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).
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.