The economic reality is both parents are usually working these days. Parenting responsibilities are a lot more shared than they used to be while men identify strongly with how they perform at work. It’s a squeeze.
Not sure it is these days; in my youth in the 80s-90s, at least 5 fathers of friends committed suicide (4 by hanging, 1 by gassing himself in his car). Might be more I don't know about.
I didn't say good friends; I was in school; guys in my class are my friends unless they are my enemies. And I included that I don't know the stats or data on it, but hearing from others now, many years later, it was not rare.
I also had 2 family members and 2 good friends commit suicide over my lifetime: no idea about stats again, but I know a lot of people (and I live in a completely different country now) who had similar stats.
This is the real problem IMO. I live in a very religiously conservative country with pretty strict gender roles in marriages. Having lived in the West before, I definitely see a lot less dysfunction or mental health issues here, at least from my peers. But there's also a lot of collectivism here - village to raise a child sort of thing and most people live in joint families.
The human being is still adapting to a very new and very foreign reality.
It should be obvious that having children is going to cause a negative impact, for an extended a duration, on a relationship. I find folks jump into being a parent with rose tinted glasses, not fully grasping what a 20+ year commitment looks like (trying to juggle a career and the economics, a partner, and children in what is essentially perpetuity).
Esp the 20 year commitment if you get separated and if there are children and if you just cant see the other person anymore after years of relationship before the children arrived.
Many, many years into my “commitment” and it’s been the best time of my life. And my partner’s, too. I’d do it all again in a heartbeat, even the tougher times. YMMV, but such is life.
> The Centers for Disease Control stopped gathering complete data on the number of children affected by divorce in 1988, and at that time more than one million children were affected (Cohen 2002). Since then, the incidence of divorce has continued to climb, and according to the 2009 American Community Survey, only 45.8 percent of children reach age 17 years while still living with their biologic parents who were married before or around the time of the child's birth (Fagan and Zill 2011). The majority of divorces affect younger children since 72 percent of divorces occur during the first 14 years of marriage. Because a high percentage of divorced adults remarry, and 40 percent of these remarriages also end in divorce, children may be subjected to multiple family realignments (Cohen 2002).
> 57% of adults under 50 who say they’re unlikely to ever have kids say a major reason is they just don’t want to; 31% of those ages 50 and older without kids cite this as a reason they never had them
> As relationships, living arrangements and family life continue to evolve for American adults, a rising share are not living with a romantic partner. A new Pew Research Center analysis of census data finds that in 2019, roughly four-in-ten adults ages 25 to 54 (38%) were unpartnered – that is, neither married nor living with a partner. This share is up sharply from 29% in 1990. Men are now more likely than women to be unpartnered, which wasn’t the case 30 years ago.
On the contrary, I’ve been with my partner for over 20 years and am happy enough. But, I don’t let my emotions get in the way of logic and the rational when advising others. I recognize luck for what it is, and you should to. We won the lottery, as I said; most do not. I’m just trying to help people who haven’t made the one way door choice yet potentially suffer less. Be well, take care.
Edit: I never felt this subthread was anything other than the polite exchange of data and thoughts, and I hope you felt the same way too.
I appreciate the data and considered response. And yes, I do recognize luck but also that good things take work, too. And your posts have made me recogize it all the more - it’s good to have a moment to realize that not everyone experiences what you do. Also I appreciate HN for enabling this to be a thoughtful exchange. So all the best - and I do mean that!
I don’t think it is obvious, because you get a lot of contradictory data on this.
Secondly, if people hadn’t rose tinted glasses, we’d have a massive drop in fertility, I am pretty sure. The facts of parenthood are not very attractive. The nom quantifiable intangible stuff makes it worth it, but those are very difficult to grasp in theory. The negative sides on the other hand are very easy to grasp…
Refer to current total fertility rates [1]. Note that ~40% of annual pregnancies in the US and internationally are unintended [2] (the data does not indicate what percentage of those are unwanted, leaving us to infer from other data sources around parental preference [3]). If we drive down those unintended pregnancies through robust access to contraceptives and reproductive healthcare, I presume the drop in fertility rate ("we’d have a massive drop in fertility") we're already seeing [4] [5] would only accelerate.
> The facts of parenthood are not very attractive.
Yes, exactly, the burden is to explain this to people who don't know so they can make an informed choice.
Well, if you want humanity to end, sure, you should inform people better.
But that’s a one sided information flow. You can quantify how much money a kid costs. You can’t quantify what it brings to you. Hence this information would be by essence very partial…
You can’t know until you’ve already walked through the one-way door. What about all of that aggregate regret and suffering for those who didn’t want, or don’t want after kids are here?
Humanity isn’t going to end because we empower people who don’t want kids to not have them, although the population will compress over the next 200 years (from 10B downward). There will always be parents who really want to be parents, as well as parents who thought they wanted to be but regret it.
For those who want to eat the glass, we salute you. Options for everyone else.
Some of us aren’t political aspirants, we just want our kids, or safety from violent partners, or fair government protections, or to not be discarded when we come back from war broken, dignity without being mocked.
For all the good every male president we’ve ever had has been in those departments.
Yes, there are many problems that are unique to men that society does not address. I would not say that is because men are not adequately represented in the halls of power, or because society does not adequately cater to men's needs. "Second class citizen" is patently absurd.
You seem to treat men as a solidary group while it is not. It's absolutely regular for a man to be treated as a second class citizen, by men. We are not "represented" in the halls of power, what an absurd idea.
But certainly not because they are a man, you understand? To claim that the "Class" in "Second Class Citizen" is "Men" - that the set of "Classes that do not contain men" constitute a "First Class" - is hilariously out of depth and not worth taking seriously as an idea. This is the idea treating men as a single group, "Men are second class citizens".
A man can be disadvantaged. And there are some areas of life where, as you say, men are put at a disadvantage due to the actions of other men. This is not because "Men are second class citizens", it is a systemic issue of gendered preference that disadvantages men and women but has traditionally been a system set up to benefit men.
There are injustices in the world that are unique to men, and deserving of correction and justice. That is not in question. What is in question is looking at the state of the world and saying "You know who really has it tough? Men."
I say men are treated based on their gender, not just happen to be disadvantaged. Don’t put words in my mouth please.
For the rest of the argument I understand it, but don’t agree, for two reasons. First is that there’s enough man-only targeted demands and judgements, all well known. Second reason is that the world has supercharged the terms “man”, “manly”, etc so much, that discriminatory statements with these may sound absolutely natural to some.
There’s absolutely a majority of cases of people who get all the downsides but can’t entertain the upsides of “being a man”, for not behaving “like a man”, despite being one (as in, being born this way and not having a strong dispreference to this biological fact alone).
Men have it though and that makes them men who have it easy — I’m curious if you see a problem in this statement.
What is patently absurd about men’s problems, that aren’t patently absurd in regards to women’s problems? Do men not suffer every indignity that everyone does?
We don’t currently or adequately cater to woman’s needs and it shows. It only follows that men are even more underserved.
What does a male president has to do with depression? Were UK women immune to depressions during the period of Elizabeth II?
I can see how rigid and restrictive gender role can impact the rate of depressions in a demographic, especially when societal pressure and expectancy has a amplify effect. The existence of a trophy title, generally given only to people who are born very rich, give very poor comfort to the rest of that demographic.
Men are overrepresented at both ends of nearly all bell curves. Men have fatter tails in most distributions you can think of. More presidents, but also more suicides.
You are effectively saying that because men are more likely to be president, CEO, Nobel Prize winner, etc, we should tell the men who are more likely to be homeless, murdered, etc, that they deserve it, and they should shut the fuck up.
The second-class citizen terminology in modern usage is generally used to highlight all cases of systemic discrimination or unequal access to material or social needs. Commonly thought examples of second-class citizen like apartheid is historical important but very far from modern use of the term. In some cases second-class citizen is also used to describe immigrants that has not received citizenship.
Modern use of second class citizens is generally ridiculous, but words do change meaning over time.
Are you really saying there are no situations where men are not treated as second class citizen? Especially around child rearing activities?
When the women around you treat you as a potential child molester and are vary about your every move simply because of your gender, you don't think that counts as being a second class citizen in those environments? Of course it does! In child care men are absolutely discriminated against and treated as lesser or evil, as just the stand in for the real parent: the mother.
Here’s a soft opener. What is the absolute difference between someone who is allocated a higher level of government assistance in time of need, not considering children at all?
Spoken like someone that has experienced demeaning comments for being a father. One of the more memorable for me was, "is Dad babysitting today?" Parents don't babysit their own kids...
It has been 5 years and while it's getting better, I still regret every single day. I never wanted one since I believe I'm unsuitable to be a parent, yet everyone around me assured me it would be ok. It wasn't. I don't spend more than 10 consecutive minutes of quality time with my wife each day and I have lost all desire to do anything. That doesn't really matter though, because I can't do anything. I feel like my ability to execute has been reduced so much. My kid isn't even bad. I think they are quite good. I am the problem. This makes me feel even worse because my kid loves me and I can't return it.
Sorry to hear you're going through that. It does sound like having someone to open up and talk to, even someone you pay (i.e. A therapist), could help. This is especially true if many crucial things around you sound to be positive.
All the best and don't forget that it can get better!
Having someone you pay is actually key here (at least for me.) Never do I want to fix something more then when there's money on the line. I'm sure that getting lucky in finding a therapist that can understand you and provide a hint as to change your approach or bolster you when you're correct but unsure. Free advice can be perfectly correct, but when you're paying maybe you take it more seriously.
Sorry to hear this. I urge you to seek some kind of help and support for this, because what you’re describing rings of depression, whatever the root cause (even if it feels obvious).
By no means an I an expert, but in my experience, engaging with your family and learning to open up to them (even about your feelings of inadequacy) results in a much richer relationship. It’s like listening to a sad song when you’re sad. You may find that they are yearning to be closer to you, even if you don’t think you’re what they need.
Really sorry you're going through this. I hope you're finding a few bright moments here and there. 5 was still a difficult, draining age in our house, but it gets easier. You'll find your kid playing more independently soon, maybe even just wanting to do their thing while you do yours, and that'll be a relief. It took me a long time to accept that life is different now, and to not obsess over the differences. Once I did, I suddenly found myself motivated to pick up old hobbies and felt more of a connection to my kiddo. Hang in there, and take care of yourself.
>I believe I'm unsuitable to be a parent, yet everyone around me assured me it would be ok
They might just have said that not to sound alarming, and to close the subject.
You know yourself infinitely better than anyone else does, so if you have even the slightest doubt, you should never rely on others to decide what's best for you.
Be especially wary of people close to you, as proximity increases the belief of knowledge much more easily than actual knowledge.
Reminds me of a Philip Roth quote: "The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again."
Kids need love and compassion. They don’t need perfect parents. You’ll have a ton more regret later if you raise a kid that becomes a broken adult.
Kids aren’t kids forever. They get older and become more autonomous. You want them to grow up and be successful in all things in life. Surprisingly, beyond some life skills, if kids have people in their life that care about them then they have a greater chance of loving themselves, which helps them face life’s challenges.
I wonder if this is just because it’s hard, and your expectations will likely be unmet, or if there is another reason? Is there an “evolutionary biology “ reason?
As a parent of 6.9 children, parenting is a huge commitment. But I have lived my entire life since 27 raising children, so to me it’s life as usual. A key factor is making time for your relationship and maintaining intimacy. Intimacy in its many forms is sooo foundational, anyone that ignores or neglects it is likely asking for serious challenges down the road.
I'd love to hear so much more from your experience!
I'm on the fence about this topic and hearing from someone who has had more than 2 might help generalise how having a kid could be.
For me, it feels like one of the few things I've experienced in life on which I won't have much control over after the first decision (of having a kid).
Almost everything else is me deciding every day to do or not do something. This is different.
I have five. It is the most utterly fulfilling aspect of my life. I'm going to (mis)quote John Deloney about this issue:
You know how when you're single and making money hand over fist and you have a lot of money (compared to you as a teen), and it's awesome? And then you first get married, together you're pretty poor but you're having tons of sex, and it's a different kind of awesome? And then you have children, and you're sleep deprived and sex is kind of weird and the baby is pooping on stuff, but you see your own child--and again, it's a different kind of awesome.
You’re right about flipping the switch and then living that decision for the next 20plus years. Once you make that choice, you’re in it for the long haul.
I’m kind of an extreme example because I took the job to heart and designed a whole new life around providing the best developmental foundation for my children I could figure out how to.
For us,that was choosing to pivot from our comfortable cntracting business into a life intentionally filled with challenges , situations, hardships, triumphs, and struggles that we would overcome as a family.
It was way outside of my comfort zone, to be sure, but the point was to give them actual life experience and skills so that when they became adults they would be as prepared as possible to manage situations, overcome obstacles, and manage risk.
It was often uncomfortable but rewarding beyond measure.
We didn’t have the resources to provide a high quality private education, so we uprooted, sold our stuff, packed up a cargo trailer and a van, and spent a decade getting by on a shoestring while doing the most interesting and challenging things we imagined we might achieve as a family.
From an early age, aside from their siblings, they interacted primarily with adults in their world, often from different cultures and speaking different languages, and often in situations where the stakes were high (intrinsic danger imposed by the natural environment and classical physics) .
They learned to be a cohesive team, to handle responsibility within the range of their understanding, to seek and accept council, and to ignore immature behavior when it pops up in inappropriate times.
This sometimes rugged beginning has served them quite well in their lives.
After traveling from Alaska to Oregon , we traded in the cargo trailer for a camper trailer because camping was a pain in the “@&. We shipped our tools and supplies from the cargo trailer to a boatyard in Florida.
When we got to the boatyard, we spent the next two years living in our camper as we rebuilt a 50foot steel schooner.
We didn’t have much cash, so we did all of the work ourselves and salvaged steel from where we could find it.
We became great customers of the metal recyclers in the area lol.
The most expensive thing was buying the epoxy based paint and the bottom paint, which cost almost as much as we paid for the boat. (And the 500 dollars a month for the boatyard)
Other than that , thousands of grinding disks and maybe 20 harbor freight grinders lol.we found they would last through 4 or 5 brush replacements if you didn’t burn up the armatures by using brushes to the point of failure.
We spent the next few years sailing the east coast and the Caribbean, central and northern South America. We would salvage contaminated fuel and filter it and treat itfor our auxiliary engine and generator, getting paid for removing the expired diesel, and I did engine and electrical repair on other boats.
It wasn’t a comfortable life, but it was full of opportunities to teach things about life, lots of skills, and independent thinking and action. Probably the most important lessons were in risk tolerance and risk management. It’s easy to be overly risk averse in the modern world, or to limit your risk taking to avocational pursuits.
I was happy to swallow the anchor when it was time for the kids to start building their social structures and to get started in more advanced levels of education.
It was hard, and an enormous sacrifice for more than a decade, but I wouldn’t trade that experience for my kids for anything else that we could have realistically managed.
The kids grew up in an adult world, but there were lots of other boat kids, and we often stopped for months at a time. When we would be in a place for more than a month or two, the kids would enroll in local schools, which we treated like social studies/ language class, managing primary curriculum on the boat.
Anyway, I’m really happy with the results. They’re all grown and starting families of their own now, and it’s been obvious that their upbringing was key in their many successes.
They refer to it as their “cheat code” because they basically aren’t deterred by anything that they have to learn or become proficient in, and they know from experience that they can do anything they reasonably decide to do.
They have all built houses (as in personally built them) and have are finding their way in software, finance, politics, farming, robotics, and whatever else is interesting to them… basically living what most would describe as a privileged life despite having come from very modest means.
The answer is obvious: Because children suck and those parents realize that they have ruined their lives entirely by choice and are now stuck chained to some kid for the next 18 years at least. The more interesting question is why this was not even considered a possible explanation in the article? We all know the reason.
While the notion of spending your twilight years with your beloved children is wonderful, what I see happening just as often is seniors ending up in a nursing home, seeing their children and grandchildren only a few times a year, if even that. This seems especially true in American society versus other countries.
And that’s not even counting the cases where your children can’t stand you, if not estranged and outright hate you. Which if you read suggestions that ever dare to suggest that you can indeed live with your parents beyond the age of 18, seems to happen quite often too.
The first scenario is the good ending, and would definitely be worth the effort of raising children.
The second ending? I think I’d rather just not have kids at all if that’s my fate.
I have two kids and while I was never depressed, I can see how it can happen. You get virtually no sleep for at least a year after the kid is born and you have to completely change your life routine (no more last-minute weekend trips for my wife and I).
You also don't see your friends as much and it can feel isolating. This also leads to more stress for you and your partner. Many people divorce/break up during this time because of the this.
I wouldn't change a thing though. I love being a father.
I love all the "helpless" internet advice in this thread by people who are oblivious to what depression is.
"Oh you're depressed and suffer from making executive decisions. Why don't you just make a decision and fix this?! You know therapists exist right!? Fuck you're so fucking dumb, you piece of shit. Just be happy, it's not that hard!"
You might also be oblivious to what depression IS, because clinical psychologists are, as well.
Depression is a cluster of symptoms, for all intents and purposes. There is some evidence that SSRIs help these symptoms, but direct causal seratonin deficiency hypotheses have yet to be supported.
There's scant evidence that modern non-pharmaceutical therapeutic interventions (with the exception of niche interventions like CBT) are even effective, yet the advice "go to therapy" gets tossed around constantly as if it's Science(tm) with a capital S.
You can claim that the "depression is just a matter of perspective bro" is an ignorant take, but according to the literature, "depression is a chemical imbalance", or any other definitive "depression is X" claim is equally ignorant. We still don't really know. We're still searching.
79 comments
[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 155 ms ] threadNo sure about the stats / difference.
That's an awful way to write that. You're insinuating that maybe their friends weren't true. How could you know?
I also had 2 family members and 2 good friends commit suicide over my lifetime: no idea about stats again, but I know a lot of people (and I live in a completely different country now) who had similar stats.
The human being is still adapting to a very new and very foreign reality.
https://ericalayne.co/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/kidhappy.gi...
https://www.ted.com/talks/rufus_griscom_alisa_volkman_let_s_...
https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/parents-under-pressu...
(parent)
I'm 33y into mine and I don't know how long it/me will last.
Esp the 20 year commitment if you get separated and if there are children and if you just cant see the other person anymore after years of relationship before the children arrived.
> ~48% of first marriages fail, ~60% of second marriages, ~70% third marriages.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4240051/
> The Centers for Disease Control stopped gathering complete data on the number of children affected by divorce in 1988, and at that time more than one million children were affected (Cohen 2002). Since then, the incidence of divorce has continued to climb, and according to the 2009 American Community Survey, only 45.8 percent of children reach age 17 years while still living with their biologic parents who were married before or around the time of the child's birth (Fagan and Zill 2011). The majority of divorces affect younger children since 72 percent of divorces occur during the first 14 years of marriage. Because a high percentage of divorced adults remarry, and 40 percent of these remarriages also end in divorce, children may be subjected to multiple family realignments (Cohen 2002).
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2024/07/25/the-exp...
> 57% of adults under 50 who say they’re unlikely to ever have kids say a major reason is they just don’t want to; 31% of those ages 50 and older without kids cite this as a reason they never had them
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2021/10/05/rising-...
> As relationships, living arrangements and family life continue to evolve for American adults, a rising share are not living with a romantic partner. A new Pew Research Center analysis of census data finds that in 2019, roughly four-in-ten adults ages 25 to 54 (38%) were unpartnered – that is, neither married nor living with a partner. This share is up sharply from 29% in 1990. Men are now more likely than women to be unpartnered, which wasn’t the case 30 years ago.
https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2024/11/family-househ...
> About 39% of U.S. family households this year included the householder’s children under 18, according to new U.S. Census Bureau estimates.
https://www.voronoiapp.com/demographics/Over-Half-of-Househo... (draw your attention to the shrinking yellow “married parent” cohort, 17.9%)
TLDR A majority of US households don’t have kids, and only 18% are households with married parents.
(Aggressively data driven; "May the odds be ever in your favor")
Edit: I never felt this subthread was anything other than the polite exchange of data and thoughts, and I hope you felt the same way too.
But often a positive impact. I would think more often than not the positive outweighs the negative, but not for everybody.
Secondly, if people hadn’t rose tinted glasses, we’d have a massive drop in fertility, I am pretty sure. The facts of parenthood are not very attractive. The nom quantifiable intangible stuff makes it worth it, but those are very difficult to grasp in theory. The negative sides on the other hand are very easy to grasp…
> The facts of parenthood are not very attractive.
Yes, exactly, the burden is to explain this to people who don't know so they can make an informed choice.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37300184 (citations)
[3] https://www.axios.com/2024/07/25/adults-no-children-why-pew-...
[4] https://www.healthdata.org/news-events/newsroom/news-release...
[5] https://www.vox.com/23971366/declining-birth-rate-fertility-...
But that’s a one sided information flow. You can quantify how much money a kid costs. You can’t quantify what it brings to you. Hence this information would be by essence very partial…
You can’t know until you’ve already walked through the one-way door. What about all of that aggregate regret and suffering for those who didn’t want, or don’t want after kids are here?
Humanity isn’t going to end because we empower people who don’t want kids to not have them, although the population will compress over the next 200 years (from 10B downward). There will always be parents who really want to be parents, as well as parents who thought they wanted to be but regret it.
For those who want to eat the glass, we salute you. Options for everyone else.
For all the good every male president we’ve ever had has been in those departments.
A man can be disadvantaged. And there are some areas of life where, as you say, men are put at a disadvantage due to the actions of other men. This is not because "Men are second class citizens", it is a systemic issue of gendered preference that disadvantages men and women but has traditionally been a system set up to benefit men.
There are injustices in the world that are unique to men, and deserving of correction and justice. That is not in question. What is in question is looking at the state of the world and saying "You know who really has it tough? Men."
For the rest of the argument I understand it, but don’t agree, for two reasons. First is that there’s enough man-only targeted demands and judgements, all well known. Second reason is that the world has supercharged the terms “man”, “manly”, etc so much, that discriminatory statements with these may sound absolutely natural to some.
There’s absolutely a majority of cases of people who get all the downsides but can’t entertain the upsides of “being a man”, for not behaving “like a man”, despite being one (as in, being born this way and not having a strong dispreference to this biological fact alone).
Men have it though and that makes them men who have it easy — I’m curious if you see a problem in this statement.
We don’t currently or adequately cater to woman’s needs and it shows. It only follows that men are even more underserved.
I can see how rigid and restrictive gender role can impact the rate of depressions in a demographic, especially when societal pressure and expectancy has a amplify effect. The existence of a trophy title, generally given only to people who are born very rich, give very poor comfort to the rest of that demographic.
You are effectively saying that because men are more likely to be president, CEO, Nobel Prize winner, etc, we should tell the men who are more likely to be homeless, murdered, etc, that they deserve it, and they should shut the fuck up.
Modern use of second class citizens is generally ridiculous, but words do change meaning over time.
When the women around you treat you as a potential child molester and are vary about your every move simply because of your gender, you don't think that counts as being a second class citizen in those environments? Of course it does! In child care men are absolutely discriminated against and treated as lesser or evil, as just the stand in for the real parent: the mother.
All the best and don't forget that it can get better!
Best of luck, friend. :)
They might just have said that not to sound alarming, and to close the subject.
You know yourself infinitely better than anyone else does, so if you have even the slightest doubt, you should never rely on others to decide what's best for you.
Be especially wary of people close to you, as proximity increases the belief of knowledge much more easily than actual knowledge.
Reminds me of a Philip Roth quote: "The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again."
Kids aren’t kids forever. They get older and become more autonomous. You want them to grow up and be successful in all things in life. Surprisingly, beyond some life skills, if kids have people in their life that care about them then they have a greater chance of loving themselves, which helps them face life’s challenges.
Now you are just making him feel worse, since his problem is that he can't give his kids love and compassion.
As a parent of 6.9 children, parenting is a huge commitment. But I have lived my entire life since 27 raising children, so to me it’s life as usual. A key factor is making time for your relationship and maintaining intimacy. Intimacy in its many forms is sooo foundational, anyone that ignores or neglects it is likely asking for serious challenges down the road.
I'm on the fence about this topic and hearing from someone who has had more than 2 might help generalise how having a kid could be.
For me, it feels like one of the few things I've experienced in life on which I won't have much control over after the first decision (of having a kid).
Almost everything else is me deciding every day to do or not do something. This is different.
You know how when you're single and making money hand over fist and you have a lot of money (compared to you as a teen), and it's awesome? And then you first get married, together you're pretty poor but you're having tons of sex, and it's a different kind of awesome? And then you have children, and you're sleep deprived and sex is kind of weird and the baby is pooping on stuff, but you see your own child--and again, it's a different kind of awesome.
I’m kind of an extreme example because I took the job to heart and designed a whole new life around providing the best developmental foundation for my children I could figure out how to.
For us,that was choosing to pivot from our comfortable cntracting business into a life intentionally filled with challenges , situations, hardships, triumphs, and struggles that we would overcome as a family.
It was way outside of my comfort zone, to be sure, but the point was to give them actual life experience and skills so that when they became adults they would be as prepared as possible to manage situations, overcome obstacles, and manage risk.
It was often uncomfortable but rewarding beyond measure.
I'm interested in doing something like world schooling and this sounds it might be related.
From an early age, aside from their siblings, they interacted primarily with adults in their world, often from different cultures and speaking different languages, and often in situations where the stakes were high (intrinsic danger imposed by the natural environment and classical physics) .
They learned to be a cohesive team, to handle responsibility within the range of their understanding, to seek and accept council, and to ignore immature behavior when it pops up in inappropriate times.
This sometimes rugged beginning has served them quite well in their lives.
After traveling from Alaska to Oregon , we traded in the cargo trailer for a camper trailer because camping was a pain in the “@&. We shipped our tools and supplies from the cargo trailer to a boatyard in Florida.
When we got to the boatyard, we spent the next two years living in our camper as we rebuilt a 50foot steel schooner.
We didn’t have much cash, so we did all of the work ourselves and salvaged steel from where we could find it.
We became great customers of the metal recyclers in the area lol.
The most expensive thing was buying the epoxy based paint and the bottom paint, which cost almost as much as we paid for the boat. (And the 500 dollars a month for the boatyard)
Other than that , thousands of grinding disks and maybe 20 harbor freight grinders lol.we found they would last through 4 or 5 brush replacements if you didn’t burn up the armatures by using brushes to the point of failure.
We spent the next few years sailing the east coast and the Caribbean, central and northern South America. We would salvage contaminated fuel and filter it and treat itfor our auxiliary engine and generator, getting paid for removing the expired diesel, and I did engine and electrical repair on other boats.
It wasn’t a comfortable life, but it was full of opportunities to teach things about life, lots of skills, and independent thinking and action. Probably the most important lessons were in risk tolerance and risk management. It’s easy to be overly risk averse in the modern world, or to limit your risk taking to avocational pursuits.
I was happy to swallow the anchor when it was time for the kids to start building their social structures and to get started in more advanced levels of education.
It was hard, and an enormous sacrifice for more than a decade, but I wouldn’t trade that experience for my kids for anything else that we could have realistically managed.
The kids grew up in an adult world, but there were lots of other boat kids, and we often stopped for months at a time. When we would be in a place for more than a month or two, the kids would enroll in local schools, which we treated like social studies/ language class, managing primary curriculum on the boat.
Anyway, I’m really happy with the results. They’re all grown and starting families of their own now, and it’s been obvious that their upbringing was key in their many successes.
They refer to it as their “cheat code” because they basically aren’t deterred by anything that they have to learn or become proficient in, and they know from experience that they can do anything they reasonably decide to do.
They have all built houses (as in personally built them) and have are finding their way in software, finance, politics, farming, robotics, and whatever else is interesting to them… basically living what most would describe as a privileged life despite having come from very modest means.
And that’s not even counting the cases where your children can’t stand you, if not estranged and outright hate you. Which if you read suggestions that ever dare to suggest that you can indeed live with your parents beyond the age of 18, seems to happen quite often too.
The first scenario is the good ending, and would definitely be worth the effort of raising children.
The second ending? I think I’d rather just not have kids at all if that’s my fate.
You also don't see your friends as much and it can feel isolating. This also leads to more stress for you and your partner. Many people divorce/break up during this time because of the this.
I wouldn't change a thing though. I love being a father.
"Oh you're depressed and suffer from making executive decisions. Why don't you just make a decision and fix this?! You know therapists exist right!? Fuck you're so fucking dumb, you piece of shit. Just be happy, it's not that hard!"
Depression is a cluster of symptoms, for all intents and purposes. There is some evidence that SSRIs help these symptoms, but direct causal seratonin deficiency hypotheses have yet to be supported.
There's scant evidence that modern non-pharmaceutical therapeutic interventions (with the exception of niche interventions like CBT) are even effective, yet the advice "go to therapy" gets tossed around constantly as if it's Science(tm) with a capital S.
You can claim that the "depression is just a matter of perspective bro" is an ignorant take, but according to the literature, "depression is a chemical imbalance", or any other definitive "depression is X" claim is equally ignorant. We still don't really know. We're still searching.