I've had a lot of thoughts while reading posts here, but my predominant thought is about how vital it is that we approach parenting with a mindset that helps us place our roles as parents in a helpful perspective. While your work is important for the obvious reason of supporting yourself and your family, raising your children well is far more important in many ways. Unfortunately, the cause and effect or investment and reward of parenting is far less tangible than that of work. Many of us spent a lot of exhausting, sleepless days and nights in college. It was an investment in ourselves to prepare us to live independently and successfully. These exhausting, sleepless days and nights that we spend as parents is a similar investment, but this time it isn't an investment in ourselves: it's an investment in our children. Are they worth the investment? Of course they are, and I don't think anyone here is suggesting that they are not. People are just trying to grapple with the struggle. One of the ways to handle an arduous struggle is to meet it with a healthy mindset; a different mindset than the one we've developed to that point in life.
Mindsets are not always easy to change, but changing them is part of life and sometimes the changes are forced on us. For example, when we lose jobs, we have to change our career mindsets; the old career that we may have loved may no longer work in our lives. That's life. Life isn't a static state and sometimes the states change whether we want them to or not. We go through stages of life and we change as we grow older. Yes, we developed hobbies, made friends, and had fun before we had kids, but when we have kids, they should be one of our new “hobbies”. They should be a new “job”. They can be our new “friends” and new fun. Parenting shouldn't be something that gets in the way of your life; it is your way of life. These little people depend on you to make them into functional people who can meet the demands of life. We can't just be task-masters who change diapers and shovel food into their mouths. Meeting their needs well will develop their senses of security, responsibility, and belonging in life. We have to treat them like the people that they are; we're getting to know them and they're getting to know us. It's far more important than that though, because we're shaping them and they're shaping us.
We also have to pay attention to how we socialize with them. How we interact from the very beginning is going to help determine how they interact with us and with others. I've seen so many parents who mindlessly fall into antagonistic relationships with their kids and spouses, without a philosophical idea of how this impacts the development of their personalities and our relationships with them. And here's the kicker: how we interact when they're babies and toddlers will help determine the nature of our relationships with them as they grow older. Contrary to what so many people say, it is helpful to reason with children long before they understand the full ramifications of the reasoning process. It's like on-the-job training of life: you're teaching them to reason. If there's a reason why they shouldn't be doing things, explain to them what the reason is instead of spanking them or dismissively saying, “because I said so.” Your willingness to invest the time with them when they're young and your determination to make that time meaningful will help make it more likely that you'll have meaningful time with them as they get older. Having teenagers who wanted to hang with dad was so much more rewarding than my peers whose kids wanted nothing to do with them.
Big picture thinking. It doesn't give us more energy, but sometimes inspiration does. Another thing that may help is looking at your little children and imagining how helpless they are in this world. And they're looking at you with awe, believing in you and depending on you to make their lives work.