"Certain areas within parts of the brain linked to attachment, nurturing, empathy and the ability to interpret and react appropriately to a baby’s behavior had more gray and white matter between 12 and 16 weeks than they did between two and four weeks."
For you father-programmers out there: did you notice any changes in your programming/work abilities around the 12-16 week mark?
I've always felt very child-focused by that point and working becomes more difficult. I've moved towards moving my work schedule around my kids rather than the other way around because I get very unhappy prioritizing work first.
So, without enough time with my kids, my abilities as a programmer absolutely plummet. I wake up early and work, spend time with my toddler, then finish work while he naps and when his mom is home.
You're so sleep starved you program like a turkey and have to try and do mundane, low risk things for much of the day. Simpler fixes, documentation, clean up technical debt in test cases etc etc. Limit tricky things for the morning after you've warmed up and keep that burst short. But this is of course from birth until n months.
I'm guessing the lifestyle changes are going to have an effect that is large and the effects discussed here, while they may indeed be statistically signficant (who knows?),
are going to have an effect so incredibly small by comparison that they really aren't worth considering. But that's pure prejudice on my part - we'll see if there's any data capable of rejecting that hypothesis.
The changes to your sleep are huge. Now if you've had twins... Yeah.
Based on the replies, I jokingly conclude that the increase in gray and white matter during these baby phases is to handle the cognitive dysfunction of sleep deprivation.
I wonder if sleep deprivation is related to raising children pre industrial era. It seems logical but I don't know much on this topic. :)
I had the opposite to the commenters above. I had the best ideas when attending to the baby, middle of the nights. I also started reading serious books (like geopolitical stuff) when my baby was falling asleep on my laps. I did some of my best and most efficient coding the first 3 months with the baby (when it was sleeping). I worked less, but better. My brain definitely shifted, I had an unparalleled motivation to do things. After 10 months it started to fade away and return to “normal”.
I was basically useless as a programmer at 12-16 weeks. I was also basically useless at 2-4 weeks, but that was largely because of the sleep deprivation and constant need to run around doing chores. (What they don't tell new parents: newborns spend 6-7 hours/day attached to the boob and do so in shifts of about 15 minutes on + 45 minutes off, so mommy basically has a full-time job breastfeeding and daddy has a full-time job doing everything else.)
I started to get some of my old coding mojo back around 8 months and at 18 months I'm IMHO better than I've ever been, but the newborn phase is basically a complete write-off. Parental leave exists for a reason.
> ...but the newborn phase is basically a complete write-off.
Good for you. The FANG (you can guess) company I worked for stack-ranked me at the bottom of the tar pit in my write-off year with zero increase in comp, followed by another quarter of intense improvement program after which they decided I still wasn't good enough. Disagreements ensued for three more quarters and then that was that. The result... unemployment.
Books and help manuals like to tell you newborns sleep for however many hours a day, to try and make it sound easy, but like you said - newborns only sleep for small periods at a time, including at night.
I spent an insane number of hours in the middle of the night bouncing on a swiss exercise ball, holding the baby, in nothing but my pants, in the dark, with the tv on (but muted), to coax the baby back to sleep. Honestly ... this sorta stuff needs to mentioned more to let prospective parents know what they're in for.
Since having a child, I've nothing but total admiration for any single parent - how they manage without a fulltime partner would be beyond my ability.
I always took off 3 months from work per baby. There's no point coding when you're always sleep deprived. Last year the company agreed to about half the salary, so I'd work from home on some things, or come in half the week or half a day as needed.
Then again I did notice I was very good at understanding baby talk.
Taking from some old notes of my 5 month old baby:
"eh eh eh", but no crying at 6 AM = "I need a diaper change" or "I'm hungry"
rapid kicking = excited
wide open arms while lying down = "pick me up"
"uh huh/mmm" with slight head inclining = yes.
when mother is saying something, baby laughs, turns head towards me, "uh huh/mmm" with inclined head = "mother is right" or "I told you so"
laughing and turning away = "I like that"
licking lips = "I want to eat whatever you're eating"
"aaaaaaaaaaa" = conversation or song
long, drawn out, angry crying = "I'm tired and I don't know how to sleep"
> “my parents are bad they aren’t feeding me they should be locked up”
lol I remember this, we called it the 'worst parents in the world' cry. It continues forever, the form changes as they get older but the message is the same
This reminds me so much of the Simpsons episode with Homer's long lost brother, Herb (he invents a machine to translate baby talk).
I think, from my own experience, babies learn to communicate in a two way fashion - they try noises and responses with their caregivers, and when the caregivers respond in an agreeable fashion, the baby stores that bit of communication away to try again later (and possibly reinforce).
So I think some of their communication is learned (signals for positive/negative), and quite specific to the baby-parent pair, while some will be instinctual (e.g. I imagine the excited kicking to be related to an adrenal surge or something, and early-infant crying is definitely an instinctual distress signal)
agree. We did some infant sign language (using what seemed to us like very exaggerated motions for “milk” “more” “diaper” and a few others I can’t recall now). I was amazed (and slightly relieved) when each child could express themself a bit.
I'll echo others on this thread and say at 12-16 weeks your work abilities are dominated by lack of sleep/just recovering from lack of sleep.
However, I think the implication is that these changes stick around. After we finally hit our "parenting rhythm" around 6 months to a year, I did find that many of the soft skills were coming easier to me than they had before I was a parent. I found was getting better at doing presentations, reading emotions/intention, doing mentoring, and organizing others to accomplish goals, Now correlation is not causation, it could also be I was just transitioning into a more senior role anyway, and I've got a sample size of 1, but I'd like to propose a mechanism: constantly practicing my public speaking by reading "The Napping House" to a miniature tyrant who communicates only through facial expressions and screaming, is your responsibility to teach everything to including successfully eating food, and requires a logistics train on par with an Army brigade just to leave the house changed my brain and resultded in transferable skills.
I took three months off each time. I suspect I'd have been very sub-par in a work context as like others have mentioned, the overriding change was lack of sleep. We definitely felt zombie-like for some good proportion of that time. Perhaps the extra brain matter was trying to compensate for running on empty? :)
We organised with me as evening shift - so mum could get a little uninterrupted sleep, and she picked up the morning shift.
I became unbeatable at catching & resolving pages in the 'wish I was dead' hours (1am-5am) with our second. Hot tea & wrapped in a blanket trying to raise my body temperature out of the depths of the circadean rhythm downward cycle so my brain would switch from sleep to awake mode
I'm curious what the relation between child-rearing and balding might be, if any. The old-wives tale is that men needed to be evolutionarily "pushed" to settle down, and actually take care of their kids. I would think a drop in testosterone would actually have the reverse effect though, and reduce balding for those susceptible to dht.
That has not been my experience. During my dating period (about 5 years ago) I was regularly told that my full head of hair was a pre. Though there could be bias there since the ones who care obviously were more likely to seek me out.
My experience is that women - like men - have preconceived notions of attraction that are easily circumvented, to make you more overall attractive enough.
Full head of hair is a qualifier, without it different things are needed to get yourself an in. The same logic goes for many attributes are considered qualifiers that aren't.
Yes, there are some men that expend very low energy and have women seemingly flock to them. I've seen bald men in this circumstance, and full haired men in this circumstance, I would say it is a very low weighting on anything.
Balding though seems to function different than bald.
It felt like a mental "click" but not like you get when you have been trying to solve a puzzle... it felt like a mental " gear change ".
My thought processes changed order or priority, Things that I felt were important before were suddenly less important and I think I things from a different angle (not just life stuff but problem solving approaches.).
its really hard to describe.
What I can say is that having a second didnt do a damned thing... lol whatever change was going to happen only happened on the first.
My first thoughts were that it was like that, but I realized after a few weeks that I was thinking like that at work as well, when nowhere near the kid.
> Things that I felt were important before were suddenly less important
I definitely felt a change in perspective like this. Sitting in a 1hr long meeting, going over something which could be done in 10 mins, and the whole time thinking "none of this even matters, there's a human life at home which I helped create!".
I was hoping this would explain my weight gain but I suppose I have to accept that replacing daily workouts with 3 bowls of ice cream and magic shell may be the culprit.
Cut out sugar, bread, and liquids with empty calories. Eat meat, fruits, and veggies -- even frozen ones. You'll drop weight very fast switching to high meat and veg, and dump the carbs/sugars.
For those of you who are skinny and want to bulk up and don't mind eating somewhat bad food: Eat lots of sugary candy and junkfood like potatoe chips. I find it's the easiest way to get fat.
My son is 10 months old. In the last month I've been able to start jogging, playing football (soccer), and I'm hoping in the next couple of weeks to restart Gymnastics and Olympic lifting training.
I don't know how much weight I've put on, but I certainly don't enjoy how I feel and look now.
Being able to exercise again has been a major milestone for me.
I find lack of sleep severely impacts my ability to stick to a diet, as well, as I find it far harder to resist temptations when I'm not rested. Combining reduced willpower with reduced amount of time to make proper meals is not great.
I also see this pattern. I've maintained at least some level of exercise throughout raising three kids, but somehow I have a strong desire to eat, and the willpower required to shed the weight is really all-consuming. When my last (of 3) goes to college next week I wonder if anything will change.
That's a big change, all the best for the next phase of your life!
Getting into a more regular exercise routine might be a good thing. Weightlifting works well for myself, alas it does nothing to curb the appetite. :) But it's a great way to relax the mind and get a break from everything. It helps produce testosterone as well, supposedly.
Yeah, weightlifting is the problem- it makes me hungry. I now do a four-day split: two days weights; two days core-conditioning. I've been pretty good about regular exercise all my life- with large (months) excepted for big change-of-life things like moving, having a kid, and so on. At the time if felt like I was falling behind if I wasn't exercising, but looking back it was only a small perturbation to my overall habits.
So if you find yourself likewise falling off the wagon, cut yourself some slack. You're playing the long game.
Now if I would just cut my serving sizes in half! :D
I’ve piled on the weight since our second was born. I attribute it to the reasons mentioned here and also that I’ve not been cycling to work for the last several months. We bought a new home and don’t currently have a place to store my bike so it’s been languishing in my office. So I take the bus because owning two cars is prohibitively expensive here in Europe. The bus is slower than car and bike so I’m rushing out without breakfast and eating junk when I get to work. On the bust home I’ll often snack on more junk.
All that changes today as we’re finally getting a garden shed and I’ll be back in the saddle.
always interesting to see the differences in commute times per vehicle. Where I am now, it's just over 7 miles to work, cycling is generally faster than the bus, bus is much faster than car (bus lane for > 50% of the journey).
It’s been interesting as my commute changed from 7km to 18km to 22km in the last year.
The 7km commute was a no brainer by bike. It took a leisurely 20 minutes where as the car would be much the same with lots of tedious traffic. Bus wasn’t an option on this route.
When I changed job my commute was 18km across the city. The car route involved a toll on a congested motorway or through stop start city congestion. The bus route required two buses with various degrees of waiting time made worse on the way home because of the one specific bus I needed that always appears unreliable. The car would take at least one hour bus would take up to two hours and the bike about 50 minutes.
Now that we’ve moved home I’m even further away but there’s a direct express bus that takes just 70 minutes. The car route is better, no toll and better connected, but is still an hour in traffic and the bike is about an hour.
Cycling is great because you arrive to work energised, but it’s tough to do everyday and still have energy for the kids at the weekend, so I’ll buy an ebike and cheat.
lots of ebikes around nowadays. I only get annoyed at them when they pass me going up the harder hills. And that's because I'm jealous of them, not actually annoyed!
our bike club members assure me that an ebike isn't all easy sailing. I believe them! With how heavy the ebikes can be, you can't just be sailing along on the battery, not putting in any effort, and expect to go very far.
I am trying out to change my behaviour right, so I fast from 20:00 in the evening to 12:00 during the day and try to eat properly between 12 and 20.
So far it's much easier to cut out junk food because I think the whole morning about what I need to eat during lunch. I also need to figure out my relationship with the feeling of hunger, which the fast gives me the possibility to do.
Ended up being full after eating 3/4 of a hamburger last day. I generally eat two with ease.
I gained around 15kg, less sport more food, my daughter is now 1 year and I lost 18kg the last 5 months through diet and sport. That said it takes some discipline, you'll have to get used to a shedule together with your partner. All my private computer time is now past 20h when my daughter is asleep, training time is after work switching each day with my gf. Dont worry you'll get alon
Hey, me too. Was certain it would be about getting fat. Thing for me is, I was not exercising before, same weight for 10 years and I’m not sleep deprived at all with our 3 months old. But I do eat out more, and have a tendency to not really care what I eat - food has become fuel. I’m kind of suprised by the whole thing. Not sure what to do because I wasnt doing anything before :)
I'm in better shape than ever, and it’s thanks to free childcare at the YMCA. Getting a break from the children is the most motivation I've had to drag myself to the gym.
When my son was born, he didn't sleep well, so I didn't either. My wife has a career and I was an equal partner in his care. It didn't help that I was working 80+ hours a week on something that was key to the success of the small company I worked for. Add in stress eating, and cutting out exercise due to perceived lack of time, and I gained 10-15lbs a year until my son was 4 or 5.
My son is 13 now, and its only in the last few years that I've really started to take care of myself. I've started exercising, stopped eating junk, and tried to make time for sleep. The result is I've lost 60lbs over the last few years, and am in better shape than I've been since highschool. However, I still don't sleep as well as I did before he was born.
My advice to new dads is: Take care of yourselves. Eat right. Don't cut out exercise to save time.
Honestly, you won’t. But until your kid is in full time school a 20-30 minute workout even everyday is eminently doable. Run around the local park, pull ups on a bar in the door way, press-ups, lots of exercises you can do to stave off muscular and skeletal atrophy which is what most of us at desk jobs literally suffer from due to chronic inactivity.
I totally agree. I had an elliptical machine in a nook outside my home office that I walked by every day. I wish I'd have just given up 30 minutes a few times a week rather than eating a bowl of ice cream. Maybe I would have only gained 20lbs and not 60.
You really don't need a gym. Get a pull up bar and some gymnast rings and just do what you can when the child naps. Even better add a bike trainer for cardio since you can't leave the house to run anymore either.
Caring for a toddler means being shackled to a creature that is entirely dependant on you, but there are still ways you can work in some self care while taking care of them.
I would definitely recommend going for calisthenic training with an emphasis on isometrics around young kids, rather than weights(equipment and prep time) or intensive cardio(too much time-on-task). Holding a bridge, squat-and-reach, or a downward dog for 30 seconds while the kid crawls around is feasible, and a few rounds of that daily will do a huge amount of good.
Has there been any studies on adopting a baby? Does it yield the same results on men? If yes, then it might as well be a matter of social construct, where a new vulnerable addition to the group needs protection for example.
Another curious question, it would be interesting to see the impact of adopting a cat or a dog on men’s testosterone levels.
> Another curious question, it would be interesting to see the impact of adopting a cat or a dog on men’s testosterone levels.
Very interesting idea though. But all of this fathering thing is related with continue one's bloodline I guess. Humans are very motivated to maintain their lineage. Adopting pets may be related with another topic.
> But all of this fathering thing is related with continue one's bloodline I guess.
Can I safely assume you haven't adopted any children? I'm a parent of two adopted kids (now mostly grown). If you think what motivates me is any different than what motivates other fathers, you would be terribly mistaken.
And here is my turn to speak without knowing: I imagine that if a father is too attached to the idea of the continuation of his genetic legacy, it may pressure the children to fulfill the father's idea of a legacy rather than find their own path.
I'd guess the idea of this study is not that having a child of your own somehow directly alters your brain biologicaly, but the experience itself is just that intense. I find it much more interesting, the fact that most of the changes mother experiences might not be the "nature's wonder", but lasting, painful, traumatic and exciting experience itself that affects one's brain.
Edit: And that itself has much deeper relation to a biological child than to adopting one. Not that adopting isn't significant or emotional, it's simply not that varying level of experience.
> Another curious question, it would be interesting to see the impact of adopting a cat or a dog on men’s testosterone levels.
I would compare this analogy to the opposite and unfortunate experience like the death of a close one. Losing someone that's biologically linked to you can be really hard even if you weren't that emotionally attached to that person.
By comparing that to losing a friend outside of your family circle, which is also a very harsh experience, it seems that biological line would be an emotional line deeply attached to a person no matter what experience one has.
> And that itself has much deeper relation to a biological child than to adopting one. Not that adopting isn't significant or emotional, it's simply not that varying level of experience.
How do you know your child is actually biologically yours? Human fathers have no biological/natural means of identifying a child as theirs. So your hypothesis that having your own child va adopting is different does not stand.
The father - child bond is a mental construct and I see absolutely no reason why adopting is lesser than biologically fathering a child.
When conceiving children biologically, if you do not have reason to believe your partner has had sex with other men, the natural assumption is that the child is yours.
Also, family resemblances do exist. Their absence doesn't disprove parentage, but their presence is evidence for it.
When adopting, if you were not sexually active prior to adoption and have not donated sperm, you can be certain the child is not biologically yours. Even if you were active or a donor, you can still be very confident the kid is likely not yours.
I think adoption is a wonderful thing and I am not trying to undercut it, but it seems entirely possible to me that those differences could impact the bond between a father and child.
Exactly. Stating that an adoption is same as having a child of your own, is going against all empirical evidence that a person has great emotional changes upon finding out about your own biological relation to someone. Maybe it is entirely psychological, but idea of a biological relation affects a person a great deal.
I think most of the confusion here is coming from the idea that psychology can't be related to biology. However, I firmly believe that biology is the base of the psychology and you cannot alter psychology without altering the biology itself.
Typical non-paternity rate among people with self-reported high-confidence in paternity are around 2%. (That’s much higher than I’d have thought, but lower than the commonly cited 10% figure, which is driven by a selection bias in who takes paternity tests in the overall case.)
I explicitly stated that experience of biologically delivering a child is affecting both of parents, NOT on a biological basis but strictly on the level of THE experience itself. I could have been clearer by stating "biologically delivered child by mother", instead of the "biological child", but I have not, in any sense, reffered to a biological child-father connection being relevant to anything.
What may have confused you is that I stated that the idea of being biologically related to someone, has a mental effect that creates some emotional attachment - yes, due to the biological relation as a social construct. That was an additional idea to compare it to adopted cat/dog/child analogy.
Trivial option: if cohabitating with the mother, I could see pregnancy having effects (via pheromones, or just behavior) that would be completely skipped over by adoption. Obviously it's not strictly a "does this child have 50% of my DNA" thing, but it does differentiate between biologically having a child and adopting.
If i recall correctly, men who are bonded (via sex of course given the huge oxytocin releases) to their childrens mother and who saw the mother throughout pregnancy and were sure there was no cheating have a higher affinity to that child and this can be measured hormonally. Its not 100 percent but probably good enough for natural selection. Also marriage and pair bonding is rather common among our closely related primate brethren
Edit: also the testosterone stuff is mostly a myth in the sense that, while testosterone of new fathers drops, it also recovers some months after the baby is born and older. So you get some months of baby snuggles and then you're back with your old libido. Also, men with kids are way more attractive to women (including their wives) anyway.
1. Division-of-labor, specialization of trade... although it might not fit every feminists' "equality of outcome, share everything" political-correctness, it doesn't make combined net income much sense (or cents) to risk a $300k income with sleeplessness/low-productivity vs. an $80k one if one spouse (assuming spouse isn't a lawyer, doctor or engineer) can be at home full-time, or both as full-time parents with parental leave policies/laws or take a sabbatical. Dumping/delegating mundane tasks onto a high income earner doesn't jive with common sense. Also, automate and delegate as much minutia as possible outside to contractors and domestic workers (cooking, cleaning, construction, yard-work etc.) of one's wheelhouse to have more family, couple & work time. If you make $80-$600/hour USD, don't waste your time doing low value tasks that others could do more cheaply for you.
Depends on what you consider to be worse, I guess. On reddit you get many of the blatant fucks. The 4chan memers, the blatant racists, the unabashedly sexist incels. They all know who they are, what they're doing, and they practically do it for fun.
On hn, you seem to have the same demographics, but they either have no idea about what they're actually saying or they're smart enough to argue that it's okay and sound like they've almost made a legitimate argument.
Making HN worse while criticizing it seems incongruent and doesn't help anything. We've banned that account (an obvious troll: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=ijiiijji1). Meanwhile this other offtopicness just adds noise, and supercilious noise to boot. If you're going to judge a site by the trolls it gets, every site is worthless.
> Dumping/delegating mundane tasks onto a high income earner doesn't jive with common sense
From the article: "Caring for your child, therefore, produces not only a strong bond but a neurochemical reward, inducing feelings of happiness, contentment and warmth"
I suspect that some of the "mundane tasks" you have in mind are exactly the ones that produce this bond - like changing a diaper when you hear your baby crying at night. That's probably difficult if you're using earplugs, and I guess such tasks might not make sense for some high income earners, though.
I am sure the author means well. However, this makes little sense from an evolutionary standpoint. Although humans have evolved far more than most animals on this planet, the basic idea of evolutionary biology remains the same. In the wild, males have to hunt (provide food), protect the new born(s) and their mate(s) from threats. Therefore having the same level or higher levels of Testosterone is a biological imperative. Testosterone makes the male stronger and more aggressive. Both are very useful traits from an evolutionary standpoint. I cannot imagine human males diverging too much from this basic framework.
Coming to today's workplace, after childbirth there is a drop in productivity of male employees as they adjust to their new reality. However, I have observed men become more diligent and aggressive at their jobs. I only imagine thats because they have a stronger sense of responsibility to provide for their partner & offspring. Whether or not Testosterone levels change is a different matter.
I don‘t doubt the results, but I also wouldn‘t exclude a causation/correlation 101 fail.
Just thinking back at my own first years with kids, the workload was so tough I neglected most testosterone producing activities (sports, action, male bonding).
It's not widely accepted that humans are more evolved than other animals. Whether males are the hunters or not depends on the species. In lions, the males are more concerned with territory while it is the females who hunt.
The species closest to us all don't hunt. They're opportunistic omnivores.
Evopsych explanations can often be used to argue both sides of any issue. For example, T is implicated in male aggression, which is useful when fending off predators both animal and human, but dangerous when you have a helpless, often extremely irritating Bundle of Evolutionary Fitness around. T is also thought to be involved in mate-seeking behaviour, which one may wish to downregulate for a while after successfully reproducing in order to devote resources to infant survival. Testosterone is also metabolically expensive, and those costs may be paid at the expense of the immune system. It might be advantageous to upregulate immune functions when an immuno-compromised neonate is around.
You and the author could both be correct, but neglect important components of the testosterone fitness package.
I'm not sure if being very aggressive is useful if you have a small child. Also, testosterone increase could lead to searching for new mates, thus lowering chances of survival for mother and child.
Most reliable method in my own experience: simply eat less.
Eat your normal amount of meals, shovel it in your mouth, but stop before finishing the whole portion. I eat maybe 75% of each meals and toss the remaining bits. Do it for a couple months and watch the weight magically shed off.
It works because it requires no change in meal-type habits; it’s simply fewer calories. End of the day, that’s always the goal and this way is the most direct and simple
When the meals come where it’s hard to stop at 75%, I force myself to toss my napkin and utensils on the plate ensuring the food is now “dirty”. So altogether, it’s very few behavior changes make for a foolproof method.
It is quite rational but it's difficult to be rational when you're hungry; it's easier to cut on food when you have calm down your stomach. Like don't go shopping when hungry, you will buy more unhealthy food.
This approach is extremely ineffective for me. I find I have a lot of will-power before I start eating, but once I begin it's very hard to get myself to stop. The best solution for me is to skip meals, and then allow myself to eat larger meals when I do eat. For instance, if I eat two meals a day instead of three, my lunch and dinner might be 10-20% larger than they would have been had I eaten breakfast, but that's still significantly less total calories for the day.
I think the best method is to understand your own patterns, and to find ways to reduce caloric consumption which are going to require the least amount of will-power for you and will cause the least amount of psychological stress. The exact method is going to be different for different people.
I have been fasting for a month now and I have lost a solid 6kg. I started with one meal a day (OMAD) and then I started skipping a day twice a week for a total of 5x 24hr fasts and 2x 48hr fasts. This week I completed a 72hr fast.
One reason I like it is that it requires the least planning and mental load. I eat what I want as much as I want (except sugar) and almost no matter what I do it works out to be less than my maintenance calories and I lose weight because I can't eat 4k calories in one sitting. The simplicity of it gives me less breaking points, and the ability to "eat whatever I want" makes planning for a big meal in 2 days a good reward to keep going.
The beginning is very hard and it's mostly due to sugar addiction. Many people say switching to keto first to wean off sugar makes fasting much easier.
To answer your questions:
1. Hunger comes and goes in waves, but mostly it just goes. Mentally I become more focused and clearer the longer I am into my fast, and overall I no longer get the fog from overeating or too much sugar.
2. I take a standard multivitamin GNC brand. When I feel light headed/have low blood pressure I drink a salty bone broth. Some people have their own electrolyte recipes like snake juice you can look into.
3. I go for a set amount of time. I found that it's very difficult if I'm just fasting for "as long as I can" because when the hunger comes I break. If I have a set breakfast time it's much easier to carry on until then.
Yeah I have also found intermittent fasting to be an excellent tool in the toolbox when I want to reduce a bit of body-fat. As you say, for me it's easier to follow a simple rule-based diet like time-restricted eating than it is to track and measure calories and macronutrients.
I also had success with a ketogenic diet, but in my experience that's a bit harder to stick to, since there's a lot of hidden carbohydrates in food, and it's also the kind of diet you find yourself explaining all the time like when you have to turn down the cookie your colleague made, or you order a hamburger without the bun at a restaurant. TRE offers many of the same benefits, but has almost no impact insofar as how you live your life.
> Hunger comes and goes in waves, but mostly it just goes.
Interesting thing about the hunger pattern you described: subjective experience of hunger maps pretty well to the hormone Ghrelin, which tends to peak close to your normal meal-times, and then naturally subsides afterwords whether or not you have eaten. So the science points to the fact that hunger is very much something you can "wait out".
> I started skipping a day twice a week for a total of 5x 24hr fasts and 2x 48hr fasts. This week I completed a 72hr fast.
It's important to be cautious when attempting longer fasts. I know a lot of people have subjectively good experiences with multi-day fasts, but I saw a talk where the presenter showed evidence that long fasts (more than 72 hours) can cause long-lasting metabolic changes which weren't recovered even several years later.
> I know a lot of people have subjectively good experiences with multi-day fasts, but I saw a talk where the presenter showed evidence that long fasts (more than 72 hours) can cause long-lasting metabolic changes which weren't recovered even several years later.
I thought one of the benefits of fasting was long-lasting metabolic changes (for the better).
So my understanding is that there are positive changes associated with spending time in a state of ketosis, which is brought on by fasting as well as extremely low-carb diets: especially in the case of people who are already suffering insulin-related metabolic damage (like diabetes, prediabetes, or insulin insensitivity), there's evidence nutritional ketosis can help to halt or reverse that damage.
What the talk I linked in the other comment talks about is something different: there's evidence that prolonged periods of severe calorie restriction can make your metabolism's bias move more toward storing calories and away from expending energy.
I was kinda in the same boat. Just getting a bit “chunkier”. Was 220lbs (some was also water weight from creatine) and now I’m 180lbs (I’m 6’1 if that helps). I tried intermittent fasting and it definitely worked for me. Related to your questions
1. For me, I never really experienced brain fog while IF. If anything, I seem to get more fog after eating regular/larger meals. When I was really hungry, drinking water and/or coffee (Starbucks double shots) worked for me. After a while you get used to hunger, and I seem to work better when I’m hungry vs when I’ve eaten a typical meal. If I’m seriously so hungry I’m getting a headache (which happens) id only have something with protein, absolutely no carbs (i.e lunch meat, eggs, nuts)
2. Don’t have too much knowledge or experience on gallstones. I took fish oil supplements occasionally and cut out creatine, but that’s about it.
3. Not 100% sure based on wording, but I was doing IF for about 6 weeks and lost ~20lbs. I ate from 6pm to 10pm, slept typically 1am to 7-8am. Only coffee and water during the day.
Now at 180lbs and not on IF or a strict IF schedule, I typically just have coffee in the mornings, a light lunch if I eat, and a typical dinner. 30 mins cardio 2-3 days a week, compound lifts 2-3 days a week.
> I seem to get more fog after eating regular/larger meals. ... After a while you get used to hunger, and I seem to work better when I’m hungry vs when I’ve eaten a typical meal.
Yeah I seem to find that a bit of mild hunger (not starvation or malnutrition) is good for the mind. I have at some points in my life found myself in a bit of a dampened state, where I am constantly either a bit lethargic from the last meal, or a bit preoccupied thinking about what I'm going to eat next.
I would love to understand the physiology more, but I have a pet theory that your brain gets a bit more "switched on" when you make calories and nutrients a bit more scarce for yourself, and that maybe when you let yourself eat whatever you want whenever you want, that survival instinct gets dialed back a bit.
I've had the same thought. My pet theory is that digestion is actually a much more exhausting process then we give it credit for, and all the chemical changes happening while you absorb nutrients have a toll on mental energy. Food availability and modern 3 big meals a day culture means we never really have any time when we are not digesting.
After trying fasting, when I see a snake with a full belly sleeping in the grass like it's dead it makes total sense to me. That's what digestion feels like.
https://nobaproject.com/modules/hormones-behavior here it says that a change in hormone levels can trigger a change in behaviour, but on the other hand it can be the result of changed behaviour. For me as a laymen it is not clear how to read all this.
Looking into the T drop in fatherhood, the original study seems to account for self reports of 'sleep quality' but I wonder if sleep deprivation is not still a confounder in this finding.
Annedoctally as a recent father of a 6 month old, I would likely self report a good sleep quality in a questionnaire. However, objectively I know I sleep about 5 hours 30min yesterday evening, which would be sufficient sleep 'deprivation' to impact T production.
Also I think parents in general will also have strong bias to not want to acknowledge their own child as a 'nuissance' in a survey/questionnaire.
My key point is that it would be important to reproduce this finding with actual sleep tracking instead of self-reporting sleep quality, to confirm if this is indeed linked with a bonding/interaction mechanism with a child or an unfortunate secondary effect of sleep deprivation.
> Annedoctally as a recent father of a 6 month old, I would likely self report a good sleep quality in a questionnaire. However, objectively I know I sleep about 5 hours 30min yesterday evening, which would be sufficient sleep 'deprivation' to impact T production.
When our 9 month old started to sleep through the night (at around 4-5 months), we'd get between 5-6 hours of sleep, which after the interrupted sleep of the previous 4 months, felt like a full night's sleep but this is sleep deprivation territory, specially given the fact that it was 7 days a week.
I know I could only survive on this little sleep because I wasn't exercising.
> Also I think parents in general will also have strong bias to not want to acknowledge their own child as a 'nuissance' in a survey/questionnaire.
I think this is one of the biggest taboos in Western society:
Anything about a newborn/small child must be 100% positive
This is absolute bullshit
I can see the downsides of having a child without loving him (in my case) any less
People would respect you more if you kept the sexist bullshit to yourself.
Or better yet, the reply that you will inevitably have to this comment? Don't post it and instead reflect on why one might view you as sexist, then attempt to change your behavior to reflect what you've learned.
Not the same person, but it was not necessarily sexist. Not everyone is trained in the art of threading the line between offense and social justice. The same meaning could (possibly) have been written in SJW terms
Being a dad, whilst rewarding in its own rights, can also be hard AF. Throw in a diagnosis of ASD+ADHD with therapies etc that must be managed, and the pressures just sky rocketed.
Managing his behaviour feels like an everlasting uphill battle. So much energy is drained, especially during meltdowns, causing frictions in the whole family.
So in order to be able to look after him I also need to look after myself. Getting enough sleep, some decompression time, looking after my body and still performing well at work is an everlasting struggle.
I don't expect people not in my situation to understand. At least I'm lucky in that it's "high functioning" we're talking about, even as much as a lot of people take objection to that term. But I know with effort he has every opportunity to thrive.
Nonetheless, in a market where as an engineer you need to stay on top of new stuff constantly ... yep, it's tough. We do it because we must.
Edit: Some additional thoughts.
As difficult as it sometimes is, being a parent is also a source of great joy. The responsibilities truly grow you as a person, and you kind of learn to cope. It's not something that's all at once either, I mean, you take it day by day, and you just learn.
As for work, for me it has helped that I'm truly passionate about what I'm doing, so have enjoyed learning about the new tech. I'm not saying I've got the same amount of talent, but it's amazing what persistence and a lot of deep dives into e.g Pluralsight can offer. As I grow older I'm more aware of my limitations, and picking the right horses (not just one) is über important.
Picking the right employer is equally important; being up front about the situation can yield amazing results.
Some people grow. Others dump almost everything on their spouse and a deep resentment grows in the marriage. You envy the good times they have and the stories they have, but not their life as there is obviously a lot a pain at home. Kudos to you, it sounds like you are doing it right. Hang in there.
Thanks, much appreciated. I've made lots of mistakes but keep trying to improve. Setting expectations for my new employer that I share the load for son's appointments, and finding one that accepted this, was probably relationship-saving decision making as such.
We have it good in software in that we can work remotely, and flexible hours. Sure it comes at a certain cost ("always on") but for myself the benefits certainly outweigh drawbacks.
The people hit hardest by this are women. Society places much, much higher expectations on the wrt motherhood than it does for fathers.
I know a huge number of women who love their kids but deeply mourn their lost independence and career opportunity they might have had without them, to say nothing of the profound physical impact of carrying a pregnancy. Women understand these issues really well, they just don’t feel comfortable talking about them with many men.
Just as society places much higher expectation that mothers will take care the child, society also places a much higher expectation that fathers will continue to go to work. Fathers with interrupted 5hrs of combined sleep are expected to do the exact same workload and work performance as they did had when they got uninterrupted 8 or 9hrs of sleep.
Talking about who got "hit hardest" is kind of pointless. Society expectation on fathers and mothers are formed from restricted gender roles. There are both women and men that feel extremely restricted from this. There is no objective "worse" fate to be either forced to go to work when you want to take care of the kids, or forced to take care of the kids when you want to go to work.
> There is no objective "worse" fate to be either forced to go to work when you want to take care of the kids, or forced to take care of the kids when you want to go to work.
Yes, but that’s not what grandparent was talking about. They were writing specifically about the expectation that parents unconditionally think their children are the best thing that ever happened to them. The burden of this specific expectation falls much more heavily on mothers.
You’re cherry picking and responding to the example. The broader point is this, and in my experience as a (male) parent it’s true:
> Talking about who got "hit hardest" is kind of pointless. Society expectation on fathers and mothers are formed from restricted gender roles. There are both women and men that feel extremely restricted from this.
A lot of this is stuff Americans have done to themselves. They all want a huge house in the suburbs with two huge gas-guzzling SUVs in the garage, so that necessitates both parents working to pay for all this largesse.
If Americans lived in dense cities with small living quarters and took public transit to work, they wouldn't need to spend so much money on housing and transportation, and they wouldn't feel the need to women to work full-time to keep up this lavish and unsustainable lifestyle.
I agree that lifestyle choices often require both spouses to work. However, it's not simply due to suburban American 'largesse'. I know plenty of people who live in France in comparatively tiny apartments or homes, who still feel the need for both spouses to work to make ends meet.
The frugal living needed to be a stay-at-home mom or dad tends to be rare regardless of location, but it's not impossible.
>I know plenty of people who live in France in comparatively tiny apartments or homes, who still feel the need for both spouses to work to make ends meet.
What kinds of careers do these people have? If they both have low-paying jobs, then that's unfortunately understandable. But the McMansion-and-2-SUV-owning Americans I derided earlier aren't people with low-paying jobs, those are people with high-paying jobs who frequently refuse to live below their means; if they lived in a small condo or townhouse and got efficient cars their living costs would be a fraction of what they pay now, and wouldn't need to work so much.
Even in Europe, lots of people have luxuries they don't really need, especially cars. Sure, people in towns, or who have jobs away from the train lines might feel the need to have a car, but there's plenty of people there who live in the city, where public transit is excellent, and they still have (frequently expensive) cars. It isn't just Americans who make lifestyle choices that require dual earners, but we epitomize it.
Gas guzzling SUVs are bad for the environment, but do not support your point. Gas is cheap in the US so 20,000 annual miles of driving at 20mpg is only ~$2500 for the year. Swapping them out for 40mpg hybrids only saves $1250 annually, which is negligible in the scheme of deciding on dual incomes.
>Gas guzzling SUVs are bad for the environment, but do not support your point.
For one, they're a sign that people are probably living beyond their means, buying things they don't need.
>Gas is cheap in the US so 20,000 annual miles of driving at 20mpg is only ~$2500 for the year.
That's a conservative mileage estimate. There's lots of commuters who drive quite a bit more than that. And gas is only cheap right now; earlier this decade it shot up to about $4/gallon for a while. I've seen this many times with Americans: gas hits a local minimum, so they all run out and buy enormous SUVs. Then gas prices go up, and they all whine about how much they're paying for gas, so they trade in their SUVs for smaller vehicles. Then gas prices go down again and they all run out and buy big SUVs again. It's idiotic.
>For one, they're a sign that people are probably living beyond their means, buying things they don't need.
Nope, buying an SUV indicates nothing about living beyond means. It’s better to have one SUV than two priuses. And again, 1-2k a year in gas is hardly a dent in car ownership costs.
$4 is super rare to never for most of the US and so is the super commuter stupid enough to drive an SUV for their super commute.
>Then gas prices go up, and they all whine about how much they're paying for gas, so they trade in their SUVs for smaller vehicles. Then gas prices go down again and they all run out and buy big SUVs again. It's idiotic.
That does sound stupid, good thing it’s now how anyone actually functions. Most popular SUVs today are the smaller ones that get twice what a Tahoe or whatever of 15 years ago would have gotten.
I suspect the issue is that your model is based on observed people in places with lower costs of gas and living and applying the costs of some big west coast metro to that lifestyle. That’s about the only idiotic thing going on here.
Here’s a tip: if you find yourself in a scenario where you think people are wasting buckets of money for no particular reason on a massive scale, you’re probably wrong.
I haven't noticed the "anything about a newborn/small child must be 100% positive" in my group of friends, especially my work colleagues. I've been pretty straight forward about how hard the whole thing has been, especially adding a second child to the mix before the first one was 2 yo. I wouldn't recommend having a second child to anyone unless they really, really wanted it. It's hard af. Logarithmically harder than one.
Maybe the only constant is that every child is different. We had two close together, and it became a net positive about two years in, when they could keep each other occupied much of the time.
And they'll have a built-in best friend. We talk about our personal perspective, but what do you wish your parents did for you?
That's assuming things go well. My two older siblings are, uh, let's just say they're not very close and dealing with them growing up was an experience in and of itself.
I can see the social media aspect of presenting the perfect child persona, but it is BS.
Going to three is exponentially harder. With two, one parent can usually manage both or worse each can manage one kid. Go to three and parents are outnumbered. And generally only two kids ever get along at one time, so there always the outlier. Even numbers are best it seems.
And moving to five children is another level. :) Parenting is what you do not a side project. Also the effects of parenting are more like keeping a good culture going and showing what are healthy ways of relating so that children can relate well to each other and enjoy being part of the family.
yeah, as a non-parent (ha!), my main exposure to parenting is my friends on social media. I don't talk to my parent friends about kid stuff much, because I don't care, and they don't care to tell yet another person.
I'm sure parent-to-parent IRL, people are a lot more negative (read:realistic) about their experiences.
I have a third child, and getting outnumbered was even harder still. But I do recommend getting the children as close together as possible, because the longer you wait between them, the more years the sleep deprivation lasts.
Agreed, but weirdly our experience was that three was easier than two. We truely had to let go of the idea that we could do everything the 'right way' and as a result became more relaxed and confident parents as a result.
Anecdotally our third child is the least anxious and most confident out of the three. We were clearer about the stuff that really didn't need sweating over - we had no choice!
We've three children as well and like you, our third is definitely the most outgoing and confident. She also acts like a "glue" for her older siblings, (boy and girl).
It actually gets easier the more children you have, not more difficult.
My last child moves out (to college) next week. We'll see. It's been pretty cool raising them, and now that they are young men it's fun and hilarious to get them all together.
For a few years it was very stressful, and life always revolved around them (I was pretty active in their life). I expect that it'll be pretty different. Maybe I'll get some T back!
Lack of exercise doesn't necessarily make it easier to survive sleep deprivation. It would be rather the opposite for most people since some moderate exercise tends to improve the quality of the limited sleep that you do get.
> When our 9 month old started to sleep through the night (at around 4-5 months), we'd get between 5-6 hours of sleep, which after the interrupted sleep of the previous 4 months, felt like a full night's sleep but this is sleep deprivation territory, specially given the fact that it was 7 days a week.
Assuming you have the space for it, I never understood couples that insist on both parents being woken up every night by a newborn. Much better for everyone involved to trade off nightly so that the other person can get a full nights rest.
I'm 99% certain that no baby cares that only one parent is being disturbed.
I'm not a parent so my knowledge here is pretty scarce, but what I've understood from friends that have kids, is that when a baby wakes up, both parents wake up due to instinct (i.e. is the baby ok?).
So I wonder if what you suggest would require some accomodation. E.g. have the 'on-call' parent sleep in the same room as the baby, and the other one can sleep in another room with the door closed.
Is this what you mean by saying that both parent need not be waken up? or are there some other methods that would help out with this?
I think early on with a new baby, both parents wake up more due to novelty than instinct. When you're used to not having a crying child in the middle of the night, suddenly having one takes some adjustment.
Since my wife nursed the kids, our arrangement was that she would be up with babies at night almost every time, and I would be up with them in the morning when they decided that 5am was time to be up for the day. Over time, I stopped waking up to baby cries at night, but I am now hyper-attuned to child noises from 5-7am.
> So I wonder if what you suggest would require some accomodation. E.g. have the 'on-call' parent sleep in the same room as the baby, and the other one can sleep in another room with the door closed.
> Is this what you mean by saying that both parent need not be waken up? or are there some other methods that would help out with this?
That's what I meant by "Assuming you have the space for it...". If the baby is in a separate room and there's space for a bed or mattress, whoever is "on-call" stays there and the other parent gets an uninterrupted nights sleep. Or the reverse and the "resting" parent goes and sleeps on the couch. 7-8 hours uninterrupted on a couch wins over repeated interruptions on a bed.
Same system works if you have a grandma visiting to take over for a night. There's no merit badge given out for everyone being equally sleep deprived. It's just worse for everyone, including the baby.
If the mother is directly breast feeding then likely she's going to be taking the heavier end of this load. If the baby is formula fed or she's pumping, there's more leeway to switch off.
I'm not even sure you need the door closed or a large house. Particularly when sleep-deprived, I think you'll start sleeping right through it, as soon as you adjust to the fact that someone is closer to the problem, and managing it to the best of their ability. Your brain is great at figuring out what needs to wake you and what you can sleep through.
I sleep right through my wife's alarms going off, and her phone is merely on the other side of the bed.
She, in turn, sleeps through my phone's alarm and my annoying klaxon on the dresser. Obviously this doesn't happen on the first night or five, but you get used to it.
Logically this makes sense but it can be tricky to implement successfully for everyone. For breast-fed infants, it may be the case that mom has to be more frequently involved in the overnight care. It makes sense for dad to get as much sleep as possible in this case, but that can lead to resentment and other issues.
My wife and I traded off as you indicated but that was no picnic, either. We found it easier to split wake-ups during a night so that each of us could get a manageable amount of sleep, vs one person waking up every couple hours all night long. No matter how you slice the time up, nobody is going to 'well-rested' when there are only two people taking care of an infant.
> Logically this makes sense but it can be tricky to implement successfully for everyone. For breast-fed infants, it may be the case that mom has to be more frequently involved in the overnight care. It makes sense for dad to get as much sleep as possible in this case, but that can lead to resentment and other issues.
Embracing marriage as a team sport goes a long way to avoiding petty resentment. It's also standard practice for the resting parent to ensure there is plenty of coffee after the non-resting parent's final 37 minute power nap.
> Embracing marriage as a team sport goes a long way to avoiding petty resentment.
Fully in agreement. Good communication and empathy in marriage are paramount to successfully raising kids. I'm just saying even the most understanding people can hit a breaking point after long enough without sleep, especially without a lot of external help.
Yes. And post-partum anxiety and depression as well as chronic sleep deprivation go a long way to engendering petty resentment, as well as other insecurities that could be mitigated by the presence of the other spouse at night.
I have a leg up working from home though - I just take the baby at the start of the day for several hours so my wife gets another good sleep cycle or two in, which makes my wife a lot more open to me sleeping in a different room.
My snoring contributes to that too though - my baby sleeps better without me in the room!
I don’t have kids but my wife and I have discussed having an explicit shift rotation where one of us stays home with the baby during the day while the other works, sleeps in the early evening when the working parent gets home, and gets up at night when the working parent goes to bed. I always wonder if it would actually work.
My wife and I did that for 2 years. It works, but like everything, there are trade offs.
It's great that you know your child is being raised by you and your partner. You aren't offloading the child to a babysitter and trusting daycare to raise them with your principles or just to your level of care.
The downside is crossing paths with your spouse in a 5 minute handoff. Rushed dinners to cram in as much adult interaction as you can before you do bedtime or rush to work. There are times when you meet up at a McDonalds to eat and trade cars.
I don't think we would have done it differently, but there were definitely periods of loneliness that both of us felt.
If you're ever talking with friends who have kids (particularly young kids)(particularly newborns like you're talking about here) you might do better by phrasing this as a question instead of a fact. ("Hey, assuming you have the space for it, why not trade off nightly?")
Nicest response you'll get from what you said is a polite nod and then they change the topic, the most useful would be a polite but pointed jest about how you obviously don't have kids, and at worst you'll do lasting damage to a friendship.
Trust me, nobody who's getting this little sleep wants to be told how to do it better (unless they've asked you, specifically, for your advice on this,specifically) :)
Bah! A life of parsing words and walking on eggshells is no fun. Speak your mind and give people the benefit of the doubt. In my experience they appreciate it.
Your experience is wrong. People don't appreciate it, and are likely working to avoid you.
"Walking on eggshells" is a similar dog whistle to "political correctness".
Consider instead thinking about it as "having empathy that other people have a different life, priorities, and experiences than yourself, and adapt your patterns to not make premature judgements or conclusions".
"Speaking your mind" is overrated. Your mind isn't that important or interesting. (Not attacking YOU here - this applies to everyone, myself included)
There are situations where you are correct but I think your brush is too broad. Sometimes unsolicited advice is welcome but there is an art that some people have when giving it.
>I think this is one of the biggest taboos in Western society:
Anything about a newborn/small child must be 100% positive
This is absolute bullshit
I’m about to have a child in the next 2 weeks and that’s not my experience. Pretty much all my friends and family with kids have been telling me about the “fun” and “positive” sleeping experience I’m about to have. They keep saying how the Nth child was terrible or didn’t sleep etc.
Absolutely true, however the linked piece (not the study) seems to imply that there is some form of evolutionary mechanism which relates to the bonding experience with a newborn/toddler that somehow helps the father 'stay around' to raise a child.
I can see that there are mechanisms at play that favour the father to 'stay around'. But specifically for the Testosterone concentrations it seems to me that the cause could have nothing to do with an endocrine change triggered by bonding or nurturing.
I am not an expert in this field and wonder if the _cause_ of the testosterone drop necessarily has to affect the outcome of bonding/nurturing behaviour? For example, maybe all or part of the testosterone drop _is_ due to the degraded sleep quality. If that drop then still results in them being more motivated to bond with their child and less motivated to find other partners, the effect seems to be the same - the man is then still better primed for parenthood.
It is hypothesized in evolutionary psychology that the testosterone drop is so that males will not be attracted to their daughters. I remember this from reading the "Evolution of Desire."
I always view articles skeptically when they talk about testosterone as effecting behavior. Most modern studies tend to conclude that testosterone levels changes after changed behavior rather than before, and artificially lowering or increasing testosterone within human levels does not usually have any measurable effect on behavior.
For example, the article stated that there is a correlation between lower testosterone and more caregiving and baby-related household tasks. What would surprise me however is if the finding would stand if they made a second study which gave a supraphysiological dose of testosterone to even out the difference in testosterone. My prediction is that the same variation of caregiving and baby-related household tasks would remain.
A prime example of that there is a correlation between testosterone and voting for the winning team in politics and sports. Measure testosterone after an election and men who has higher testosterone will have a higher rate of having voted for the winning party. Obviously, before the election there is no such correlation, so we can fairly rational make the conclusion that having more testosterone does not make a person a better judge of who is going to win.
Indeed testosterone and behavior both affect each other. I have however several reasons why I am skeptical when people focus exclusively on testosterone as effecting behavior.
One larger reason, as given by a professor in neuroendocrinology, is that people and researchers alike tend to view behavior as soft science and hormones as hard science. There has been (and still are) a lot of resistance to the idea that behavior alone can cause biological changes in the body.
The second reason is that again and again, when people try to test a correlation between a hormone and behavior by supraphysiological doses, the predicted behavior does not occur.
The third reason is that the general role of sex hormones is to regulate the body in favor of reproductive success. The generally accepted theory to explain why testosterone goes up by having voted on the winning team, or by winning a competition, or by winning a physical fight, is that the individual perceive themselves as having gained social rank and thus the body adjust testosterone levels accordingly. Any behavior that does not have a clear link to reproductive success is unlikely to be regulated by a sex hormone.
I'm not sure I would describe this as a confounder in this context - if fatherhood results in sleep deprivation which results in testosterone levels dropping,
then fatherhood generally results in testosterone levels dropping.
I was wondering this too. Every new parent seems to report that they basically don't sleep for a year or two. That has got to account for a lot of the biological changes in parenthood. (Honestly, I'd really want to know about likelihood of dying in a car accident or other heavy machinery sleep-deprivation-induced-screwup.)
> Every new parent seems to report that they basically don't sleep for a year or two
I'm a new parent, and I'm pleased to say that our 5-week-old is sleeping really, really well. I was not expecting this after all the horror stories others told... I did, however, feel like I aged about 10 years in the first week as my other half had an emergency C-section and I had to do everything for both her and the baby.
Nothing like getting thrown in at the deep end! :D
It is the martyrdom story that is dumb. There are two of you there is absolutely zero reason for both not to have decent sleep.
First couple weeks sure after that.. get a second bed, couch whatever. Separation of concern works way better one takes care of the kids other takes care of $$.
I have 2 kids.. first one was terrible, she did not want to sleep more then 2-3 hours till she was 8 month or so. Wife dealt with it, fed her and took care of her at night, while I worked, cooked during the day, took kid out for walks etc
Correct. The same applies for post-partum depression which many attribute to an increase in new hormones in the women's body. But how much of this effect is attributable to simple sleep deprivation?
There’s a definite difference. There’s some pretty normal post baby blues for many moms that is a mix of hormones + sleep. But post partum depression is a different animal entirely and takes a lot of support and good council.
You gotta wonder how much all of this is due to sleep deprivation. None of these things make any sense evolutionarily, either PP depression or fathers losing their testosterone. So how much is due to things that are a product of modern society, rather than biology?
Weight gain has been the most obvious impact for me, but that’s probably a consequence of a collapse in willpower/discipline as a result of sleep deprivation and stress.
After becoming father I experienced biggest weight loss ever. I went from 260 lbs to 200 lbs. During the months not being chained to a table with computer I was living healthy life. Lots of time outside with stroller or baby carrier, healthy food for baby and me. Few years later I am at 220 lbs again.
1. It doesn't mention obvious potential causes to brain changes and hormone levels that coincide with having children like lack of sleep, changes to diet, or adjustments to work patterns etc.
2. It says towards the end that I should continue to wrestle the boys. Great!
Maybe it's just my biology training, but that was obvious to me decades ago. I mean, why should humans be different from other mammals, regarding such a basic thing?
It's also part of why I never wanted kids. That, and the threat of global nuclear war.
>2014, Dr. Pilyoung Kim, Ph.D., a developmental neuroscientist at The University of Denver, put 16 new dads into an M.R.I. machine: once between the first two to four weeks of their baby’s life, and again between 12 and 16 weeks
16 examples -> I would set more store by tealeaf reading.
> Women become pregnant before they become mothers. Men become pregnant after they become fathers.
I heard this joke a while ago, and while cruel seems to have an element of truth to it by observation. Lack of sleep, lack of exercise, less time to make healthy meals seems to be a terrible combination for weight gain.
There probably are worse alternative, but I'd rather teach my kid to enjoy good food and see a meal as a time to socialize/relax rather than something to be optimized
The experience itself is different. While for women it is more shocking and exciting, men still need to handle their partner and other responsibilities during this period and pretty much share that experience which, as article suggests, alters them both in some ways.
It is interesting that things I've noticed anecdotally have some, possible, grounds in science. It is also nice to have this to show new dads that they will adjust automatically (biologically that is) without needed to worry. Yes they need to work at bonding but their body will help them out.
I also find the drop in testosterone and increase in brain matter really easy to accept. My husband changed after our first was born. Something automatic happened that changed the way he acted towards our baby than he had to other babies and it wasn't just the fact it almost killed me.
Lastly, because I'm overly verbose tonight, sorry, I love that the "fun" dad stereotype actually might be the biologic usual setting. It doesnt mean dad cant be the nurturing one and mom the fun one but it does mean it should come a little more naturally for men, therefore, it is likely to happen in any father, so both roles are covered biologically.
I lied. One more thought, I wonder how this would work in a same sex couple. If one woman gives birth does the other automatically take on the father role biologically? What if they take turns giving birth? Do they get to play noth roles then? What about in men? Does one take on the mom role hormonally? Would this being found to be true remove some of the objections to same sex couples parenting or does science mean nothing to the objectors?
The first six months of my daughter's life were a lot like what you describe. She had "colic" (medical term for: we don't know what's wrong) and would never settle down until she started eating solid foods. After that, we were good. But those first six months, wow! I would get home from work and she would hand me our daughter and head to bed. It was like that for six months, no breaks.
Anyhow she is 14 now and she's a musician and is great at math, writing, and she does great anime drawings. We also have a second child, a son, 9, and clearly the five year span between kids was not completely left to chance.
I empathize with those who have true special needs children because just raising "regular" kids is traumatic.
It’s the fact that the source of sound is often 10-20 cm from your ear. As the average source-ear distance grows though, their lung volume grows too so you end up with a looong period of dangerous sound pressure levels.
I've got Tinnitus. I should have used ear plugs or rather a heavy duty hearing protection much earlier.
My daughter had problems with her stomach or with us trying to put some clothes on her. The scream amplitude and frequency in a small bathroom are a horrendous combination.
Our youngest daughter screamed something terrible for months and months when she was a baby. There was a period of maybe two months where I thought I had permanent hearing loss from it.
Went to the doctor and turned out that I had a cold as some point and the pressure in my ear never equalized back correctly, which meant the ear drum couldn't vibrate right. A couple weeks of allergy medicine seemed to fix the issue.
Around that time though, I bought a pair of ear muffs and wore them every time I had to put her to bed or change her diaper. Amazing. Highly recommended.
Anecdotal I know, but when my first was born and I was outside with them for the first time, I got a weird sense of extreme overprotectiveness - exaggerating somewhat to make the point, but it almost felt like I would punch anyone if they looked vaguely threateningly at my new child (a particularly memorable experience for me because I'm usually such a placid person). Not an expert, but that felt like it could be something hormonal.
And at risk of sounding a bit handwavy, I think I've adapted to being a parent much better than I thought I would, which I guess could be thanks to some biological help.
Also used to look a lot younger than I actually was, and now I look my age or even older, but that could simply be lack of sleep.
same ... I'll also add that for a time, I became hyper-aware of literally any noise that happened anywhere in my house at night. Lol, I can't tell you how many times I jumped out of bed to fend off an imagined intruder, or to run into the baby's room to make sure she was still breathing :P
This has been a very useful thread.I have struggled with weight for many years. I have sufficient motivation to exercise and I am normally able to keep a disciplined schedule. But with our 2yr old daughter, sleeplessness has kind of messed me up and I struggle to keep any form of discipline now. It's hard. I am just glad to know that I am far from the only one :)
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[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 281 ms ] threadFor you father-programmers out there: did you notice any changes in your programming/work abilities around the 12-16 week mark?
So, without enough time with my kids, my abilities as a programmer absolutely plummet. I wake up early and work, spend time with my toddler, then finish work while he naps and when his mom is home.
My productivity took a nose dive from the quite extreme sleep deprivation. Sleeping 3-4h for months is bad for your mind.
You're so sleep starved you program like a turkey and have to try and do mundane, low risk things for much of the day. Simpler fixes, documentation, clean up technical debt in test cases etc etc. Limit tricky things for the morning after you've warmed up and keep that burst short. But this is of course from birth until n months.
I'm guessing the lifestyle changes are going to have an effect that is large and the effects discussed here, while they may indeed be statistically signficant (who knows?), are going to have an effect so incredibly small by comparison that they really aren't worth considering. But that's pure prejudice on my part - we'll see if there's any data capable of rejecting that hypothesis.
The changes to your sleep are huge. Now if you've had twins... Yeah.
I wonder if sleep deprivation is related to raising children pre industrial era. It seems logical but I don't know much on this topic. :)
Just watch the first few minutes of this.
https://www.ted.com/talks/matt_walker_sleep_is_your_superpow...
I started to get some of my old coding mojo back around 8 months and at 18 months I'm IMHO better than I've ever been, but the newborn phase is basically a complete write-off. Parental leave exists for a reason.
Good for you. The FANG (you can guess) company I worked for stack-ranked me at the bottom of the tar pit in my write-off year with zero increase in comp, followed by another quarter of intense improvement program after which they decided I still wasn't good enough. Disagreements ensued for three more quarters and then that was that. The result... unemployment.
I spent an insane number of hours in the middle of the night bouncing on a swiss exercise ball, holding the baby, in nothing but my pants, in the dark, with the tv on (but muted), to coax the baby back to sleep. Honestly ... this sorta stuff needs to mentioned more to let prospective parents know what they're in for.
Since having a child, I've nothing but total admiration for any single parent - how they manage without a fulltime partner would be beyond my ability.
Then again I did notice I was very good at understanding baby talk.
Taking from some old notes of my 5 month old baby:
"eh eh eh", but no crying at 6 AM = "I need a diaper change" or "I'm hungry"
rapid kicking = excited
wide open arms while lying down = "pick me up"
"uh huh/mmm" with slight head inclining = yes.
when mother is saying something, baby laughs, turns head towards me, "uh huh/mmm" with inclined head = "mother is right" or "I told you so"
laughing and turning away = "I like that"
licking lips = "I want to eat whatever you're eating"
"aaaaaaaaaaa" = conversation or song
long, drawn out, angry crying = "I'm tired and I don't know how to sleep"
Screaming at night = “my parents are bad they aren’t feeding me they should be locked up”
Kicking feet = “oh god I’m wet please change me it’s so gross”
lol I remember this, we called it the 'worst parents in the world' cry. It continues forever, the form changes as they get older but the message is the same
But seriously, congratulations on getting to that level of bonding with child. It was also the same for me and it is magical!
I think, from my own experience, babies learn to communicate in a two way fashion - they try noises and responses with their caregivers, and when the caregivers respond in an agreeable fashion, the baby stores that bit of communication away to try again later (and possibly reinforce).
So I think some of their communication is learned (signals for positive/negative), and quite specific to the baby-parent pair, while some will be instinctual (e.g. I imagine the excited kicking to be related to an adrenal surge or something, and early-infant crying is definitely an instinctual distress signal)
A surprisingly common problem with very young children. Maybe also some adults.
However, I think the implication is that these changes stick around. After we finally hit our "parenting rhythm" around 6 months to a year, I did find that many of the soft skills were coming easier to me than they had before I was a parent. I found was getting better at doing presentations, reading emotions/intention, doing mentoring, and organizing others to accomplish goals, Now correlation is not causation, it could also be I was just transitioning into a more senior role anyway, and I've got a sample size of 1, but I'd like to propose a mechanism: constantly practicing my public speaking by reading "The Napping House" to a miniature tyrant who communicates only through facial expressions and screaming, is your responsibility to teach everything to including successfully eating food, and requires a logistics train on par with an Army brigade just to leave the house changed my brain and resultded in transferable skills.
We organised with me as evening shift - so mum could get a little uninterrupted sleep, and she picked up the morning shift.
Full head of hair is a qualifier, without it different things are needed to get yourself an in. The same logic goes for many attributes are considered qualifiers that aren't.
Yes, there are some men that expend very low energy and have women seemingly flock to them. I've seen bald men in this circumstance, and full haired men in this circumstance, I would say it is a very low weighting on anything.
Balding though seems to function different than bald.
It was so noticeable... like I'd just stepped into someone else's brain. really weird.
It felt like a mental "click" but not like you get when you have been trying to solve a puzzle... it felt like a mental " gear change ".
My thought processes changed order or priority, Things that I felt were important before were suddenly less important and I think I things from a different angle (not just life stuff but problem solving approaches.).
its really hard to describe.
What I can say is that having a second didnt do a damned thing... lol whatever change was going to happen only happened on the first.
Very possible that been a father cornered you to think more pragmatically in daily life, and that translates to how you do things at work.
I definitely felt a change in perspective like this. Sitting in a 1hr long meeting, going over something which could be done in 10 mins, and the whole time thinking "none of this even matters, there's a human life at home which I helped create!".
For those of you who are skinny and want to bulk up and don't mind eating somewhat bad food: Eat lots of sugary candy and junkfood like potatoe chips. I find it's the easiest way to get fat.
I gained 40 pounds through my wife's pregnancy and post.
I am just starting to shed some weight now
- 5 months old baby
I don't know how much weight I've put on, but I certainly don't enjoy how I feel and look now.
Being able to exercise again has been a major milestone for me.
Getting into a more regular exercise routine might be a good thing. Weightlifting works well for myself, alas it does nothing to curb the appetite. :) But it's a great way to relax the mind and get a break from everything. It helps produce testosterone as well, supposedly.
So if you find yourself likewise falling off the wagon, cut yourself some slack. You're playing the long game.
Now if I would just cut my serving sizes in half! :D
All that changes today as we’re finally getting a garden shed and I’ll be back in the saddle.
The 7km commute was a no brainer by bike. It took a leisurely 20 minutes where as the car would be much the same with lots of tedious traffic. Bus wasn’t an option on this route.
When I changed job my commute was 18km across the city. The car route involved a toll on a congested motorway or through stop start city congestion. The bus route required two buses with various degrees of waiting time made worse on the way home because of the one specific bus I needed that always appears unreliable. The car would take at least one hour bus would take up to two hours and the bike about 50 minutes.
Now that we’ve moved home I’m even further away but there’s a direct express bus that takes just 70 minutes. The car route is better, no toll and better connected, but is still an hour in traffic and the bike is about an hour.
Cycling is great because you arrive to work energised, but it’s tough to do everyday and still have energy for the kids at the weekend, so I’ll buy an ebike and cheat.
our bike club members assure me that an ebike isn't all easy sailing. I believe them! With how heavy the ebikes can be, you can't just be sailing along on the battery, not putting in any effort, and expect to go very far.
So far it's much easier to cut out junk food because I think the whole morning about what I need to eat during lunch. I also need to figure out my relationship with the feeling of hunger, which the fast gives me the possibility to do.
Ended up being full after eating 3/4 of a hamburger last day. I generally eat two with ease.
It's a cascade of less sleep and time which means less exercise and a worse diet.
My son is 13 now, and its only in the last few years that I've really started to take care of myself. I've started exercising, stopped eating junk, and tried to make time for sleep. The result is I've lost 60lbs over the last few years, and am in better shape than I've been since highschool. However, I still don't sleep as well as I did before he was born.
My advice to new dads is: Take care of yourselves. Eat right. Don't cut out exercise to save time.
Caring for a toddler means being shackled to a creature that is entirely dependant on you, but there are still ways you can work in some self care while taking care of them.
Another curious question, it would be interesting to see the impact of adopting a cat or a dog on men’s testosterone levels.
Very interesting idea though. But all of this fathering thing is related with continue one's bloodline I guess. Humans are very motivated to maintain their lineage. Adopting pets may be related with another topic.
Can I safely assume you haven't adopted any children? I'm a parent of two adopted kids (now mostly grown). If you think what motivates me is any different than what motivates other fathers, you would be terribly mistaken.
And here is my turn to speak without knowing: I imagine that if a father is too attached to the idea of the continuation of his genetic legacy, it may pressure the children to fulfill the father's idea of a legacy rather than find their own path.
Edit: And that itself has much deeper relation to a biological child than to adopting one. Not that adopting isn't significant or emotional, it's simply not that varying level of experience.
> Another curious question, it would be interesting to see the impact of adopting a cat or a dog on men’s testosterone levels.
I would compare this analogy to the opposite and unfortunate experience like the death of a close one. Losing someone that's biologically linked to you can be really hard even if you weren't that emotionally attached to that person. By comparing that to losing a friend outside of your family circle, which is also a very harsh experience, it seems that biological line would be an emotional line deeply attached to a person no matter what experience one has.
How do you know your child is actually biologically yours? Human fathers have no biological/natural means of identifying a child as theirs. So your hypothesis that having your own child va adopting is different does not stand. The father - child bond is a mental construct and I see absolutely no reason why adopting is lesser than biologically fathering a child.
Also, family resemblances do exist. Their absence doesn't disprove parentage, but their presence is evidence for it.
When adopting, if you were not sexually active prior to adoption and have not donated sperm, you can be certain the child is not biologically yours. Even if you were active or a donor, you can still be very confident the kid is likely not yours.
I think adoption is a wonderful thing and I am not trying to undercut it, but it seems entirely possible to me that those differences could impact the bond between a father and child.
I think most of the confusion here is coming from the idea that psychology can't be related to biology. However, I firmly believe that biology is the base of the psychology and you cannot alter psychology without altering the biology itself.
What may have confused you is that I stated that the idea of being biologically related to someone, has a mental effect that creates some emotional attachment - yes, due to the biological relation as a social construct. That was an additional idea to compare it to adopted cat/dog/child analogy.
Edit: also the testosterone stuff is mostly a myth in the sense that, while testosterone of new fathers drops, it also recovers some months after the baby is born and older. So you get some months of baby snuggles and then you're back with your old libido. Also, men with kids are way more attractive to women (including their wives) anyway.
1. Division-of-labor, specialization of trade... although it might not fit every feminists' "equality of outcome, share everything" political-correctness, it doesn't make combined net income much sense (or cents) to risk a $300k income with sleeplessness/low-productivity vs. an $80k one if one spouse (assuming spouse isn't a lawyer, doctor or engineer) can be at home full-time, or both as full-time parents with parental leave policies/laws or take a sabbatical. Dumping/delegating mundane tasks onto a high income earner doesn't jive with common sense. Also, automate and delegate as much minutia as possible outside to contractors and domestic workers (cooking, cleaning, construction, yard-work etc.) of one's wheelhouse to have more family, couple & work time. If you make $80-$600/hour USD, don't waste your time doing low value tasks that others could do more cheaply for you.
Welcome to hn
Male tech workers who value money above all else.
On hn, you seem to have the same demographics, but they either have no idea about what they're actually saying or they're smart enough to argue that it's okay and sound like they've almost made a legitimate argument.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Making HN worse while criticizing it seems incongruent and doesn't help anything. We've banned that account (an obvious troll: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=ijiiijji1). Meanwhile this other offtopicness just adds noise, and supercilious noise to boot. If you're going to judge a site by the trolls it gets, every site is worthless.
> Dumping/delegating mundane tasks onto a high income earner doesn't jive with common sense
From the article: "Caring for your child, therefore, produces not only a strong bond but a neurochemical reward, inducing feelings of happiness, contentment and warmth"
I suspect that some of the "mundane tasks" you have in mind are exactly the ones that produce this bond - like changing a diaper when you hear your baby crying at night. That's probably difficult if you're using earplugs, and I guess such tasks might not make sense for some high income earners, though.
Coming to today's workplace, after childbirth there is a drop in productivity of male employees as they adjust to their new reality. However, I have observed men become more diligent and aggressive at their jobs. I only imagine thats because they have a stronger sense of responsibility to provide for their partner & offspring. Whether or not Testosterone levels change is a different matter.
Just thinking back at my own first years with kids, the workload was so tough I neglected most testosterone producing activities (sports, action, male bonding).
I am certainly no expert on this area but it sounds to me like you are concluding that the study must be invalid, based on a bit of armchair science.
The species closest to us all don't hunt. They're opportunistic omnivores.
0. Has anyone seriously looked into variations of intermittent fasting &| extended fasting?
1. Did you have brain fog after hunger went away after a few days, or less fog?
2. What about maintenance vitamins, electrolytes and preventing gallstones?
3. How long did you continue for, until hunger returned?
Eat your normal amount of meals, shovel it in your mouth, but stop before finishing the whole portion. I eat maybe 75% of each meals and toss the remaining bits. Do it for a couple months and watch the weight magically shed off.
It works because it requires no change in meal-type habits; it’s simply fewer calories. End of the day, that’s always the goal and this way is the most direct and simple
When the meals come where it’s hard to stop at 75%, I force myself to toss my napkin and utensils on the plate ensuring the food is now “dirty”. So altogether, it’s very few behavior changes make for a foolproof method.
I think the best method is to understand your own patterns, and to find ways to reduce caloric consumption which are going to require the least amount of will-power for you and will cause the least amount of psychological stress. The exact method is going to be different for different people.
One reason I like it is that it requires the least planning and mental load. I eat what I want as much as I want (except sugar) and almost no matter what I do it works out to be less than my maintenance calories and I lose weight because I can't eat 4k calories in one sitting. The simplicity of it gives me less breaking points, and the ability to "eat whatever I want" makes planning for a big meal in 2 days a good reward to keep going.
The beginning is very hard and it's mostly due to sugar addiction. Many people say switching to keto first to wean off sugar makes fasting much easier.
To answer your questions:
1. Hunger comes and goes in waves, but mostly it just goes. Mentally I become more focused and clearer the longer I am into my fast, and overall I no longer get the fog from overeating or too much sugar.
2. I take a standard multivitamin GNC brand. When I feel light headed/have low blood pressure I drink a salty bone broth. Some people have their own electrolyte recipes like snake juice you can look into.
3. I go for a set amount of time. I found that it's very difficult if I'm just fasting for "as long as I can" because when the hunger comes I break. If I have a set breakfast time it's much easier to carry on until then.
I also had success with a ketogenic diet, but in my experience that's a bit harder to stick to, since there's a lot of hidden carbohydrates in food, and it's also the kind of diet you find yourself explaining all the time like when you have to turn down the cookie your colleague made, or you order a hamburger without the bun at a restaurant. TRE offers many of the same benefits, but has almost no impact insofar as how you live your life.
> Hunger comes and goes in waves, but mostly it just goes.
Interesting thing about the hunger pattern you described: subjective experience of hunger maps pretty well to the hormone Ghrelin, which tends to peak close to your normal meal-times, and then naturally subsides afterwords whether or not you have eaten. So the science points to the fact that hunger is very much something you can "wait out".
> I started skipping a day twice a week for a total of 5x 24hr fasts and 2x 48hr fasts. This week I completed a 72hr fast.
It's important to be cautious when attempting longer fasts. I know a lot of people have subjectively good experiences with multi-day fasts, but I saw a talk where the presenter showed evidence that long fasts (more than 72 hours) can cause long-lasting metabolic changes which weren't recovered even several years later.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1r8ffLDFcE
I thought one of the benefits of fasting was long-lasting metabolic changes (for the better).
What the talk I linked in the other comment talks about is something different: there's evidence that prolonged periods of severe calorie restriction can make your metabolism's bias move more toward storing calories and away from expending energy.
1. For me, I never really experienced brain fog while IF. If anything, I seem to get more fog after eating regular/larger meals. When I was really hungry, drinking water and/or coffee (Starbucks double shots) worked for me. After a while you get used to hunger, and I seem to work better when I’m hungry vs when I’ve eaten a typical meal. If I’m seriously so hungry I’m getting a headache (which happens) id only have something with protein, absolutely no carbs (i.e lunch meat, eggs, nuts)
2. Don’t have too much knowledge or experience on gallstones. I took fish oil supplements occasionally and cut out creatine, but that’s about it.
3. Not 100% sure based on wording, but I was doing IF for about 6 weeks and lost ~20lbs. I ate from 6pm to 10pm, slept typically 1am to 7-8am. Only coffee and water during the day.
Now at 180lbs and not on IF or a strict IF schedule, I typically just have coffee in the mornings, a light lunch if I eat, and a typical dinner. 30 mins cardio 2-3 days a week, compound lifts 2-3 days a week.
Source - mid 20’s software developer
Yeah I seem to find that a bit of mild hunger (not starvation or malnutrition) is good for the mind. I have at some points in my life found myself in a bit of a dampened state, where I am constantly either a bit lethargic from the last meal, or a bit preoccupied thinking about what I'm going to eat next.
I would love to understand the physiology more, but I have a pet theory that your brain gets a bit more "switched on" when you make calories and nutrients a bit more scarce for yourself, and that maybe when you let yourself eat whatever you want whenever you want, that survival instinct gets dialed back a bit.
After trying fasting, when I see a snake with a full belly sleeping in the grass like it's dead it makes total sense to me. That's what digestion feels like.
Startlingly? Almost like every person was different..
English is not a good language
Annedoctally as a recent father of a 6 month old, I would likely self report a good sleep quality in a questionnaire. However, objectively I know I sleep about 5 hours 30min yesterday evening, which would be sufficient sleep 'deprivation' to impact T production.
Also I think parents in general will also have strong bias to not want to acknowledge their own child as a 'nuissance' in a survey/questionnaire.
My key point is that it would be important to reproduce this finding with actual sleep tracking instead of self-reporting sleep quality, to confirm if this is indeed linked with a bonding/interaction mechanism with a child or an unfortunate secondary effect of sleep deprivation.
When our 9 month old started to sleep through the night (at around 4-5 months), we'd get between 5-6 hours of sleep, which after the interrupted sleep of the previous 4 months, felt like a full night's sleep but this is sleep deprivation territory, specially given the fact that it was 7 days a week.
I know I could only survive on this little sleep because I wasn't exercising.
> Also I think parents in general will also have strong bias to not want to acknowledge their own child as a 'nuissance' in a survey/questionnaire.
I think this is one of the biggest taboos in Western society:
Anything about a newborn/small child must be 100% positive
This is absolute bullshit
I can see the downsides of having a child without loving him (in my case) any less
People refuse to see/acknowledge this, esp. women.
Or better yet, the reply that you will inevitably have to this comment? Don't post it and instead reflect on why one might view you as sexist, then attempt to change your behavior to reflect what you've learned.
Managing his behaviour feels like an everlasting uphill battle. So much energy is drained, especially during meltdowns, causing frictions in the whole family.
So in order to be able to look after him I also need to look after myself. Getting enough sleep, some decompression time, looking after my body and still performing well at work is an everlasting struggle.
I don't expect people not in my situation to understand. At least I'm lucky in that it's "high functioning" we're talking about, even as much as a lot of people take objection to that term. But I know with effort he has every opportunity to thrive.
Nonetheless, in a market where as an engineer you need to stay on top of new stuff constantly ... yep, it's tough. We do it because we must.
Edit: Some additional thoughts.
As difficult as it sometimes is, being a parent is also a source of great joy. The responsibilities truly grow you as a person, and you kind of learn to cope. It's not something that's all at once either, I mean, you take it day by day, and you just learn.
As for work, for me it has helped that I'm truly passionate about what I'm doing, so have enjoyed learning about the new tech. I'm not saying I've got the same amount of talent, but it's amazing what persistence and a lot of deep dives into e.g Pluralsight can offer. As I grow older I'm more aware of my limitations, and picking the right horses (not just one) is über important.
Picking the right employer is equally important; being up front about the situation can yield amazing results.
We have it good in software in that we can work remotely, and flexible hours. Sure it comes at a certain cost ("always on") but for myself the benefits certainly outweigh drawbacks.
Cheers!
I know a huge number of women who love their kids but deeply mourn their lost independence and career opportunity they might have had without them, to say nothing of the profound physical impact of carrying a pregnancy. Women understand these issues really well, they just don’t feel comfortable talking about them with many men.
Just as society places much higher expectation that mothers will take care the child, society also places a much higher expectation that fathers will continue to go to work. Fathers with interrupted 5hrs of combined sleep are expected to do the exact same workload and work performance as they did had when they got uninterrupted 8 or 9hrs of sleep.
Talking about who got "hit hardest" is kind of pointless. Society expectation on fathers and mothers are formed from restricted gender roles. There are both women and men that feel extremely restricted from this. There is no objective "worse" fate to be either forced to go to work when you want to take care of the kids, or forced to take care of the kids when you want to go to work.
Yes, but that’s not what grandparent was talking about. They were writing specifically about the expectation that parents unconditionally think their children are the best thing that ever happened to them. The burden of this specific expectation falls much more heavily on mothers.
> Talking about who got "hit hardest" is kind of pointless. Society expectation on fathers and mothers are formed from restricted gender roles. There are both women and men that feel extremely restricted from this.
The current economic situation in the US is prohibitive to this family structure as well.
The combination of those two things is a huge problem in our society.
If Americans lived in dense cities with small living quarters and took public transit to work, they wouldn't need to spend so much money on housing and transportation, and they wouldn't feel the need to women to work full-time to keep up this lavish and unsustainable lifestyle.
Also my suburb I just moved to is way cheaper than dense city living and much less stressful. No gas guzzling.
The frugal living needed to be a stay-at-home mom or dad tends to be rare regardless of location, but it's not impossible.
What kinds of careers do these people have? If they both have low-paying jobs, then that's unfortunately understandable. But the McMansion-and-2-SUV-owning Americans I derided earlier aren't people with low-paying jobs, those are people with high-paying jobs who frequently refuse to live below their means; if they lived in a small condo or townhouse and got efficient cars their living costs would be a fraction of what they pay now, and wouldn't need to work so much.
Even in Europe, lots of people have luxuries they don't really need, especially cars. Sure, people in towns, or who have jobs away from the train lines might feel the need to have a car, but there's plenty of people there who live in the city, where public transit is excellent, and they still have (frequently expensive) cars. It isn't just Americans who make lifestyle choices that require dual earners, but we epitomize it.
For one, they're a sign that people are probably living beyond their means, buying things they don't need.
>Gas is cheap in the US so 20,000 annual miles of driving at 20mpg is only ~$2500 for the year.
That's a conservative mileage estimate. There's lots of commuters who drive quite a bit more than that. And gas is only cheap right now; earlier this decade it shot up to about $4/gallon for a while. I've seen this many times with Americans: gas hits a local minimum, so they all run out and buy enormous SUVs. Then gas prices go up, and they all whine about how much they're paying for gas, so they trade in their SUVs for smaller vehicles. Then gas prices go down again and they all run out and buy big SUVs again. It's idiotic.
Nope, buying an SUV indicates nothing about living beyond means. It’s better to have one SUV than two priuses. And again, 1-2k a year in gas is hardly a dent in car ownership costs.
$4 is super rare to never for most of the US and so is the super commuter stupid enough to drive an SUV for their super commute.
>Then gas prices go up, and they all whine about how much they're paying for gas, so they trade in their SUVs for smaller vehicles. Then gas prices go down again and they all run out and buy big SUVs again. It's idiotic.
That does sound stupid, good thing it’s now how anyone actually functions. Most popular SUVs today are the smaller ones that get twice what a Tahoe or whatever of 15 years ago would have gotten.
I suspect the issue is that your model is based on observed people in places with lower costs of gas and living and applying the costs of some big west coast metro to that lifestyle. That’s about the only idiotic thing going on here.
Here’s a tip: if you find yourself in a scenario where you think people are wasting buckets of money for no particular reason on a massive scale, you’re probably wrong.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5jAUgJATAg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=166L3cE3zyk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEJAOfHlREA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cubu_JeaV2g
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u27b7bAY1ro
And they'll have a built-in best friend. We talk about our personal perspective, but what do you wish your parents did for you?
Going to three is exponentially harder. With two, one parent can usually manage both or worse each can manage one kid. Go to three and parents are outnumbered. And generally only two kids ever get along at one time, so there always the outlier. Even numbers are best it seems.
I'm sure parent-to-parent IRL, people are a lot more negative (read:realistic) about their experiences.
Anecdotally our third child is the least anxious and most confident out of the three. We were clearer about the stuff that really didn't need sweating over - we had no choice!
It actually gets easier the more children you have, not more difficult.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2213655-having-kids-mak...
People with kids are happier than those without, only after their kids move out.
For a few years it was very stressful, and life always revolved around them (I was pretty active in their life). I expect that it'll be pretty different. Maybe I'll get some T back!
Assuming you have the space for it, I never understood couples that insist on both parents being woken up every night by a newborn. Much better for everyone involved to trade off nightly so that the other person can get a full nights rest.
I'm 99% certain that no baby cares that only one parent is being disturbed.
So I wonder if what you suggest would require some accomodation. E.g. have the 'on-call' parent sleep in the same room as the baby, and the other one can sleep in another room with the door closed.
Is this what you mean by saying that both parent need not be waken up? or are there some other methods that would help out with this?
Since my wife nursed the kids, our arrangement was that she would be up with babies at night almost every time, and I would be up with them in the morning when they decided that 5am was time to be up for the day. Over time, I stopped waking up to baby cries at night, but I am now hyper-attuned to child noises from 5-7am.
> Is this what you mean by saying that both parent need not be waken up? or are there some other methods that would help out with this?
That's what I meant by "Assuming you have the space for it...". If the baby is in a separate room and there's space for a bed or mattress, whoever is "on-call" stays there and the other parent gets an uninterrupted nights sleep. Or the reverse and the "resting" parent goes and sleeps on the couch. 7-8 hours uninterrupted on a couch wins over repeated interruptions on a bed.
Same system works if you have a grandma visiting to take over for a night. There's no merit badge given out for everyone being equally sleep deprived. It's just worse for everyone, including the baby.
If the mother is directly breast feeding then likely she's going to be taking the heavier end of this load. If the baby is formula fed or she's pumping, there's more leeway to switch off.
I sleep right through my wife's alarms going off, and her phone is merely on the other side of the bed.
She, in turn, sleeps through my phone's alarm and my annoying klaxon on the dresser. Obviously this doesn't happen on the first night or five, but you get used to it.
My wife and I traded off as you indicated but that was no picnic, either. We found it easier to split wake-ups during a night so that each of us could get a manageable amount of sleep, vs one person waking up every couple hours all night long. No matter how you slice the time up, nobody is going to 'well-rested' when there are only two people taking care of an infant.
Embracing marriage as a team sport goes a long way to avoiding petty resentment. It's also standard practice for the resting parent to ensure there is plenty of coffee after the non-resting parent's final 37 minute power nap.
Fully in agreement. Good communication and empathy in marriage are paramount to successfully raising kids. I'm just saying even the most understanding people can hit a breaking point after long enough without sleep, especially without a lot of external help.
I have a leg up working from home though - I just take the baby at the start of the day for several hours so my wife gets another good sleep cycle or two in, which makes my wife a lot more open to me sleeping in a different room.
My snoring contributes to that too though - my baby sleeps better without me in the room!
Sometimes I wonder if people would be a lot better off if they formed 3-6 adult family units for the purpose of sharing resources and raising kids.
Back in the "old days", and still in many non-Western cultures, grandparents live with parents and help with family care.
It's great that you know your child is being raised by you and your partner. You aren't offloading the child to a babysitter and trusting daycare to raise them with your principles or just to your level of care.
The downside is crossing paths with your spouse in a 5 minute handoff. Rushed dinners to cram in as much adult interaction as you can before you do bedtime or rush to work. There are times when you meet up at a McDonalds to eat and trade cars.
I don't think we would have done it differently, but there were definitely periods of loneliness that both of us felt.
If you're ever talking with friends who have kids (particularly young kids)(particularly newborns like you're talking about here) you might do better by phrasing this as a question instead of a fact. ("Hey, assuming you have the space for it, why not trade off nightly?")
Nicest response you'll get from what you said is a polite nod and then they change the topic, the most useful would be a polite but pointed jest about how you obviously don't have kids, and at worst you'll do lasting damage to a friendship.
Trust me, nobody who's getting this little sleep wants to be told how to do it better (unless they've asked you, specifically, for your advice on this,specifically) :)
"Walking on eggshells" is a similar dog whistle to "political correctness".
Consider instead thinking about it as "having empathy that other people have a different life, priorities, and experiences than yourself, and adapt your patterns to not make premature judgements or conclusions".
"Speaking your mind" is overrated. Your mind isn't that important or interesting. (Not attacking YOU here - this applies to everyone, myself included)
And exercise itself has a major influence on T levels.
I’m about to have a child in the next 2 weeks and that’s not my experience. Pretty much all my friends and family with kids have been telling me about the “fun” and “positive” sleeping experience I’m about to have. They keep saying how the Nth child was terrible or didn’t sleep etc.
I can see that there are mechanisms at play that favour the father to 'stay around'. But specifically for the Testosterone concentrations it seems to me that the cause could have nothing to do with an endocrine change triggered by bonding or nurturing.
For example, the article stated that there is a correlation between lower testosterone and more caregiving and baby-related household tasks. What would surprise me however is if the finding would stand if they made a second study which gave a supraphysiological dose of testosterone to even out the difference in testosterone. My prediction is that the same variation of caregiving and baby-related household tasks would remain.
A prime example of that there is a correlation between testosterone and voting for the winning team in politics and sports. Measure testosterone after an election and men who has higher testosterone will have a higher rate of having voted for the winning party. Obviously, before the election there is no such correlation, so we can fairly rational make the conclusion that having more testosterone does not make a person a better judge of who is going to win.
One larger reason, as given by a professor in neuroendocrinology, is that people and researchers alike tend to view behavior as soft science and hormones as hard science. There has been (and still are) a lot of resistance to the idea that behavior alone can cause biological changes in the body.
The second reason is that again and again, when people try to test a correlation between a hormone and behavior by supraphysiological doses, the predicted behavior does not occur.
The third reason is that the general role of sex hormones is to regulate the body in favor of reproductive success. The generally accepted theory to explain why testosterone goes up by having voted on the winning team, or by winning a competition, or by winning a physical fight, is that the individual perceive themselves as having gained social rank and thus the body adjust testosterone levels accordingly. Any behavior that does not have a clear link to reproductive success is unlikely to be regulated by a sex hormone.
then fatherhood generally results in testosterone levels dropping.
I'm a new parent, and I'm pleased to say that our 5-week-old is sleeping really, really well. I was not expecting this after all the horror stories others told... I did, however, feel like I aged about 10 years in the first week as my other half had an emergency C-section and I had to do everything for both her and the baby.
Nothing like getting thrown in at the deep end! :D
First couple weeks sure after that.. get a second bed, couch whatever. Separation of concern works way better one takes care of the kids other takes care of $$.
1. It doesn't mention obvious potential causes to brain changes and hormone levels that coincide with having children like lack of sleep, changes to diet, or adjustments to work patterns etc.
2. It says towards the end that I should continue to wrestle the boys. Great!
It's also part of why I never wanted kids. That, and the threat of global nuclear war.
16 examples -> I would set more store by tealeaf reading.
I heard this joke a while ago, and while cruel seems to have an element of truth to it by observation. Lack of sleep, lack of exercise, less time to make healthy meals seems to be a terrible combination for weight gain.
The experience itself is different. While for women it is more shocking and exciting, men still need to handle their partner and other responsibilities during this period and pretty much share that experience which, as article suggests, alters them both in some ways.
meh, not really. I don't think you can equate having to walk around mother+baby type stores on your weekend with growing a baby inside you.
Life doesn't change "that" much for fathers during the pregnancy apart from support the mother with the changes she is going through
After the birth, then hold on, the ride is now beginning and everything you ever know is turned upside down
GP is not equating, and explicitly says so in the first real sentence of their post:
>The experience itself is different.
o hair loss (Eldest's birth and early life was traumatic)
o Loss of short term memory (mostly temporary, sleep loss related.)
o loss of hearing (eldest was fond of screaming)
o grey hair.
We split child care into two shifts. I took nights, wife took days. Hence why I had less sleep than the wife.
Anyhow she is 14 now and she's a musician and is great at math, writing, and she does great anime drawings. We also have a second child, a son, 9, and clearly the five year span between kids was not completely left to chance.
I empathize with those who have true special needs children because just raising "regular" kids is traumatic.
not only that its at about 3.5khz. now look at this graph: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal-loudness_contour
Right in the loudness contour.
children, less so, babies yes.
number two is nowhere near as loud or as prone to screaming
That sounds absolutely terrible. I am not looking forward to having a kid. :-(
I was unlucky, I had a screamy one. The second child barely cries at all.
My daughter had problems with her stomach or with us trying to put some clothes on her. The scream amplitude and frequency in a small bathroom are a horrendous combination.
I joked at the time that she sounded like Nazgûl.
Went to the doctor and turned out that I had a cold as some point and the pressure in my ear never equalized back correctly, which meant the ear drum couldn't vibrate right. A couple weeks of allergy medicine seemed to fix the issue.
Around that time though, I bought a pair of ear muffs and wore them every time I had to put her to bed or change her diaper. Amazing. Highly recommended.
And at risk of sounding a bit handwavy, I think I've adapted to being a parent much better than I thought I would, which I guess could be thanks to some biological help.
Also used to look a lot younger than I actually was, and now I look my age or even older, but that could simply be lack of sleep.