Parents spend too much time apologizing for prioritizing their careers, and it’s particularly unfair to women. Studies repeatedly fail to show significant and durable results from different kinds of parenting styles. But you know what is shown, in study after study, as highly correlated with children's’ long term prosperity? Parental income.
What's the definition of a child's long term prosperity? Is it grades or does it take into account emotional/physical well-being? And do those studies go into adulthood?
> This research examined the association between parenting style and life satisfaction in adulthood (N=112). Participants responded to an online survey, called the Parenting Style and Life Satisfaction Survey, which included questions pertaining to parenting style experienced in childhood, parenting style used in adulthood, and levels of life satisfaction. A chi-square test was conducted to determine if there was a relationship between parenting style experienced in childhood and the adult's own parenting style. Analysis of variance tests were conducted to determine how parenting style experienced in childhood was connected to life satisfaction in adulthood and how the adult's parenting style was related to their life satisfaction. Correlations revealed that there were no statistically significant relationships between parenting style and life satisfaction. Results were interpreted and implications were discussed.
Yes, because that is how we determine whether or not someone needs help in the first place. If you have a better alternative, I invite you to elaborate.
Why is it particularly unfair to women? Is a man's place in the home? TBH I see a lot more grousing over men prioritizing their careers in the advice columns and popular media today while women are exalted for going into the same soul crushing rat races (ie in this article) that men are told to spurn for the more important things in life.
> Taken together, the results of these analyses suggest that ma- ternal employment early in a child’s life is not commonly associ- ated with decreases in later achievement or increases in behavior problems.
> negative findings associated with employment during the child’s first year are compatible with
calls for more generous maternal leave policies.
The other one says a similar thing. They both seem to say that for the first year or two having a stay at home parent is beneficial, but beyond that it doesn't really matter.
These seem like significant and durable results on how to raise a child beyond parental income
>Parents today spend more than twice as much time today with their kids today than fifty years ago
That's a good point but there's some detail missing here: how are the kids being raised. Historically, kids were raised within a tribal or quasi-tribal structure. When you have grandparents, siblings, cousins, uncles and aunts always around, room to play and explore, you don't need parents to be there 24/7 hovering over you. You learn independence as well as a way to interact and negotiate with others.
What this looks like is the worst of all words. The kids are abandoned to a set of nannies and managed activities, while the mother and father live their own lives.
> Historically, kids were raised within a tribal or quasi-tribal structure. When you have grandparents, siblings, cousins, uncles and aunts always around, room to play and explore, you don't need parents to be there 24/7 hovering over you. You learn independence as well as a way to interact and negotiate with others.
Mostly untrue in Western Europe for more than 500 years[1] and very much untrue in North America, to an even greater extent, since after WWII especially, but also before. Relatively late marriage and forming a new household upon marriage has been the norm in Western Europe since the 1500s in the North Sea region. North America was different in having earlier marriage because of labour scarcity and land abundance but nuclear families rather than extended family households were the norm in every decade and century among European descended peoples and those who assimilate to their culture.
The quasi-tribal group doesn’t have to be actual relatives. Stay-at-home parents (mothers, really) in the neighborhood often played this role, even after WW2.
The larger point was that though kids don't need their parents hovering over them and planning their activities, as it happens now, they still need a community - whether that community is are immediate or close relations, or a tribe, doesn't matter. If a kid has 6 siblings, you almost don't need parents to be anything other than income providers since the kids will socialize and raise themselves. The alternative of a parent living their own life, and abandoning kids to a nanny and a set of structured managed activities isn't that great. The nuclear family is perfectly fine too. That was also a reality throughout a lot human history.
This mother describes the worst of all worlds. She's not involved in the lives of her kids. The kids are shuttled between her and her father. The nanny and her preschool teacher are the primary caregivers. It just isn't great. The fact that she wrote this article in the nyTimes to pat herself on the back for what a great job she's doing for society (Hint: She's not that important and society will survive without her) - is distasteful.
You seem to think that because a family moves into their own house they do not get support from relatives? This is obviously completely false, and until ~50 years ago most people lived near their relatives, who would obviously help out a lot with raising a child.
Geographic mobility in the USA has been declining for decades but it’s still probably the most mobile least rooted nation in the Western world. Whether you’re talking about immigrants from abroad or internal migration from the North to the Sunbelt and South or post WWII migration to California, the Great Migration of Southern Blacks to what’s now the Rustbelt or before that Appalachians and Okies to the West Americans are extremely mobile. Most people live near their family still but a culture where the professional classes move away from home for college and probably move again for their first job will have a lot of people living nowhere near any family. Even apart from the professional classes people from economically depressed classes join the military in droves and they move where they’re sent and often settle there after their enlistment.
“They later had five sons through in vitro fertilization – twins in 2004, followed by triplets in 2006.” is the sentence following the quoted one in that wikipedia link.
We don’t know if it would suck, since we know neither Elon nor his kids personally. However, we do know that Elon can’t be spending much time with them.
I would want to be her kid, because I was homeschooled and hated it, and she would have certainly been too busy to homeschool her kids, or be any other sort of helicopter parent.
I grew up with absentee parents. This is an unwelcome spin on that situation. I can't even give an opinion on this that doesn't immediately fly into rage. I just hope I don't try to pair off with someone who ends up getting hoodwinked by articles like this. This is disgusting.
There is a difference between parents who are absent because they don’t care, and parents who are absent because they have a lot of work to do. My dad worked overseas and was gone for 30-40% of the year when I was a kid. Grew up to have a great relationship with him, because when he was here he was always attentive. (Not in the sense of spending a lot of time with us—he worked 60 hour weeks stateside. But in the sense of always calling when we got home from school and generally being loving and supportive.)
>because when he was here he was always attentive.
That doesn't sounds like the author. Kids will understand if a parent is away because they are working to make their (i.e. the kid's) life better. My father worked long hours, sometimes multiple jobs, all his life for little money, as did my mother. Even though they weren't around for some of my recitals or Christmas pageants, I respect them both that much more because I knew why they were doing it ... even as a kid. Kids aren't stupid though. If the parent is absent for selfish reasons, in order to fulfil their life and their goals, it will lead to bitterness and resentment. It will.
Some people are bitter and resentful and would have had the exact same childhood you did and think their parents weren’t there for them. People in extremely similar circumstances feel very differently about them all the time, often enough within the same family.
You're correct, and we're all speculating because we don't know their situation. It could all be fine and the kids have other support systems ... but it doesn't sound good as written.
Same here. My dad was military when I was young and during my teenage years had another job that took him away from home for about half of the month.
I wouldn't ever disparage him for it. He provided well for his family, and most of my favorite childhood memories are the times we spent together. To this day, I try to spend as much time with him as possible while I still can.
I can only hope that I give my kids as much of myself as he did.
> Sometimes my choices make me sad. My daughter’s seventh birthday was the worst. She cried, and I did everything I could not to. I felt sick to my stomach. But I had a trial starting the next day, six hours away.
> I had picked the date, not the judge, because I knew that the other side wasn’t ready. Delaying even a few days would have meant losing a crucial advantage. I wasn’t going to risk it knowing what was on the line for my client.
I don’t think this one counts as “absent because they had a lot to do.” This one is just prioritizing the kids second.
> They were lovingly cared for by their father, their grandmother, my son’s preschool teacher and my daughter’s babysitter.
For me that’s the critical part. Her kids could still feel they don’t get enough of her time, but they’re not just abandonned.
As a kid I spent a lot of time with my grand mother and other outer family members, without my parents. It was fine, actually fun, and everyone seemed to feel responsible for my well being while I was with them.
I also feel this mother chose to prioritize her job because she actualy could, and wouldn’t be doing so if her kids were miserable.
I made the opposite choice. I'm a single father and I've prioritised my children over my career. I'm not going to pretend it's an amazing lifestyle. If you're intellectually driven then looking after two young children isn't fascinating. However, I love them and they rely on me. I made a choice to bring them into the world and I'm not going to neglect them. I have the kids more than their mother does, and I also pay significant child support as I earn far more than her.
It's affected my career choices. I started studying Comp Sci, as I felt it's a field where I can have more flexibility than my current field. This degree is getting closer and closer to completion and it's looking 95% likely that my career will be changing in January.
It's affected my love life too but I won't go into detail here.
One thing this article misses the mark on is the quote " I also remind myself that if I were a dad, I would be getting accolades for all the times I scheduled a doctor’s appointment or arranged a play date.".
My experience as a dad is that people simply don't trust my parenting skills or assume I'm simply helping the mum out. It's incredibly sexist and somewhat hurtful. There has been times I've been battling with my workload and then people drop innocent comments which feel like a knife in the back.
> I also remind myself that if I were a dad, I would be getting accolades for all the times I scheduled a doctor’s appointment or arranged a play date.
> My experience as a dad is that people simply don't trust my parenting skills or assume I'm simply helping the mum out. It's incredibly sexist and somewhat hurtful.
You and the author are talking about the exact same pervasive sexism from opposite perspectives.
The difference being one is talking about "how they think things would be if they were a dad", while the other is talking about the actual experience they had while being a dad. Somehow I feel like one of the two takes precedence in terms of credibility.
They're both true, though. Expectations of decent parenting are lower: just taking both my children to the park gets 'wow, that must be a handful' comments that my wife doesn't get. At the same time, I'm not assumed to be a competent caregiver, and am excluded from some of the social/mutual support side of parenting as it's in practice mums only.
GP is correct; these are in many ways two sides of the same sexist coin.
But they are in agreement. The same way both assuming that a [category X] can't do [stuff Y] and being positively surprised when they do are two faces of the same discrimination.
They could both arise from the same cause, but that says nothing about how often they occur. You seem to imply they’re equivalent, potentially in frequency as well. A real world account seems to suggest the negative experience happens more often. I’d like to hear him comment on it.
My point is she thinks it would be great to have no one expect you to be a decent parent and she passes it off as men having it better in her article. I'm saying, that for a dedicated parent, it's worse.
Thanks. My two children are doing amazing. My long term goal is to raise them into healthy adults with a good chance of being happy (nothing is guaranteed).
>If you're intellectually driven then looking after two young children isn't fascinating.
I've never understood this viewpoint - children are simply the most fascinating things!
They're born with next to no inborn knowledge and yet have the potential to learn about quantum mechanics. Someone with the same potential would only have learned about fire some hundred thousands of years ago.
In the early days you get to see a baby slowly mentally program the things we take so for granted we forget that you actually have to learn them - how to walk, how to speak, language.
YMMV but for me to see the world indirectly through the eyes of children is like rediscovering everything there is to the world we live in!
On the scale of months and years children are amazing, and I agree it’s fascinating to watch as they develop into their own people.
However, on the scale of hours and days they can be mind-numbingly boring, as anyone who’s played hide and seek with a four year old who repeatedly goes and hides in their bedroom cupboard can probably attest. I love my boy dearly, but I am so, so, bored of playing the first hour of Minecraft now - he loves it though, so every few days we start up a new world, and we mine our way down to some diamonds, at which point he loses interest.
I think Adventure Mode and also the stuff available in Education Edition might make Minecraft a bit more of a long-term prospect there. You can make stuff for your kids to explore or do (either on rails or unguided), and there's quite a decent body of work out there shared in the education space.
I personally love Education Edition for the coding interface, but there is some other neat stuff in there as well.
Mind you, my first daughter is coming up on 2 years old, so there's a ways off until I get there. I'm just speaking as a teacher who uses it. My daughter is fascinating though - it's really interesting watching her figure out skills like sorting, and also discovering all the little ways my wife and I have unconsciously confused her with our use of language, which she then picks up without us realising it.
I don’t think parents were ever meant to play hide and seek with their children for hours on end, but to let them go play with the other 4 year olds and relatives in the village, give them bandaids and hugs when they fall, have them be back by sundown, feed them food and tuck them into bed by 8pm.
But in todays atomized and helicopter parenting with liability world, you can’t do that and thus parenting is a lot more work than it should be.
I cannot remember my parents ever playing hide and seek with me. I don't think adults need to feel that they need to play with children for hours on end. That's incredibly dull. Find your kid a playmate.
I agree. There are lots of things about raising kids that are intellectually stimulating and fascinating. I really enjoy seeing them grow mentally and figuring out ways to help them along, and also think up ways to make things fun of course, because everyone needs fun.
For us, this has meant quite a lot of shared cultural consumption. I've bought hundreds of story books 2nd hand, and read to them, and I think it has helped their vocabulary (which is amazing). We've seen tons of children's movies together, we've played Minecraft and other comp. games together, we often play board games. I have also built things for them, like a huge outdoor swing set and a crossword puzzle game to help them get started with reading - https://puzzlepirate.net (also available as a free Android app).
There are so many things you can do with or for your kids that is fun or challenging to you also, if you just use some imagination (and have the time).
Are you doing this solo or do you have a partner? My experience as a single dad is that I can go entire days without having a single conversation with another adult. My adult friends aren't too interested in hanging out parenting. They are also demanding enough that I'll get zero time to do anything I wish to do while they're awake.
I have a partner yeah, and the kids are reaching an age now (5 and 7) where they don't need as much help anymore. Dressing, eating, tidying etc they can do on their own so things are also getting easier. With them, at least. We also have a 2-month old now ;)
Anyway, your comment about friends not being interested makes it sound as if you have no adult support whatsoever. It would probably help a lot if you could make new friends w people who have kids the same age. Where I am (Stockholm) it seems this tends to happen when people go on a longer stretch of parental leave - you automatically meet and start hanging out w families w small kids, whose parents are also on parental leave. I think it really helps having other adults around who understand - as emotional support if nothing else.
I bet there are parents groups, or even single-parent groups you can join, to get in touch w others like you.
That happens like 10% of the time if you are lucky.
Rest of it can be kinda monotonous? Like, getting my daughter from bed through breakfast, dressing up, and walking to kindergarten. Or getting her to walk all the way to her friends house for a play date. Or getting her dinner, showered, and to bed ...
I still like it, but the day to day is stressful and monotonous
After spending some time working with machine learning and AI, the early development of the human brain is just fascinating to me.
With our best algorithms, you have to feed thousands and thousands of images for ML to be able to identify things like a certain type of animal.
And yet, my 14 month old can see a cartoon drawing of a penguin in her books a few times and then days later, recognize an actual photo of a penguin from a completely different source.
The human brain, even on an infant level is just so spectacularly amazing.
You also have to remember that our brains have millions of years of evolution to learn from, so we have had far more than thousands and thousands of images and other perceptions recognized by the DNA of our ancestors, which gets passed down to us.
> I've never understood this viewpoint - children are simply the most fascinating things!
Yeah seriously. My wife and I have a six month old and simply because we want to educate her, we've both been reading way more than normal. My wife (who stays at home with our daughter all day) has already completed a university lecture series + read many books on ancient civilizations. I've started reading about philosophy on my bus ride to/from work.
Having children has only expanded our desire and ability to learn.
I have worked in health care for 15 years primarily taking care of elderly. The biggest message basically they all make is to not let time pass you by when you are young and to enjoy the time with your kids when they are young. Because before you know it they grow up and it’s never the same. I am a single dad as well. I too sacrificed my career so they got the time they needed. My love life is non existent also but I don’t mind. It won’t be like that forever. You are doing the right thing by the sounds of it so good job. When we get to our death beds our kids will be at our sides and there will be no doubt you and I made the correct choice. As for the lady in the article, the entire time I read it as her trying so hard to convince herself her choices were worth it but I fear from my experience she will later regret it. Though I truly like her cause, her own kids lost a family member much like these people going to jail away from their family. I hope she can make the balance her children seek from her.
Amen. The author of the article is incorrect to think that the effect her career can have on society is anywhere near as important as the effect she can have on her children, should she take the time.
> If you're intellectually driven then looking after two young children isn't fascinating. However, I love them and they rely on me.
I feel you. My wife and I are managing two kids and I work from home, meaning I am home almost 24x7. I help my wife taking care of our children and I often get annoyed by the whole bunch of dumb or repetitive things we need to do to take care of them. Still, I love them more than anything in the world.
That’s terrible advice. Kids are great (they’re also not, at societal scale, really optional). According to a Pew study, about 7% of people who had kids would, if they did it over again, have had no kids. By contrast, more than half of those who didn’t have kids would’ve chosen to not have kids again: https://news.gallup.com/poll/164618/desire-children-norm.asp.... Indeed, out of people who didn’t have kids, a greater proportion wish they would’ve had 3+ kids than people who had kids who wish they had no kids.
If you impose artificially high hurdles for parenting, you’re encouraging people to possible forgo a fulfilling life choice, because they fear they can’t live up to artificially inflated expectations for parenting. And that’s damaging.
A thing is "inflated expectations for parenting", another thing is the person who wrote the article which has three different jobs (she could easily drop two and still manage to bring home more than enough money, but she doesn't want to for selfish reasons... Which are totally ok if you are not a divorced parent of two very young kids) and, as she herself said, prioritize all of them over her children because she prefers that way.
The “selfish” remark rings pretty hollow when you’re talking about someone that is literally spending her time freeing wrongfully convicted people.
What Ms. Bazelon is doing is the opposite of selfish. She’s providing for her family, serving her profession, and serving her community. She’s teaching her kids good morals by example: hard work and service. What kind of terrible lesson would it be to her children if she taught them that their school camping trip was more important than those things?
If you’re going to assert that a group of people should forgo a major aspect of life, it’s incumbent on you to actually provide evidence that shows concrete and major harms from that combination of life choices. And that evidence just doesn’t exist.
In most situations, if you tell people they shouldn’t do X without citing concrete evidence that X is bad, your viewpoint won’t be taken seriously. In the area of parenting, however, we switch off our brains, because we assign some mystical importance to biological parents spending time with kids, instead of alternative caretakers. In the case of the author:
> They were lovingly cared for by their father, their grandmother, my son’s preschool teacher and my daughter’s babysitter.
Many children, often in low income families, are raised primarily by grandparents and school. Are you prepared to say that those families shouldn’t have had children?
The long run effects of adoption on personality attributes and IQ is indistinguishable from zero. People are as like their biological siblings whether they ever meet them or not, and as like their adoptive siblings as any random stranger. Outside major abuse and genetic contributions parents have limited effects on adult outcomes.
If the worst parents working more does to children is a less happy childhood on average that’s a hard choice to condemn. Normal people send their children to child warehousing facilities where they’re taught to sit down, shut up and do as they’re told while subjected to busywork, boredom, ranking and the ennui of meaninglessness for over a decade instead of letting them grow and play and they don’t get judged much for it.
I'd rather have a planet of people raised by people committed to doing the best job possible than people who have made a fulfilling life choice due to a lack of proper expectations.
Following this advice I feel more than half of our generation wouldn’t be. Perhaps there’s already too many people on earth, but it’s something I’d think about.
> If you don't want to prioritise your kids over your job... don't have kids.
Having kids while prioritizing job over direct care and attention to them has been an accepted (and often expected) pattern for men for centuries. (And for much of that time for upper and often middle class [0] women, too, though their primary vocations weren't “jobs” in the usual sense.)
Should it be surprising or any worse that when women are sole or co-equal breadwinners, that the same is often true of women with jobs?
[0] “middle class” in the sense of the petit bourgeoisie, not the other common modern American usage, where it refers to the middle income segment which is almost entirely within the working class.
> Sorry, but men prioritizing their jobs over their kids has never been historically accepted.
Men (and for that matter upper and often also middle class women in roles that aren't actually jobs, though that's also true of upper class men in either the hereditary aristocracy or th
e capitalist haut bourgeiosie) prioritizing their job—or, where they don't have a job as such, their externally-focussed class role over personally providing direct care and attention to their children (which is what I said and what is, despite the less precise language, actually being discussed in the article), has, in fact, been widely historically accepted.
> Having kids while prioritizing job over direct care and attention to them has been an accepted (and often expected) pattern for men for centuries. (And for much of that time for upper and often middle class [0] women, too, though their primary vocations weren't “jobs” in the usual sense.)
False. Most men throughout history had to work or their children would starve. Their requirement to work was forced legally by laws allowing wives to sue husbands that did not work and support their family.
For most of history before the industrial revolution, the standard model would have been a farm, where both mom and dad worked, but worked at home. The ideal has always been for moms and dads to stay home, until relatively recently -- certainly not centuries.
Lastly, if we even accept your claim to be true at all, it really would only be limited in scope to the very rich or at least the upper middle class, where men actually had careers 'worth' sacrificing for. Perhaps an attorney sees his work as meaningful and a source of advancement. I highly doubt a coal miner wanted to be in the mines longer because of career advancement. In fact, history is actually littered with the opposite -- working men demanding that they work less (see the labor movement).
>She just made the same choices that many dads do.
There is one difference: she boasted about it on a NYTimes editorial page. I would argue that suggests she may be on the spectrum. Her kids will read this. Their friends and classmates will read this. Terrible.
If you have children and then choose to work over doing the legitimately full time job of being a parent (full time being at least 40 hours a week, not that you can't do anything else ever) you need to provide them at least a parent to do that job or else you are neglecting them.
Psychology is pretty uniform in the observation that children need parents, preferably both, but just one is a massive developmental influence. There are minor benefits from they/them being biological but it isn't absolutely necessary, but a care worker, teacher, etc is not filling the same social niche with a child that a parent is. Its a job title in its own right that also has by far the most impact on developing functioning healthy human beings than any other. Its also a job you don't just quit or substitute for without lasting consequences, the role of a parent is to anchor children and provide an immovable stake upon their foundation.
You can absolutely hire a parent if you don't want to or have the time yourself to parent the children you make, but it is substantively harmful to deny them having parent(s) when they need them. If a mother wants to work a full time job while a spouse or even just long term domestic partner? wants to take on the job of being a (or more) parent(s) that works. If a father wants to do the same, that works. But kids still need parent(s), preferably two, and that is two full time positions to fill.
One quandary to think on is that society really doesn't organize or optimize for parental efficiency. We organize schools to lecture and teach to try to balance between quantity of children to a quality of education, but adults are just en masse making new lives and mostly playing it by ear on fulfilling parental responsibilities. We haven't tried to promote good parents to be parents by getting them more children - biological or not - to parent. As a civilization it feels backwards to me how what might be the most important job there is - developing future generations - is the one that is the least recognized for its value and importance. It isn't a career, it isn't prestigious, it isn't treated with the same scrutiny you would want to see in getting your plumbing fixed. But broken pipes are a much less substantive issue than mental malaise or physiological complications brought about by poor or absent parenting in the development of the billions to succeed us.
When it comes to panting, an important part of quality is quantity. As much as some people want to think that a day filled to the brim with exciting activities is a substitute for a week of near-absence, it's just not. That's not only my experience, but the experience of many of my friends with parents who greatly prioritized their career over spending time with them.
I don't want to be too harsh, but I can't respect her decision. It's selfish, and not properly caring for the next generation is a dead giveaway of a sick society.
It's not apparent to me from the article that this woman is making a serious attempt to make up for those absences. That she wrote this almost seems like a celebration of her choice to de-prioritize them. My father would be gone for a week, but then home for a week. When he was home, he was 100% available to us.
Prioritizing clients over kids seems misguided if there's a conscious choice being made, but in my childhood I think I benefited a lot from benign neglect: not having everything micromanaged by my parents who let me figure things out on my own, just because they didn't feel like they had to help me the moment I have the slightest hint of a problem. Thanks to this I could pursue things that _I_ (rather than my parents) wanted to pursue, and I had vast stretches of free time to do it. I joined a volleyball team on my own, I learned electronics and programming on my own, I've read basically all of "golden age" science fiction worth reading, I got our math teacher at school to give a few of us extra lessons to prepare for the college entrance exam, etc.
This autonomy had two interesting effects. On the one hand it definitely benefited me later in life, because I felt like I had a built-in direction. On the other I don't like it when people tell me what to do, particularly if they have an unearned position of power and don't really know what to do themselves, but have to "lead", by hook or by crook.
It's much easier to waste time nowadays, I agree (my son is a perfect example; left to his own devices he'd do pretty much what you said). My father got rid of our TV when I was 10 years old and haven't bought one since. Internet also wasn't a thing back then.
I'm a single father of five who obtained full-time custody last year, and trying to balance work and parenting is a never-ending challenge.
Some of my observations:
1) Kids have a great time with other kids, so don't feel bad about daycare. Having them at home full-time past the age of 2 is, I think, more about the parent than the child.
2) Sometimes kids just suck, and work can be a glorious escape.
3) School life in my culture (NZ) is still modelled like there's always one stay at home parent, which means you'll never be able to be there for every certificate, every kapa haka performance, and kids are okay about it so long as you communicate, and do get to the occasional one.
4) You can fit a lot of effective parenting into dinner table discussions and bedtime discussions
5) I'm really glad I'm a single Dad and not a single Mum because there are very few cultural expectations of me beyond working, and everyone acts like I'm amazing for just raising my kids. It's kinda insulting to both genders.
6) It's impossible to perfectly balance a 40 hour working week and family. Best you can aim for is a kind of homeostasis where work suffers for family one week and then family suffers a bit for work the next.
7) You will feel, at times, like you're letting down everyone equally, workmates and children both. And you just have to ride with it.
And I've found that workmates will notice your child related late starts or early finishes, and resent them. The only solution is communication. And a decent employer.
Our work culture also assumes two people families to an extent.
> You will feel, at times, like you're letting down everyone equally
My girlfriend struggles with that quite a bit. And now that we're fully cohabitated and my work-from-home / lack-of-commute situation allows me to participate in more kids things that aren't accomodating to parents with traditional work schedules and typical commutes... I get heaps of praise from everyone, including her, for basically just not being a dick.
Great! I find I might be in the same situation in the future. How do you do parenting around the dinner table? Heck—how do you get dinner ready for 5?! If you can, would love to hear more! :)
Everyone eats together, no screens, books, toys etc. Especially me, it's always tempting to clean while they eat, but there's so much more value just touching base.
And then we talk. Things that happened at school, on the bus, at work, in the news. Any teachable moments come up, you use them - especially good for reinforcing the values you're trying to impart by running through scenarios based on what happened.
Bedtime is the important one. Having 15 minutes alone with them, in a muted environment where they feel safe, is where they feel best able to express emotional stuff. Once again, easy to skip and do the multitude of other tasks, but too valuable.
And in terms of cooking, buying in bulk and cooking in bulk. Pastas, risottos, pies etc. I like stuff that's quick for after work, or can be cooked the night before and reheated. I'm not a very organised person so the last year has been a definite learning experience.
I think your kids are very lucky. You seem to know what's important and be determined enough to get it. The only thing I can add that I didn't see on your list is "Take care of yourself also". My dad died young because he didn't take care of himself, and his four kids thought it kind of sucked. Perhaps see yourself as just the eldest kid in the family. Easy to say, hard to do I guess.
That is hard, but I try. My partner and I (we still run separate households) cherish the time we get together - and I'm really lucky that my oldest son is able and willing to watch the others, every Saturday, when my toddler is down for her nap, my partner and I have lunch at a favourite restaurant.
I never resent my co-workers for child-related late starts or early finishes. I respect them. I prioritize work/career and I always admire the ones who don't.
Daycare is not only great fun for the kids - playing with their peers is fun - it's also fantastic for their development.
We have an excellent daycare. My daughter spends three days a week crafting, playing outside with kids, baking, doing make-up etc. The carers have skills that I don't have and my kids get to enjoy that.
We both work four days a week so the kids get lots of parent time and we get a bit of a rest from them.
I’m fortunate enough to live in Iceland so both my kids got a place in a state kindergarten (leikskoli) from 18 months. Having seen the care and attention they pay to the development of kids I honestly don’t know why this isn’t more common outside of Nordic countries. Particularly with modern societal expectations on parents and the future of society being entirely dependent on the effort it put into its future citizens.
Almost the same in swedish: lekskola (or "lekis") and dagskola ("dagis") but they have now been replaced by the more pretentious "förskola" as we like to be pretentious over here. "barnhage" is a small cage you put toddlers in so they can't escape - makes sense you guys use that word for kindergarten ;)
So has most of western society. Thus the birthrate cratering. Since this woman has two kids she's picking kids over job more than most people. She's simply more honest than most about the whole thing.
I find the western disinterest in raising their own children (and having them) fascinating. There seems to be a widespread ideal of trying to leave a legacy through deeds rather than through your own children. Much of the right wing is agitated at the whole thing because this is gradually reducing the population of an ethnic group they're quite fond of.
Your short comment rings very true to me and reminded me of Adam Curtis' "Century of the Self" theory which in his latest documentary "Hypernormalization" gets developed even further. I guess you might know it but for those who don't - both freely available on youtube.
Gosh. This is me. I sacrificed almost ten years of my career to be there for my sons as a divorced dad. Work travel, sales, meetings - much of it missed so the boys could have me as much as possible. Doctors, judges, lawyers, mom's were hostile & cold throughout it all. It was the single biggest contributing factor to the failure of my business this year. And... It was worth it. The boys are turning out to be fantastic young adults, our relationship is strong, and they both fought hard to get even more time with me. Hard road, great destination. The courts are total shit btw.
> I also remind myself that if I were a dad, I would be getting accolades for all the times I scheduled a doctor’s appointment or arranged a play date.
1000 times this. If I take the kids to the store, or through airport security, or pretty much anywhere, women are practically running over to "help" me. Thank you but I got it. Go help that poor mom over there with three meltdowns to deal with, she needs it a lot more than me.
The other day we had a birthday party for my daughter, and some of the moms saw me prepping food and doing work while I gave my wife a chance to relax and talk to the guests. They actually told her they were surprised that I would "allow" her to take a break like that. Seriously?! First of all, she is "allowed" to do whatever they hell she wants, and secondly, how messed up is it that their immediate expectation is that mom should be working the whole time while dad gets to relax?
But my favorite story of all was I was in the bathroom at Newark airport, changing my daughter's diaper. A man walks in wear the most "New Jersey" outfit ever -- expensive suit, slicked hair, gold chains, etc. He said, "Where's the mom?"
"Outside."
"Why isn't she changing the diaper then?"
I said, "She didn't want to?"
He didn't even know what to say after that, his mind was so blown.
This is very cultural too. Some places it's expected that dads take care of kids equally with mums.
I heard a great anecdote about a Manhattanite visiting Stockholm on vacation. Lots of men pushing prams all around town. "My goodness, look at all the young male nannies in Sweden!"
Go to any playground and you'll see 80% fathers. The reason is the mom is usually home the first 10-12 months, and the dad after that, which coincides with the baby learning to walk and being able to actually play at the playground. It doesn't necessarily mean we split things exactly equal, personally I'm on leave for 7 months now while my wife took 12, while the average for men is 3-4 months. Must make a strange scene for Manhattanites though!
Yes, in Stockholm (and I guess most of Sweden) noone local raises an eyebrow when a dad comes pushing a pram. I think there's been a change the past 10-15 years when new parental leave requirements has forced both parents to share the parental leave (or they'll get less of it). This made it almost stupid for many dads not to go on parental leave and it's accelerated a change that would otherwise have taken some time.
Not my experience (in Germany). Sometimes people (mostly women) assume I am taking a day off for daddy time and give me some sort of mini applause. But that is pretty rare.
More notable is perhaps the gender distribution on the playground. I do think it is easier for moms to connect/bond with each other. Like if I plan an excursion and wonder what friends of my kids could join, I find it more difficult to simply ask another mom. Might just be me, though.
I'm (a father) in Berlin with 2 little kids & I've had the same experience- a lot of dads in the playground (more mums tho) & my involvement with my kids usually goes unremarked.
I also know a lot of fathers that took parental leave for months at a time.
I live in Canada and things are just as you described. I'm in awe at what so many other folks are describing in the USA. I wouldn't have expected to see such a difference.
These are our kids, of course we take care of them.
> 6) It's impossible to perfectly balance a 40 hour working week and family. Best you can aim for is a kind of homeostasis where work suffers for family one week and then family suffers a bit for work the next.
The article refers to things like:
> But there is always another client to defend, story to write or struggling student who just can’t wait. Here are things I have missed: my daughter’s seventh birthday, my son’s 10th birthday party, two family vacations, three Halloweens, every school camping trip.
I agree in that regard, but the child had a father and grandparents actively involved in their lives.
She may come to regret not building a closer relationship with her children in the future, but it sounds like the children have other loving adults in their lives so they'll do okay.
Americans assign a silly and unjustified sentimental value to things like birthday parties and school outings. Part of my wife’s family is Jehovah’s witnesses, who don’t even celebrate birthdays. Are those kids somehow missing out? Do you think the immigrant parents that own a Chinese restaurant open seven days a week make it to any of their kids school functions or camping trips? Are they being irreparably damaged?
> Do you think the immigrant parents that own a Chinese restaurant open seven days a week make it to any of their kids school functions or camping trips? Are they being irreparably damaged?
Based on my experience going to college with a few kids like that, yes. They all resented their childhood and the fact that the only way to see their parents was to work in the restaurant.
Yet they’re in college. Their parents having prioritized work over their kids undoubtedly will allow those kids to live an immensely better life than they would have otherwise. There’s millions of people in the world that would trade places with them in a heartbeat.
One of my fears is that my kids will learn these bad American ideas from media. I saw my daughter watching a Disney show (Bunk’d), where a high achieving Asian girl was telling her parents they “pushed her too hard.” No wonder China is eating our lunch.
Ironically, no matter how attentive of a parent you are, your daughter is in fact likely to pick up ideas like that from media, her friends, and the surrounding culture. Alas!
There is lot of room between “slave like conditions” and the modern American trend of decadent children and adolescents that live in a state of extended infancy well into their 20s. From 1948 to 2000, the teenage labor force participation rate was 45-55%. Since 2000 it has dropped dramatically, to just 35% last year.
“Extended infancy”? Really? Protracted adolescence sure, a giant pointless distraction fine, a diversion from things you value, ok, but infancy? Infants and children do not take time off to find themselves, travel, take a career break or whatever in particular you don’t value about this American (and Western) cultural tendency.
If you don’t want your children to do this what are you going to do about it? Help them get real jobs without going to college? Accelerate their paths into professional jobs by accelerating their academic careers? Because if you don’t do something out of the ordinary you’re going to get pretty much the same results as other people in your position.
With good reason... the labor force is such that employers don’t want teenagers and the strings attached to them (ie work hour limits, etc). They prefer to put adults on call.
Having lived in China for seven years I see no sign that the Chinese have eaten, are eating, or are going to eat America’s lunch. Growth at the technological frontier is about what the best are doing and diffuses from there. I am unaware of any academic field or major industry where the US is not in the top three, hardly surprising given its 5% of global population and 25% of global economic activity. As long as the US has enough strivers and hard workers it can afford plenty of slackers.
The only way for the US’ relative position not to decline with China’s rise involve megadeaths, just as after WWII it’s relative power could only decline.
> As long as the US has enough strivers and hard workers it can afford plenty of slackers.
That's an uncomfortable idea - growth of a nation being dependent on a few people working their ass off. Like sacrificial lambs. Though almost all of these people probably do it willingly.
That's life. Life is incredibly expensive, and people who enjoy it are getting from the hard work and suffering of animals and other people and themselves. And the suffering of others scales far better then self-sacrificing.
One of my fears is that my kids will learn these bad American ideas from media.
I watched my poor Sikh friend exasperated with his two young daughters who desperately wanted a Christmas tree like all the other kids and bugged him endlessly about it. He lost. It was pretty funny. They've both now grown into fine young women who are proud of their Sikh religion, so no harm done.
> I saw my daughter watching a Disney show (Bunk’d), where a high achieving Asian girl was telling her parents they “pushed her too hard.” No wonder China is eating our lunch.
The thing is, such a phenomenon exists. And kids pushed too hard may grow resentful or plain reject parents ideas and rebel. Not all them grow super succesfull. Plenty just grow feeling like failures.
It is possible to push children just right, of course. But there is such a thing as too much and those adults then complain (that is how I know).
I think birthday celebrations teach kids to be self-centered, but that’s neither here nor there. (And I lost that battle with my wife as to my own kid anyway.)
But the folks criticizing the article aren’t just asserting that these things are good. They’re claiming that not having these things is so damaging that a woman who prioritizes her career over attending birthday parties and school events is a bad mother. But many children grow up to be perfectly well adjusted despite not having those things. That is evidence of the fact that, even if those things are “good,” they’re not “essential.”
This is not black and white. If I recall correctly from other interactions we've had on Hacker News, we're both Bangladeshi-American so please know I'm looking at this with a similar lens.
My parents absolutely should have emphasized academics and my need to go to college to break out of the poverty trap my family was in. But they did that in violent and traumatic ways. They did that by using guilt and shame and burden as the primary engine to drive me to act. They are not alone in this. Friends of Asian-American heritage (East and South Asia) tell me their parents did the same.
Those things work when you're fighting for survival and then turn out to be incredibly harmful when you're not. It's taken me years of work and will take years more to undo that damage.
I understand your sensitivity to your daughter's situation. If you live in upper middle class America, and I suspect you do, your daughter is observing a deeply unnatural form of childhood. But there is a middle ground between squeezing performance out of young brains and being coddled into doing nothing. I hope for both of your sakes you look for it.
I don’t know the complete details of Jehovah’s Witnesses. But then not celebrating birthdays along with not celebrating [almost] any other major fun holiday among things does seem to be a definite negative aspect.
I’ve read if you accuse someone in the religion of abuse and the only thing you have is he said she said, then the accuser is essentially iced out and ostracized from their religious culture/society. This includes children.
Unless I’m mistaken, it does seem like the Witnesses are having children miss out on what you stated and in general seem like a bad example to bring up.
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For both parents working all the time, it is a negative for most children.
Witnesses miss out on birthdays, non Witnesses miss out on being a part of their community with the benefits and disadvantages that come with that. I’m not familiar with them but any demanding (and hence cohesive) religious community I’m aware of is it’s own social group, support network, family substitute if someone is sick or when somebody dies or just needs to move. Mormons celebrate birthdays but the adults have to give up alcohol, caffeine, swearing and R-rated movies. Communities are bundles of goods, they don’t come à la carte. Religious communities that demand nothing from their adherents other than weekly attendance and nothing else that is not appropriate to their social and class position like Unitarianism, Episcopalianism or Liberal Judaism wither because people wonder why they bother attending.
Communities demand and give different things. Birthday parties seem a very small thing to give up if an actual community is what you get in return.
Regarding accusations why should making accusations be costless? If you’re trying to drum someone out of a community and fail to bring convincing evidence they kick you out. It’s just a community deciding on its internal norms. The US legal system has different burdens of proof and punishments when it comes to slander but the US system is still available to them. Communities exist outside the state.
Small correction -- members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (of which I am one) don't have to give up on caffeine. There were some people who taught and practiced that, but that is largely in the past.
Even BYU, the church-owned school, now sells fully-caffeinated Coke on campus. This was a fairly recent development.
As well, members are encouraged to avoid any media that includes sexually explicit, violent, or otherwise negative content -- not only avoiding R-rated movies. The church teaches that people should be careful about their media choices and consume media that enlightens or edifies, not just entertains. Active members of the church definitely vary in how they interpret that, of course.
I do love your point about sacrificing some things and getting a community in return. I work as a software engineer and at the age of 25 I already have two kids. My wife and I definitely sacrifice for them, but I hope we can build a loving family that will give us social returns that are lifelong. Growing up, I had a large network of cousins and siblings that were closer to me than friends were. I know much of this is because of the influence of the church.
It is also true that being a member gives you a network of people -- people are always around to help you move in and out, they're always there every Sunday, etc. Members are assigned "ministers", two people who check up on them, are officially assigned to love them, and report back to the leadership of each ward (congregation) regularly about any problems the people they minister to may have. All this in addition to the friendships that naturally form with people you see once a week.
Sacrificing alcohol, swearing, and other things -- tithing, Sundays, a two year-mission -- seems like a small trade in comparison for the creation of relationships with people who love you and who you love in return.
As an atheist, that sounds terrible. Also there is some legit criticism: taken from wikipedia (where you can see the sources): It also warns members to "avoid independent thinking", claiming such thinking "was introduced by Satan the Devil" and would "cause division". Those who openly disagree with official teachings are condemned as "apostates" who are "mentally diseased".
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jehovah%27s_Witnesses
This has nothing to do with being a community in my mind. A community would help it's people develop and not keep them in (mental) chains.
As another atheist, that sounds (taken at face value) pretty good to me. Community is massively missing for many people and having a structure that provides that is very attractive.
Not disputing your points, just would be nice to have an equivalent without the religion and other negative side effects
As an (Jungian?) atheist I fully claim that similar problems exist fully within non religious communities. Try voicing doubts on progressive ideologies in many woke communities, they do not take is well either.
I do not understand why communities often morph in this way.
Sounds like present day mainstream media... e.g. if you “think independently” and decide that affirmative action is bad, you’re branded a “bigoted racist” or “sexist” or “nazi”
"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."
That’s the point. A community that can keep people who are indifferent or hostile to its values out has some chance of survival. One that can’t doesn't. Keeping people like you or me out is not an incidental benefit of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, it’s indispensable. If you completely disagree with a community's core tenets they do not want you. And if you’re not a member of a community your feelings about how it should be governed are relevant only insofar as they are enforced by men with guns.
I really don't think so. Societal pressure can be even more convincing than violence. If you are going to lose all of your friends and family if you complain about something, that is not healthy. If you have to tell your followers that independent thought is coming right from the devil (lol btw), somethings not quite right with your faith. Else you would not fear independent thought.
> Societal pressure can be even more convincing than violence.
this is true, these communities are walking on a thin rope. They are constantly in danger of falling out of balance.
> somethings not quite right with your faith. Else you would not fear independent thought.
I disagree. There is no indication that rationality and independent thinking are what is best for an individual. They have been hugely positive for humanity, but there is also freedom in submission. Being in a healthy community where you fully understand your role in life seems a lot better than being a nihilist (not the only outcome, but also not the worst one).
This crosses into religious flamewar. Please keep that far away from this site.
If you're wondering where the differences are, there are two critical ones. The GP's comment was mostly about personal experience, where your comment went generic—that's how we get boring flamewars. Had you shared personal experience in return, this might have been better. Second, your comment swerved into indignant rhetoric. When indignation levels spike up, the needle goes into the red for flamewar risk.
As a side point, I think you got your religions mixed up. That's a minor detail but it illustrates how generic the comment was. Generic comments on divisive issues are what we're most trying to avoid on HN, because they make discussion more repetitive and provoke other users into posting even more generically and indignantly (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20317078).
>Members are assigned "ministers", two people who check up on them, are officially assigned to love them, and report back to the leadership of each ward (congregation) regularly about any problems the people they minister to may have. All this in addition to the friendships that naturally form with people you see once a week.
I have friends who left the mormon church after decades because of these "ministers". They were always asking when the couple was going to have another baby and constantly prying into their lives and reporting back. They found it creepy.
When they finally decided to leave, it got so bad (mormons ambushing them in the strangest places with aggressive questioning) that they had to file for a restraining order to keep them away.
The churches stance on homosexuality didn't help either, but it was the ministers that were the most invasive part.
You're right. It's all about how we set our values. Like for some perhaps spending B'day with the kids is more valuable for some (including my family) birthday is just another day in the month.
Are younger generations in the age of social media who are eager to share their b'day celeb pics set their value right? That's a thing to be pondered upon.
I had immigrant parents who had to work all the time to build and grow their business, so I didn’t have birthdays and that kind of stuff. I don’t care about that kind of stuff at all, not to say that I hate it or anything.
I haven’t studied other children, so I can only make statements about myself. The only negative of my childhood regarding the lack of birthdays and whatnot is the inability to feign excitement for others’ celebrations as much as might be expected, simply because I don’t care about it for myself in the first place. It probably has hampered my ability to socialize or make networking connections in some situations where I wasn’t able to fit in.
Be happy that others are happy. That's the key to empathy and sharing the pleasure. You don't have to understand why they are happy, and you don't have to agree with the cause. But you can still find joy in the fact that others are feeling wonderful.
If the children grow up in an environment that (unreasonably?) values birthdays then they'll (unreasonably?) resent that their parents weren't with them.
The town I grew up in had a chinese restaurant downtown, right where all the busses stopped at the end of their routes. My mom and I went there all the time, since it was one of our favorite places to eat. I knew most of their family lol - the kids would usually hang out and do their homework on one of the tables in the back next to the kitchen.
Those scenarios are what you make of them. They're not always doom and gloom. :) Honestly I think a family business is a better situation than a draconican employer that expects one to devote their life to them.
I was really responding to what I saw as the GP breaking other guidelines by not responding to the article, so I quoted the only relevant part of their comment and the appropriate part of the article.
I suppose I should have flagged their comment instead if I thought it was bordering on off-topic?
You should flag a comment if it's breaking the site guidelines, but it doesn't break the site guidelines to go off topic. Sometimes off-topic comments can be interesting. It's when they become generic tangents that they break the guidelines. If you reread https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html you'll see that that the line is drawn carefully that way.
For example, someone sharing their personal experience about a marginally-related point may be off topic but isn't generic. But turning a thread like this into an argument about, say, the men's rights movement (as happened elsewhere)—that's generic and therefore breaks the guidelines.
A less clear case is the subthread right here that goes into a long discussion about birthdays and Jehovah's Witnesses. That's pretty off topic, and crossing perilously toward religious flamewar. On the other hand, it was weird enough not to count as generic—except where it swerved into atheism vs. religion stuff at the end.
What we're trying to avoid is getting sucked into the black holes of the hottest controversies that online forums can't seem to resist but that people never have anything new to say about. That's the purpose of the rule. On HN, the organizing principle is intellectual curiosity, and there's no curiosity in repetition.
Coincidently I just saw a convincing interview with a father from the Greatest Generation where he shares his regrets on being a famous yet absent father:
I'm not judging her preference on having a successful career - I'm the same actually - yet I don't plan to have children because of that very reason...
I remember that Dr Gabor Maté also talks a lot about the scars and potential trauma a child can be left with when neglected. I remember presence of both parents to be of paramount importance. And that's not "only" a problem for the child but for society at large.
My mother was amazing in that no matter when I called her on the phone, it was impossible to tell if she was in an important meeting.
I'd call her after school and chat for a while, only a to find out a bit later that she was in the middle of closing a huge deal!
This made me feel like a million bucks - to know that even though she was very busy, I was still important enough to have her full attention whenever I called her.
I always "felt" like I was more important than her work.
One morning, about 2am in one of the Mission Control rooms at JSC, I was sitting next to two semi-retired flight controllers managing a simulation. They went back to Apollo.
One of my 20-something peers walked back to our row where the pizza boxes lay, ruffled through them, sighed “its all cold” and walked back to his terminal.
Now, we’d been doing this for weeks.
Old fart #1 turns to #2 and says under his breath “You know, I gave up my marriage and kids to get us to the moon”
But it wasn't just about mankind making it to the moon. It was about getting there "before the bad guys". About making a show of willpower. About proving that no sacrifice is too large.
Beating the Russians to the moon isn't what caused their failing political and economic system to collapse. The Russians are still the ones who keep the ISS alive, and it's not meaningfully harming USA or helping Russia in geopolotical hegemony
Any yet if Britain and France had made more of a show of willpower in 1937 then Germany probably would've decided against starting WWII and about 28 million lives would've been saved.
I am that child. My parents were very eager to make a great career. Today I suffer from the emotional neglect with some issues such as ADHD.
Being a father myself today, I do think kids can do with relatively little facetime. But the time that is devoted to them must be exclusive quality time that makes it clear you love them and that you are present. There are studies that have shown that if fathers take 30 minutes of exclusive attention for their kids every day, it has great benefits for the child‘s development.
It may be helpful to look into the Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE) test and the research around it. It helped me gain an objective perspective and overcome patterns of family dysfunction that impacted my psychology.
"Pick your sacrifice" applies here. I think you need to know where your red lines are in your career and family life. Having a schedule helps you keep on track.
Other than that, my Dad once said something along the lines of, "Life is a constant juggling act; you have your work ball, your family ball etc. However, your family ball is made of glass, so if you drop it, it will shatter and you may not be able to put it together again."
Typical New York Times, and typical for that kind of discussion.
In such discussions, the image is always of a mother resigning from an interesting and important academic job. Presumably it is mostly academics who discuss such things, and NYT readers are also mostly academics. So when they think of mothers and careers, they think of interesting academic jobs.
In reality, most women (and men) don't have such interesting jobs. The most common job for women is shop assistant, followed by nurse (or vice versa, don't remember for sure - numbers from Germany a couple of years ago). Now nurse might be reasonably interesting, but not irreplaceable like that lawyer. And arguably, you would be doing the same job as at home (changing diapers), only not with your children.
Sorry it annoys me that this women styles herself like some sort of hero, when other people are forced to make that choice out of financial necessity.
Obviously it is a valid choice to prioritize her job, like she did. The annoying part is the claim between the lines that she is somehow special and going against the societal pressure.
> Now nurse might be reasonably interesting, but not irreplaceable like that lawyer. And arguably, you would be doing the same job as at home (changing diapers), only not with your children
Did you seriously just equate the work that nurses do with changing diapers?
It has some great ideas and pretty much somesup every thing. Watch little bit longer as he goes from one subject to another and then come back to point.
It's quite funny because in this 2 comments lies every reasons why JP is successful. From 0 to 100 baseless personal attack, we're not even discussing facts we're discussing how you feel about people.
> pseudo intellectual
I'm afraid the burden of proof is on you for this one.
> regressive
He's pretty nuanced in fact, but you have to listen to him other than in the 30 seconds, out of context, videos being regurgitated on tweeter daily.
And again, develop, what are you talking about ? You have the right to disagree with someone but if you want to make it public you'll have to explain a bit more, we're not on Trump's tweeter here.
Maybe I don’t take enough of Joe R’s pills to better understand how I, as a white man, am oppressed my today’s society. I’m entitled to my reading of his media appearances just as you’re entitled to your regressive worldview
I think you went to far down the rabbit hole, why are you so offended?
If all it takes for you to judge someone and hold such virulent opinions is "media appearances" you should probably reassess your position on who's regressive. These kind of comments have nothing to do here, feel free to rant on tweeter and reddit.
First It's not my thoughts and secondly Jordon has very profound deep understanding and I think I am not capable of summarising his thoughts as I am also trying to decipher and get.
He is clinical physiologist and he has good depth of this kind of subject and I'm not right person to translate his views. But what I get is this
"Life is sacrifice at every level (He quotes and decipher bibles story) and you have to sacrifice the some things for your family and loved ones"
But I feel these above lines do not do justice for the video as I said it has so much to get and everyone has their own perspective to get the things.
Sure you might disagree with me or him but you have your own perspective and you should decipher the meaning by yourself.
Jordan Peterson uses his psychology degree to give false authority to his political musings, to inspire a profit from his fandom of hateful harassers. There are 7 billion people on this Earth and Jordan Peterson is not more worthy of study than the othets.
Well! I agree with some of his thoughts. I came to notice him recently through social media and do not know much about him.
But his identity politics argument and his equality of outcome is very true. In my country I am seeing the consequence of identity politics and groupism. Everyday lot of people being violent and some time it leads to deaths and lynching.
Another thing in my country is some group have certain quotas (equality of outcome) which leads to degraded products and performance and competent people are being ignored which can contribute much better.
Other than that I find some of his interview thought provoking.
> There are 7 billion people on this Earth and Jordan Peterson is not more worthy of study than the othets.
How does that bring anything to the table ? I doubt 99% of the population would be as interesting if they gave speeches.
There are only a handful of people knowing their shit and sharing it in public for free. I don't see many people running around saying "Yoh Plato is shit no one should ever listen to him" even if they don't agree with his views.
Did you actually study him, as you seem to imply by making such strong statements ? I don't agree with a lot of his points but I have to admit that he has very interesting things to say about postmodernism, personal meaning, religions, &c. and as far as I know no one else is addressing these issues with that kind of depth in these days.
You can decipher and think his thoughts in two ways
1) Making sacrifice for Loved ones by giving priority to them instead of career.
2) Making sacrifice in personal lives(like children and your home duties) for greater good or humanity (giving priority to career).
Also he is saying lot of things about religious believes and stories which I am unaware of because I do not belong to same religion.
I can not make argument for you. It's very sensitive and deep topic and you should think and priorities as per your free will.
Everybody is responsible and capable of making their own decisions. We should listen to everybody but should take action as per our own beliefs and value.
Edit: I did not posted this because I am advertising him. I find it interesting and thought provoking as god(it might be made up) asks for sacrifice and we need to sacrifice to find our true-self.
>I think I am not capable of summarising his thoughts as I am also trying to decipher and get.
If you are not able to summarize and explain someone else's point, then you don't actually grasp it intellectually. You only have a sense for it emotionally, and that is the fundamental problem with Jordan Peterson and his bread and butter. He preaches, not makes logical arguments, and is attractive to an emotional audience. Which is ironic given his premise.
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 352 ms ] threadParents spend too much time apologizing for prioritizing their careers, and it’s particularly unfair to women. Studies repeatedly fail to show significant and durable results from different kinds of parenting styles. But you know what is shown, in study after study, as highly correlated with children's’ long term prosperity? Parental income.
> This research examined the association between parenting style and life satisfaction in adulthood (N=112). Participants responded to an online survey, called the Parenting Style and Life Satisfaction Survey, which included questions pertaining to parenting style experienced in childhood, parenting style used in adulthood, and levels of life satisfaction. A chi-square test was conducted to determine if there was a relationship between parenting style experienced in childhood and the adult's own parenting style. Analysis of variance tests were conducted to determine how parenting style experienced in childhood was connected to life satisfaction in adulthood and how the adult's parenting style was related to their life satisfaction. Correlations revealed that there were no statistically significant relationships between parenting style and life satisfaction. Results were interpreted and implications were discussed.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Taken together, the results of these analyses suggest that ma- ternal employment early in a child’s life is not commonly associ- ated with decreases in later achievement or increases in behavior problems.
The other one says a similar thing. They both seem to say that for the first year or two having a stay at home parent is beneficial, but beyond that it doesn't really matter.
These seem like significant and durable results on how to raise a child beyond parental income
That's a good point but there's some detail missing here: how are the kids being raised. Historically, kids were raised within a tribal or quasi-tribal structure. When you have grandparents, siblings, cousins, uncles and aunts always around, room to play and explore, you don't need parents to be there 24/7 hovering over you. You learn independence as well as a way to interact and negotiate with others.
What this looks like is the worst of all words. The kids are abandoned to a set of nannies and managed activities, while the mother and father live their own lives.
Mostly untrue in Western Europe for more than 500 years[1] and very much untrue in North America, to an even greater extent, since after WWII especially, but also before. Relatively late marriage and forming a new household upon marriage has been the norm in Western Europe since the 1500s in the North Sea region. North America was different in having earlier marriage because of labour scarcity and land abundance but nuclear families rather than extended family households were the norm in every decade and century among European descended peoples and those who assimilate to their culture.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_European_marriage_patt...
This mother describes the worst of all worlds. She's not involved in the lives of her kids. The kids are shuttled between her and her father. The nanny and her preschool teacher are the primary caregivers. It just isn't great. The fact that she wrote this article in the nyTimes to pat herself on the back for what a great job she's doing for society (Hint: She's not that important and society will survive without her) - is distasteful.
Dang, according to wiki, he has 5 living kids.
"Their first son, Nevada Alexander Musk, died of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) at the age of 10 weeks."
More interestingly, the five are two twins and three triplets.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk
https://www.asrm.org/topics/topics-index/multiple-births-or-...
I grew up with absentee parents. This is an unwelcome spin on that situation. I can't even give an opinion on this that doesn't immediately fly into rage. I just hope I don't try to pair off with someone who ends up getting hoodwinked by articles like this. This is disgusting.
That doesn't sounds like the author. Kids will understand if a parent is away because they are working to make their (i.e. the kid's) life better. My father worked long hours, sometimes multiple jobs, all his life for little money, as did my mother. Even though they weren't around for some of my recitals or Christmas pageants, I respect them both that much more because I knew why they were doing it ... even as a kid. Kids aren't stupid though. If the parent is absent for selfish reasons, in order to fulfil their life and their goals, it will lead to bitterness and resentment. It will.
I wouldn't ever disparage him for it. He provided well for his family, and most of my favorite childhood memories are the times we spent together. To this day, I try to spend as much time with him as possible while I still can.
I can only hope that I give my kids as much of myself as he did.
> I had picked the date, not the judge, because I knew that the other side wasn’t ready. Delaying even a few days would have meant losing a crucial advantage. I wasn’t going to risk it knowing what was on the line for my client.
I don’t think this one counts as “absent because they had a lot to do.” This one is just prioritizing the kids second.
For me that’s the critical part. Her kids could still feel they don’t get enough of her time, but they’re not just abandonned.
As a kid I spent a lot of time with my grand mother and other outer family members, without my parents. It was fine, actually fun, and everyone seemed to feel responsible for my well being while I was with them.
I also feel this mother chose to prioritize her job because she actualy could, and wouldn’t be doing so if her kids were miserable.
It's affected my career choices. I started studying Comp Sci, as I felt it's a field where I can have more flexibility than my current field. This degree is getting closer and closer to completion and it's looking 95% likely that my career will be changing in January.
It's affected my love life too but I won't go into detail here.
One thing this article misses the mark on is the quote " I also remind myself that if I were a dad, I would be getting accolades for all the times I scheduled a doctor’s appointment or arranged a play date.".
My experience as a dad is that people simply don't trust my parenting skills or assume I'm simply helping the mum out. It's incredibly sexist and somewhat hurtful. There has been times I've been battling with my workload and then people drop innocent comments which feel like a knife in the back.
> My experience as a dad is that people simply don't trust my parenting skills or assume I'm simply helping the mum out. It's incredibly sexist and somewhat hurtful.
You and the author are talking about the exact same pervasive sexism from opposite perspectives.
GP is correct; these are in many ways two sides of the same sexist coin.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/02/different-worlds/
I've never understood this viewpoint - children are simply the most fascinating things!
They're born with next to no inborn knowledge and yet have the potential to learn about quantum mechanics. Someone with the same potential would only have learned about fire some hundred thousands of years ago.
In the early days you get to see a baby slowly mentally program the things we take so for granted we forget that you actually have to learn them - how to walk, how to speak, language.
YMMV but for me to see the world indirectly through the eyes of children is like rediscovering everything there is to the world we live in!
However, on the scale of hours and days they can be mind-numbingly boring, as anyone who’s played hide and seek with a four year old who repeatedly goes and hides in their bedroom cupboard can probably attest. I love my boy dearly, but I am so, so, bored of playing the first hour of Minecraft now - he loves it though, so every few days we start up a new world, and we mine our way down to some diamonds, at which point he loses interest.
I personally love Education Edition for the coding interface, but there is some other neat stuff in there as well.
Mind you, my first daughter is coming up on 2 years old, so there's a ways off until I get there. I'm just speaking as a teacher who uses it. My daughter is fascinating though - it's really interesting watching her figure out skills like sorting, and also discovering all the little ways my wife and I have unconsciously confused her with our use of language, which she then picks up without us realising it.
But in todays atomized and helicopter parenting with liability world, you can’t do that and thus parenting is a lot more work than it should be.
Childhood is long days and short years.
For us, this has meant quite a lot of shared cultural consumption. I've bought hundreds of story books 2nd hand, and read to them, and I think it has helped their vocabulary (which is amazing). We've seen tons of children's movies together, we've played Minecraft and other comp. games together, we often play board games. I have also built things for them, like a huge outdoor swing set and a crossword puzzle game to help them get started with reading - https://puzzlepirate.net (also available as a free Android app).
There are so many things you can do with or for your kids that is fun or challenging to you also, if you just use some imagination (and have the time).
Anyway, your comment about friends not being interested makes it sound as if you have no adult support whatsoever. It would probably help a lot if you could make new friends w people who have kids the same age. Where I am (Stockholm) it seems this tends to happen when people go on a longer stretch of parental leave - you automatically meet and start hanging out w families w small kids, whose parents are also on parental leave. I think it really helps having other adults around who understand - as emotional support if nothing else.
I bet there are parents groups, or even single-parent groups you can join, to get in touch w others like you.
Rest of it can be kinda monotonous? Like, getting my daughter from bed through breakfast, dressing up, and walking to kindergarten. Or getting her to walk all the way to her friends house for a play date. Or getting her dinner, showered, and to bed ...
I still like it, but the day to day is stressful and monotonous
With our best algorithms, you have to feed thousands and thousands of images for ML to be able to identify things like a certain type of animal.
And yet, my 14 month old can see a cartoon drawing of a penguin in her books a few times and then days later, recognize an actual photo of a penguin from a completely different source.
The human brain, even on an infant level is just so spectacularly amazing.
Yeah seriously. My wife and I have a six month old and simply because we want to educate her, we've both been reading way more than normal. My wife (who stays at home with our daughter all day) has already completed a university lecture series + read many books on ancient civilizations. I've started reading about philosophy on my bus ride to/from work.
Having children has only expanded our desire and ability to learn.
Is that guaranteed though?
This is probably the most heartwarming thing that I'll read in a long time. Made my day :-).
I feel you. My wife and I are managing two kids and I work from home, meaning I am home almost 24x7. I help my wife taking care of our children and I often get annoyed by the whole bunch of dumb or repetitive things we need to do to take care of them. Still, I love them more than anything in the world.
Parenting would also be easier on people if the US had sensible maternity/paternity policies and free childcare like we ought to have.
Contraception is pretty damn effective, and people often have children for entirely selfish reasons.
A dog isn't for christmas, and your kids aren't just cute toys until you get bored of raising them.
There are plenty of people who are willing, enough that we won't have population problems.
If you impose artificially high hurdles for parenting, you’re encouraging people to possible forgo a fulfilling life choice, because they fear they can’t live up to artificially inflated expectations for parenting. And that’s damaging.
What Ms. Bazelon is doing is the opposite of selfish. She’s providing for her family, serving her profession, and serving her community. She’s teaching her kids good morals by example: hard work and service. What kind of terrible lesson would it be to her children if she taught them that their school camping trip was more important than those things?
That you can rationalize anything to fit your choices.
Nobody can really know that without being an oracle. Neither choice is clearly superior but one is considered natural and the other is not.
Sacrificing some other person for a cause you believe in is certainly not a selfless act.
I'm not saying people that want to work 40/50 hour weeks shouldn't have kids.
I'm saying people who want to work 80 hour weeks shouldn't have kids.
They probably shouldn't have dogs either...
In most situations, if you tell people they shouldn’t do X without citing concrete evidence that X is bad, your viewpoint won’t be taken seriously. In the area of parenting, however, we switch off our brains, because we assign some mystical importance to biological parents spending time with kids, instead of alternative caretakers. In the case of the author:
> They were lovingly cared for by their father, their grandmother, my son’s preschool teacher and my daughter’s babysitter.
Many children, often in low income families, are raised primarily by grandparents and school. Are you prepared to say that those families shouldn’t have had children?
Let me know if you don't have access to the journal.
That's 2-3 times increased chance of measurable mental health problems if parents work outside of 9-5
If the worst parents working more does to children is a less happy childhood on average that’s a hard choice to condemn. Normal people send their children to child warehousing facilities where they’re taught to sit down, shut up and do as they’re told while subjected to busywork, boredom, ranking and the ennui of meaninglessness for over a decade instead of letting them grow and play and they don’t get judged much for it.
It's not like underpopulation is a problem.
Willing to what?
Having kids while prioritizing job over direct care and attention to them has been an accepted (and often expected) pattern for men for centuries. (And for much of that time for upper and often middle class [0] women, too, though their primary vocations weren't “jobs” in the usual sense.)
Should it be surprising or any worse that when women are sole or co-equal breadwinners, that the same is often true of women with jobs?
[0] “middle class” in the sense of the petit bourgeoisie, not the other common modern American usage, where it refers to the middle income segment which is almost entirely within the working class.
Sole breadwinner is not by definition prioritizing job over kids. Working 80 hours per week when 40 hours could provide your family with enough, is.
Men (and for that matter upper and often also middle class women in roles that aren't actually jobs, though that's also true of upper class men in either the hereditary aristocracy or th e capitalist haut bourgeiosie) prioritizing their job—or, where they don't have a job as such, their externally-focussed class role over personally providing direct care and attention to their children (which is what I said and what is, despite the less precise language, actually being discussed in the article), has, in fact, been widely historically accepted.
False. Most men throughout history had to work or their children would starve. Their requirement to work was forced legally by laws allowing wives to sue husbands that did not work and support their family.
For most of history before the industrial revolution, the standard model would have been a farm, where both mom and dad worked, but worked at home. The ideal has always been for moms and dads to stay home, until relatively recently -- certainly not centuries.
Lastly, if we even accept your claim to be true at all, it really would only be limited in scope to the very rich or at least the upper middle class, where men actually had careers 'worth' sacrificing for. Perhaps an attorney sees his work as meaningful and a source of advancement. I highly doubt a coal miner wanted to be in the mines longer because of career advancement. In fact, history is actually littered with the opposite -- working men demanding that they work less (see the labor movement).
More Examples:
- https://www.thesun.co.uk/fabulous/9340451/wish-mr-perfect-hu...
- https://www.cosmopolitan.com/sex-love/a28198301/cheated-on-e...
There is one difference: she boasted about it on a NYTimes editorial page. I would argue that suggests she may be on the spectrum. Her kids will read this. Their friends and classmates will read this. Terrible.
Psychology is pretty uniform in the observation that children need parents, preferably both, but just one is a massive developmental influence. There are minor benefits from they/them being biological but it isn't absolutely necessary, but a care worker, teacher, etc is not filling the same social niche with a child that a parent is. Its a job title in its own right that also has by far the most impact on developing functioning healthy human beings than any other. Its also a job you don't just quit or substitute for without lasting consequences, the role of a parent is to anchor children and provide an immovable stake upon their foundation.
You can absolutely hire a parent if you don't want to or have the time yourself to parent the children you make, but it is substantively harmful to deny them having parent(s) when they need them. If a mother wants to work a full time job while a spouse or even just long term domestic partner? wants to take on the job of being a (or more) parent(s) that works. If a father wants to do the same, that works. But kids still need parent(s), preferably two, and that is two full time positions to fill.
One quandary to think on is that society really doesn't organize or optimize for parental efficiency. We organize schools to lecture and teach to try to balance between quantity of children to a quality of education, but adults are just en masse making new lives and mostly playing it by ear on fulfilling parental responsibilities. We haven't tried to promote good parents to be parents by getting them more children - biological or not - to parent. As a civilization it feels backwards to me how what might be the most important job there is - developing future generations - is the one that is the least recognized for its value and importance. It isn't a career, it isn't prestigious, it isn't treated with the same scrutiny you would want to see in getting your plumbing fixed. But broken pipes are a much less substantive issue than mental malaise or physiological complications brought about by poor or absent parenting in the development of the billions to succeed us.
> They were lovingly cared for by their father, their grandmother, my son’s preschool teacher and my daughter’s babysitter.
Sounds like there were at least two family members watching the kids on a regular basis.
When am I neglecting my kids exactly? In the two hours of after school care between school ending and my coming home?
You're implying that there's a direct correlation between quantity and quality of parenting, that's a bold claim.
This autonomy had two interesting effects. On the one hand it definitely benefited me later in life, because I felt like I had a built-in direction. On the other I don't like it when people tell me what to do, particularly if they have an unearned position of power and don't really know what to do themselves, but have to "lead", by hook or by crook.
Some of my observations:
1) Kids have a great time with other kids, so don't feel bad about daycare. Having them at home full-time past the age of 2 is, I think, more about the parent than the child.
2) Sometimes kids just suck, and work can be a glorious escape.
3) School life in my culture (NZ) is still modelled like there's always one stay at home parent, which means you'll never be able to be there for every certificate, every kapa haka performance, and kids are okay about it so long as you communicate, and do get to the occasional one.
4) You can fit a lot of effective parenting into dinner table discussions and bedtime discussions
5) I'm really glad I'm a single Dad and not a single Mum because there are very few cultural expectations of me beyond working, and everyone acts like I'm amazing for just raising my kids. It's kinda insulting to both genders.
6) It's impossible to perfectly balance a 40 hour working week and family. Best you can aim for is a kind of homeostasis where work suffers for family one week and then family suffers a bit for work the next.
7) You will feel, at times, like you're letting down everyone equally, workmates and children both. And you just have to ride with it.
And I've found that workmates will notice your child related late starts or early finishes, and resent them. The only solution is communication. And a decent employer.
Our work culture also assumes two people families to an extent.
My girlfriend struggles with that quite a bit. And now that we're fully cohabitated and my work-from-home / lack-of-commute situation allows me to participate in more kids things that aren't accomodating to parents with traditional work schedules and typical commutes... I get heaps of praise from everyone, including her, for basically just not being a dick.
It's the flip side of the "women with careers are neglecting their children" and "men at the park are paedos!" mindset.
It's nice having positive feedback, but I'd prefer a society where it's unremarked upon.
And then we talk. Things that happened at school, on the bus, at work, in the news. Any teachable moments come up, you use them - especially good for reinforcing the values you're trying to impart by running through scenarios based on what happened.
Bedtime is the important one. Having 15 minutes alone with them, in a muted environment where they feel safe, is where they feel best able to express emotional stuff. Once again, easy to skip and do the multitude of other tasks, but too valuable.
And in terms of cooking, buying in bulk and cooking in bulk. Pastas, risottos, pies etc. I like stuff that's quick for after work, or can be cooked the night before and reheated. I'm not a very organised person so the last year has been a definite learning experience.
Yeah you’re getting praise for being there for your child, sometimes overbearingly so, like you were rare and precious.
Maybe it’s because you are rare and precious. Maybe most men are shits. Maybe you are one of the very few who aren’t.
Personally, I like children about as much as I like cats, but much less than I like dogs.
But I hate the unruly ones. Almost makes one yearn for the days of ritual infanticide.
We have an excellent daycare. My daughter spends three days a week crafting, playing outside with kids, baking, doing make-up etc. The carers have skills that I don't have and my kids get to enjoy that.
We both work four days a week so the kids get lots of parent time and we get a bit of a rest from them.
I just learned another one; leikskoli. Beats our 'barnehage' for kindergarten, that's for sure!
Førskole is a bridge between kindergarten and primary school - typically a few hours a week for the last few months in kindergarten.
We've been pretentious at least since I attended førskole some 35 years ago! Hah! :)
I find the western disinterest in raising their own children (and having them) fascinating. There seems to be a widespread ideal of trying to leave a legacy through deeds rather than through your own children. Much of the right wing is agitated at the whole thing because this is gradually reducing the population of an ethnic group they're quite fond of.
The racists are free to keep squeezing out as many kids as they want.
Your comment would be fine without the last sentence.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Century of the Self: https://youtu.be/eJ3RzGoQC4s
Hypernormalization https://youtu.be/F8YqRaZSZWo
Adam Curtis: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Curtis
1000 times this. If I take the kids to the store, or through airport security, or pretty much anywhere, women are practically running over to "help" me. Thank you but I got it. Go help that poor mom over there with three meltdowns to deal with, she needs it a lot more than me.
The other day we had a birthday party for my daughter, and some of the moms saw me prepping food and doing work while I gave my wife a chance to relax and talk to the guests. They actually told her they were surprised that I would "allow" her to take a break like that. Seriously?! First of all, she is "allowed" to do whatever they hell she wants, and secondly, how messed up is it that their immediate expectation is that mom should be working the whole time while dad gets to relax?
But my favorite story of all was I was in the bathroom at Newark airport, changing my daughter's diaper. A man walks in wear the most "New Jersey" outfit ever -- expensive suit, slicked hair, gold chains, etc. He said, "Where's the mom?"
"Outside."
"Why isn't she changing the diaper then?"
I said, "She didn't want to?"
He didn't even know what to say after that, his mind was so blown.
I heard a great anecdote about a Manhattanite visiting Stockholm on vacation. Lots of men pushing prams all around town. "My goodness, look at all the young male nannies in Sweden!"
More notable is perhaps the gender distribution on the playground. I do think it is easier for moms to connect/bond with each other. Like if I plan an excursion and wonder what friends of my kids could join, I find it more difficult to simply ask another mom. Might just be me, though.
I also know a lot of fathers that took parental leave for months at a time.
These are our kids, of course we take care of them.
The article refers to things like:
> But there is always another client to defend, story to write or struggling student who just can’t wait. Here are things I have missed: my daughter’s seventh birthday, my son’s 10th birthday party, two family vacations, three Halloweens, every school camping trip.
She didn't even try to balance...
She may come to regret not building a closer relationship with her children in the future, but it sounds like the children have other loving adults in their lives so they'll do okay.
Based on my experience going to college with a few kids like that, yes. They all resented their childhood and the fact that the only way to see their parents was to work in the restaurant.
One of my fears is that my kids will learn these bad American ideas from media. I saw my daughter watching a Disney show (Bunk’d), where a high achieving Asian girl was telling her parents they “pushed her too hard.” No wonder China is eating our lunch.
Slave like conditions can do that to a more moderate work-life balance culture.
If you don’t want your children to do this what are you going to do about it? Help them get real jobs without going to college? Accelerate their paths into professional jobs by accelerating their academic careers? Because if you don’t do something out of the ordinary you’re going to get pretty much the same results as other people in your position.
Kids need less money these days and are more focused on education vs work experience.
The only way for the US’ relative position not to decline with China’s rise involve megadeaths, just as after WWII it’s relative power could only decline.
That's an uncomfortable idea - growth of a nation being dependent on a few people working their ass off. Like sacrificial lambs. Though almost all of these people probably do it willingly.
I watched my poor Sikh friend exasperated with his two young daughters who desperately wanted a Christmas tree like all the other kids and bugged him endlessly about it. He lost. It was pretty funny. They've both now grown into fine young women who are proud of their Sikh religion, so no harm done.
The thing is, such a phenomenon exists. And kids pushed too hard may grow resentful or plain reject parents ideas and rebel. Not all them grow super succesfull. Plenty just grow feeling like failures.
It is possible to push children just right, of course. But there is such a thing as too much and those adults then complain (that is how I know).
China is eating our lunch? Excuse me?
But the folks criticizing the article aren’t just asserting that these things are good. They’re claiming that not having these things is so damaging that a woman who prioritizes her career over attending birthday parties and school events is a bad mother. But many children grow up to be perfectly well adjusted despite not having those things. That is evidence of the fact that, even if those things are “good,” they’re not “essential.”
My parents absolutely should have emphasized academics and my need to go to college to break out of the poverty trap my family was in. But they did that in violent and traumatic ways. They did that by using guilt and shame and burden as the primary engine to drive me to act. They are not alone in this. Friends of Asian-American heritage (East and South Asia) tell me their parents did the same.
Those things work when you're fighting for survival and then turn out to be incredibly harmful when you're not. It's taken me years of work and will take years more to undo that damage.
I understand your sensitivity to your daughter's situation. If you live in upper middle class America, and I suspect you do, your daughter is observing a deeply unnatural form of childhood. But there is a middle ground between squeezing performance out of young brains and being coddled into doing nothing. I hope for both of your sakes you look for it.
I’ve read if you accuse someone in the religion of abuse and the only thing you have is he said she said, then the accuser is essentially iced out and ostracized from their religious culture/society. This includes children.
Unless I’m mistaken, it does seem like the Witnesses are having children miss out on what you stated and in general seem like a bad example to bring up.
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For both parents working all the time, it is a negative for most children.
Communities demand and give different things. Birthday parties seem a very small thing to give up if an actual community is what you get in return.
Regarding accusations why should making accusations be costless? If you’re trying to drum someone out of a community and fail to bring convincing evidence they kick you out. It’s just a community deciding on its internal norms. The US legal system has different burdens of proof and punishments when it comes to slander but the US system is still available to them. Communities exist outside the state.
Even BYU, the church-owned school, now sells fully-caffeinated Coke on campus. This was a fairly recent development.
As well, members are encouraged to avoid any media that includes sexually explicit, violent, or otherwise negative content -- not only avoiding R-rated movies. The church teaches that people should be careful about their media choices and consume media that enlightens or edifies, not just entertains. Active members of the church definitely vary in how they interpret that, of course.
I do love your point about sacrificing some things and getting a community in return. I work as a software engineer and at the age of 25 I already have two kids. My wife and I definitely sacrifice for them, but I hope we can build a loving family that will give us social returns that are lifelong. Growing up, I had a large network of cousins and siblings that were closer to me than friends were. I know much of this is because of the influence of the church.
It is also true that being a member gives you a network of people -- people are always around to help you move in and out, they're always there every Sunday, etc. Members are assigned "ministers", two people who check up on them, are officially assigned to love them, and report back to the leadership of each ward (congregation) regularly about any problems the people they minister to may have. All this in addition to the friendships that naturally form with people you see once a week.
Sacrificing alcohol, swearing, and other things -- tithing, Sundays, a two year-mission -- seems like a small trade in comparison for the creation of relationships with people who love you and who you love in return.
This has nothing to do with being a community in my mind. A community would help it's people develop and not keep them in (mental) chains.
Not disputing your points, just would be nice to have an equivalent without the religion and other negative side effects
I do not understand why communities often morph in this way.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
this is true, these communities are walking on a thin rope. They are constantly in danger of falling out of balance.
> somethings not quite right with your faith. Else you would not fear independent thought.
I disagree. There is no indication that rationality and independent thinking are what is best for an individual. They have been hugely positive for humanity, but there is also freedom in submission. Being in a healthy community where you fully understand your role in life seems a lot better than being a nihilist (not the only outcome, but also not the worst one).
If you're wondering where the differences are, there are two critical ones. The GP's comment was mostly about personal experience, where your comment went generic—that's how we get boring flamewars. Had you shared personal experience in return, this might have been better. Second, your comment swerved into indignant rhetoric. When indignation levels spike up, the needle goes into the red for flamewar risk.
As a side point, I think you got your religions mixed up. That's a minor detail but it illustrates how generic the comment was. Generic comments on divisive issues are what we're most trying to avoid on HN, because they make discussion more repetitive and provoke other users into posting even more generically and indignantly (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20317078).
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I have friends who left the mormon church after decades because of these "ministers". They were always asking when the couple was going to have another baby and constantly prying into their lives and reporting back. They found it creepy.
When they finally decided to leave, it got so bad (mormons ambushing them in the strangest places with aggressive questioning) that they had to file for a restraining order to keep them away.
The churches stance on homosexuality didn't help either, but it was the ministers that were the most invasive part.
Are younger generations in the age of social media who are eager to share their b'day celeb pics set their value right? That's a thing to be pondered upon.
According to my children who went from not celebrating birthdays to celebrating them - yes.
I haven’t studied other children, so I can only make statements about myself. The only negative of my childhood regarding the lack of birthdays and whatnot is the inability to feign excitement for others’ celebrations as much as might be expected, simply because I don’t care about it for myself in the first place. It probably has hampered my ability to socialize or make networking connections in some situations where I wasn’t able to fit in.
Those scenarios are what you make of them. They're not always doom and gloom. :) Honestly I think a family business is a better situation than a draconican employer that expects one to devote their life to them.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
(We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20315373)
I was really responding to what I saw as the GP breaking other guidelines by not responding to the article, so I quoted the only relevant part of their comment and the appropriate part of the article.
I suppose I should have flagged their comment instead if I thought it was bordering on off-topic?
For example, someone sharing their personal experience about a marginally-related point may be off topic but isn't generic. But turning a thread like this into an argument about, say, the men's rights movement (as happened elsewhere)—that's generic and therefore breaks the guidelines.
A less clear case is the subthread right here that goes into a long discussion about birthdays and Jehovah's Witnesses. That's pretty off topic, and crossing perilously toward religious flamewar. On the other hand, it was weird enough not to count as generic—except where it swerved into atheism vs. religion stuff at the end.
What we're trying to avoid is getting sucked into the black holes of the hottest controversies that online forums can't seem to resist but that people never have anything new to say about. That's the purpose of the rule. On HN, the organizing principle is intellectual curiosity, and there's no curiosity in repetition.
https://youtu.be/GJMciK6xWrk
I'm not judging her preference on having a successful career - I'm the same actually - yet I don't plan to have children because of that very reason...
I remember that Dr Gabor Maté also talks a lot about the scars and potential trauma a child can be left with when neglected. I remember presence of both parents to be of paramount importance. And that's not "only" a problem for the child but for society at large.
I'd call her after school and chat for a while, only a to find out a bit later that she was in the middle of closing a huge deal!
This made me feel like a million bucks - to know that even though she was very busy, I was still important enough to have her full attention whenever I called her.
I always "felt" like I was more important than her work.
One of my 20-something peers walked back to our row where the pizza boxes lay, ruffled through them, sighed “its all cold” and walked back to his terminal.
Now, we’d been doing this for weeks.
Old fart #1 turns to #2 and says under his breath “You know, I gave up my marriage and kids to get us to the moon”
And so they did.
Beating the Russians to the moon isn't what caused their failing political and economic system to collapse. The Russians are still the ones who keep the ISS alive, and it's not meaningfully harming USA or helping Russia in geopolotical hegemony
I would posit that this mindset is broadly a disease and not a cure.
Being a father myself today, I do think kids can do with relatively little facetime. But the time that is devoted to them must be exclusive quality time that makes it clear you love them and that you are present. There are studies that have shown that if fathers take 30 minutes of exclusive attention for their kids every day, it has great benefits for the child‘s development.
Other than that, my Dad once said something along the lines of, "Life is a constant juggling act; you have your work ball, your family ball etc. However, your family ball is made of glass, so if you drop it, it will shatter and you may not be able to put it together again."
In such discussions, the image is always of a mother resigning from an interesting and important academic job. Presumably it is mostly academics who discuss such things, and NYT readers are also mostly academics. So when they think of mothers and careers, they think of interesting academic jobs.
In reality, most women (and men) don't have such interesting jobs. The most common job for women is shop assistant, followed by nurse (or vice versa, don't remember for sure - numbers from Germany a couple of years ago). Now nurse might be reasonably interesting, but not irreplaceable like that lawyer. And arguably, you would be doing the same job as at home (changing diapers), only not with your children.
Sorry it annoys me that this women styles herself like some sort of hero, when other people are forced to make that choice out of financial necessity.
Obviously it is a valid choice to prioritize her job, like she did. The annoying part is the claim between the lines that she is somehow special and going against the societal pressure.
Did you seriously just equate the work that nurses do with changing diapers?
It has some great ideas and pretty much somesup every thing. Watch little bit longer as he goes from one subject to another and then come back to point.
> pseudo intellectual
I'm afraid the burden of proof is on you for this one.
> regressive
He's pretty nuanced in fact, but you have to listen to him other than in the 30 seconds, out of context, videos being regurgitated on tweeter daily.
And again, develop, what are you talking about ? You have the right to disagree with someone but if you want to make it public you'll have to explain a bit more, we're not on Trump's tweeter here.
I'd recommend to listen to:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIeFt88Hm8s
https://player.fm/series/the-jordan-b-peterson-podcast-15392...
If all it takes for you to judge someone and hold such virulent opinions is "media appearances" you should probably reassess your position on who's regressive. These kind of comments have nothing to do here, feel free to rant on tweeter and reddit.
He is clinical physiologist and he has good depth of this kind of subject and I'm not right person to translate his views. But what I get is this
"Life is sacrifice at every level (He quotes and decipher bibles story) and you have to sacrifice the some things for your family and loved ones"
But I feel these above lines do not do justice for the video as I said it has so much to get and everyone has their own perspective to get the things.
Sure you might disagree with me or him but you have your own perspective and you should decipher the meaning by yourself.
But his identity politics argument and his equality of outcome is very true. In my country I am seeing the consequence of identity politics and groupism. Everyday lot of people being violent and some time it leads to deaths and lynching.
Another thing in my country is some group have certain quotas (equality of outcome) which leads to degraded products and performance and competent people are being ignored which can contribute much better.
Other than that I find some of his interview thought provoking.
How does that bring anything to the table ? I doubt 99% of the population would be as interesting if they gave speeches.
There are only a handful of people knowing their shit and sharing it in public for free. I don't see many people running around saying "Yoh Plato is shit no one should ever listen to him" even if they don't agree with his views.
Did you actually study him, as you seem to imply by making such strong statements ? I don't agree with a lot of his points but I have to admit that he has very interesting things to say about postmodernism, personal meaning, religions, &c. and as far as I know no one else is addressing these issues with that kind of depth in these days.
You can't have it both ways. If you are trying to "decipher and get" his thoughts how do you know he has a "profound and deep" understanding?
>> Sure you might disagree with me or him but you have your own perspective and you should decipher the meaning by yourself.
This is a discussion. The above sounds like you are prostelizing or advertising without participating.
1) Making sacrifice for Loved ones by giving priority to them instead of career.
2) Making sacrifice in personal lives(like children and your home duties) for greater good or humanity (giving priority to career).
Also he is saying lot of things about religious believes and stories which I am unaware of because I do not belong to same religion.
I can not make argument for you. It's very sensitive and deep topic and you should think and priorities as per your free will.
Everybody is responsible and capable of making their own decisions. We should listen to everybody but should take action as per our own beliefs and value.
Edit: I did not posted this because I am advertising him. I find it interesting and thought provoking as god(it might be made up) asks for sacrifice and we need to sacrifice to find our true-self.
If you are not able to summarize and explain someone else's point, then you don't actually grasp it intellectually. You only have a sense for it emotionally, and that is the fundamental problem with Jordan Peterson and his bread and butter. He preaches, not makes logical arguments, and is attractive to an emotional audience. Which is ironic given his premise.