When I read things like this, it makes me not want to have children. From friends, it doesn’t sound like your experience is much different.
I’m sure you’re biased and it’s culturally unacceptable (to say the least) to say that you’d rather not have had kids, but I wonder how often you think about that loss of individuality? Maybe it’s that what you’d do were you to have the time wouldn’t be as “productive” in a broad, undefinable “life” sense? Or that intellectualizing “take away this kid” is too emotionally fraught to even consider?
It feels amoral to ask these questions, but as I reach the time when friends are having kids and the biological clock of partners becomes a real factor, I’m not sure how to know.
I experience much the same things GP does and I like to take a stab at replying to some of your fears. It would have been perfectly acceptable to my circle of family and friends to say that I and my wife would not have kids. Having children is not for everyone, especially those that are afraid of losing their personal time. I definitely miss the amount of personal freedom and time I had on my hands before and kick myself for not realizing at the time how much personal time I had, not that it would have changed my behavior, but to just have appreciated what I had at the time more fully. Having said all of that nothing compares to the joy my son brings me every day, and there's no amount of crying and fighting he could do that would make me yearn for the time before his existence. For those on the fence, I would say it is better to not have children if you're uncertain. Having children should feel like a leap of faith that you're ready to take together, not one you feel you have to take despite your fear because of a biological clock or possible regret. Everything in life has a season, and you will go through many seasons. I only get 1 year with my 2 year old. Then I'll only get 1 year with my 3 year old. The seasons of life will come again (hopefully) when I have more free time and my son pursues his own passions in life. The time I spend playing with him while my partner cooks dinner, or that my partner spends with him while I clean the dishes is fleeting as is all of life. I'll blink and he'll be a grown man and I'll have all the free time in the world again. Live for today, and hope for tomorrow. If you want all of your todays and tomorrows to be yours and your partner's to enjoy with each other only, the choice to not have children easy. I chose to experience fatherhood and was privileged to make that choice without pressure either way and with my partner's support. Live life exactly how you want and be kind.
This sounds like a healthy perspective and I appreciate you acknowledging that having kids might not be for everyone, as someone who is leaning that way myself. Thank you.
Disclaimer: I don't have kids, but I have done my share of childcare
I suspect that this is one of the places we've lost out by splitting off to nuclear families with a small number of closely spaced children. Childcare is a job that, while difficult and stressful at times, is not particularly intellectually challenging, nor does it require very much expertise or physical strength. It's also relatively parallelizeable (the added effort of taking care of an extra simultaneous child is sublinear). Those characteristics make it a perfect job for both past-working-age people and older children.
We still utilize this dynamic some through grandparents and babysitters, but it's not nearly as prevalent as it would have been in an earlier era where multiple generations (and familial leaves) lived in a single household, with a wide range of children.
While this sounds nice and good, the removal of generational living was completely intentional. Why? Because of the one thing you left out: it is the women who disproportionately end up taking care of the home and the children.
There is no real feminism with this traditional system in place. Even with the modern setup, women take care of children more _even if they don't want to_, simply because nursing takes a lot of time.
I don't have much of an opinion on generational living, but could you elaborate on how it guarantees women disproportionately end up with kin work? Also I find it interesting that the institution of motherhood is completely removed from the modern day narrative of empowerment. As long as it is fairly left up to the woman to choose, why would choosing motherhood not be empowering?
You choose motherhood by having kids. You choose fatherhood by having kids. Do you feel empowered by fatherhood? What does it even means? If no, then that is the answer of why would choosing motherhood not be empowering.
Empowering means: "make (someone) stronger and more confident, especially in controlling their life and claiming their rights". Having child does not really make that and I dont see how it should make that.
I have found fatherhood empowering but did not go into it with that expectation. Fatherhood has opened me to new emotional expression and capabilities that I lacked beforehand and I now speak for more than just me when I look for new work or increase my responsibility at work, since any pay or benefit improvements go directly to the family. Fatherhood added more responsibility to my day, which ends up feeling like I have more power, even if I traded some of my personal freedom in order to obtain it. I'm not sure if that means I actually have been disempowered; if so, my more powerful life before marriage and childhood felt less fulfilling.
I don't think multi-generational households necessarily need to put a heavier burden on women. In fact, my argument is exactly that households like that do a better job of allocating labor to those who are less able to earn.
I don't think there's a real argument to be made that the nuclear household developed because of feminism. The New Deal and post-WWII policies that gave returning vets and their families cheap mortgages in sprawly suburbs appears to have had more to do with it (an era that was notably accompanied by an expansion of household technologies whose goals were to enable a single person to care for an entire household).
They do, because many grandparents will expect women to do more of traditional household and will treat her more badly or with more resentment if she does not.
Also, full time childcare is quite tiring for older people, grandparents who are strong enough are typically employed.
> full time childcare is quite tiring for older people
Full-time, sure. But what about flexibly available when necessary?
Also, traditional household provides too little privacy, but living within 10 minutes walking distance is fantastic.
There are all these situations like "grandma, I need to go shopping, could you please take care of the kids for about 30 minutes? maybe later if it is more convenient for you" where having good social infrastructure is awesome, and I cannot imagine how more difficult life would be without it.
Seems to me that as a society we went from one extreme to the other, skipping over the point where things could work really great.
Yes, my perspective was perhaps US-centric, but so is my experience of social history. My understanding was that much of the European and Japanese post-war reconstruction operated on a similar (if less supercharged) model, but I'm hazier on the Eastern Bloc. I'd be very interested in alternative processes, if you can suggest them.
The first couple years of a kid's life often really, really sucks for the parents. If you don't just intrinsically adore babies, you've just got a whole lot of work with no immediate payoff. Sleep deprivation has a way of making everything worse, too.
There are fun bits later, and some people will insist childrearing is 'fun', but I don't think so.
It's loads of work, but fulfilling, interesting work, getting to know a new person. It is full of joy. Fun / contentment? Not so much. The amount of work decreases as the kids get older, but the complexities of the problems that present themselves increase, too.
In some ways, you could view it as an increased opportunity for individuality. You're not just doing you anymore, but creating your own miniature culture around you. You're choosing who you are and how you're going to pass it on to a new generation. Hopefully, you start to take a really intentional view of the structure of your life at this point, too.
I'm not really looking forward to my kids growing up and having my individuality back. Though I do sure wish there was a chance to take a couple weeks vacation each year. ;)
I mean, there are summer camps for kids who are old enough, grandparents if you have them and they are willing to take the kids for a week or two, but the thing is even the "vacation" is not the same as your life before kids. You're always still thinking about them, always ultimately responsible for them. Having kids is a fork in the road. There is no going back to the old path, even temporarily. The closest you will get is when your kids are adults themselves, but even then it's not the same.
Yah, I'm nowhere near even those levels of taking a break, though. Only one grandparent left and he's not up to take 3 rambunctious boys at once, and the youngest is 6 so there's not great stay-away camp opportunities.
We were going to have two of them go away to Johns Hopkins-CTY this summer, but it didn't happen (for obvious reasons).
Maybe summer 2021 I'll get a week or two partially off :D
My experience hasn't been the same, I have two kids age 4 and 6, and my experience has been more laid back. Most of the time I spend with this kids is fun. Sure, there can be bad times that are stressful and/or exhausting but it's mostly been very rewarding.
My kids are asleep by 830 or 9pm, I'm not sure why this person feels they don't have free time until 11pm, that seems like an exaggeration to me.
Even when they are awake, they rarely occupy both my wife and I full time, unless we're choosing to spend quality time with them. Sometimes just one of us watches them while the other one had time to relax or catch up on work.
It's not like my wife and I were globetrotting before kids anyway. Having kids is far more interesting than the same old, same old routine. I don't really feel like I'm missing out on things I would have been doing before kids.
Ours is 3. He's winding down at 7:30 PM. That leaves 8-11 PM most evenings for my time.
I'm not going to pretend like I don't miss having 5-11 PM for myself, or the fact that weekends tend to be quite busy. But I've done the "all non-work time is _my_ time" for my previous 38 years. And I've also come to understand that the luxury of time I had previously I was also quite adept at BS'ing myself about: "I'll start that tomorrow! never starts it"
If I don't work on a side project, I understand very clearly now it is because I didn't sit down and actually do it.
My experience has been close to yours. The wife and I have a 3 and 5 year old. We did tons of research into different methods of sleep training methods and arrived at practical ways to make sure they understood that bedtime meant staying in their room and in their own beds, even if they weren't necessarily sleepy yet.
The 5 year old is in his "big boy bed" and we use a color-changing nightlight on a timer that is a soft red when he needs to stay in his room and turns blue when he can come out. The 3 year old is still in his crib for another few weeks, then we will transition him to the same setup.
Apart from the predictable times here and there where the older one sneaks out of bed to see what we're up to, it's worked out really well and gives us our sanity back from around 745pm to whenever we go to bed.
I have kids that same age, and our bedtime is 8:00. Usually they're asleep by 9 but there have definitely been days where they are up and fighting until well past 10. Certainly the gp was exaggerating, but just because my kids are in bed doesn't mean it's my time. 8-9 is lost policing actually being in bed almost every day.
That said, I agree more with you, because as much as I like to say, "oh I could be doing x or y if I weren't caring for my kids," in reality, I probably wouldn't be doing much differently. Maybe I'd go out a few more times a month, but oops pandemic.
Bed time used to be 8:30pm but a few weeks ago she just turned the age where she absolutely needed someone to be beside her until she falls asleep. All hell breaks loose if we don't, and I've thought about implementing cry-it-out but looking at her mode of crying I'm not sure that's healthy. Anyway, I'm staying with her for 2 hours until she falls asleep (she does take that long) because my spouse already cares for her all day and is exhausted, besides, she has a part time job she has to do some work in the evening for. 11pm is not an exaggeration and it's how it's been in the past 6+ weeks. I have hopes that things will be different at 3~4 years old, but not right now.
It won't change until you change it. Kids that age don't have a concept of feeling guilty about burdening anyone else. Cry-it-out can seem cruel but it doesn't take long. The other thing about kids that age is they have short memories and adapt to change quickly. Talk to your pediatician if you need reassurance.
Similar story here with soon to be 4yo and a new baby, bed time has been bleeding into later times and sometimes it's easier to sleep together to calm them down. It's a phase and I'm not too stressed about it, but it totally limits me time.
You didn't mention how old, but I want to re-emphasize putting in the investment now. This problem will only get worse and the joys of parenting a child on a routine are vast
Considering that I don't have kids and feel the same, I'm not surprised by OP. Depending on your commute and chores, that's not so crazy. Of course as someone without kids, I have way more time, but if I cook a dinner and do chores... There's also overhead and time spent overwhelmed. You can work harder, and take less breaks, but that's the rub. Being a flurry of constant activity burns people out.
Out of curiosity, what’s the minimum hours per day that you must spend on keeping the kid alive and well? (Minimum hours assuming you don’t get someone else to take care of the kid.)
I have three children aged 2-8 and my spare personal time is typically 9pm-2am. Yes, you lose a lot of freedom. Your routine is different, travel is different. But they're priceless and I would give up much more for any little moment with them.
It's worth mentioning that sleep routine discipline for the kids is worth working towards. Not being free until 11pm is just crazy. We have friends who sit/lie beside their kids for an hour or more until they get to sleep - insane.
Our kids are usually in bed at 7:30 and more often than not, we walk out after saying goodnight and don't hear from them until the morning. If the eldest struggles to get to sleep, he goes out to the living room to read for half an hour and then goes back, but it's nothing that would stop us watching TV elsewhere, working, doing dishes, etc. If the youngest sulks about sleep, being responsive/attentive and caving to demands will not help you in the future.
Doing dishes as you cook is worth it. Cooking more so you have leftovers for the next night is worth it. Combining routine with play (kids help cook, help clean, etc) is useful. Those little helpful things add up and buy you time.
Another one is, if date nights are difficult to schedule (or babysitting expensive), work from home on the same day as your partner or work a four day week, and then go out for lunch while the kids are in school/childcare.
I think those are great questions to ask actually, my only real answer here is that, one should be very aware of the fact that this current stage is temporary (both for my sanity, as well as for a perspective of cherishing it). As others have said and you already know, the first couple of years of a kid is the toughest for parents. It gets better from there and I know I'll get more free time back pretty much as soon as she starts school, and I'll have more and more free time as she grows older gradually. By the time she's in high school I'll probably have just as much free time as before having kids.
You'll have more free time than you do now, possibly, but there will be school events, extracurricular activities, meetings with teachers, help with homework. etc.
You will likely never get a parent saying they wish they didn't have kids, for the reasons you stated, regardless of how the "what if"-scenario would look like.
I've always known I wanted kids, but knew I wasn't ready through my entire 20s. I have older siblings with kids of their own, and I'm on the younger side of the extended family, so I was around a lot of kids regardless, watching the different dynamics.
I was conceptually well aware of the hard work it involved, the priorities needed etc, and to the best of my abilities set my own bar for that.
We had our first kid a few years into our 30s, very much by choice. I think it's very difficult to conceptualize it through others kids. I was never really good with kids in general, but I believe (and have no reason not to) that I'm very good with my kids (in general, there will always be bad days behind the photo ops).
I can't shut myself in my office for 8 hours doing a project, gaming, watching movies or just nap.
I obviously miss that on some level, but the reason I can't do that (at least until they're old enough not to want to hang out with me) is of such value that I don't mind really. And that part is something at least I had no way of conceptualizing before having kids.
Absolutely don't have kids if you don't want to. I like to imagine I have a finely tuned radar to spot those families instantly, and it's not about a love thing, because I think most parents do regardless, but about patience/acceptance that this was your choice, and all of the great parts make up for it thousandfold.
I'm not a different person now, I'm just a person with baggier eyes, who frets a little less about things that don't really matter. That can be done with or without kids, I think it's merely that the latter forces the issue.
But I still binged Queen's Gambit with our youngest using me as a glorified crib.
Not sure this rant had a point, but try to shut out friends, society, biology and just ask yourself whether you want kids. If you do it'll be great, and if not that'll be great too.
Thing is - not kids are the problem. The problem is 9-17 work so many companies force us into.
I can finish my work in 2h of my 8h workday. Just let me leave at 11am. I’ll have plenty time to learn new things, play with kids, get enough sleep, maintain a healthy social life.
TBH current covid situation is like a blessing for me. I don’t have to “be there”, my work is still done and I can finally spend some time with family.
Yeah. In the office, when I look around, I see people browsing web, watching YouTube videos, socializing at coffee, taking long lunch breaks, and I suspect that many meetings are actually just an excuse to chat. And that's all okay. Only leaving sooner and being with my family is not.
Working at home, instead of wasting time socializing at coffee with the same people every day, I can use my breaks to go shopping, cook, have a lunch together with my family, do the dishes, exercise, pick up kids' toys, etc. I am not taking more breaks than in the office; I just do something useful during the breaks, and it probably makes me relax better than reading web.
I wish we could have 6-hour workdays, or 4-day workweeks, or both, in the 21st century. The productivity is supposed to be so much higher than 100 years ago that we really could afford a bit more free time.
Until then, I will enjoy the benefits brought by the COVID situation, and dread the moment it will all revert to the usual 8-hour prison time. (Or even worse, business trips, when you have to be 24 hours a day without your family, just because someone couldn't explain something over video.)
When "work + family" is too much work, the proper solution isn't to give up having kids. That's insane.
Nope.. It's great that you are making an informed decision and really thinking about it. People have different experiences. Mine is that as a baby you are just really into it, the whole baby thing and don't really worry about individualism. As they get a bit older you think about that again - your career, maybe travel etc. and realize it is constraining having kids, and 90% of that is because of cost of living (IMO). I.e. if I had millions that'd fix it, ha ha! (maybe it wouldn't!) but money does help - you can buy time with it by getting help like cleaners, working less, and can afford holidays etc.
I feel very similarly to you. As time goes on I feel myself becoming more and more of an Anti-Natalist, especially as I reflect on my childhood. It seems like having kids is just a very instinctual/romantic thing that people don't really try to resist, and oft not thinking about the implications that come with it (and I certainly don't just mean loss of time and autonomy). I find it very strange, and somewhat disappointing in a way. Having a kid just because you "want" to feels kind of perverse to me.
> When I read things like this, it makes me not want to have children. From friends, it doesn’t sound like your experience is much different.
If you're seriously considering the question, you owe it to yourself to seek out parents who specifically enjoy and thrive with parenting.
There's a serious imbalance in conversation about children. Most of the internet comments you read about raising children will sound negative or burdensome. Why is that? It's because they're venting, or wanting to discuss a challenging situation.
Meanwhile, you're likely surrounded by countless parents who simply don't talk about their experience. No one wants to hear endless "I love my children" stories, so we just keep quiet. As you get older, you also realize that many people want children but struggle to conceive, so we refrain from child talk around non-parents out of caution and sensitivity.
Chances are good that the majority of parents in your community, office, or social circle are actually very happy most of the time. There's just not much to talk about because being happy with your family is the boring, normal state.
It also helps to keep in mind that the infant and toddler phases are relatively short. It's only 4 years, relative to your expected lifespan of around 80 years. If you're in your early 20s and just barely out of college, spending 4 years raising a child past the toddler age probably feels like an eternity. When you're in your late 30s and 40s, you realize that it's merely a blip on the radar. 5% of your life.
Look at this way: If you walked into an Ivy League university library around finals time and started asking sleep deprived students cramming for tests if they're enjoying their decision to enroll, you wouldn't get an accurate picture of the lifelong benefits of an Ivy League degree. Ask them if it was worth it in their 40s or 50s and you'll get a very different answer. Asking parents in the middle of the most difficult few childraising years if a lifetime of child raising makes sense isn't going to give you an accurate picture, either.
> I’m sure you’re biased and it’s culturally unacceptable (to say the least) to say that you’d rather not have had kids, but I wonder how often you think about that loss of individuality?
It's actually an extremely common question from my non-parent friends. I was afraid of it myself before having kids. The truth is that your old self doesn't disappear when you have kids. Free time still exists. Time management and efficiency becomes vastly more important. When I first had kids, it would take me hours to handle feeding, bathing, prepping for bed, and so on. We made a deliberate effort to streamline our workflows and now we can get it all done quickly and get on with having fun. Believe it or not, dinner time and bath time can actually be fun.
If you approach everything as a miserable chore that you have to slog through before you can get back to wasting time on the internet, you're going to have a bad time. If you lean into it and make an effort to make things fun, it's way better than messing around online.
And don't forget that after a few years they feed and bathe themselves. After 18 years they're off to college and you're back to you. People seem to forget that children grow up quickly.
Frankly, having kids helped me improve some aspects of my individuality and social life. I'm more likely to take the kids for a hike or schedule a meetup with fellow parents. I meet new friends through community functions. And this won't make sense to non-parents, but I actually enjoy spending time my kids.
> Chances are good that the majority of parents in your community, office, or social circle are actually very happy most of the time. There's just not much to talk about because being happy with your family is the boring, normal state.
Slightly off-topic, but this isn't limited to parenting feedback, it's true of nearly any topic online.
Some forums are full of people venting, some forums are full of people showing off how great their lives are.
It's very difficult to get an accurate view of an average person's experience with X (and maybe it's not even relevant to you—what you really want is a picture of your experience with X, which may depend a lot on your socioeconomic circumstances).
I've found anecdotes from friends to significantly outperform online anecdotes in predicting my personal experience.
Very true. Even worse, there's a significant selection bias that occurs where people pre-filter for opinions that match their pre-conceived notions.
On the topic of children, someone can spend their entire life around coworkers, extended family, and friends who are happy parents without thinking twice about it. Yet as soon as they read some comments online about someone struggling with their children, they have an "I knew it!" reaction.
As a parent, I don't try to push other people to have children. I do, however, roll my eyes at how out of touch the anti-child rhetoric on the internet has become. It's almost as if young people are convinced that all parents are actually secretly miserable but we're all collectively lying about enjoying it out of a sense of societal obligation.
> I do, however, roll my eyes at how out of touch the anti-child rhetoric on the internet has become.
I guess it depends where you look, but here on HN comments seem to lean towards being pro-children - which makes sense, since most people want them and have them.
The most interesting kind of comments, to me, are the ones that try to convey how having kids is great and worth it, and yet - upon reading them - all I can think of is "wow, that sounds horrible". There is one example that is kind of like that in this thread [0].
I know it's because it's much easier to convey in words how annoying or boring something is compared to how it brings this deep, unspeakable (and perhaps, for some readers, yet unexperienced) joy. It's still a bit funny.
"I’m sure you’re biased and it’s culturally unacceptable (to say the least) to say that you’d rather not have had kids,"
Why? I think not having kids is generally seen as the most responsible course of action. I adore my two but the planet is likely to be worse off, ecologically at least, for their existence.
>I adore my two but the planet is likely to be worse off, ecologically at least, for their existence.
Our planet is already on the tail end of its lifespan, in terms of how long it will be able to support advanced life before the sun gets too hot and cooks everything.
Ours is, as best we can tell, the first and only species to arise that has enough intelligence to be able to do something about it.
If we expired as a species tomorrow, the chance of another one rising to the challenge before things wind down is (probably) very low.
We need smart, motivated people to work on the problem, and we need these people to have kids and pass on the same pro-education, pro-problem-solving cultural habits to the next generation.
In my opinion, that's worth far, far more than the extra eco burden one additional human life adds.
I’m sure you’re biased and it’s culturally unacceptable (to say the least) to say that you’d rather not have had kids, but I wonder how often you think about that loss of individuality? Maybe it’s that what you’d do were you to have the time wouldn’t be as “productive” in a broad, undefinable “life” sense? Or that intellectualizing “take away this kid” is too emotionally fraught to even consider?
It feels amoral to ask these questions, but as I reach the time when friends are having kids and the biological clock of partners becomes a real factor, I’m not sure how to know.