> Some of my worries about having kids were right, though. They definitely make you less productive. I know having kids makes some people get their act together, but if your act was already together, you're going to have less time to do it in. In particular, you're going to have to work to a schedule. Kids have schedules. I'm not sure if it's because that's how kids are, or because it's the only way to integrate their lives with adults', but once you have kids, you tend to have to work on their schedule.
> You will have chunks of time to work. But you can't let work spill promiscuously through your whole life, like I used to before I had kids. You're going to have to work at the same time every day, whether inspiration is flowing or not, and there are going to be times when you have to stop, even if it is.
> I hate to say this, because being ambitious has always been a part of my identity, but having kids may make one less ambitious. It hurts to see that sentence written down. I squirm to avoid it. But if there weren't something real there, why would I squirm? The fact is, once you have kids, you're probably going to care more about them than you do about yourself. And attention is a zero-sum game. Only one idea at a time can be the top idea in your mind. Once you have kids, it will often be your kids, and that means it will less often be some project you're working on.
This is likely not a problem pg has, but becoming a parent can provide an ambition to provide for them and have enough success to be able to spend time with them.
Welcome to the world of being a parent. It can be frustrating, perplexing and mind-bending. Few things compare to those little arms snug around your neck, the head leaning on your shoulder, all in complete trust that you love them and wish them the best.
It's good that he thinks about "getting enough done" now. That should be everyone's focus in the first place -- if you're focusing on only doing what's necessary, the quality of your choices is bound to improve (Warren Buffet's punch card analogy comes to mind). It's depressing to me that with productivity culture we've left this so far behind.
There's a strange anecdotal contradiction with the research. Although much research says otherwise I'm finding that anecdotally people disagree with my statement and they actually end up have multiple children indicating that the first one was an enjoyable experience.
I think what's going on is that those research studies are picking up on unbiased measures of happiness.
In general if you ask people if children make their lives happier, they answer yes. However if you ask the same people about there overall happiness on a 1-5 scale people with children score lower then people without.
This makes sense from a biological perspective. Having an extra person to take care of; who only takes advantage of your hard earned resources without contributing does not give you any intrinsic form of happiness in any context unless this extra person is your child. Your body produces chemicals to counteract the unhappiness to satisfy your biological imperative but the main stressors are still their and can be measured in a survey that asks you questions about your happiness without the context of children.
It's hard to say if it actually is better to have kids. Is it like falling in love? Are we better off with the ability to fall in love?
As of this writing, my initial post has negative three votes which indicates general disagreement. Obviously, I don't have kids so I can only observe the phenomenon from an impartial standpoint.
Almost everything he says rings true with me after we got a dog. Especially the moments where I feel present and the joy from doing mundane tasks. Get a dog if you are childless!
Probably one of the more honest and rational takes on this subject that I've seen.
Asking people why they want/wanted kids usually (but not always) results in a loop of they have kids because they wanted kids. Or they want kids because they want kids.
Not that's it not a sufficient answer, just that it's different from some "artificial" wants which can be justified more easily.
My favorite other simple answers were just "I grew up with four siblings and three dogs and I like there to be lots of movement at home" and "I'm not plotting for world domination only to let it go to waste after I die"
Right , that's what I meant by other more "artificial" desires. This one is as natural/biological as it gets and that's why wanting to have them because you want to have them is a perfectly acceptable answer.
a small percentage of the population can avoid having kids and work a "support role", that's not a new thing. We even codified some of that with priests, monks and nuns. Overall though having kids is the "normal" thing to do and most people do it.
Uhh. Just going to chime in here. It is absolutely OK if you don’t experience the emotions he writes about here.
You aren’t broken.
I write this because I read and it immediately messaged a few friends who respect Paul as well asking them if I was broken.
Everyone experiences parenthood differently.
I never had the chemical changes in my brain and often over the past 3 years have realized just how selfish I am when it comes to taking care of the munchkins. There are other things I’d rather be doing, learning, building.
That is OK.
Just because the HN generally respects Paul doesn’t mean that if your experience as a parent doesn’t match his something is wrong.
You are OK and chances are you are a better parent than you think.
And the 50 lines of code you hurriedly typed in a flash of inspiration is also likely to not compile. Because it's a project that starts off very rough and requires work to shape it into what it needs to be.
I have kids and what I’ve learned and noticed is that kids are, unsurprisingly, just like people, and there are selfish ones, and not so selfish ones. Generalizations don’t really work with people, or kids, because kids are people.
Parphrasing Brian Tracy [0] all people (and kids) are - lazy, greedy, ambitious, selfish, ignorant and vain - this is just a human nature. We're not bad because we feel those - because everybody does - what makes a difference is how we react/what habits we develop around those feelings that counts.
[0] Six basic character (...) - Psychology of Achievement - Brian Tracy
And you're playing a game of teaching them about what it means - more general what everything in the world means, how to read the world. You will find it frustraiting and interesting, arguably your task is to shift the balance so it's not frustrating for you and your kid, you'll learn a lot about humans, yourself and kids along the way (or not).
Kids demand a lot of time but can be remarkably unselfish. My 3 y.o. daughter made my bed this morning and tries to help me if I seem tired. We help each other out, and parenthood opened me up to a way of living that was less self-interested.
All kids are different, but FWIW, my daughter used to take our her pacifier and stick it in her twin brother's mouth when he was crying. When she was a bit older (maybe three?) she'd often give him the last strawberry or whatever from her plate if he finished first. She's five now, and she's an extremely generous and high empathy kid.
Maybe that's unusual, and on average kids can be selfish (or maybe self-centered), but it's not as black and white as you're describing.
Not exactly, but my take was similar, that he seemed to be implying that it doesn't make you a "worse" parent.
Specifically:
> I never had the chemical changes in my brain and often over the past 3 years have realized just how selfish I am when it comes to taking care of the munchkins. There are other things I’d rather be doing, learning, building. That is OK.
Had he said "That is OK, provided your partner is also ok with it of course." I would have a different interpretation.
It doesn’t make you a better parent. But you shouldn’t feel guilty about your experience just because someone you respect wrote about their experience and it doesn’t mesh with yours.
You’ll make the hard decisions to do what is best for your kid but it isn’t always roses or easy as Paul makes it sound. I’m lucky if I have 3-4 experiences a week where I’m 100% in the moment and enjoying it. That is spending between 3-6 hours a day with my kids during the week.
I have a 2 year old. I enjoy playing with and spending time with him, but after some amount of time I get bored, and the time becomes more tedious. If I spend an entire weekend day only spending time with him, I find myself growing resentful and doing things to just pass the time -- like driving him somewhere reasonably far away, just because driving seems more stimulating for me.
But if I carve out a couple of hours for myself and my hobbies, then I'm able to be more present and engaged and better enjoy the time I spend with my son, which I think makes for a better overall experience for both of us.
I also did not feel a sudden transformation when my son is born. It took about seven months for my wife and I to not feel like we had made a major mistake (note that women are also not necessarily transformed immediately, but that it is even less culturally acceptable for them to admit this.) But somewhere around 18 months that warm, protective feeling that pg described kicked in and I don't have any regrets now (but sometimes it's still boring).
I'll chime in and say it's a balance like everything else in life. If your kids instantly get your attention whenever they want they may have a pretty unrealistic expectation of the real world later when they aren't such a special snowflake.
It's tricky business though and varies by context (age, finances, relationships), and I doubt anyone really knows best. You can easily (and will) err on both sides.
There is a delicate, nebulous balance between modeling independent adult behavior and being a care giver. Every parent has to decide where that line is; it's constantly changing and difficult to evaluate. We live in an unprecedented time in humanity's history, the longitudinal research is still coming in, and everyone's making up the rules as we go along.
"No one ever walked into my psychology practice because their parents made them too emotionally independent."
There are some parents out there who continually martyr themselves because they think it makes them a good person (I get 4 hours of sleep a night to make sure my kids have everything! I'm awesome!) but are in fact overinvolved and setting a bad example for the kid by not taking care of themselves. Anecdotally I've found most of my married friends who are/were hesitant about kids were raised by such parents.
It's healthy for the kid to see that the parent needs some enforced level of time to themselves, short of neglect of course. The precise balance is up to the individual.
American parenting is a cancer. I was raised in Europe and had a kid in California, I hate how most kids are raised here and I hate the expectations put on parents. Most people think you gotta stop having fun, you can’t go out because kids and you have to constantly hover them. I took my son out when he was 5 days old and I brought him everywhere since. He knows he needs to be quiet when we go in public and we will not be listening to him if he tries to interrupt our conversations without asking politely. He’s completely fine and well adjusted and the teachers love him.
If you want to raise your kids well, stop treating them like they are a rare Chinese vase and they’ll be just fine.
> I took my son out when he was 5 days old and I brought him everywhere since.
Generally, this is advised against to minimize chances of the child contracting a virus or bacteria while there are no good treatment options in the first few months of life. Also, putting them in a vehicle increases their risk of being in a collision, which has the same problem of having few good remedies, so playing it safe is considered OK.
It's not really clear to me why your comment is being downvoted. You're expressing a constructive opinion.
It seems to me that children can thrive under a wide variety of parenting styles. I consider that my own upbringing was a bit "rough around the edges", but with age I respect and understand my parents more and more.
In retrospect, I wouldn't have it any other way. I respect my parents a lot more than I used to.
I don't know if this is what was implied - but my wife and I have always believed strongly that you have to maintain the "hub" that is your relationship in order for the bigger picture - the family - to thrive.
My kids (now 12 and 15, goddamit!) are 100% the entirety of my life: the beginning, middle and end. They're the reason my wife and I work for ourselves, the reason we don't work all the time, the reason we haven't grown our business even though we could have. We want to be here for them in the tiny period of time we have them at home, and who cares if we end up financially poorer because of it - our lives are infinitely richer with this time we have as a family together.
But.
Some parents become parents and let their kids dominate. And I don't mean in a disciplinary way, I mean that the kids - especially when tiny - take over the adults lives too. This was obvious for us in the parents that let their kids stay up until whatever time, had no routine, let their kids sleep in their bed, never got out as a couple, etc etc.
The point I'm making is that having kids is THE single hardest thing you'll ever do. It's also THE BEST thing you'll ever do, but it's the hardest. And if you don't take care of you and your partner - by making time to be together, making time to be a couple and not parents, making time to be in love and connected and all those things you did before being a parent - then the whole thing is likely to fall apart.
Whether this is what the poster meant as "selfish" I don't know, but being aware of yourself, your partner, and your relationship in this rollercoaster of a ride seems to me to be an incredibly good thing.
When you're on an airplane, the instructions are to put on the mask before assisting others.
As a parent, it seems counter intuitive to save yourself first.
Self-care and balancing your needs (for whatever definition of balance applies) helps makes sure you are fully present and able to parent--making you a better parent.
It may feel like you are being selfish by putting your needs first; but that's our culture of shame and not a reflection of parenting skills.
Yeah I didn't have that instant flip. But after about 6-9 months, when they become increasingly interactive I started to enjoy it more. Before then it was more a sense of duty to help this tiny thing survive.
The way I explain it to my non-dads male coworkers, 1 to 18 months is mommy time and you’re there to help, but month 19 and forward is all daddy time until they’re 15 and they hate you. You’re literally the coolest person on earth for them. I like being a superhero.
This is very true because yes, kids can be a lot of fun. They can also be exhausting, frustrating, terrifying, and just plain boring at times. That too is ok. It's kinda how it's supposed to be.
I suspect one of the reason Paul Graham views them the way he does is because he has approached them with a genuine sense of curiosity. If you're trying to mould them too much (a mistake I'm sad to say I've made too much) then things are going to be rough for both of you. But if you explore the world with them, placing boundaries only where true danger lies, then things can become really intellectually and emotionally interesting.
Also, you know what? Take some time for yourself periodically to recharge! You know what else? Let and encourage your spouse do the same! Also? Take some time together without the kids from time to time. Your kids might complain at the moment but you'll all be better for it in the end.
Probably another factor is wealth. He must be, what, at least a hundred-millionaire at this point? That's going to afford a lot more options for dealing with the dreary parts, and give him a lot more confidence that he'll be able to follow through on those protective urges he describes.
When my 4 year old comes and wakes me up to ask for breakfast, I can't just tell him to go away, even if I only went to bed 2 hours ago because I sometimes have trouble sleeping.
When he asks me to play with him it breaks my heart when I say no because I'm working. I work from home, so I need to maintain boundaries otherwise I'd always be playing with him.
I feel terrible that I resent him for waking me up early, and really have to work at reminding myself that I don't hold it against him and that I did get up and care for him, even when I didn't want to.
It breaks my heart to disappoint him, but I need to work or he doesn't eat. I also try to actually keep working hours so that I have time to spend with him.
Honestly, just meeting your childrens basic needs as well as you can is being a good parent. We can't be there all the time to do everything possible. We're human; we don't have the time or attention.
As for the chemical change mentioned, the only difference I've ever felt is I get much more sad when something bad happens to a child, but otherwise, I don't think I think I've changed much elsewise. My heart wasn't bursting with joy when either was born, not to say I wasn't happy.
Out of curiosity, how old are you? I was much more selfish and 'go go go' in my 20s. In my mid thirties now and mellowed a lot. I find parenting a joy now, but think I would have hated it 10 years ago.
For sure. I wasn't intending to give life advice, just a personal account for younger folks who regret/are afraid of parenting. It's easy to change without realizing when it happened!
I definitely did. First night home she projectile pooped all over me, and my instinct was to laugh and think it was cute. That brought me up short and i realized my brain had been hacked for the purpose of the species' survival. I would still rather vegetate than play with her on many occasions, but something flipped a switch and all kids are way less annoying than they were. A friend of mine who has gotten all his out of the nest says it wears off. My father in law says the same until you hit your first grandchild when something similar kicked in.
When I had my first kid in 2009 I was expecting this whole life changing experience, instead it was just...the same, except now there's a baby take care of.
Three kids later and I definitely have strong feelings around my kids, but it's not some kind of revelation. They're people just like me, they just have less experience. It's my job (legally and ethically) to make sure they have a reasonably well informed, if biased, framework to examine, test and act in the world.
The Rules of the New Car
by Wesley McNair
After I got married and became
the stepfather of two children, just before
we had two more, I bought it, the bright
blue sorrowful car that slowly turned
to scratches and the flat black spots
of gum in the seats and stains impossible
to remove from the floor mats. “Never again.”
I said as our kids, four of them by now,
climbed into the new car. “This time,
there will be rules.” The first to go
was the rule I made for myself about
cleaning it once a week, though why,
I shouted at the kids in the rearview mirror,
should I have to clean it if they would just
remember to fold their hands. Three years
later, it was the same car I had before,
except for the dent my wife put in the grille
when, ignoring the regulation about snacks,
she reached for a bag of chips on her way
home from work and hit a tow truck. Oh,
the ache I felt for the broken rules,
and the beautiful car that had been lost,
and the car that we now had, on soft
shocks in the driveway, still unpaid for.
Then one day, for no particular reason except
that the car was loaded down with wood
for the fireplace at my in-laws’ camp
and groceries and sheets and clothes
for the week, my wife in the passenger seat,
the dog lightly panting beside the kids in the back,
all innocent anticipation, waiting for me
to join them, I opened the door to my life.
This is true. Having kids changed my life and outlook, but it didn't necessarily subtract from my personal ambitions. I've experienced it more pragmatically than as an epiphany. Some epiphany, for sure, but it didn't change my personality.
What almost always bothers me about Paul's essays is that he includes 'facts' like they apply to everyone. This is why I don't like most of his eesays.
For example: "..but having kids may make one less ambitious.".
It might apply to Paul but I have never been more ambitious since I had kids.
In his next sentences he almost makes us feeling guilty for it because "..you're probably going to care more about them than you do about yourself."
Ehm, no. Taking more care about your kids has nothing to do with ambitions. At least not for me. You can have great ambitions which include your whole family.
I highly recommend watching Mike Birbiglia "The New One". It's on Netflix, which is how I watched it, but I bet it would be pretty awesome to see in person.
My first child was born at 1 AM, on our third night at the hospital that week. All I felt was tired.
> over the past 3 years have realized just how selfish I am when it comes to taking care of the munchkins.
Ditto. Part of the deal with parenting is to grow out of the selfishness. It's never completely gone (at least, not for me), but I've grown to a place where I am (hopefully, at least) less selfish than I was.
I wonder if the same chemical switch that he talks about gets flipped if you adopt a child, or marry a single parent and thus become a step-parent. If so, I wonder how young the child has to be for that to happen.
It’s not a switch, not in a meaningful way. It’s the time spent together that forms the bond. I don’t love my kid because I had sex to have him, I do because I taught him how to walks and speak, go to the toilet and play with marbles and had all kinds of fun in the process. I love him because every time I show him something new, or I let him have a spoon of my coffee (he loves it) there’s a wide smile appearing on his face followed by “I love you daddy”. Its the most validating, gratifying experience I had in my life, even if it’s a pain in the ass and I’d rather watch tv or tinker in the garage instead of sitting on the bleachers of this gym while he practices somersaults. If I adopted him it would be largely the same thing.
If it's chemically-based, maybe it can be induced.
I wonder - and I'm being serious here, although this could certainly be a terrible idea for various reasons - what would happen if, say, a low dose of MDMA or similar were administered to new parents when they first began bonding with their child. Surely a spike of serotonin and oxytocin plays a role in the physiology of parental attachment? Perhaps guaranteeing such a spike could have significant long-term effects by helping to cement this bond?
>Having kids is one of those intense types of experience that are hard to imagine unless you've had them. But it is not, as I implicitly believed before having kids, simply your DNA heading for the lifeboats.
But it is, because your entire biology has evolved for billions of years with the sole purpose of reproducing effectively. No amount of "I feel like I enjoy it" negates that it is programmed into you as an organism. It just re-enforces how integrated the drive is with your psychology and consciousness.
The negative points from the post:
* less productive
* less time for your ideas
* less ambitious
If you're the type of person for which those points sounds disastrous, don't have kids. Get a pet instead. You can still fulfill that nurturing side of you without having it take a wrecking ball to your productivity.
My first 7 months with the newborn were exactly that: absolutely unproductive at work (got fired) and no time for anything of my own. And I was OK with it, because my only concern at the time was making sure the baby’s needs are met. After the initial 7 months passed, things went back to “old normal” - baby was much more stable and predictable, and I could get back to work.
I refer you to his later point: "On the other hand, what kind of wimpy ambition do you have if it won't survive having kids? Do you have so little to spare?"
I'd argue that your ambition simply shifts upon having kids. If you channel that ambition into being a better parent everyone benefits.
And from an "accomplishment" perspective, I'd ask which of a would-be parent's projects are so world-changing that they'll be alive or still affecting things 70 years from now? If you're Elon Musk maybe you can make that argument, but for most people their kids will have more overall influence then their work ever will. So if you want to make an impact over the long term and aren't just satisfying an obsessive workaholic itch, kids can be a great way to do that.
> If you channel that ambition into being a better parent everyone benefits.
That's begging the question. Your original ambition doesn't benefit. What if it was something really good and worthwhile?
> for most people their kids will have more overall influence then their work ever will.
This can't be the case, unless you think the amount of 'influence' always increases as generation pass (why?)
My kids are humans, just like me. If we're both selected at random, we should expect equal 'influence' for both. If I have some reason to think I'm above average in influence, then I should expect regression to the mean for my kids.
> > for most people their kids will have more overall influence then their work ever will.
> This can't be the case, unless you think the amount of 'influence' always increases as generation pass (why?)
There are three errors in your reasoning:
1) Having kids won't completely eliminate any non-child influence you've had or will have in the future.
2) If you have two or more kids, they'll together have more influence than you have (respectively three or more kids, if you account for your partner).
3) Your kids will potentially have kids themselves, further increasing the influence your kids can have.
I'd say having kids is also really good and worthwhile if you raise them into responsible, productive adults.
Why would influence have to always increase? Kids have a lifespan as well, it's just much longer than most projects.
The piece of software I'm currently working on will almost certainly not be doing squat 20 years from now. It will have been replaced with something else or upgraded beyond all recognition. And if I wasn't there to write said code some other software developer would be hired to do it. My personal contributions will have zero or asymptotically approaching zero influence 20 years from now. Kids on the other hand...
Kids aren't entirely selected at random, you select your partner based on impulses evolutionarily designed to produce stronger offspring. Then you spend over a decade shaping their behavior, whether you choose to do so directly or not. If you're a responsible parent you teach your kids what you know so that they can build on it as they see fit, when they grow up. And then they pass along a diluted form of said lessons to grandchildren. Now there's no guarantee of this happening, tragedy can strike and you can mess it up. But it's an effective enough mechanism that, for most people, your indirect influence through raising kids will be far greater over time than your direct influence via your work. It's one of the ways generational wealth is formed.
If you can take an honest look at your work and say:
1. If I don't do this no one else will, or they'll do it substantially worse
and
2. Its direct or indirect impact will still be felt 70 years from now
Then sure, don't have kids. And I'm not being facetious, if you're working on some unique device or policy that shows real promise at saving/fundamentally improving lives and your leaving would set development back years or worse, that qualifies. Most people aren't doing stuff like that though, in part because simply being in a position to do so is largely luck. In that case, kids are probably a better bet.
>On the other hand, what kind of wimpy ambition do you have if it won't survive having kids? Do you have so little to spare?"
It's a disingenuous argument. He acknowledges "attention is a zero-sum game" and that having kids has lowered his ambitions. Therefore, it's not a question of what is there "to spare" (implying leftover time/energy), it is a question of "how much are you willing to give up" to make room for the new priority.
It's not a question of ambition being strong or wimpy, it's a question of your tolerance for lowering your ambition.
Yeah, that didn't really track with me either. If attention (and therefore ambition?) is a zero-sum game, diverting attention from $SOME_THING to your kids implies diverting ambition as well. Either you divert less attention to your kids, and are still able to fulfill your prior ambitions, or you divert more, and you aren't. Or somewhere in between. It's not that your ambition is wimpy, just that it's finite.
I do better when I'm busy. Calling attention/ambition zero-sum doesn't add up for me. I don't really consider it finite either. We can usually find a way to push past our previous limits.
The interesting thing here is that if you take a long-term holistic view, there is actually more productivity (literally an extra lifetime), more time for ideas, and more ambitions being added to the world. You can choose to instill your values in your children and watch them bring ideas you might've had into a world you will never enter.
That only matters if you care about what happens to the world after you die to the extent that you're willing to allocate many person-years of your life toward raising a child. If that's not the case, and you just aren't interested in having kids, then this point doesn't really matter.
Do you like food? Or sex? Or being at a comfortable temperature? Because those are all programmed into you as an organism, too. Do you enjoy social status? Accomplishing goals? Material prosperity? Same deal. You are an organism and all of your root-level desires and goals are programmed into you by an evolutionary process of self-replicating genes and ideas. You’re not an immaterial ghost of rationality haunting a meat puppet that might hijack your life goals; you are the meat.
My point is not: "it's biologically programmed, therefore bad," as you seem to be suggesting. My point is: "it's biologically programmed, so it's silly to say that it isn't just because you enjoy it."
The same argument could be made for literally anything you or any other meatbag ever experiences, desires, or enjoys. It’s completely fatuous to use this line of argument to distinguish having children from any other human goal, activity, or desire because the criticism applies on both sides and hence cancels out.
If you go back to my original post, I used the idea of "biologically programmed" in the context of "sole purpose of reproducing effectively." That's the context that I am using "biologically programmed." It seems you are using it in a much broader context of "all possible human behavior." I am using it to distinguish between behaviors that support reproducing effectively and those that don't. If you are using it to include all possible human behavior, which it seems like you are, then of course we are going to disagree, because our basic definitions are not aligned.
Example: suicide before reproduction may be a "biologically programmed behavior" in your context, but not in mine, because it's not a behavior that supports the biological programming of reproduction.
In other words, you’re making a circular argument: since you’re defining “biologically programmed behavior” as “having children”, you’re only proving that having children implies having children—a tautology.
You’re also missing my point. The only reason you have any desires or goals or ambitions in the first place is because, at least heuristically, they serve some sort of self-replicating purpose. Not all possible human behavior serves a self-replicating purpose, but the vast majority of actual human behavior does, at least heuristically. That’s why we behave that way and not in some other way.
>In other words, you’re making a circular argument: since you’re defining “biologically programmed behavior” as “having children”
No, I am pointing out a contradictory argument, which was PG's "X is not X (because some Y)." Well, no, X is X, because that's how reasonable people define identities.
His original quote:
>But it is not, as I implicitly believed before having kids, simply your DNA heading for the lifeboats.
How I read it:
>[Having kids] is not...simply your [biological programming to reproduce].
That is obviously wrong to me, and the clearest way to point that out is to show that "biological programming to reproduce" is the definition of having kids.
>You’re also missing my point. The only reason you have any desires or goals or ambitions in the first place is because, at least heuristically, they serve some sort of self-replicating purpose.
I'm not missing that point, I agree with that point. I just don't see the relevance to my original argument.
> If you're the type of person for which those points sounds disastrous, don't have kids.
This is not a great advice. Those points only "sounds disastrous". It can be totally changed after you have kids.
As a developer, I always know I will be less productive etc. after having kids. On the other hand, I know I am not a genius, and I know I will be fulfilled more from my kids than from my lost productivity.
And then, you know what? When you get older, you will realize that losing productivity is unavoidable. It is so great to spend time with your family outside of work. Nobody can stay at 20s forever.
There is one more important factor: If you want to have a life without kids, you need to find a partner with the same mind set, which is not easy, or just stay alone.
> you need to find a partner with the same mind set, which is not easy,
That's actually not as hard as you probably think it is. More and more people (of both genders) are skeptical of child-rearing than ever before. Certainly any showstopper requirement you place on a romantic partner will reduce the size of the pool, but I think the pool of people who don't want children is plenty big enough these days.
At any rate, "I want to have kids because otherwise I won't find a partner and will be lonely" is a horrifyingly selfish and terrible reason to have kids, and if that's your thinking, you absolutely should not.
And yet if you look at some of the highest achieving people, many of them have kids. Presidents have kids. CEOs have kids. Billionaires and movie stars have kids. Nobel prize winners have kids. Not all of them, but many. A key part is probably having a spouse who is willing to do a larger share of the childcare, but kids do not seem to be a disqualifying factor for achieving just about anything.
* less productive
* less time for your ideas
* less ambitious
These points may or may not be true depending over what timeframe you measure.
If it’s your own lifetime, sure. If you measure your productivity over the next 300 years as what you plus your transitive offspring accomplish, it’s possible having kids is a huge boost to your aggregated productivity.
I agree your DNA is heavily involved, but I don't think he's trying to deny that, at least the way I interpreted it.
I think "simply" is an important word in that sentence, and when I read "is not ... simply your DNA", I read "simply" as "merely". He's saying that, sure, there is a biological compulsion involved, but there is also more to it.
The kid is a human being you can have a meaningful relationship with. They will do or say things that are interesting or worthwhile or significant in a way that's not really connected to the fact that they're your kid.
(It can be compared to a romantic relationship. Are there hormones making you want to be with a romantic partner because you like their looks, etc.? Absolutely. But on top of that, you can have a real friendship with a romantic partner where you have shared interests you enjoy pursuing together, you have interesting discussions, you support each other, and so on.)
On a side note, some parents can only see their kid through the lens of parenting. They rarely or never connect with their kid on the human-to-human level, and every thought and interaction is on the parent-to-child level. Maybe they just haven't thought in those terms, or they're afraid of undermining parental authority by being too much of a buddy, or their sense of parental duty dominates their thoughts, or maybe they can't connect personally to anyone else either.
> But it is, because your entire biology has evolved for billions of years with the sole purpose of reproducing effectively. No amount of "I feel like I enjoy it" negates that it is programmed into you as an organism. It just re-enforces how integrated the drive is with your psychology and consciousness.
I don’t think it’s programmed into me. I am
actively repulsed by children, the thought of reproducing, the concept of adding more humans to society, or increasing the resource consumption of my leaf node’s subtree.
The whole thing seems disgusting and self-centered and self-indulgent and selfish and irresponsible to me.
That said, I think that myself and others that feel this way stand in contrast to your claim that we are simply programmed to reproduce. We are not—only a subset of us are.
It depends on what you count as biologically programmed, I think. Certainly there's a great deal of cultural programming driving people to reproduce, which is a kind of software programming, even though it's much more malleable than a hardwired instinct would be.
It varies from person to person. For me it was mostly a sacrifice in leisure time. But I spent most of my weekends hanging out with friends and playing games. If you spend 24/7 focused on career, then yeah you're an extremely ambitious outlier and will have less time towards those things you listed.
But in my experience most people actually spend a lot of time hanging out with friends or doing nothing at all. This is where sacrifice of leisure and time management kicks in. I don't actually work on side projects any less than before I had kids. But I play games, hang out with friends, and do nothing a lot less.
Just remember that your desire for productivity, for time to think, and your ambitions, all come from that same place that makes you want to have sex and maybe kids.
You get to decide what kind of slave to your genes you'll be, but no one gets to build themselves free of them.
> If you're the type of person for which those points sounds disastrous, don't have kids.
I agree 100%. But at the same time, I have to appreciate that nearly all Presidents (to use an example) have children, many of them young enough to live in the White House. So maybe it's not quite as brtual as 'take a wrecking ball to your productivity' unless you want it to.
Anecdotally, I also observe that I don't mean that many folks in senior management and above who don't have kids. It's clearly possible to remain ambitious and be very successful even with kids in the picture.
Now, if your definition of productivity is coding every waking moment, then ... well, that goes away with age regardless :).
I'd also say don't get a pet unless you really want one. I'd much rather have another kid than a dog.
A bit of this feels like rose coloured glasses. I don't regret having kids, and I love them to death, and even at 2 and 4, they really are interesting to talk to and interact with! However, they're also at times the worst housemates and worst companions there are. As Graham says, kids take a tremendous amount of time and attention, which can be very frustrating. Kids are possibly the greatest inconvenience one can imagine, maybe even more so.
I think it was a ted talk I watched long ago whose basic premise was that with kids the highs are really high and the lows are really low. It goes on to say that a major component of the lows is that we feel like we shouldn't feel like this because it's not socially acceptable to talk about the negative aides of children. However, if we talked about how frustrating children are, we could help make those lows a bit less low.
Like I said, I don't regret mine, but it definitely not all flowers. I'm not really refuting anything in the essay, as he highlights many of the good parts of parenthood, I do think it's important that we don't look at child rearing with rose coloured glasses. I mean, it _is_ super awesome, but it also _sucks_ too.
> I mean, it _is_ super awesome, but it also _sucks_ too.
Totally.
In my experience the inconvenience has changed pretty dramatically (for the better) as they've gotten older. Maybe it's just that I don't mind the new inconveniences as much as the old ones, but I do _not_ miss the diaper/toilet training/can't talk/can't get into the car themselves phase.
It's not always delicate and perfect but you'll do fine. Consider how many other humans have done this successfully before you. Just do what you can without driving yourself and your co-parent(s) crazy and accept that your best might gracefully be a bit different than it used to be.
As someone who's two new arrivals recently turned two; it's by far the hardest thing I've done. I envy those who have one at a time. Having a startup fail around me was a piece of cake. Singlehandedly building a house (not commissioning a house) was peanuts. Building and shipping products now used by the billions was far less stressful than keeping two little rascals alive.
But I'm managing and I'm sure you will too. Clichés exist for a reason: as it turns out; I wouldn't trade it for anything.
The decision to have kids is a lot like the decision to continue living. There is no logical basis for it. Or rather, any latticework of logic you erect to justify this choice is based on a foundation that has nothing to do with reason. It is an emotional and spiritual desire to live and love, and give more life and more love to the world.
That's why I when see people engage in complex rational calculations about the utility a child may or may not bring into their life, I feel like they are missing the point. Of course people ought to be thoughtful about the decision to have children. And there are very good reasons to abstain. But in a sense they are not grasping that having children is a profound act of hope.
Agree. In many ways I wonder if we're seeing a couple compounding forces at play:
* The introduction of birth control and giving people (yes both men and women) too much control over procreation without having to control the impulse for procreation.
* Seeing people solely as material beings as a consequence of the Enlightenment. After all, if you're just the matter you're composed off then you're no more special than a rock or your iPhone or a dog. Why sacrifice so much material comfort in exchange for the material discomfort that parenting will inevitably cause if the baby is just matter?
Yes, and you're getting downvoted, but the whole framework of individualism and enlightenment principles prioritizing individual autonomy above all else often locks people's views in such a way they cannot conceive of having children as a fundamental responsibility/obligation to continue legacy of their ancestors.
There is this enlightenment western philosophy that everyone is an atomized, isolated blank slate acting only in their own self interest, severed from any ties to the past... it goes against long standing views of having inherited legacy, and responsibility to continue this legacy which applied much social pressure to having children, even many children like in more traditional/religious cultures, and this has been abandoned in a very short period of time (seen in declining birth rates, marriage rates, increasing age of having children etc.)
There is no responsibility or obligation to one's ancestors to have children. This is a construct you are creating to justify your choice, or rather "lack of choice". You're playing the logic games you're saying others play to justify not having children.
>There is no responsibility or obligation to one's ancestors to have children
I think it's probably a philosophical, maybe even a spiritual argument. Enlightenment individualism has ingrained in western cultures the idea they have no connection or ties to the past, or their ancestors, and shouldn't even conceive of themselves in terms of these other people. Blank slate, complete autonomy, etc. I think it's just a fundamental philosophical disagreement to start from a different premise that isn't self interest per se.
"Lack of choice", I like that. It removes the consideration to construct arguments about self-interested "choice".
I'll make a logical one though:
Every single person's existence is the sum total of all previous generations of ancestors action of making the choice that led to you. Not just one or a few of your ancestor's, but all of them are owed this choice. Maybe even this choice is owed to the universe (~God) itself?
The evolutionary "winners" will be the ones that consistently take this action. You can simply say, are you evolutionarily a winner, or a loser? Will you continue the propagation of your genes, or won't you? This is the "forest for the trees" way to frame it, I believe, as it steps back to avoid endless lower-level convenience rationales for opting out (if the choice is available to you of course).
Glorification of your ancestors, or having the expectation that your descendants will procreate in your honor, sounds like self-interested ego stroking and a vain attempt at establishing ones own importance in the universe, when that importance in the grand scheme of things is questionable.
Adopting a belief of "Lack of choice" is still a choice, as no one holds a gun to your head to have children, and birth control options are readily available to much of the world. This sounds like an excuse to remove inhibitions around sex, in that you are somehow doing this sexual act to honor "something greater than yourself", rather than it being your own self-interested pleasure seeking.
Species that adopt breeding = winning behaviors often experience overpopulation pressures which leads to catastrophic die offs. Turning this into a winners vs losers argument, over an act that is not that terribly complex or worthy of ticker-tape parades, seems again more self-interested ego stroking. How many points do you score when you have a baby, and who is keeping score? Maybe just you.
Evolutionary arguments in this day and age are moot points. We are already a genetically modified species (through IVFs and more recently , crispr) and won't be long before we can grow babies extracorporeally. And it's pretty certain , when designer babies become the norm, the trend is not to select traits that resemble some mythical ancestors, but the traits that are likely to maximize their happiness in the future.
> The introduction of birth control and giving people (yes both men and women) too much control over procreation without having to control the impulse for procreation.
Why "too much" control? I'm curious why you think the amount of control is larger than it should be (and to what end).
> There is no logical basis for it. Or rather, any latticework of logic you erect to justify this choice is based on a foundation that has nothing to do with reason.
Any formal system is going to be based upon some set of axioms. You can't apply reason without some foundational choices (ie. your axioms).
The bright line you are looking for is a lot fuzzier than it seems at first glance.
If you take as axiomatic that "the human race surviving is a good thing we should work towards". Having kids becomes an exceptionally rational thing for people to do.
Funny how my belief system is basically the contrapositive.
"Having kids is not universally good so the survival of the human race might not be that important (but we should still work for the quality of life for the people who are and will be alive.)"
To add to everything you said, which I agree with, having children is also a profound act of responsibility, or even obligation.
Along with all the logic games people play to justify not having children, they miss the overarching principle that they have a responsibility, to their ancestors, to match the gift of life that was given to them, to the sense of continuing the legacy of their parents, grandparents etc.
Or... one should, or even must, think this way to overcome the obsession with seeking a logical or selfish reason to have kids when they might not find one.
“ when our first child was born. It was like someone flipped a switch. I suddenly felt protective not just toward our child, but toward all children”
This happened to me two months back when I had my first child. Yes having a child has made me less productive with my work but I feel I’m happier now. Everyday I look forward to get home from work
It's not their fault. It's not personal. They've never done anything, they've had no experiences, their tastes are bland and repetitive because of their physical state and their limited experience, of course they're dull and uninteresting.
It's not their fault, but it's still the case. And they're not even like dull adults whom you can choose not to interact with (and even adults are often dull in a different way - some of them are hyper focused on something so niche that in that regard, in that niche, I'M the child with no experience and no understanding). Children seem to suck up so much of people's time and energy.
There was a post some time in which someone talked about how their small child got into MineCraft. Great, thought he. We can do this together. So they did. Building the exact same building every night, no deviations, just repetition. I suppose it's a more modern version of having to read the exact same storybook every night.
However, I teach up to 18 hours a day with children of various ages. I've done this for 22 years.
I also have been the de facto babysitter for my family since I was 14. Kids in my home almost constantly.
The #1 thing I've learned is that kids love to help,
. If you are busy and shush them away then they'll cause havoc. Involve them ever so slightly and you can continue your task.
Realizing this was the biggest boon to my productivity that I've had in my life. Sometimes the kids can increase your output by utilizing their curious/helpful minds or attempting to apply your thoughts in their space.
I'm sure this would be different if it were my children, but I constantly see parents making the mistake of thinking that their thoughts/activities and mutually exclusive to their children's thoughts/activities. They're not.
It does take time to learn to engage and frame your thoughts/activities, but children are only a pure attention sucker if you treat them as a distraction.
> kids love to help [ ... ] Involve them ever so slightly and you can continue your task.
I think it can be a mindset or awareness thing, but some people are also resistant to involving anyone else in their stuff.
It requires having an attitude where you believe others might have have something worthwhile to contribute, and it requires exercising faith in that person. And thinking through how they might contribute and/or what reasonable limits are. Some people aren't willing to do that, and they tend to shut people out so they keep control. (This applies to both kids and adults.)
IMHO (as a non-parent), it might actually be way better parenting, too, if you can get this right. People often respond well if you give them a stake in things and responsibility for something (assuming it's not genuinely more than they can handle). You're telling them you believe in them and giving them an opportunity to grow. Many people will take that opportunity. And if you always avoid giving them such opportunities, you're implicitly suggesting you don't think they can handle it. Developmentally, I think a kid needs to have these experiences where they see that they are trusted with things, learn to step up, see that their contributions fit in somewhere, and see how to do more of that. If they don't, they are probably going to go out into the world not really expecting anyone to want their contribution.
I think that's the most succinct way to put it: Give children stake in your interests.
It doesn't even have to be direct. If I'm working on a lesson (I teach technology), I can ask the kid to come up with some ideas, help clean the room, decide on what to have for lunch, help me grade assignments, etc...
At home it's the same. Help clean, ask if they can help me find a mistake I made, ask about food, ask them to comb my hair (funny, but kids 3-10 love doing this for some reason), ask them to put some music on for us, etc...
Of course it doesn't always stick and the kid wants some other attention, but when it _does_ stick I find it to be as beneficial as the time lost.
Great insight and I agree. I would add that you don't need to believe your child have something to contribute to involve him/her.
They are little brats and don't know shit, they get discracted by anything and so clumsy they are dangerous to themselves! I'm talking about 1 to 3 years old.
You have to involve them so they can have a chance to learn and grow. You are the most important, strongest, knowledgeable person in they little world and they want to be part in everything you do. How could one be so heartless to ignore this most basic and pure need and not involve them in everything? :) Part of parenting is dancing on that fine edge where they can excel, want more, able to fail and try again without hurting themselves too much and develop their skills and interest in a safe environment.
Yes! My kids love me fixing stuff, so I can multiplex minding them, fixing up the house and, in a sense, educate them all at the same time. Obviously it takes longer with them spilling tools everywhere, but chores get done and the kids are happy
Speaking as someone who was raised like that as well, you are doing your kids a great service. I feel pretty comfortable being the handyman in my house all because my dad involved me with his projects from a very young age.
That's kinda how my parents managed me as well, and it definitely paid off for everyone involved. Holding the flashlight for dad at 5 years old turned into helping build the car port by 10.
My parents got free labor they would have otherwise needed a pricey contractor for, and I got practical skills that have helped me to this day.
> The #1 thing I've learned is that kids love to help
This this this a 1000 times. Feeling needed, learning to help, and being rewarded with happy words and a clear sense of success and achievement is like a hard drug.
Every children will lean towards different activities; involving them will need a slightly different approach; and you will need to learn patience while they learn, so it's not a trivial task, but IME if you work it out, it works wonders even with the most challenged (or challenging) kids.
I've noticed this when seeing my sister's kid at her home. Cooking is hard for her because her son constantly wants her attention. For a while (when he was 2ish), he really wanted to help cook. Obviously giving him a kitchen knife or letting him near a hot stove/oven would be a terrible idea, so instead she would give him a big bowl, a spatula, some flour, a used spice shaker that she'd put flour or something colorful in, and have him sit on the floor in the kitchen and "help cook". Sure, he made a bit of a mess, but it wasn't hard to clean up, kept him occupied, and made him feel a part of the action.
I do this often with my little humans and we're doin great. But there are caveats:
1. If you cannot priorize having fun and teaching your children over the actual thing you are doing, you gonna have a bad time. Filling the dishwasher with a 2 yr old? You will spend 45 min on it while laughing 10 times, having a heart attack two times and maybe break a chip off a plate or break a cup now and then. Of course you can do it alone in 15 minutes if you could get rid of him/her... As soon as you get frustrated by the slowness and just want the task done you've lost. There is no task for you other than to teach them and you need to incorporate your daily chores into this task. This is of course fuckin' hard and sometimes impossible and a great source of frustration, shouting and regret.
2. Kids add a time multiplier for everything you do together and for he first 4 years it's gonna be less than one. After that there is an ever incerasing chance for them to be actually useful and reduce the time needed for a task. But the catch is : if you let them empty and fill the dishwasher regularly at 2 yr old and endure the long task they will help later on and you will benefit. If you don't they won't be interested in helping when they are 6,8,12 years old and their help would actually make a difference.
> Adults with children are 3.6 times more likely to tell Google they regret their decision than are adults without children.
I'd be curious if others have data on this. I'm especially interested in how many people have a reaction like Paul Graham (a switch flipped, it's inconvenient but totally worth it) vs. how many end up feeling overwhelmed and regretful. The latter thought carries far more stigma, so it might be harder to know how many people experience this.
I endorse looking at data like this, but I think there is much better way to estimate how kids would affect your happiness: do activities that put you in extensive contact with kids, e.g., volunteer to baby sit for your friends/family, offer to tutor/advise neighborhood kids, and coach youth sports. (In addition to learning about yourself, you're helping out parents and kids when you do this, so win-win.)
Obviously these activities do not capture huge things about the 24/7 job that being a parent is, but they will probably tell you a lot more about how you relate to children than looking at population self-report data.
Yes, I agree with that; my experiences lead me to strongly believe that 24/7 parenting is not for me. Right now, I like kids in small doses.
The question I'm attempting to answer with data is: how likely is it that I would experience the "switch flip" that Paul describes here, and would it be enough to overcome the feelings I have about it now? If the data strongly indicated that most parents experience this kind of "switch flip", it would make me more inclined.
This might work for some people, but for me it would have been a worthless and tragically misleading signal. I got modest-at-best enjoyment from being around kids before I had one, but the past 10 years with our son has held many of the best experiences of my life. Your own kid is a very different thing than all the other kids you might spend time with.
My experience is more like pg describes, where I had a lot of trouble projecting what it would be like, and in retrospect all the rational pro/con analysis I did wasn't really getting to the core of the matter.
I certainly didn't mean to suggest that you would enjoy spending time around a stranger's children as much as your own! I just mean that if you like spending time around a stranger's children more than average, or if you find babysitting less grating than average, this gives you some info that's specific to you, rather than being at the population level.
> but I think there is much better way to estimate how kids would affect your happiness: do activities that put you in extensive contact with kids, e.g., volunteer to baby sit for your friends/family, offer to tutor/advise neighborhood kids, and coach youth sports
I strongly disagree that this gives good evidence whether you'll enjoy having kids yourself. I never liked dealing with kids of any age; the experience with my own kids, however, is vastly different, and I really enjoy their company.
One possible confounder is that having children is a pretty much irreversible step. Whereas many people who don't have children might choose to have them later. So they regret their choice less, because it's a less final choice.
Another confounder is that parents with kids know what it's like to be single. Most people without children have no idea what it's like to have kids of their own. There is a subset that knows exactly what it's like, and it's those who have lost their children. Ask them if they regret their choice. Or actually don't, because people in that situation almost never made it there by choice.
Not having children is assumed not to be a final choice. But in many cases, it is. The more I learn about correlations between genetic disorders and parent age (including the age of the father), the more I feel I have been deceived about this.
There's bias: people with children were previously people without children and can realistically regret the lifestyle that they're leaving behind, but people who've never had children lack that same capacity for regret.
And as to who is feeling overwhelmed and regretful, it's mostly women who are shoved into a thankless housewife roll and living far away from their family and friends.
When people who attempt suicide but fail are interviewed later, they almost universally claim that they don't want their life to end, they just want their suffering to end. So it doesn't necessarily follow that they regret being born.
...most of the freedom I had before kids, I never used. I paid for it in loneliness, but I never used it.
Paul's written a lot of smart stuff, but this might be the smartest.
I took a lot of steps to protect my freedom before getting engaged to my partner, and I realize now that was a shitty tradeoff. Freedom was an unexercised resource I had, which is to say it was largely wasted on me. I spent a lot of time being lonely - not alone, which implies by choice, but lonely - having no steadfast companionship and with no alternative to that.
I think it's smart in concept, but it feels like its a little too overarching.
Taken literally, it sounds like he's dismissing his relationship/marriage and saying he was lonely while in it, pre-children. I'm not going to try and extrapolate if that's what he truly meant or what the implications of such a statement would mean.
The sentiment, I think, would improve from removing kids and saying "I didn't take advantage of my pre-children freedoms and was lonely because of that."
It also raises an interesting question... If he had maximized those freedoms, how would that have affected his decision to have a child?
That statement in the article actually turned me off quite a bit. Loneliness is not the opposite of having kids. Having kids is sort of an "easy mode" for filling your time[0]. So sure, if you don't have kids, and don't have a romantic partner, and and don't have friends, and attempt to go through life expecting that you and only you are necessary for entertaining yourself, yeah, you'll be lonely.
Earlier in life I often considered loneliness to be my biggest fear, but I eventually realized that loneliness isn't something that just happens to you. It's a choice. If you don't want that choice, then you have to put in effort to find and maintain friendships[1], find a hopefully-lifelong romantic partner, etc.
Beyond that, though, there are plenty of elderly people who are profoundly lonely because their children have families and lives of their own and rarely see them. Perhaps if they tried harder to maintain relationships outside their nuclear family, they'd be better off. Not saying all that is easy (especially with kids in the mix), but I certainly think it's worthwhile in the end.
[0] "Easy" in that your time will always be filled, with no searching needed on your part; I'm not suggesting that raising kids is easy.
[1] Being friends with parents (when you are not one) is hard, but it's worthwhile to make the time, and be flexible with your time since theirs often isn't.
I regret reading this essay because now the discouragement is back. I have wanted children; my wife has not. I am determined not to force the issue as she would be the one undertaking most of the burden, and why should I cause her to resent me? So I made peace with it, but every time something like this comes up I am torn again.
You're right not forcing the issue. But this is something that merits at least a dialogue. You don't have the right to force your partner to do what you want on this, but you have the right to be able to speak about your desires, and having them acknowledged.
Forget about this idea of burden, this is not for you to decide, and if you are serious about that, you should be clear about sharing the workload.
And yes, there are also the specific burdens of pregnancy, lactation that you can't share, but also for plenty of women, there is also a reward for those activities. A reward that you as a man can also only reap vicariously. So, for every woman there will be a different balance of perspectives, some value more the rewards and will be happy having kids, others will feel more actually the burdens. Not your business to decide that.
But, what is your business is to understand what is important to you. To understand that if you feel so strongly about it now, it probably won't go away and that you will resent over time, if not right now.
And then, if you have such different attitudes about this matter, maybe, just maybe, it would be best for both of you to free yourselves from each other.
Ironically, this essay shows the biggest problem I have with having kids -- especially in the US, people with kids seem to single-mindedly focus on them and can't stop telling you about their kids. What remains of their social lives and all their holidays seem to revolve around the kids. I think pg echoes a bit of this sentiment himself when he says:
> To some extent I'm like a religious cultist telling you that you'll be happy if you join the cult too — but only because joining the cult will alter your mind in a way that will make you happy to be a cult member.
My offhand guess is that this general situation is due to dual-earning families that live separately from the grandparents. This seems to be social experiment started after World War II, and from the point of view of an observer I can tell you it's not going great. I suspect that the traditional large joint family approach is probably best in case you do want to have kids and not have it completely upend your life.
Can you elaborate? What exactly is wrong with parents talking to you about their kids? Kids are a big part of our lives. We're telling you about our life.
I think what you're saying is that you want us to be interested in different stuff, more along the lines of what you're interested in, because you're not interested in kids. That doesn't sound so much like a social problem to me as a simple personality mismatch.
> Can you elaborate? What exactly is wrong with parents talking to you about their kids?
I'm not sure I can, but let me try. Some of my coworkers will chat to me for five minutes about watching that new Scorsese movie, and maybe make plans to hang out after work. Let's call this Group A. Some other ones will talk to me for twenty minutes about how their kids are really into Frozen 2, and how they dressed up as Elsa for Halloween. They also never have time to hang out. Let's call this Group B.
It so happens that none of the people in Group A have children, and that's really my problem with it. It's not really that I care whether or not anyone has kids (none of my business, really) -- but it seems like the people I overwhelmingly have no interest in listening to or talking with always end up being the ones that have kids. And so I end up wondering if this divide is inevitable, like of your (hah) sibling comments seems to say.
It's normal to be friendly with people you meet, that often leads to friendship - which is convenient. Certainly it's more fulfilling to work with friends than mere acquaintances IME.
Like pg notes in his essay, there's a good chance that there are members of Group B who are parents but you don't notice because they're not talking about their kids all the time.
They meant there are parents in Group A. You might be talking to someone (who is a parent, but low-key) about a new Scorsese film, and think "this here's an interesting person, talking about interesting things!" You aren't thinking about the fact that the person you're talking to is a parent.
But as others have pointed out, you're ignoring those of us in group A who like to talk about our kids, but also about films and hobbies and interests and all the other stuff you like.
I mean, look, it's possible your world is populated by a discernable "Group B" who "only" talk about kids and "never" hang out after work. But that's not a representative sample. Most of us parents have both lives and kids, and express both in our public lives.
I think if you look harder at your B subjects, you'd probably find that they do the same thing. I bet they talk about their new Teslas, and kitchen renovations, and vacations, and other stuff that you'd be presumptively interested in even as a single person. But because those are "family" activities I'm guessing you're lumping them in with the "kids" bucket and... maybe just refusing to engage a little?
Again, it doesn't make you a bad person to hate kids. But if you do, at least recognize that it is you that is doing the isolation here. Parents are more interesting than you might think.
If I'm insulting anyone, it's only out of genuine concern rather than intent to denigrate. I don't want them waking up one day at 45 realising they've missed their chance and have 40+ long years of emptiness and regret to reflect on their mistake. I don't want them observing the demographic changes around them with overwhelming guilt for their doing nothing.
I want them to experience the joy and fulfilment of family. Parenthood fundamentally changes people. I see it. You do too.
People who have kids (and people who really want kids) and people who don't (and people who don't want). They can't understand each other and most of one camp think the other camp dull and crazy.
It's just pov, and yeah, I keep distances from people with kids when the kids are around, because very possible they will leave their kids to me to gain a couple of hours to themselves.
> I keep distances from people with kids when the kids are around, because very possible they will leave their kids to me to gain a couple of hours to themselves.
I recognize that you certainly have your unique circle of acquaintances, but in general I find the above statement to be extremely improbable. Not only would I never leave my kids with an unwilling babysitter, it's actually the opposite -- you have to convince me that you are a safe choice.
It's hard not to talk about the most dominant thing in your life, and only a few people have the skill of being genuinely interested in the priorities of other people.
Some people are boring about their hobbies, some are boring about people, some are boring about work, some are boring about their kids.
If you find the conversation boring just remember they are probably just as bored at you droning on about blockchain or whatever it is you are keen to talk about.
This is a fair point. Taking it further, I also think it may just be that people with kids find "kid talk" to be a good default, safe topic of conversation with other people who have kids, so 50% or more of cases it actually makes them more interesting to those other kid-having people they can bond and empathize with.
Whereas I, who am not interested in that stuff, end up mentally putting them all into a single "boring" bucket, while the guy who can't stop talking about his 24-pack of Soylent gets his own separate "boring" bucket.
Definitely 'or more'. Something like 85% of adults 35+ have children. It's a pretty reliable low-effort conversation starter that immediately gets you a point of commonality with someone.
I don't have kids, but am involved in the lives of young relatives and am generally interested in questions about how to raise a child in ways that lead to them being competent, well adjusted humans. To me, parent talk seems to fall into two broad categories: discussions about raising children in general, and anecdotes about some supposedly funny thing that a particular child did last week. The former I find interesting, and I can engage in these conversations for hours. The latter bores me to death (and when the child being described is present I actively try to derail the conversation, as I hated listening to embarrassing stories about myself as a child and imagine most children feel the same way even if they lack the courage to voice that opinion to their parents). This is the difference between discussing the mechanics of a blockchain and discussing some anecdote about Coinye West rebranding as Coinye. I'm not too knowledgeable about or even particularly interested in cars, but I can listen to a mechanic talk about different types of engines and be genuinely engaged. I can't be genuinely engaged by somebody talking about the new paint job they put on their muscle car last week. I can recognise that others seem more engaged by anecdotal narratives than discussions of underlying systems, but I still think this distinction is different than simply being interested in one broad topic like "children" or "blockchains" over another.
It's just random small talk. It's the equivalent of talking about goofy stuff you run across at work. Or that you really like programming language X for <these subjective reasons>. A lot of people use sports for this too.
A good portion of the discussions on even this website are on the level of "I painted my car red last weekend". The articles are oftentimes better than this, but not always. Any fashionable piece of tech tends to have articles devoid of intellectual effort. E.g. back when NoSQL first came around, or just about any article about microservices.
Huh, I have the opposite opinion. For context. I am relatively young in the workforce, and also don't have kids nor immediate plans to have any.
I find general discussions about child development less interesting than humorous personal antidotes while parenting. Specifically when talking to my coworkers over lunch. Kids do stupid things, and hearing about the stupid things of the newest generation from my coworkers perspective can be a fun and interesting break from software engineering work we usually engage in. Where as a technical (some might say "deep") discussion about parenting and child development as a process feels more similar to the stuff I already grind at day to day.
I agree what you’re saying is a problem, but it isn’t universal. Anecdotally the trend seems to match living preferences: parents in central cities tend to be less myopic about their kids, parents in the suburbs more so.
For my wife and I, the book “Bringing Up Bebe” was really influential in how we thought about kids before and after we had them. It’s a perspective shift kind of like this: your newborn human can’t talk, can’t move, doesn’t have any hobbies, interests, or friends. Rather than bend your life around that, why not invite this child into your life, to join in your hobbies, meet your friends, etc.
That may sound silly but it’s actually a pretty influential idea to latch on to. We don’t have a schedule wrapped around our kids, or weekends wrapped around our kids. We go places we want to go, and do things we want to do, and include the kids and tell them what we’re doing and why and invite them to join the fun. The great thing about kids is they’re pretty much up for anything, so they usually love this and jump in :)
I think, as an adult, you also have to make a conscious choice to keep up your independent life.
Losing your independence is something that happens to people for various reasons - you see it sometimes when people get married, and then they withdraw from all their old social life and kind of retreat into each other. It’s a lot of pressure to be someone’s entire world... I haven’t seen many of those couples stay happy.
I think that’s the part of having kids that’s hardest. Because they do have needs and do have to be accommodated, it can be easy to just worry about taking care of them and give up on everything else because it’s not as easy as it used to be to maintain your independent life. But it’s a choice you make, and in my experience it’s deeply worthwhile.
While I agree with your later point about having larger families leading to a healthier mix of time spent, I cant agree with your first point.
Yes, most parents talk a lot about their kids and that can be annoying if you don't have kids. Most single people are just as annoying though. You can talk about your kids or you can talk about your vacation, or your job... for the most part people will find it interesting if they relate and boring if they don't. I don't think there's a qualitative difference there between parents and single people, just different audiences that will be receptive to what they're talking about.
I don't know if that's fair. I talk about my kids too much, no doubt, but only one of my (not single, but childless) friends is annoying that way. He likes to smugly point out what he did this weekend that had nothing to do with kids. I make a point of not discussing my kids or family life with him, and he still makes it a discussion point. Most other friends in my circle are pretty relaxed about the kid thing, either because they have kids, or because they know that kids are just people and therefore part of our larger social group, so discussing them is okay.
I didn't even know Paul Graham had kids. I don't recall them playing much of a part in his business, his essays, his creations, etc.
So how exactly does that show the biggest problem you have with kids?
Alternately, for some reason you laser-focus on the topic for some reason and you can't help but let it fill the entirety of your perception. This appears in Facebook a lot where people complain about baby pictures or anecdotes and somehow ignore the 99.99% of absolutely irrelevant inanity that the rest of their feed is ("Oh you ate at a restaurant...wowwweeeee"). It happens in loud restaurants when people filter out enormous volumes of ambient sound to focus on the sounds of a child sixty feet away. When someone has some sort of hangup about children, it's amazing how large it can appear in their perspective.
I think it’s the other way around: somehow we tried to build ourselves a civilization without children at all. I think in most human cultures, children are considered an important if not primary concern. Not having children well into adulthood is a modern privilege—one could even characterize modern childless adulthood as merely an extension of our own childhoods. But by starting to normalize childless adulthood, we’ve made the most normal and natural thing human beings do come across as a weird cultish type of social deviancy.
Logistically, extended families are a good idea. But I don’t think they stop people from putting their children first in terms of life priorities. On the contrary, a culture where parenthood rather than childless adulthood is normal is one where talking about your kids is a universal common ground you can share with other adults. (People need to have lots of kids for extended families to be normal—everyone will have grandparents but not necessarily aunts and uncles). Maybe you’re just observing one of these (sub)cultures from the outside.
>Not having children well into adulthood is a modern privilege—one could even characterize modern childless adulthood as merely an extension of our own childhoods.
this.
>Logistically, extended families are a good idea.
My fiancée and I have discussed buying a duplex, and moving her parents or mine (or both) into the other half. Looking into the future of what elder care will look like for them ... it's not pretty. A nursing home in a city I don't live in, staffed mostly with people that aren't even from this country (nothing wrong with that, generally, but it's something to be considered). For them it would be the best option, moving in with us. They get to see their grandkids, and we get to see them as they sunset their lives.
There's a difference between using kid-talk as a way to find common ground and bond with other people, and being literally unable to talk about anything but your kids. That latter bit actually does happen with a disturbingly-significant number of my friends who are parents.
The main commonality among parents I know who are afflicted with this problem is that they have no or few relatives living nearby. Those who have relatives (especially their own parents) nearby seem to be more well adjusted. While they still talk about their kids a lot, they can at least speak about other interests and events unrelated to the kids.
One of my friends who also is able to talk about other things is a freelancer and is not a workaholic. I suspect number of hours worked to be correlated here too.
Don’t people do this regardless though? Most people mainly talk about themselves and their interests. Kids are just a very common interest.
There are also a lot of people out there who only talk about work, or tech, or sports, or who hooked up with who, and anyone else who doesn’t share that interest will be bored to tears hearing them go on and on and about it.
Agreed. I do remember reading somewhere that the average current full time working mother spends more time with her children than a housewife in the 50s. Children used to go outside and play and have more unstructured time. I feel like there is this whole odd child-centric culture in the US. It is bizarre how many young adults I meet nowadays who have not been left without adult supervision for more than 15 minutes their entire childhood.
Most of my friends are from childhood. For the ones who have children, about half of them have turned into uninteresting people who are incapable of carrying a conversation about anything other than their children. And some of them were extremely interesting beforehand. A few have snapped out of it when their kids have turned 3-5, but most seem stuck forever.
When I go to visit family and family friends outside the US, they all have a bunch of kids but none of them have this disease where they can only talk about the kids. But there's also much more family support nearby and societal norms allow the children to be more independent.
We're American but live outside the US. Honestly our parent friends in the US seem sad and exhausted by comparison- the cult of workaholism is terrible for families, and the (guaranteed month of real pto/decent parental leave/shorter commutes/million other little things that make life less precarious) add up.
Wow, I don't think I had ever realised that connection; you're absolutely right. I guess if you don't live with an extended family, then more flexible work hours, or even 50% work (which is common in Europe I hear) makes a huge difference. Ha, more parental leave will make for less boring parents in addition to everything else :)
> When I go to visit family and family friends outside the US...
I was raised outside the US, and this has been my experience as well. My friends/family outside the US with kids do talk about them sometimes, but it's usually blended with other anecdotes, like "We were going on a trip to this place, and Timmy was well behaved for a change (eyeroll)".
In the US these conversations tend to be more along the lines of "Timmy had underwater basket weaving practice, so we had to drive 5 hours to take him, and he threw in the car on the way there and back. Did I mention he's getting really good with those baskets?"
Agree with CalRobert that this could very well be because of stingy PTO and parental leave policies in the US which seem to have been designed with hard-driving male car salesmen in the 1960s as the target group.
I try to avoid telling unsolicited stories about my kids, but what else am I supposed to answer when people ask about my weekend? It's not that I'm mistaken about how exciting my kids are, it's that other people are mistaken about how exciting (for them) my weekend could possibly be!
Despite not having children, I like hearing about my coworker's and friend's kids. Complaining about them can get old, but funny stories and things they are proud of are great to hear. I don't think I'm unique in this.
I don't mind -- and am often interested in -- cool/funny things about my friends' kids, but the complaining... ugh. I get that kids are far from being all rainbows and sunshine, and I would never begrudge my friends the occasional (or even more than occasional) venting session, but after some threshold of complaining I just want to say "maybe you shouldn't've had kids if all you can do is complain about them".
Ignore them. Nothing they have to share could possibly be as exciting as your family. They went somewhere, saw something, whatever. Maybe they have some vile tale of drunken stupidity to share from Saturday night. Gross.
Everything they do, every weekend of their life, combined, pales in comparison to the life, love, and family you've created. Their immature adventures ought to register pity, if anything.
Eh, you’re thinking way too hard about this imo. It’s a biological thing. Having a kid takes you back to a level of animality that probably only sex gets close to—you’re tapping into a bilogical instinct and you’re ruled by instinct—that’s why people talk so much about their kids—there’s really not too many experiences in everyday life that have such a fundamental psychological and biological effect—as soon as you have a kid nature has wired you up to put that kid before everything else —just look at how a mama bear will react when you get between her and her cubs, human parents are not so different, so obviously their intense focus on their kids seep into their social life.
It’s probably not something varianece in social structure will change since it comes from a fundamentally biological place.
This is offensive. People talk about what they’re passionate about, and who are you to judge someone who is passionate about parenthood? It’s condescending. You could apply that same logic to anyone who talks about anything to a degree more than you deem it to be worthy of. I hope you someday get some perspective on life and learn how to appreciate people who are different than you are
TBH I think it's just the chemical change. Basically you are happy in one way or another, and once you made decision most people tend to regret a bit/lot afterwards.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 389 ms ] threadJust don't act on such feelings, or you might get banned from HN for "doing ideological battle" :P
> You will have chunks of time to work. But you can't let work spill promiscuously through your whole life, like I used to before I had kids. You're going to have to work at the same time every day, whether inspiration is flowing or not, and there are going to be times when you have to stop, even if it is.
> I hate to say this, because being ambitious has always been a part of my identity, but having kids may make one less ambitious. It hurts to see that sentence written down. I squirm to avoid it. But if there weren't something real there, why would I squirm? The fact is, once you have kids, you're probably going to care more about them than you do about yourself. And attention is a zero-sum game. Only one idea at a time can be the top idea in your mind. Once you have kids, it will often be your kids, and that means it will less often be some project you're working on.
I remember seeing research done on people that have had the full experience and the overall ratings of happiness were lower.
Many Parents Are Happier Than Non-Parents — But Not in the U.S. https://time.com/collection/guide-to-happiness/4370344/paren...
Having kids makes you happier, but only when they move out https://www.newscientist.com/article/2213655-having-kids-mak...
The depressing reason why having kids doesn’t actually make you happier https://www.marketwatch.com/story/one-theory-on-why-having-k...
I think what's going on is that those research studies are picking up on unbiased measures of happiness.
In general if you ask people if children make their lives happier, they answer yes. However if you ask the same people about there overall happiness on a 1-5 scale people with children score lower then people without.
This makes sense from a biological perspective. Having an extra person to take care of; who only takes advantage of your hard earned resources without contributing does not give you any intrinsic form of happiness in any context unless this extra person is your child. Your body produces chemicals to counteract the unhappiness to satisfy your biological imperative but the main stressors are still their and can be measured in a survey that asks you questions about your happiness without the context of children.
It's hard to say if it actually is better to have kids. Is it like falling in love? Are we better off with the ability to fall in love?
As of this writing, my initial post has negative three votes which indicates general disagreement. Obviously, I don't have kids so I can only observe the phenomenon from an impartial standpoint.
Asking people why they want/wanted kids usually (but not always) results in a loop of they have kids because they wanted kids. Or they want kids because they want kids.
Not that's it not a sufficient answer, just that it's different from some "artificial" wants which can be justified more easily.
My favorite other simple answers were just "I grew up with four siblings and three dogs and I like there to be lots of movement at home" and "I'm not plotting for world domination only to let it go to waste after I die"
Lol.
You are more important than your children - for their sakes!
It’s similar to the phrase “you can’t truly love somebody until you love yourself”
You aren’t broken.
I write this because I read and it immediately messaged a few friends who respect Paul as well asking them if I was broken.
Everyone experiences parenthood differently.
I never had the chemical changes in my brain and often over the past 3 years have realized just how selfish I am when it comes to taking care of the munchkins. There are other things I’d rather be doing, learning, building.
That is OK.
Just because the HN generally respects Paul doesn’t mean that if your experience as a parent doesn’t match his something is wrong.
You are OK and chances are you are a better parent than you think.
[0] Six basic character (...) - Psychology of Achievement - Brian Tracy
Wait until they are 12.
Maybe that's unusual, and on average kids can be selfish (or maybe self-centered), but it's not as black and white as you're describing.
It's not at all obvious.
Specifically:
> I never had the chemical changes in my brain and often over the past 3 years have realized just how selfish I am when it comes to taking care of the munchkins. There are other things I’d rather be doing, learning, building. That is OK.
Had he said "That is OK, provided your partner is also ok with it of course." I would have a different interpretation.
You’ll make the hard decisions to do what is best for your kid but it isn’t always roses or easy as Paul makes it sound. I’m lucky if I have 3-4 experiences a week where I’m 100% in the moment and enjoying it. That is spending between 3-6 hours a day with my kids during the week.
But if I carve out a couple of hours for myself and my hobbies, then I'm able to be more present and engaged and better enjoy the time I spend with my son, which I think makes for a better overall experience for both of us.
I also did not feel a sudden transformation when my son is born. It took about seven months for my wife and I to not feel like we had made a major mistake (note that women are also not necessarily transformed immediately, but that it is even less culturally acceptable for them to admit this.) But somewhere around 18 months that warm, protective feeling that pg described kicked in and I don't have any regrets now (but sometimes it's still boring).
It's tricky business though and varies by context (age, finances, relationships), and I doubt anyone really knows best. You can easily (and will) err on both sides.
"No one ever walked into my psychology practice because their parents made them too emotionally independent."
There are some parents out there who continually martyr themselves because they think it makes them a good person (I get 4 hours of sleep a night to make sure my kids have everything! I'm awesome!) but are in fact overinvolved and setting a bad example for the kid by not taking care of themselves. Anecdotally I've found most of my married friends who are/were hesitant about kids were raised by such parents.
It's healthy for the kid to see that the parent needs some enforced level of time to themselves, short of neglect of course. The precise balance is up to the individual.
If you want to raise your kids well, stop treating them like they are a rare Chinese vase and they’ll be just fine.
Generally, this is advised against to minimize chances of the child contracting a virus or bacteria while there are no good treatment options in the first few months of life. Also, putting them in a vehicle increases their risk of being in a collision, which has the same problem of having few good remedies, so playing it safe is considered OK.
Helicopter parenting is a problem, for sure, but that isn't any more american than obesity is.
It's parenting based on fear, a reality of being in the information age and less fortunately the age of social media.
It seems to me that children can thrive under a wide variety of parenting styles. I consider that my own upbringing was a bit "rough around the edges", but with age I respect and understand my parents more and more.
In retrospect, I wouldn't have it any other way. I respect my parents a lot more than I used to.
My kids (now 12 and 15, goddamit!) are 100% the entirety of my life: the beginning, middle and end. They're the reason my wife and I work for ourselves, the reason we don't work all the time, the reason we haven't grown our business even though we could have. We want to be here for them in the tiny period of time we have them at home, and who cares if we end up financially poorer because of it - our lives are infinitely richer with this time we have as a family together.
But.
Some parents become parents and let their kids dominate. And I don't mean in a disciplinary way, I mean that the kids - especially when tiny - take over the adults lives too. This was obvious for us in the parents that let their kids stay up until whatever time, had no routine, let their kids sleep in their bed, never got out as a couple, etc etc.
The point I'm making is that having kids is THE single hardest thing you'll ever do. It's also THE BEST thing you'll ever do, but it's the hardest. And if you don't take care of you and your partner - by making time to be together, making time to be a couple and not parents, making time to be in love and connected and all those things you did before being a parent - then the whole thing is likely to fall apart.
Whether this is what the poster meant as "selfish" I don't know, but being aware of yourself, your partner, and your relationship in this rollercoaster of a ride seems to me to be an incredibly good thing.
As a parent, it seems counter intuitive to save yourself first.
Self-care and balancing your needs (for whatever definition of balance applies) helps makes sure you are fully present and able to parent--making you a better parent.
It may feel like you are being selfish by putting your needs first; but that's our culture of shame and not a reflection of parenting skills.
I suspect one of the reason Paul Graham views them the way he does is because he has approached them with a genuine sense of curiosity. If you're trying to mould them too much (a mistake I'm sad to say I've made too much) then things are going to be rough for both of you. But if you explore the world with them, placing boundaries only where true danger lies, then things can become really intellectually and emotionally interesting.
Also, you know what? Take some time for yourself periodically to recharge! You know what else? Let and encourage your spouse do the same! Also? Take some time together without the kids from time to time. Your kids might complain at the moment but you'll all be better for it in the end.
When he asks me to play with him it breaks my heart when I say no because I'm working. I work from home, so I need to maintain boundaries otherwise I'd always be playing with him.
I feel terrible that I resent him for waking me up early, and really have to work at reminding myself that I don't hold it against him and that I did get up and care for him, even when I didn't want to.
It breaks my heart to disappoint him, but I need to work or he doesn't eat. I also try to actually keep working hours so that I have time to spend with him.
Honestly, just meeting your childrens basic needs as well as you can is being a good parent. We can't be there all the time to do everything possible. We're human; we don't have the time or attention.
As for the chemical change mentioned, the only difference I've ever felt is I get much more sad when something bad happens to a child, but otherwise, I don't think I think I've changed much elsewise. My heart wasn't bursting with joy when either was born, not to say I wasn't happy.
Virtue is exactly what allows you to behave further that your feelings.
Three kids later and I definitely have strong feelings around my kids, but it's not some kind of revelation. They're people just like me, they just have less experience. It's my job (legally and ethically) to make sure they have a reasonably well informed, if biased, framework to examine, test and act in the world.
For an introduction to this concept, I recommend:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23129659-adult-children-...
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15812553-running-on-empt...
For example: "..but having kids may make one less ambitious.".
It might apply to Paul but I have never been more ambitious since I had kids.
In his next sentences he almost makes us feeling guilty for it because "..you're probably going to care more about them than you do about yourself."
Ehm, no. Taking more care about your kids has nothing to do with ambitions. At least not for me. You can have great ambitions which include your whole family.
Many of us stress about college costs, and costs in general. And, getting help can be very expensive, unless you have extensive family support.
> over the past 3 years have realized just how selfish I am when it comes to taking care of the munchkins.
Ditto. Part of the deal with parenting is to grow out of the selfishness. It's never completely gone (at least, not for me), but I've grown to a place where I am (hopefully, at least) less selfish than I was.
Children grow their parents, too.
I wonder - and I'm being serious here, although this could certainly be a terrible idea for various reasons - what would happen if, say, a low dose of MDMA or similar were administered to new parents when they first began bonding with their child. Surely a spike of serotonin and oxytocin plays a role in the physiology of parental attachment? Perhaps guaranteeing such a spike could have significant long-term effects by helping to cement this bond?
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/257612445_The_Sacre...
But it is, because your entire biology has evolved for billions of years with the sole purpose of reproducing effectively. No amount of "I feel like I enjoy it" negates that it is programmed into you as an organism. It just re-enforces how integrated the drive is with your psychology and consciousness.
The negative points from the post:
If you're the type of person for which those points sounds disastrous, don't have kids. Get a pet instead. You can still fulfill that nurturing side of you without having it take a wrecking ball to your productivity.I'd argue that your ambition simply shifts upon having kids. If you channel that ambition into being a better parent everyone benefits.
And from an "accomplishment" perspective, I'd ask which of a would-be parent's projects are so world-changing that they'll be alive or still affecting things 70 years from now? If you're Elon Musk maybe you can make that argument, but for most people their kids will have more overall influence then their work ever will. So if you want to make an impact over the long term and aren't just satisfying an obsessive workaholic itch, kids can be a great way to do that.
That's begging the question. Your original ambition doesn't benefit. What if it was something really good and worthwhile?
> for most people their kids will have more overall influence then their work ever will.
This can't be the case, unless you think the amount of 'influence' always increases as generation pass (why?)
My kids are humans, just like me. If we're both selected at random, we should expect equal 'influence' for both. If I have some reason to think I'm above average in influence, then I should expect regression to the mean for my kids.
> This can't be the case, unless you think the amount of 'influence' always increases as generation pass (why?)
There are three errors in your reasoning:
1) Having kids won't completely eliminate any non-child influence you've had or will have in the future.
2) If you have two or more kids, they'll together have more influence than you have (respectively three or more kids, if you account for your partner).
3) Your kids will potentially have kids themselves, further increasing the influence your kids can have.
Why would influence have to always increase? Kids have a lifespan as well, it's just much longer than most projects.
The piece of software I'm currently working on will almost certainly not be doing squat 20 years from now. It will have been replaced with something else or upgraded beyond all recognition. And if I wasn't there to write said code some other software developer would be hired to do it. My personal contributions will have zero or asymptotically approaching zero influence 20 years from now. Kids on the other hand...
Kids aren't entirely selected at random, you select your partner based on impulses evolutionarily designed to produce stronger offspring. Then you spend over a decade shaping their behavior, whether you choose to do so directly or not. If you're a responsible parent you teach your kids what you know so that they can build on it as they see fit, when they grow up. And then they pass along a diluted form of said lessons to grandchildren. Now there's no guarantee of this happening, tragedy can strike and you can mess it up. But it's an effective enough mechanism that, for most people, your indirect influence through raising kids will be far greater over time than your direct influence via your work. It's one of the ways generational wealth is formed.
If you can take an honest look at your work and say:
1. If I don't do this no one else will, or they'll do it substantially worse
and
2. Its direct or indirect impact will still be felt 70 years from now
Then sure, don't have kids. And I'm not being facetious, if you're working on some unique device or policy that shows real promise at saving/fundamentally improving lives and your leaving would set development back years or worse, that qualifies. Most people aren't doing stuff like that though, in part because simply being in a position to do so is largely luck. In that case, kids are probably a better bet.
It's a disingenuous argument. He acknowledges "attention is a zero-sum game" and that having kids has lowered his ambitions. Therefore, it's not a question of what is there "to spare" (implying leftover time/energy), it is a question of "how much are you willing to give up" to make room for the new priority.
It's not a question of ambition being strong or wimpy, it's a question of your tolerance for lowering your ambition.
Example: suicide before reproduction may be a "biologically programmed behavior" in your context, but not in mine, because it's not a behavior that supports the biological programming of reproduction.
You’re also missing my point. The only reason you have any desires or goals or ambitions in the first place is because, at least heuristically, they serve some sort of self-replicating purpose. Not all possible human behavior serves a self-replicating purpose, but the vast majority of actual human behavior does, at least heuristically. That’s why we behave that way and not in some other way.
No, I am pointing out a contradictory argument, which was PG's "X is not X (because some Y)." Well, no, X is X, because that's how reasonable people define identities.
His original quote:
>But it is not, as I implicitly believed before having kids, simply your DNA heading for the lifeboats.
How I read it:
>[Having kids] is not...simply your [biological programming to reproduce].
That is obviously wrong to me, and the clearest way to point that out is to show that "biological programming to reproduce" is the definition of having kids.
>You’re also missing my point. The only reason you have any desires or goals or ambitions in the first place is because, at least heuristically, they serve some sort of self-replicating purpose.
I'm not missing that point, I agree with that point. I just don't see the relevance to my original argument.
This is not a great advice. Those points only "sounds disastrous". It can be totally changed after you have kids.
As a developer, I always know I will be less productive etc. after having kids. On the other hand, I know I am not a genius, and I know I will be fulfilled more from my kids than from my lost productivity.
And then, you know what? When you get older, you will realize that losing productivity is unavoidable. It is so great to spend time with your family outside of work. Nobody can stay at 20s forever.
There is one more important factor: If you want to have a life without kids, you need to find a partner with the same mind set, which is not easy, or just stay alone.
That's actually not as hard as you probably think it is. More and more people (of both genders) are skeptical of child-rearing than ever before. Certainly any showstopper requirement you place on a romantic partner will reduce the size of the pool, but I think the pool of people who don't want children is plenty big enough these days.
At any rate, "I want to have kids because otherwise I won't find a partner and will be lonely" is a horrifyingly selfish and terrible reason to have kids, and if that's your thinking, you absolutely should not.
If it’s your own lifetime, sure. If you measure your productivity over the next 300 years as what you plus your transitive offspring accomplish, it’s possible having kids is a huge boost to your aggregated productivity.
I think "simply" is an important word in that sentence, and when I read "is not ... simply your DNA", I read "simply" as "merely". He's saying that, sure, there is a biological compulsion involved, but there is also more to it.
The kid is a human being you can have a meaningful relationship with. They will do or say things that are interesting or worthwhile or significant in a way that's not really connected to the fact that they're your kid.
(It can be compared to a romantic relationship. Are there hormones making you want to be with a romantic partner because you like their looks, etc.? Absolutely. But on top of that, you can have a real friendship with a romantic partner where you have shared interests you enjoy pursuing together, you have interesting discussions, you support each other, and so on.)
On a side note, some parents can only see their kid through the lens of parenting. They rarely or never connect with their kid on the human-to-human level, and every thought and interaction is on the parent-to-child level. Maybe they just haven't thought in those terms, or they're afraid of undermining parental authority by being too much of a buddy, or their sense of parental duty dominates their thoughts, or maybe they can't connect personally to anyone else either.
I don’t think it’s programmed into me. I am actively repulsed by children, the thought of reproducing, the concept of adding more humans to society, or increasing the resource consumption of my leaf node’s subtree.
The whole thing seems disgusting and self-centered and self-indulgent and selfish and irresponsible to me.
That said, I think that myself and others that feel this way stand in contrast to your claim that we are simply programmed to reproduce. We are not—only a subset of us are.
But in my experience most people actually spend a lot of time hanging out with friends or doing nothing at all. This is where sacrifice of leisure and time management kicks in. I don't actually work on side projects any less than before I had kids. But I play games, hang out with friends, and do nothing a lot less.
You get to decide what kind of slave to your genes you'll be, but no one gets to build themselves free of them.
I agree 100%. But at the same time, I have to appreciate that nearly all Presidents (to use an example) have children, many of them young enough to live in the White House. So maybe it's not quite as brtual as 'take a wrecking ball to your productivity' unless you want it to.
Anecdotally, I also observe that I don't mean that many folks in senior management and above who don't have kids. It's clearly possible to remain ambitious and be very successful even with kids in the picture.
Now, if your definition of productivity is coding every waking moment, then ... well, that goes away with age regardless :).
I'd also say don't get a pet unless you really want one. I'd much rather have another kid than a dog.
I think it was a ted talk I watched long ago whose basic premise was that with kids the highs are really high and the lows are really low. It goes on to say that a major component of the lows is that we feel like we shouldn't feel like this because it's not socially acceptable to talk about the negative aides of children. However, if we talked about how frustrating children are, we could help make those lows a bit less low.
Like I said, I don't regret mine, but it definitely not all flowers. I'm not really refuting anything in the essay, as he highlights many of the good parts of parenthood, I do think it's important that we don't look at child rearing with rose coloured glasses. I mean, it _is_ super awesome, but it also _sucks_ too.
Totally.
In my experience the inconvenience has changed pretty dramatically (for the better) as they've gotten older. Maybe it's just that I don't mind the new inconveniences as much as the old ones, but I do _not_ miss the diaper/toilet training/can't talk/can't get into the car themselves phase.
I don't think anything will prepare me for what lies ahead, feeling apprehensive, worried but looking forward to it none the less.
I've no idea how I'll manage time for our team in between diaper changes but I'm sure it'll all just work out for the best. Thinking positively.
But I'm managing and I'm sure you will too. Clichés exist for a reason: as it turns out; I wouldn't trade it for anything.
That's why I when see people engage in complex rational calculations about the utility a child may or may not bring into their life, I feel like they are missing the point. Of course people ought to be thoughtful about the decision to have children. And there are very good reasons to abstain. But in a sense they are not grasping that having children is a profound act of hope.
* The introduction of birth control and giving people (yes both men and women) too much control over procreation without having to control the impulse for procreation.
* Seeing people solely as material beings as a consequence of the Enlightenment. After all, if you're just the matter you're composed off then you're no more special than a rock or your iPhone or a dog. Why sacrifice so much material comfort in exchange for the material discomfort that parenting will inevitably cause if the baby is just matter?
There is this enlightenment western philosophy that everyone is an atomized, isolated blank slate acting only in their own self interest, severed from any ties to the past... it goes against long standing views of having inherited legacy, and responsibility to continue this legacy which applied much social pressure to having children, even many children like in more traditional/religious cultures, and this has been abandoned in a very short period of time (seen in declining birth rates, marriage rates, increasing age of having children etc.)
I think it's probably a philosophical, maybe even a spiritual argument. Enlightenment individualism has ingrained in western cultures the idea they have no connection or ties to the past, or their ancestors, and shouldn't even conceive of themselves in terms of these other people. Blank slate, complete autonomy, etc. I think it's just a fundamental philosophical disagreement to start from a different premise that isn't self interest per se.
"Lack of choice", I like that. It removes the consideration to construct arguments about self-interested "choice".
I'll make a logical one though:
Every single person's existence is the sum total of all previous generations of ancestors action of making the choice that led to you. Not just one or a few of your ancestor's, but all of them are owed this choice. Maybe even this choice is owed to the universe (~God) itself?
The evolutionary "winners" will be the ones that consistently take this action. You can simply say, are you evolutionarily a winner, or a loser? Will you continue the propagation of your genes, or won't you? This is the "forest for the trees" way to frame it, I believe, as it steps back to avoid endless lower-level convenience rationales for opting out (if the choice is available to you of course).
Adopting a belief of "Lack of choice" is still a choice, as no one holds a gun to your head to have children, and birth control options are readily available to much of the world. This sounds like an excuse to remove inhibitions around sex, in that you are somehow doing this sexual act to honor "something greater than yourself", rather than it being your own self-interested pleasure seeking.
Species that adopt breeding = winning behaviors often experience overpopulation pressures which leads to catastrophic die offs. Turning this into a winners vs losers argument, over an act that is not that terribly complex or worthy of ticker-tape parades, seems again more self-interested ego stroking. How many points do you score when you have a baby, and who is keeping score? Maybe just you.
Why "too much" control? I'm curious why you think the amount of control is larger than it should be (and to what end).
> You have not bought these boys, nor stolen them, nor passed any bit for them. You have them by some strange and lovely dispensation.
Any formal system is going to be based upon some set of axioms. You can't apply reason without some foundational choices (ie. your axioms).
The bright line you are looking for is a lot fuzzier than it seems at first glance.
If you take as axiomatic that "the human race surviving is a good thing we should work towards". Having kids becomes an exceptionally rational thing for people to do.
"Having kids is not universally good so the survival of the human race might not be that important (but we should still work for the quality of life for the people who are and will be alive.)"
Along with all the logic games people play to justify not having children, they miss the overarching principle that they have a responsibility, to their ancestors, to match the gift of life that was given to them, to the sense of continuing the legacy of their parents, grandparents etc.
Or... one should, or even must, think this way to overcome the obsession with seeking a logical or selfish reason to have kids when they might not find one.
This happened to me two months back when I had my first child. Yes having a child has made me less productive with my work but I feel I’m happier now. Everyday I look forward to get home from work
I have met people like that who do not even have children!
It's not their fault. It's not personal. They've never done anything, they've had no experiences, their tastes are bland and repetitive because of their physical state and their limited experience, of course they're dull and uninteresting.
It's not their fault, but it's still the case. And they're not even like dull adults whom you can choose not to interact with (and even adults are often dull in a different way - some of them are hyper focused on something so niche that in that regard, in that niche, I'M the child with no experience and no understanding). Children seem to suck up so much of people's time and energy.
There was a post some time in which someone talked about how their small child got into MineCraft. Great, thought he. We can do this together. So they did. Building the exact same building every night, no deviations, just repetition. I suppose it's a more modern version of having to read the exact same storybook every night.
But my own kid, despite statistically being just like all the kids and could be considered just as dull, is most certainly not dull to me.
Whatever is doing that to you is a blessing, I suspect, because there are parents out there who do not have that. What must their lives be like?
However, I teach up to 18 hours a day with children of various ages. I've done this for 22 years.
I also have been the de facto babysitter for my family since I was 14. Kids in my home almost constantly.
The #1 thing I've learned is that kids love to help, . If you are busy and shush them away then they'll cause havoc. Involve them ever so slightly and you can continue your task.
Realizing this was the biggest boon to my productivity that I've had in my life. Sometimes the kids can increase your output by utilizing their curious/helpful minds or attempting to apply your thoughts in their space.
I'm sure this would be different if it were my children, but I constantly see parents making the mistake of thinking that their thoughts/activities and mutually exclusive to their children's thoughts/activities. They're not.
It does take time to learn to engage and frame your thoughts/activities, but children are only a pure attention sucker if you treat them as a distraction.
I think it can be a mindset or awareness thing, but some people are also resistant to involving anyone else in their stuff.
It requires having an attitude where you believe others might have have something worthwhile to contribute, and it requires exercising faith in that person. And thinking through how they might contribute and/or what reasonable limits are. Some people aren't willing to do that, and they tend to shut people out so they keep control. (This applies to both kids and adults.)
IMHO (as a non-parent), it might actually be way better parenting, too, if you can get this right. People often respond well if you give them a stake in things and responsibility for something (assuming it's not genuinely more than they can handle). You're telling them you believe in them and giving them an opportunity to grow. Many people will take that opportunity. And if you always avoid giving them such opportunities, you're implicitly suggesting you don't think they can handle it. Developmentally, I think a kid needs to have these experiences where they see that they are trusted with things, learn to step up, see that their contributions fit in somewhere, and see how to do more of that. If they don't, they are probably going to go out into the world not really expecting anyone to want their contribution.
It doesn't even have to be direct. If I'm working on a lesson (I teach technology), I can ask the kid to come up with some ideas, help clean the room, decide on what to have for lunch, help me grade assignments, etc...
At home it's the same. Help clean, ask if they can help me find a mistake I made, ask about food, ask them to comb my hair (funny, but kids 3-10 love doing this for some reason), ask them to put some music on for us, etc...
Of course it doesn't always stick and the kid wants some other attention, but when it _does_ stick I find it to be as beneficial as the time lost.
They are little brats and don't know shit, they get discracted by anything and so clumsy they are dangerous to themselves! I'm talking about 1 to 3 years old.
You have to involve them so they can have a chance to learn and grow. You are the most important, strongest, knowledgeable person in they little world and they want to be part in everything you do. How could one be so heartless to ignore this most basic and pure need and not involve them in everything? :) Part of parenting is dancing on that fine edge where they can excel, want more, able to fail and try again without hurting themselves too much and develop their skills and interest in a safe environment.
My parents got free labor they would have otherwise needed a pricey contractor for, and I got practical skills that have helped me to this day.
This this this a 1000 times. Feeling needed, learning to help, and being rewarded with happy words and a clear sense of success and achievement is like a hard drug.
Every children will lean towards different activities; involving them will need a slightly different approach; and you will need to learn patience while they learn, so it's not a trivial task, but IME if you work it out, it works wonders even with the most challenged (or challenging) kids.
1. If you cannot priorize having fun and teaching your children over the actual thing you are doing, you gonna have a bad time. Filling the dishwasher with a 2 yr old? You will spend 45 min on it while laughing 10 times, having a heart attack two times and maybe break a chip off a plate or break a cup now and then. Of course you can do it alone in 15 minutes if you could get rid of him/her... As soon as you get frustrated by the slowness and just want the task done you've lost. There is no task for you other than to teach them and you need to incorporate your daily chores into this task. This is of course fuckin' hard and sometimes impossible and a great source of frustration, shouting and regret.
2. Kids add a time multiplier for everything you do together and for he first 4 years it's gonna be less than one. After that there is an ever incerasing chance for them to be actually useful and reduce the time needed for a task. But the catch is : if you let them empty and fill the dishwasher regularly at 2 yr old and endure the long task they will help later on and you will benefit. If you don't they won't be interested in helping when they are 6,8,12 years old and their help would actually make a difference.
> Adults with children are 3.6 times more likely to tell Google they regret their decision than are adults without children.
I'd be curious if others have data on this. I'm especially interested in how many people have a reaction like Paul Graham (a switch flipped, it's inconvenient but totally worth it) vs. how many end up feeling overwhelmed and regretful. The latter thought carries far more stigma, so it might be harder to know how many people experience this.
Obviously these activities do not capture huge things about the 24/7 job that being a parent is, but they will probably tell you a lot more about how you relate to children than looking at population self-report data.
The question I'm attempting to answer with data is: how likely is it that I would experience the "switch flip" that Paul describes here, and would it be enough to overcome the feelings I have about it now? If the data strongly indicated that most parents experience this kind of "switch flip", it would make me more inclined.
My experience is more like pg describes, where I had a lot of trouble projecting what it would be like, and in retrospect all the rational pro/con analysis I did wasn't really getting to the core of the matter.
I strongly disagree that this gives good evidence whether you'll enjoy having kids yourself. I never liked dealing with kids of any age; the experience with my own kids, however, is vastly different, and I really enjoy their company.
And as to who is feeling overwhelmed and regretful, it's mostly women who are shoved into a thankless housewife roll and living far away from their family and friends.
If the goal is "minimizing regret" (probably it isn't, but let's say it is for now), then not having kids is a more probably way of getting there.
At any rate, best to give people the chance to make that choice themselves.
Paul's written a lot of smart stuff, but this might be the smartest.
I took a lot of steps to protect my freedom before getting engaged to my partner, and I realize now that was a shitty tradeoff. Freedom was an unexercised resource I had, which is to say it was largely wasted on me. I spent a lot of time being lonely - not alone, which implies by choice, but lonely - having no steadfast companionship and with no alternative to that.
Taken literally, it sounds like he's dismissing his relationship/marriage and saying he was lonely while in it, pre-children. I'm not going to try and extrapolate if that's what he truly meant or what the implications of such a statement would mean.
The sentiment, I think, would improve from removing kids and saying "I didn't take advantage of my pre-children freedoms and was lonely because of that."
It also raises an interesting question... If he had maximized those freedoms, how would that have affected his decision to have a child?
Earlier in life I often considered loneliness to be my biggest fear, but I eventually realized that loneliness isn't something that just happens to you. It's a choice. If you don't want that choice, then you have to put in effort to find and maintain friendships[1], find a hopefully-lifelong romantic partner, etc.
Beyond that, though, there are plenty of elderly people who are profoundly lonely because their children have families and lives of their own and rarely see them. Perhaps if they tried harder to maintain relationships outside their nuclear family, they'd be better off. Not saying all that is easy (especially with kids in the mix), but I certainly think it's worthwhile in the end.
[0] "Easy" in that your time will always be filled, with no searching needed on your part; I'm not suggesting that raising kids is easy.
[1] Being friends with parents (when you are not one) is hard, but it's worthwhile to make the time, and be flexible with your time since theirs often isn't.
Imagine that one adjusts as one's life is adjusting around them. Surprise?
You discover if you had really seen the possibility space of life and weighed it's options.
Forget about this idea of burden, this is not for you to decide, and if you are serious about that, you should be clear about sharing the workload. And yes, there are also the specific burdens of pregnancy, lactation that you can't share, but also for plenty of women, there is also a reward for those activities. A reward that you as a man can also only reap vicariously. So, for every woman there will be a different balance of perspectives, some value more the rewards and will be happy having kids, others will feel more actually the burdens. Not your business to decide that.
But, what is your business is to understand what is important to you. To understand that if you feel so strongly about it now, it probably won't go away and that you will resent over time, if not right now.
And then, if you have such different attitudes about this matter, maybe, just maybe, it would be best for both of you to free yourselves from each other.
Decades of data suggest parenthood makes people unhappy https://bigthink.com/sex-relationships/should-you-have-kids
Google confessional: Your search engine knows if you regret having kids https://www.salon.com/2017/05/09/google-confessional-your-se...
Many Parents Are Happier Than Non-Parents — But Not in the U.S. https://time.com/collection/guide-to-happiness/4370344/paren...
Having kids makes you happier, but only when they move out https://www.newscientist.com/article/2213655-having-kids-mak...
The depressing reason why having kids doesn’t actually make you happier https://www.marketwatch.com/story/one-theory-on-why-having-k...
> To some extent I'm like a religious cultist telling you that you'll be happy if you join the cult too — but only because joining the cult will alter your mind in a way that will make you happy to be a cult member.
My offhand guess is that this general situation is due to dual-earning families that live separately from the grandparents. This seems to be social experiment started after World War II, and from the point of view of an observer I can tell you it's not going great. I suspect that the traditional large joint family approach is probably best in case you do want to have kids and not have it completely upend your life.
I think what you're saying is that you want us to be interested in different stuff, more along the lines of what you're interested in, because you're not interested in kids. That doesn't sound so much like a social problem to me as a simple personality mismatch.
I'm not sure I can, but let me try. Some of my coworkers will chat to me for five minutes about watching that new Scorsese movie, and maybe make plans to hang out after work. Let's call this Group A. Some other ones will talk to me for twenty minutes about how their kids are really into Frozen 2, and how they dressed up as Elsa for Halloween. They also never have time to hang out. Let's call this Group B.
It so happens that none of the people in Group A have children, and that's really my problem with it. It's not really that I care whether or not anyone has kids (none of my business, really) -- but it seems like the people I overwhelmingly have no interest in listening to or talking with always end up being the ones that have kids. And so I end up wondering if this divide is inevitable, like of your (hah) sibling comments seems to say.
I mean, look, it's possible your world is populated by a discernable "Group B" who "only" talk about kids and "never" hang out after work. But that's not a representative sample. Most of us parents have both lives and kids, and express both in our public lives.
I think if you look harder at your B subjects, you'd probably find that they do the same thing. I bet they talk about their new Teslas, and kitchen renovations, and vacations, and other stuff that you'd be presumptively interested in even as a single person. But because those are "family" activities I'm guessing you're lumping them in with the "kids" bucket and... maybe just refusing to engage a little?
Again, it doesn't make you a bad person to hate kids. But if you do, at least recognize that it is you that is doing the isolation here. Parents are more interesting than you might think.
If I'm insulting anyone, it's only out of genuine concern rather than intent to denigrate. I don't want them waking up one day at 45 realising they've missed their chance and have 40+ long years of emptiness and regret to reflect on their mistake. I don't want them observing the demographic changes around them with overwhelming guilt for their doing nothing.
I want them to experience the joy and fulfilment of family. Parenthood fundamentally changes people. I see it. You do too.
People who have kids (and people who really want kids) and people who don't (and people who don't want). They can't understand each other and most of one camp think the other camp dull and crazy.
It's just pov, and yeah, I keep distances from people with kids when the kids are around, because very possible they will leave their kids to me to gain a couple of hours to themselves.
I recognize that you certainly have your unique circle of acquaintances, but in general I find the above statement to be extremely improbable. Not only would I never leave my kids with an unwilling babysitter, it's actually the opposite -- you have to convince me that you are a safe choice.
Some people are boring about their hobbies, some are boring about people, some are boring about work, some are boring about their kids.
If you find the conversation boring just remember they are probably just as bored at you droning on about blockchain or whatever it is you are keen to talk about.
Whereas I, who am not interested in that stuff, end up mentally putting them all into a single "boring" bucket, while the guy who can't stop talking about his 24-pack of Soylent gets his own separate "boring" bucket.
Definitely 'or more'. Something like 85% of adults 35+ have children. It's a pretty reliable low-effort conversation starter that immediately gets you a point of commonality with someone.
A good portion of the discussions on even this website are on the level of "I painted my car red last weekend". The articles are oftentimes better than this, but not always. Any fashionable piece of tech tends to have articles devoid of intellectual effort. E.g. back when NoSQL first came around, or just about any article about microservices.
I find general discussions about child development less interesting than humorous personal antidotes while parenting. Specifically when talking to my coworkers over lunch. Kids do stupid things, and hearing about the stupid things of the newest generation from my coworkers perspective can be a fun and interesting break from software engineering work we usually engage in. Where as a technical (some might say "deep") discussion about parenting and child development as a process feels more similar to the stuff I already grind at day to day.
For my wife and I, the book “Bringing Up Bebe” was really influential in how we thought about kids before and after we had them. It’s a perspective shift kind of like this: your newborn human can’t talk, can’t move, doesn’t have any hobbies, interests, or friends. Rather than bend your life around that, why not invite this child into your life, to join in your hobbies, meet your friends, etc.
That may sound silly but it’s actually a pretty influential idea to latch on to. We don’t have a schedule wrapped around our kids, or weekends wrapped around our kids. We go places we want to go, and do things we want to do, and include the kids and tell them what we’re doing and why and invite them to join the fun. The great thing about kids is they’re pretty much up for anything, so they usually love this and jump in :)
I think, as an adult, you also have to make a conscious choice to keep up your independent life.
Losing your independence is something that happens to people for various reasons - you see it sometimes when people get married, and then they withdraw from all their old social life and kind of retreat into each other. It’s a lot of pressure to be someone’s entire world... I haven’t seen many of those couples stay happy.
I think that’s the part of having kids that’s hardest. Because they do have needs and do have to be accommodated, it can be easy to just worry about taking care of them and give up on everything else because it’s not as easy as it used to be to maintain your independent life. But it’s a choice you make, and in my experience it’s deeply worthwhile.
Yes, most parents talk a lot about their kids and that can be annoying if you don't have kids. Most single people are just as annoying though. You can talk about your kids or you can talk about your vacation, or your job... for the most part people will find it interesting if they relate and boring if they don't. I don't think there's a qualitative difference there between parents and single people, just different audiences that will be receptive to what they're talking about.
I don't know if that's fair. I talk about my kids too much, no doubt, but only one of my (not single, but childless) friends is annoying that way. He likes to smugly point out what he did this weekend that had nothing to do with kids. I make a point of not discussing my kids or family life with him, and he still makes it a discussion point. Most other friends in my circle are pretty relaxed about the kid thing, either because they have kids, or because they know that kids are just people and therefore part of our larger social group, so discussing them is okay.
So how exactly does that show the biggest problem you have with kids?
Alternately, for some reason you laser-focus on the topic for some reason and you can't help but let it fill the entirety of your perception. This appears in Facebook a lot where people complain about baby pictures or anecdotes and somehow ignore the 99.99% of absolutely irrelevant inanity that the rest of their feed is ("Oh you ate at a restaurant...wowwweeeee"). It happens in loud restaurants when people filter out enormous volumes of ambient sound to focus on the sounds of a child sixty feet away. When someone has some sort of hangup about children, it's amazing how large it can appear in their perspective.
Logistically, extended families are a good idea. But I don’t think they stop people from putting their children first in terms of life priorities. On the contrary, a culture where parenthood rather than childless adulthood is normal is one where talking about your kids is a universal common ground you can share with other adults. (People need to have lots of kids for extended families to be normal—everyone will have grandparents but not necessarily aunts and uncles). Maybe you’re just observing one of these (sub)cultures from the outside.
this.
>Logistically, extended families are a good idea.
My fiancée and I have discussed buying a duplex, and moving her parents or mine (or both) into the other half. Looking into the future of what elder care will look like for them ... it's not pretty. A nursing home in a city I don't live in, staffed mostly with people that aren't even from this country (nothing wrong with that, generally, but it's something to be considered). For them it would be the best option, moving in with us. They get to see their grandkids, and we get to see them as they sunset their lives.
The main commonality among parents I know who are afflicted with this problem is that they have no or few relatives living nearby. Those who have relatives (especially their own parents) nearby seem to be more well adjusted. While they still talk about their kids a lot, they can at least speak about other interests and events unrelated to the kids.
One of my friends who also is able to talk about other things is a freelancer and is not a workaholic. I suspect number of hours worked to be correlated here too.
There are also a lot of people out there who only talk about work, or tech, or sports, or who hooked up with who, and anyone else who doesn’t share that interest will be bored to tears hearing them go on and on and about it.
Most of my friends are from childhood. For the ones who have children, about half of them have turned into uninteresting people who are incapable of carrying a conversation about anything other than their children. And some of them were extremely interesting beforehand. A few have snapped out of it when their kids have turned 3-5, but most seem stuck forever.
When I go to visit family and family friends outside the US, they all have a bunch of kids but none of them have this disease where they can only talk about the kids. But there's also much more family support nearby and societal norms allow the children to be more independent.
I was raised outside the US, and this has been my experience as well. My friends/family outside the US with kids do talk about them sometimes, but it's usually blended with other anecdotes, like "We were going on a trip to this place, and Timmy was well behaved for a change (eyeroll)".
In the US these conversations tend to be more along the lines of "Timmy had underwater basket weaving practice, so we had to drive 5 hours to take him, and he threw in the car on the way there and back. Did I mention he's getting really good with those baskets?"
Agree with CalRobert that this could very well be because of stingy PTO and parental leave policies in the US which seem to have been designed with hard-driving male car salesmen in the 1960s as the target group.
Everything they do, every weekend of their life, combined, pales in comparison to the life, love, and family you've created. Their immature adventures ought to register pity, if anything.
It’s probably not something varianece in social structure will change since it comes from a fundamentally biological place.