pestering boss. But often it is because you are trying to be clever at HN instead of giving them your undivided attention.
Or when they're hungry. Or over-stimulated, under-stimulated, tired, anxious over something that happened at school, hyped for the holiday season.
Guilt-tripping someone who shares that they're not always having a good time as a parent is not cool. Your comment is over-generalizing, and IMO quite mean.
Yet there is a very large societal problem here worth pointing at. Parental time with children in this society is bizarrely low by anthropological standards. You can get a look at the stark difference by reading the book "The Old Way," about a nomadic society.
I suppose a typical nomadic society is not like "mother and father with kids, the nearest relative a few miles away".
Childcare is easier when you have a group of adults taking care of a group of kids. And of course, parents have the primary responsibility, but it is not a 24 hour duty.
That counts, but parents spend most of their time with their kids. Moms gather and the kids come along and help to an extent. If you can take your children to work and interact with them while you're working, that's huge.
The upshot is that we have to do everything we can to give our children more of our time; we aren't a desperately poor society, we can do more. We have wandered far from our "species essence" and now wonder why so much is going wrong.
'Tis true. Even sixty years ago, kids (7 or 8 and older) walked long distances in cities to school and then hung out in packs for hours 'till the streetlights came on. Not every day but a lot. This does seem to be a pretty good (substantial) substitute for parental supervision/contact; and may well be normal for nomads some of the time (in high visibility terrain only lone predators could hide.)
Nomadic societies are no where near standard of human society. They are more of an exception. Also, they are such due to lack of other choice. As in, they evolved when the option of staying long term was not there. The anthropological argument about our exceptionality should not start with outlier society where the world around is too dangerous and there is no way for adults to make it safer.
Sounds like you think I'm trying to argue that most people on earth in 2022 are still nomads? Really, this was about anthropological (and, unstated, evolutionary) averages. Nomad's evolutionary and genetic inheritance is our own, very largely. There hasn't been enough time since agriculture came, enough generations, for widespread genetic change.
Anthropology studies past societies as much as modern ones, although the evidence is thinner.
Evolution prepared us for nomadic life, not this life. Do take a look at "The Old Way." How children are in a nomadic tribe; and our experience of what children are like is way, way different. They're better company, more mature, more useful, and vastly "better behaved" because they're not struggling constantly to compensate for weird raising conditions.
While I somewhat regret the tone in my comment, the whole notion that pointing out that you sometimes at least are partially responsible for your circumstances is called "guilt tripping" is weird.
It's not that my kids never are unruly. But I can almost always track it down to some failure from my side. I was too busy with something, or simply distracted, so I forgot to give them their snack in time, or they got to bed too late the day before, or I didn't pay attention when they tried to tell me something they felt was important, etc.
And while I'm aware that my experiences aren't universal. The opposite notion that I often hear that tantrums are some kind of unavoidable natural disaster is even more absurd. Yeah, if I bring my kids to the store at 5pm to buy dinner without giving them any snack, while I'm hangry yourself, stressed, and trying to think of something not horribly unhealthy to eat, they might end up screaming on the floor in front of the candy shelves. But my thought then isn't "why am I cursed with such horrible kids". My thought is "ok, I screwed up today, because this was predictable and preventable, and by now I certainly know better than putting ourselves in situations like this."
I'm curious just how many hours of undivided attention per day you think you have to give? Because most small children will drain you entirely dry within a week, and you have half a decade or more of that to deal with.
This. He is right about this.