A test with 1 person isn't a real study either. And whether the brain is shrunken or not, the sleep disruption, the great increase of things to take care of, the constant distraction... definitely makes you less smart. But too late, you're permanently rewired into "parent mode" and would have it no other way.
>you're permanently rewired into "parent mode" and would have it no other way.
that's a big assumption. we'd like to think that all people that have become parents wanted to be parents, but not everyone that's a parent wanted it. obviously, certain actions could have been taken to help prevent that. however, even if both parents were in agreement neither wanted to be parents, their options are less and less with each month's passing.
One thing I've never heard anyone talk about is how much you can learn about yourself from your children if you pay attention, e.g. my child would start crying if things got too loud and I could never concentrate apart from working in the middle of the night. Putting two and two together I got myself a pair of -30db fitted ear plugs and now I can work during the day just as effectively. Turned out I'd been doing me wrong for 20 years.
Why? Did they use fake people? Ask the people managing the flow of info from those 40 people and ask if it was real or not.
If anything, this is how I'd imagine real science being done. Doing something like this to get results at a scale that isn't quite funded, but enough to get attention. Later, someone else recreates the study at a larger scale to see if it is reproducible and hold as it scales.
nonsense. I for one recall my fathers near clairvoyant ability to sense minute fluctuations in the ambient air temperature even before they were made. he focused this experience into a sound known only to a child's ears
'don't touch that damn thermostat'
his poetic aptitude for dad jokes was intense, dare I say profound. truly a mind of the ages.
Dad jokes are intentionally lame. They serve an important social function - they establish the dad as the "lowest" member of the social totem pole, which frees kids up to not sweat social status so much. They allow everyone to unite in solidarity about how lame dad is, instead of obsessing about being cool all the time.
I'm astounded at how well this explanation sounds. It's as if someone did a social study into dad jokes that was funded by the NSF with actual trained professionals.
I'm guessing this only applies in a heavily matriarchial society. If it was a patriarchial society, you'd be killed for lowering the status of the head of the family with such nonsense!
It wouldn't surprise me if someone else already figured it out, but I put it together after becoming a father myself and reading Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre
Interesting take, based on my own life I would suggest the opposite: Dad is secure in his position and thus not vying for status. I enjoy saying silly stuff or teasing my kids. Not for any tactical or strategic reason just to have a chance to joke with them.
I expect if I was worried about social standing I would not say silly things. That I am "Dad" and cannot be fired means I am safe.
For example: I feel super proud when my daughter tells _me_ what I am saying is silly and she tells me why. So much of parenting is about us telling our kids things, what to do, or why something happens. Saying silly things invites the kids to tell us stuff with their own authority.
How is this playing out in higher-tech homes? Are kids overcoming parental technical aptitudes, or is this scaring kids off from fiddling with all things techy?
(I am dreading the day my kids will want to poke around in Hubitat [or whatever I am running at the time] and mess up my perfectly configured rules.)
If you do it nice you have the thermostat so you can twist or slide it and it goes up or down a degree (enough for the heat or AC to turn on) and then your program kicks in 30 later and resets it to where it was. Win-win.
> Dr Martínez-García’s study followed a group of 40 expectant fathers, 20 from Spain and 20 from America, and also, as a control, 17 Spanish men who did not have a baby on the way.
They should also have included fathers from cultures that aren’t as involved in pregnancy and infant care.
I think OP was not talking about absence altogether, but rather fathers that weren't as intimately involved in the day to day affairs of their children. Maybe nobility?
So what's the working theory here? Does the shrinkage allow new attachments to grow, essentially a "re-wiring" that causes the mother and father to focus on the child more than the rest of their lives?
Anecdotally, I feel that experience; consequently, business tasks have become much harder. I don't believe it'll be anything more than temporary, but it is certainly substantial.
> Anecdotally, I feel that experience; consequently, business tasks have become much harder.
Interesting. My experience was the opposite. After the initial sleep deprivation, once our child was sleep trained, I achieved a new level of productivity in my life.
Before children, I wasn't as focused. Now, I'm more efficient. The knowledge I have a break coming where I know I'll be giving my family my undivided attention helps motivate me through the day.
I became more productive, although less efficient. Kids really fuck with after-hours efficiency.
There's always the knowledge that if I fail to maintain a job, it is statistically associated with divorce, and that divorce is statistically associated with child support, and that child support is statistically associated with prison and revocation of passport/property/licenses keep me going. If I fail to be productive enough I will be tossed in jail, that wasn't really the case before. But unlike some other people, I lived an exceedingly free (and low-cost) life before children, often just being homeless and hitch-hiking around the country, fighting for foreign militia, spending months living in forest or hiking trails, etc.
Where are you getting two hours a day for yourself? We have two hours a day between kid bed time and our own, and we spend it being exhausted or together (or else we'd be total strangers real soon). I'm happy to manage 2 hours a week.
Same here. I feel like by having obligatory daily deadlines and processes imposed on me every day, together with the sleep deprivation, made me 200% more focused on what really matters, what is a good process, see what can be improved and what is the core of each task I'm trying to achieve (definition of done).
I think this isn’t really specific to having children - most people don’t become efficient until they have to. For many people the first time they have had strong enough time constraints is having children, but it might another family responsibility, a big outsidemof work commitment, or even a job or graduate degree in a high performance environment where you face sink or swim.
Nothing generates focus like “I have this exact 45 minutes to do X this week, or it isn’t going to happen”.
How do we know the sleep deprivation isn't the cause of the shrinkage? Not everyone's experience is the same, but ours was pretty bad for the first 6 months or so. Even now at 18 months we wake up usually once a night. I would not be surprised if this has an effect on my brain. That being said, I do feel my brain was "rewired" in a sense, that before I was not a baby person at all, but now I do really appreciate not just my baby but others.
>How do we know the sleep deprivation isn't the cause of the shrinkage?
I think that's a valid question -- one likes to assume that it's some adaptability trait, but the reality is that it could just as well be evidence of sub-standard conditions facilitated by the scenario.
Back pain and other chronic pains have been linked to decreased brain size too. My working understanding is brains change like the rest of us - both good and bad ways.
I was going to say this. I did feel remarkably stupid for a while after each kid was born. But they're 10 and 12 now, and I feel back to 100%. They require a lot less constant supervision now, which I imagine has a lot to do with it.
As all of my friends start to have kids, I'm noticing that they are basically completely different people.
It's almost as if 90% of their brain is dedicated solely to making sure their children are safe and looked after. It's like - at any moment - they think their children could just spontaneously combust or something. And I'm not talking infants. These are like 3 & 4 year olds...
As a non-parent, this is so bizarre. We all grew up with parents that weren't perfect, and we all ended up just fine.
I'm not sure if this is what's always happened to people when they become parents or if it's something new.
But the complete irrationality of their constant fears - something MUST have happened to their brains.
Honestly at 3 & 4 children will do the wildest stuff and I wouldn’t be surprised a parent has a head on a swivel for stupid kid nonsense at that point, by 4 you have a bachelors degree in “my child will handle/eat animal shit for no reason”. Children at that age are not capable of rational thinking, emotional regulation, and have no real sense of danger or stakes.
One of my favourite moments of fatherhood was at a playground this summer. Someone’s kid was doing something precarious on the monkey bars as I sat quietly with other dads minding our own business.
The girl began to wobble and myself and two other dads, without coordination or communication all instinctively began to lunge towards her (maybe 15 feet away).
We barely got two steps before we harnessed ourselves, noticed what happened and had a laugh. Then went back to being hermits.
I really felt like I was part of this ancient order. We didn’t know each other and yet we all understood each other.
You're a braver man than me. I never ever touch children I don't know (as a man), doesn't matter how compelling the reason. I assume no matter how good my intentions I will be sued / police called / crucified. Doubly so if it is a child of the opposite sex.
I have 'daydream'ish visions maybe weekly to monthly about my children (particularly the 4yo, less so the 1yo) being horrifically killed in various manners. Sometimes while I'm not even anywhere near them, but more often when they're in proximity. It's (mostly) completely irrational. Maybe the brain sees them doing so much dumb shit that you can't help but imagine the possibilities.
There’s a lot of multitasking with kids which I don’t think is healthy for the mind. Also I never have quiet moments to reflect which is when I make connections, mentally piece things together etc.
How do you "walk away" from a screaming toddler in public? In my experience the toddler will follow you to make sure they're screaming in your face. If they somehow actually do get separated, they'll go into an even worse meltdown from the separation anxiety and if someone sees you walk away from the child (in a meaningful way that would no longer let them scream in your face) you may get investigated from CPS.
Personally I don't indulge tantrums but that doesn't make them stop. I assume the child does it to punish me to try and make me feel as bad as they do, as she seems to understand the tantrum won't result in me actually doing anything. Like a tic-for-tac, not as a way to actually get something (she knows I don't give anything or really acknowledge a tantrum).
If you got a toddler to make tantrums 'not happen much anymore' I think either you have an exceptional child or they just grew old enough to grow out of it.
I have no idea what you do in whatever country you're in .. I personally have just told them I'll be in the next aisle and walked away.
It's worked fine with my own children, my grandchildren, and various nieces and nephews.
I agree that the the "not indulging" in tantrums doesn't make them stop on a dime .. but they peter out faster and anecdotally appear less frequently in the future.
It's good to have cool calm collected kids down the track so you can teach them to pull molten glass from a 1000C furnace when they're five, to use an angle grinder safely at nine, and start driving by ten.
None of these offspring of mine are exceptional BTW, they're kind of typical for rural WA (W.Australia).
Good on you I guess. Appreciate the good faith advice.
I'm 100% sure my kid would just start ripping and destroying the items on the shelving in that aisle. And that if the child were seen unsupervised in the aisle, at best the kid would be taken to the front and at worst police would be called (my country, USA, is extremely paranoid about children which means even if you are not paranoid about your kid you have to be paranoid about CPS and the criminal charges).
At any rate I wish more places were mroe like rural Australia in that regard. Even relatively minor independence for young children is effectively illegal in much of the US.
> I'm 100% sure my kid would just start ripping and destroying the items on the shelving in that aisle.
You think .. but you don't actualy know is what I hear you saying :-)
In my experience small people indulge in a lot of performance art for the benefit of the faces they recognise in order to gather reactions and learn from that feedback - not as a front of brain delibrate strategy, more as innate "born to learn" pattern.
If you get in a Mexican standoff with you're own kid you're almost certainly going to lose .. I know I would with mine .. you start "daring them" not to do something and they'll start inching that jar ever closer to the edge until it drops.
"Young enough" kids will generally pull into best behaviour in a sea of faces they don't recognise, that's pretty much the time that you have a window to treat poor behaviour by simply walking away.
After that period they're more confident in front of strangers AND (uh-oh) understand that behaviour not seen by you is still behaviour known by you .. and that can manipulate you.
Child-parent relations are a non stop conveyor of escalating mirror awareness | peek-a-boo interactions .. and then puberty hits and you're into full Cold War MAD scenarios :-).
But yeah, independence for kids is pretty essential, it's good to have them walking | riding to school, looking after pets, growing food, building radios etc.
Love happened. And maybe that’s a purely physical thing like brain shrinkage or whatever.
I’ve loved before. But once my first came things were very different. It was a new kind of love. I suddenly had such a clear mission in life: protect and nurture this baby.
As a new parent I would say that it's new. With the amount of stuff marketed to parents, constant social media, and people enjoying the spotlight/karma when they exaggerate a story, impossible to not have a concern.
"This pram needs to have suspension system. What if you got a pot hole too hard and the baby bounces out and hits the ground causing brain damage? Happened to a cousin."
I see this and push back on my wife almost every day (I don't have social media, so I'm blissfully unaware of what dangers lurk)
As the parent of a three year old…I promise it’s more rational than you think.
Children that age have the _potential_ to do a lot of damage and no _foresight_ whatsoever. They literally cannot see the potential consequences of running into the street.
It’s fine to not understand, but please think twice about calling something you don’t understand “irrational.”
Father here. Yes, it was the biggest change in my whole life. I could switch career and become a plumber it wouldn't be as radical.
If you don't believe in letting natural selection sort if you child will get past 2 yo, you 'll either recenter your whole environment and routines around the kid, or spend 90% or your time make sure they don't stab themselves with your antique knives collection or soldering iron.
Fo that for a few years and you won't be switching back to what you were before just because your kid can now read your phone password from your finger movements from across the room.
I think the same thing happens when you're looking after your elderly parents.
PS:
> We all grew up with parents that weren't perfect, and we all ended up just fine.
I talked to my parents a while after my kids were out of the "let's gob anything that can fit in my face hole", and I also basically robbed a few years of their life where they basically frozr their career and couldn't do much outside of making sure we're not dying. Some parents forget how hard it was though (and it's normal. Your brain is really in a bad state all that time)
You didn't know your parents before they became parents, and as a child, did not have the EQ anyway to read their personas. Also, a mobile and curious 3 or 4 year old is a LOT more stressful than age 0-1.
Preparing every meal for your kids, getting them to and from daycare, negotiating over every single thing you ask them to do, doing dishes, doing laundry, fixing drywall, etc. it's a lot of work. You can't just roll out of bed, get to work, work all day, then come home and work or unwind or whatever like you used to; you're "on" all the time, for years, and you squeeze some work in when you can so that you don't have to eat cat food when you're older.
Lots of people have already given you plenty of opinions, but I’ll add one more: I love thinking about my child. Making her life amazing and safe makes me feel good.
Other than any sort of epigenetic change, and without any sort of clinical evidence whatsoever, I wouldn't be surprised if it was somehow linked with the almost universal sleep deprivation associated with having an infant.
I mean, they’re not wrong! They’re expensive ($300k each 2022 inflation adjusted in the US, from 0-18), they age you faster, and there is no guarantee the experience is worth it. They also destroy relationship satisfaction in the early years. Half of all annual pregnancies both domestic to the US and internationally are unintended.
I have kids and attempt to convince those who ask me about my experience not to have them. It is not for the faint of heart.
You can easily adjust your spending by an order of magnitude either direction.
> they age you faster
Yeah, I'm sure you'd have been looking great at 60 if not for those damned kids.
> there is no guarantee the experience is worth it
Satisfying the primary evolutionary optimization criterion seems overwhelmingly likely to be worth it.
> They also destroy relationship satisfaction in the early years
What do you think the effect on relationship satisfaction will be in later years to have lost your youth in any case, but also to be in a sterile relationship with no connection to the future?
> It is not for the faint of heart.
Almost anyone can handle it. Nutrient-deprived illiterate cavemen have been doing it for hundreds of thousands of years without much issue - anyone doing it today is probably fine.
“Life is going to suck anyway, might as well drag others along for the ride” is not a philosophy worth having imho.
Suffering is a choice I suppose, just go into it with both eyes open. That’s my thesis. You can have a great life without having kids. Unpartnered older childfree women are one of the happiest cohorts, for example.
> Life is going to suck anyway, might as well drag others along for the ride
How in the world did you get that from anything I said?
I can't pick out any part of my comment that could be construed to mean that.
Marginal life is (as of now) more or less strictly positive EV, as is the expected internalized and externalized outcome of most of the people on this site having kids.
> Unpartnered older childfree women are one of the happiest cohorts
I really really doubt this is the case. Typically for sociology research, there are tons of papers claiming strong effect sizes of child-rearing on life satisfaction in both directions. However, older women are by far the subpopulation most dependent on psychoactive drugs such as antidepressants. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db377.htm I unfortunately can't find any studies that break down antidepressant use rates by parental status at all, or a fortiori by age/marriage/parental status individually.
I think it would be interesting to compare new parents with sleep deprived non-parents (if there is some way to do that).
I have 3 kids, for me the first 18 months for newborns was pretty rough in terms of sleep. My first 2 are 15 months apart, there was a long duration of round the clock work. Doing startups and having babies is extra challenging in my experience, maybe that makes success extra sweet.
Pre-kids: "someone in the house is screaming 12 hours a day. I think I'll move out or have them evicted."
Post-kids: "someone in the house is screaming 12 hours a day. I'll be tossed in jail if I leave the screaming person to their own devices, so I'll think I'll have a beer so I don't go clinically insane."
Maybe sitting on the toilet too long results in screwing up blood flow to other parts of the body, like the brain. Because I'll tell you what, sitting on the toilet never appealed so much before I had kids.
All these articles about magical changes to fathers drive me crazy by listing every physiological consequence of sleep deprivation and attributing them all to the magic of fatherhood.
I wasn't very sleep deprived at all with our 2. Wife and I slept in separate rooms so that I could be focused at work. I still feel... completely different a s a father in ways I cannot possibly put into words. We got started late, so I'm over 40 now with a 1yo; I may just be 'getting old', but certainly experience more moments of cognitive decline than I ever have.
I always cringe slightly when I see a headline like this on HN, imagining it feeding unfair prejudices about protected groups, to some nonempty subset of tech industry founders and interviewers.
Also problematic are HN comments like (exaggerated here) "Shucks, on the day I turned 30, I lost 100 IQ points, and now have trouble remembering not to pick my nose at the same time I'm eating paste."
You be you, but please remember that prejudices and confirmation bias are problems, and try not to tar an entire group with your paste.
Sorry but how is an article about physiological changes in men becoming fathers possibly feeding into prejudice? Because we might try to be a founder someday? We’re fine, thanks.
If some halfwit VC seriously passes on my company because he sees this one headline and concludes fathers are stupid then he’s terrible at his job and remind me to short everything he touches.
> Sorry but how is an article about physiological changes in men becoming fathers possibly feeding into prejudice?
It’s noted above the paywall in the article too. I won’t comment further than noting that you’re demonstrating the biases other comment warned about very well.
Perhaps you don't understand how science or the aegis of science have been historically used to justify discrimination. You can look to phrenology as a good example of this. It was touted at some point as a biological justification for white-black racism. So here we have a class of people who suffer discrimination (parents) and a "scientific" justification.
> If some halfwit VC...
You won't know that this happened. There will be plenty of other reasons which can be explicitly stated for not funding you (or passing you over for a promotion or whatever). You will only learn that you are suffering from discrimination if you get lucky and catch the oppressor on a hot mike or they fat finger the reply all.
For example, anecdotally, the percentage of founders I've heard say that they only want to hire early-20s engineers, is... high.
(PG might've started it, with influential essays about why he wanted college students as founders, perhaps making it socially acceptable. Then people like Zuckerberg reinforced it, with public comments. Many companies structure their interviews around tests/rituals that arguably start from "How, uh, fresh in mind are your undergrad CS classes, even though that probably has little-to-no relevance to the actual work you'd be doing here?")
That's only ageism. There's also sexism, racism, classism, genderism(?), etc.
There's enough of those biases going around, and we're in/hitting a recession. Not everyone can afford to decide "I don't want to work for a company where anyone who could influence my opportunities has some ill-informed bias against some group.".
Some scientific finding of X is fine, if the science is solid. But being aware of ongoing bias problems can affect how we communicate and think around that.
>For example, anecdotally, the percentage of founders I've heard say that they only want to hire early-20s engineers, is... high.
Maybe that's because early-20s people are willing to work for less, easier to manipulate to work long hours and don't understand red flags like founders who say things like that.
They’re also looking for repeat successes. If they give money to a founder early on and they have a hit - there’s a good chance they’ll want to found another company and they’ll have another hit.
Bingo. In my experience, young employees are hoping desperately for a lottery win, because owning their own home some day is starting to seem impossible. They want to believe that the magic beans (pre-IPO options) are real and are usually willing to hang on at a bad job, desperately trying to make it work, because they've spent a year of their life believing that their options would be worth megabucks in 5-8 years. It's extremely difficult to walk away from that. If it is successful, they find out too late that their options aren't worth nearly as much as they'd been led to believe. Older engineers, especially those who already have a home, or have been burned by the dream once or twice, are more likely to think of pre-IPO stock like an actual lottery ticket.
Men with kids are at the top of the power structure in nearly every industry. Anybody who has a negative stereotype about dads almost certainly isn’t in a position to do anything about it other than utter under their breath. In practice the opposite stereotype exists: childless men make less money, live shorter lives, and are seen as less responsible and trustworthy.
This is true until you try to actually raise your kids. "Men with kids" may poll high with bosses, but the third or fourth time you need reasonable accommodations for a school pickup, you're suddenly not the type of go-getter this company values.
I would go so far as to argue that there is a single cohort "at the top of the power structure" comprised of men with no kids and men who have kids but do not actively parent. Men who have significant childcare commitments are in a lower cohort.
As I understand the article, and the response, it’s talking about changes to mens’ brains caused by fatherhood. “Men who have kids are dumber” isn’t a prejudice anyone meaningfully has to worry about. Your point is fair—fathers definitely face headwinds if they try and take on more caregiving roles—but that’s directed to a different thing.
I recall an Amazon director 10 years ago commenting during a mixer about how having kids was a limiting factor for career progression. It wasn’t possible to be serious about your career and be a parent.
>I always cringe slightly when I see a headline like this on HN, imagining it feeding unfair prejudices about protected groups
"Protected" by and from who? Whose "unfair prejudices" are really at issue here? I always cringe when scientific studies or other bits of objective reality are suppressed or downplayed because of the prejudices of people who believe that arbitrarily cobbled together groups of people by those who think they know better need to somehow "be protected".
>You be you, but please remember that prejudices and confirmation bias are problems
If someone has a problem with science and objective reality, that is a personal problem they should deal with, not a problem with science and objective reality. Unfortunately there is an ever-growing mentality (especially among younger people) that if objective reality is somehow offensive to one's sensibilities then objective reality should be ignored or explicitly rejected all together.
1. This study had a relatively small sample size, curious if it’s even statistically significant enough for the claims. Particularly, with MRIs not being a perfect measurement for bodily function.
2. I wouldn’t be surprised if this is true, but not for the reasons the study (why are we linking to the economist) concludes. Everyone who’s an active parent recognizes that you’ll be sleep deprived the first year of having a child. Youll also be working harder and have higher stress. I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s the reason for shrinking the cerebrum.
Fairly certain it’s just prolonged, extreme sleep deprivation. You can’t know if you haven’t been through it. My first required someone to be awake walking her around all night long for the first few months. I’d switch off with my wife at 3am then get up at 7 to get ready for work. For months.
I actually remember the first time after she was born that I got more than 30 consecutive minutes of sleep, (maybe a week after?) because I woke up and saw the sun low and red in the sky, and legitimately did not know if was morning or evening. Turns out I had only been asleep 2 hours.
I never understood the phrase “sleep like a baby.” You mean, for 20 minutes at a time then you wake up screaming?
Tbh i didn't read the article but the headline makes me think about synaptic pruning. When you're young your brain is actually a bit bigger than your adult brain, but then you go through synaptic pruning. A lot of extra neurons die off and your brain in turn re-wires in a more complex way. I wonder if it's something similar to that. I see a lot of people jumping to "smaller brain=less smart" but that's not always true.
Did they check later down the road to see if the cerebrum volume continued to be reduced? Having been a dad 2x, I would wonder if the decrease was do to being woken up often and having messed up sleep schedules.
Does the decrease in vol happen again with the 2nd(3rd, 4th…) kid?
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 337 ms ] threadthat's a big assumption. we'd like to think that all people that have become parents wanted to be parents, but not everyone that's a parent wanted it. obviously, certain actions could have been taken to help prevent that. however, even if both parents were in agreement neither wanted to be parents, their options are less and less with each month's passing.
If anything, this is how I'd imagine real science being done. Doing something like this to get results at a scale that isn't quite funded, but enough to get attention. Later, someone else recreates the study at a larger scale to see if it is reproducible and hold as it scales.
'don't touch that damn thermostat'
his poetic aptitude for dad jokes was intense, dare I say profound. truly a mind of the ages.
i was going to suggest the opposite as the lameness of dad jokes pretty much supports the premise.
I'm guessing this only applies in a heavily matriarchial society. If it was a patriarchial society, you'd be killed for lowering the status of the head of the family with such nonsense!
I expect if I was worried about social standing I would not say silly things. That I am "Dad" and cannot be fired means I am safe.
For example: I feel super proud when my daughter tells _me_ what I am saying is silly and she tells me why. So much of parenting is about us telling our kids things, what to do, or why something happens. Saying silly things invites the kids to tell us stuff with their own authority.
"What are they going to do, fire me?"
knock, knock
"You've been served"
<opens package to find divorce papers for irreconcilable dad jokes>
But then again, my 10 year old son does better dad jokes than I do. And it definitely hasn't made him the lowest member of our social totem pole.
How is this playing out in higher-tech homes? Are kids overcoming parental technical aptitudes, or is this scaring kids off from fiddling with all things techy?
(I am dreading the day my kids will want to poke around in Hubitat [or whatever I am running at the time] and mess up my perfectly configured rules.)
Keep your rules in a repo somewhere, and the kids can't screw them up.
You could even have unsigned commits change the temperature in the opposite (or randomized) direction to discourage tampering.
They should also have included fathers from cultures that aren’t as involved in pregnancy and infant care.
Anecdotally, I feel that experience; consequently, business tasks have become much harder. I don't believe it'll be anything more than temporary, but it is certainly substantial.
Interesting. My experience was the opposite. After the initial sleep deprivation, once our child was sleep trained, I achieved a new level of productivity in my life.
Before children, I wasn't as focused. Now, I'm more efficient. The knowledge I have a break coming where I know I'll be giving my family my undivided attention helps motivate me through the day.
There's always the knowledge that if I fail to maintain a job, it is statistically associated with divorce, and that divorce is statistically associated with child support, and that child support is statistically associated with prison and revocation of passport/property/licenses keep me going. If I fail to be productive enough I will be tossed in jail, that wasn't really the case before. But unlike some other people, I lived an exceedingly free (and low-cost) life before children, often just being homeless and hitch-hiking around the country, fighting for foreign militia, spending months living in forest or hiking trails, etc.
We spend all the weekend together, the week is for me-time.
But heaven forbid you expect your wife to keep up the pretenses set when you married her.
Nothing generates focus like “I have this exact 45 minutes to do X this week, or it isn’t going to happen”.
For good and Ill, I suppose .
I think that's a valid question -- one likes to assume that it's some adaptability trait, but the reality is that it could just as well be evidence of sub-standard conditions facilitated by the scenario.
It's almost as if 90% of their brain is dedicated solely to making sure their children are safe and looked after. It's like - at any moment - they think their children could just spontaneously combust or something. And I'm not talking infants. These are like 3 & 4 year olds...
As a non-parent, this is so bizarre. We all grew up with parents that weren't perfect, and we all ended up just fine.
I'm not sure if this is what's always happened to people when they become parents or if it's something new.
But the complete irrationality of their constant fears - something MUST have happened to their brains.
The girl began to wobble and myself and two other dads, without coordination or communication all instinctively began to lunge towards her (maybe 15 feet away).
We barely got two steps before we harnessed ourselves, noticed what happened and had a laugh. Then went back to being hermits.
I really felt like I was part of this ancient order. We didn’t know each other and yet we all understood each other.
I mean, we kind of are, right?
I couldn’t, I had these same ignorant ideas based on my fleeting, non-accountable contact with small kids.
Now let me tell you about the time my 10 month old, in the blink of an eye, managed to get a handful of her own poo into her mouth.
The struggle is real.
Plenty of us didn’t.
Never happened with other family/friends before.
1) a little bit dumber than I used to be
2) a lot more tired than I used to be, even after a rare full night sleep
3) a lot less self serving than I used to be
4) a lot more anxious than I used to be (which was already pretty high). I definitely visualize the “worst case scenario” in every situation I’m in
5) (stealth edit in) a lot less career motivated than I used to be. I predict this returns when the kids are older but maybe not
All that to say: yes, my brain has definitely rewired itself.
Also I used to think parents whose kids were throwing a tantrum in the middle of the grocery store were doing a bad job but now I get it.
I suspect any drop in cognitive ability is largely a symptom of this, not a permanent rewiring.
Many non-parents experience memory, concentration, computation, and anxiety problems, when operating under the pressure of low (or low quality) sleep.
The first time they throw a tantrum to get something just walk away and don't buckle .. especially if it's in a very public place.
Avoid providing feedback that throwing a fit in public will bend you to their will and it won't happen much more.
Personally I don't indulge tantrums but that doesn't make them stop. I assume the child does it to punish me to try and make me feel as bad as they do, as she seems to understand the tantrum won't result in me actually doing anything. Like a tic-for-tac, not as a way to actually get something (she knows I don't give anything or really acknowledge a tantrum).
If you got a toddler to make tantrums 'not happen much anymore' I think either you have an exceptional child or they just grew old enough to grow out of it.
It's worked fine with my own children, my grandchildren, and various nieces and nephews.
I agree that the the "not indulging" in tantrums doesn't make them stop on a dime .. but they peter out faster and anecdotally appear less frequently in the future.
It's good to have cool calm collected kids down the track so you can teach them to pull molten glass from a 1000C furnace when they're five, to use an angle grinder safely at nine, and start driving by ten.
None of these offspring of mine are exceptional BTW, they're kind of typical for rural WA (W.Australia).
I'm 100% sure my kid would just start ripping and destroying the items on the shelving in that aisle. And that if the child were seen unsupervised in the aisle, at best the kid would be taken to the front and at worst police would be called (my country, USA, is extremely paranoid about children which means even if you are not paranoid about your kid you have to be paranoid about CPS and the criminal charges).
At any rate I wish more places were mroe like rural Australia in that regard. Even relatively minor independence for young children is effectively illegal in much of the US.
You think .. but you don't actualy know is what I hear you saying :-)
In my experience small people indulge in a lot of performance art for the benefit of the faces they recognise in order to gather reactions and learn from that feedback - not as a front of brain delibrate strategy, more as innate "born to learn" pattern.
If you get in a Mexican standoff with you're own kid you're almost certainly going to lose .. I know I would with mine .. you start "daring them" not to do something and they'll start inching that jar ever closer to the edge until it drops.
"Young enough" kids will generally pull into best behaviour in a sea of faces they don't recognise, that's pretty much the time that you have a window to treat poor behaviour by simply walking away.
After that period they're more confident in front of strangers AND (uh-oh) understand that behaviour not seen by you is still behaviour known by you .. and that can manipulate you.
Child-parent relations are a non stop conveyor of escalating mirror awareness | peek-a-boo interactions .. and then puberty hits and you're into full Cold War MAD scenarios :-).
But yeah, independence for kids is pretty essential, it's good to have them walking | riding to school, looking after pets, growing food, building radios etc.
I’ve loved before. But once my first came things were very different. It was a new kind of love. I suddenly had such a clear mission in life: protect and nurture this baby.
I definitely changed.
"This pram needs to have suspension system. What if you got a pot hole too hard and the baby bounces out and hits the ground causing brain damage? Happened to a cousin."
I see this and push back on my wife almost every day (I don't have social media, so I'm blissfully unaware of what dangers lurk)
There is a constant on-edge aspect where you find out in the span of a minute they can:
- open or climb over a gate to the stairs - reach on the counter to grab a glass jar - open a door by grasping the door knob
> we all ended up just fine.
It's probably once bitten, twice shy - every parent screws up and then remembers that one accident.
Children that age have the _potential_ to do a lot of damage and no _foresight_ whatsoever. They literally cannot see the potential consequences of running into the street.
It’s fine to not understand, but please think twice about calling something you don’t understand “irrational.”
If you don't believe in letting natural selection sort if you child will get past 2 yo, you 'll either recenter your whole environment and routines around the kid, or spend 90% or your time make sure they don't stab themselves with your antique knives collection or soldering iron.
Fo that for a few years and you won't be switching back to what you were before just because your kid can now read your phone password from your finger movements from across the room.
I think the same thing happens when you're looking after your elderly parents.
PS: > We all grew up with parents that weren't perfect, and we all ended up just fine.
I talked to my parents a while after my kids were out of the "let's gob anything that can fit in my face hole", and I also basically robbed a few years of their life where they basically frozr their career and couldn't do much outside of making sure we're not dying. Some parents forget how hard it was though (and it's normal. Your brain is really in a bad state all that time)
I have kids and attempt to convince those who ask me about my experience not to have them. It is not for the faint of heart.
Sounds like you might need a little therapy
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09567976103970...
Sounds like you hit one of two here. Not for the faint of heart. I hope yours recovers soon enough.
You can easily adjust your spending by an order of magnitude either direction.
> they age you faster
Yeah, I'm sure you'd have been looking great at 60 if not for those damned kids.
> there is no guarantee the experience is worth it
Satisfying the primary evolutionary optimization criterion seems overwhelmingly likely to be worth it.
> They also destroy relationship satisfaction in the early years
What do you think the effect on relationship satisfaction will be in later years to have lost your youth in any case, but also to be in a sterile relationship with no connection to the future?
> It is not for the faint of heart.
Almost anyone can handle it. Nutrient-deprived illiterate cavemen have been doing it for hundreds of thousands of years without much issue - anyone doing it today is probably fine.
Suffering is a choice I suppose, just go into it with both eyes open. That’s my thesis. You can have a great life without having kids. Unpartnered older childfree women are one of the happiest cohorts, for example.
How in the world did you get that from anything I said?
I can't pick out any part of my comment that could be construed to mean that.
Marginal life is (as of now) more or less strictly positive EV, as is the expected internalized and externalized outcome of most of the people on this site having kids.
> Unpartnered older childfree women are one of the happiest cohorts
I really really doubt this is the case. Typically for sociology research, there are tons of papers claiming strong effect sizes of child-rearing on life satisfaction in both directions. However, older women are by far the subpopulation most dependent on psychoactive drugs such as antidepressants. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db377.htm I unfortunately can't find any studies that break down antidepressant use rates by parental status at all, or a fortiori by age/marriage/parental status individually.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1563020169160851456
It won't be overpopulated, though Thanos-type NIMBYs think it will.
I have 3 kids, for me the first 18 months for newborns was pretty rough in terms of sleep. My first 2 are 15 months apart, there was a long duration of round the clock work. Doing startups and having babies is extra challenging in my experience, maybe that makes success extra sweet.
Pre-kids: "someone in the house is screaming 12 hours a day. I think I'll move out or have them evicted."
Post-kids: "someone in the house is screaming 12 hours a day. I'll be tossed in jail if I leave the screaming person to their own devices, so I'll think I'll have a beer so I don't go clinically insane."
If you had a kid with colic, you know.
All these articles about magical changes to fathers drive me crazy by listing every physiological consequence of sleep deprivation and attributing them all to the magic of fatherhood.
Also problematic are HN comments like (exaggerated here) "Shucks, on the day I turned 30, I lost 100 IQ points, and now have trouble remembering not to pick my nose at the same time I'm eating paste."
You be you, but please remember that prejudices and confirmation bias are problems, and try not to tar an entire group with your paste.
If some halfwit VC seriously passes on my company because he sees this one headline and concludes fathers are stupid then he’s terrible at his job and remind me to short everything he touches.
It’s noted above the paywall in the article too. I won’t comment further than noting that you’re demonstrating the biases other comment warned about very well.
Perhaps you don't understand how science or the aegis of science have been historically used to justify discrimination. You can look to phrenology as a good example of this. It was touted at some point as a biological justification for white-black racism. So here we have a class of people who suffer discrimination (parents) and a "scientific" justification.
> If some halfwit VC...
You won't know that this happened. There will be plenty of other reasons which can be explicitly stated for not funding you (or passing you over for a promotion or whatever). You will only learn that you are suffering from discrimination if you get lucky and catch the oppressor on a hot mike or they fat finger the reply all.
(PG might've started it, with influential essays about why he wanted college students as founders, perhaps making it socially acceptable. Then people like Zuckerberg reinforced it, with public comments. Many companies structure their interviews around tests/rituals that arguably start from "How, uh, fresh in mind are your undergrad CS classes, even though that probably has little-to-no relevance to the actual work you'd be doing here?")
That's only ageism. There's also sexism, racism, classism, genderism(?), etc.
There's enough of those biases going around, and we're in/hitting a recession. Not everyone can afford to decide "I don't want to work for a company where anyone who could influence my opportunities has some ill-informed bias against some group.".
Some scientific finding of X is fine, if the science is solid. But being aware of ongoing bias problems can affect how we communicate and think around that.
Maybe that's because early-20s people are willing to work for less, easier to manipulate to work long hours and don't understand red flags like founders who say things like that.
I would go so far as to argue that there is a single cohort "at the top of the power structure" comprised of men with no kids and men who have kids but do not actively parent. Men who have significant childcare commitments are in a lower cohort.
"Protected" by and from who? Whose "unfair prejudices" are really at issue here? I always cringe when scientific studies or other bits of objective reality are suppressed or downplayed because of the prejudices of people who believe that arbitrarily cobbled together groups of people by those who think they know better need to somehow "be protected".
>You be you, but please remember that prejudices and confirmation bias are problems
If someone has a problem with science and objective reality, that is a personal problem they should deal with, not a problem with science and objective reality. Unfortunately there is an ever-growing mentality (especially among younger people) that if objective reality is somehow offensive to one's sensibilities then objective reality should be ignored or explicitly rejected all together.
2. I wouldn’t be surprised if this is true, but not for the reasons the study (why are we linking to the economist) concludes. Everyone who’s an active parent recognizes that you’ll be sleep deprived the first year of having a child. Youll also be working harder and have higher stress. I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s the reason for shrinking the cerebrum.
I actually remember the first time after she was born that I got more than 30 consecutive minutes of sleep, (maybe a week after?) because I woke up and saw the sun low and red in the sky, and legitimately did not know if was morning or evening. Turns out I had only been asleep 2 hours.
I never understood the phrase “sleep like a baby.” You mean, for 20 minutes at a time then you wake up screaming?
Brain is definitely different.
So much of the disruption is dependent on your kids personality, any medical issues (and sleep).
If I had 3 clones of each kid and their personality my stress would range from minimal:
"this parenting thing is amazing with some difficult moments and changes of rhythm"
To if I had three clones of the middle child, I would be losing my complete mind.
- if the brain shrinks again after the 2nd kid
- if the change is permanent, or if the brain expands 5 years after having a child.
Does the decrease in vol happen again with the 2nd(3rd, 4th…) kid?