571–580 of 1001 posts
Managing remote school sessions plus my work was a mess. I made my 10 and 12yo kids drop their remote school stuff and work with me instead. The young one is responsible for slack, keeping everyone in the living room updated and replying with text and the occasional gif, he also summarizes with voice important incoming emails. Older one writes python code alongside me and I now mostly check her syntax. She learned gi…
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Then is it cool if I skip a few meetings to volunteer to help the homeless? We already heavily subsidise child-rearing through taxes and other benefits. As I said elsewhere, there are mechanisms for supporting parents already. If you tried to let any other charitable endeavour take over your work schedule, you wouldn't expect your compensation to remain unaffected. I'm not resentful at parents. It just seems complete…
One of the many reasons I have had kids is as a service to humanity. It’s definitely fun, but way too many people just cannot be bothered so someone has to. I kind of want our race/country/planet to continue existing even if I can’t.
This couldn't be further from the truth. I don't know anything about you but I can confidently say for every person like you, there are 5 that have a lot of kids purely out of inability or unwillingness to try not to. We are so far from not having enough children that your service to humanity is nothing but a stroke of your own ego. If you really, truly believed what you're saying, would you give up your right to have children under a guaranteed contract that someone else would in your place? Probably not.
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And in non-pandemic times, they're subsidizing the continuation of society for the childless, to their own detriment (less free time, less self time, less money, less social life, less sleep; the list goes on and on and on).
Except children benefit their parents. Before social security, children were your social security. This mechanism hasn't disappeared. Childless people already pay more taxes that are used to subsidize other peoples' children, but they don't get nearly the benefit from that that parents do.
[1] https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2017/01/13/cost-raising-chil...
Before the pandemic, this resentment already existed. It's just exacerbated now. There have always been hidden benefits for people with kids. And although those benefits don't nearly make up for the extra responsibilities of having kids, those without kids feel that it's unfair. For example, someone with kids gets a bigger insurance benefit. Usually managers are pretty forgiving when someone says they need to leave t…
Most employers that would accept that of parents would accept it of anyone. Most employers that wouldn't accept employees setting reasonable boundaries or making reasonable requests wouldn't accept them from parents, either. There are bound to be some that only accept boundary-setting from parents, but I assert that it's a very small percent of employers or managers. Maybe I'm wrong.
What I'm proposing here is that most people are too afraid to ask for what they want. Parents have the benefit of having some of those expectations carved out beforehand, but I think that many of them also develop a newfound ability to say, "No, sorry, can't do that."
I am a middle-aged adult with no children who's worked at tech firms for the past couple decades. To be honest, the "resentment" of those without children have for "benefits" those with children get strikes me as extremely selfish, immature and displaying a total lack of empathy. This is time off specifically to take care of children, something now that has become exceedingly more difficult in Covid times. What's nex…
> the "resentment" of those without children have for "benefits" those with children get strikes me as extremely selfish, immature and displaying a total lack of empathy. Unpopular opinion: We should not be rewarding or elevating people for having unprotected sex without the support network to take care of their children in the event they are unable to attend school. There's a thousand reasons a child might not be ab…
Hey, I get it. Here's the thing: that "support network" used to exist in the form of close-knit local groups of parents, churches, etc. which are all fading from our society as we atomize into our own little bubbles. COVID has amplified this phenomenon exponentially.
It is an unreasonable request to expect people to weather MONTHS of their children not being able to attend school. Not without government assistance. People's lives are not structured for this kind of contingency; and if you had more perspective as to the way people outside of the tech sector lived, you'd understand this. On HN there aren't that mean people living paycheck to paycheck; but out there in the real world, where single moms scrape along on next to nothing, it's unrealistic to expect everyone to be able to handle this without a lot of things falling through the cracks.
> If your plans for raising a child rely upon schools being able to take them off your hands for 8+ hours a day (not to mention feeding them), that's your problem, not ours.
What an insensitive, hyper-individualist attitude. EVERYONE'S plans for raising a child include having schools take them for 6-8 hours a day, and have for almost a century now. Everything about the structure of family life and the normal routine people follow is designed around making this possible because no compelling alternative has presented itself.
> It's "selfish" and "immature" to bring a child into the world that you don't have the time or means to raise.
It's selfish and exceedingly immature for you to believe that it's okay to just point to the next generation of humans and say "that's your problem, not ours". There's no "ours" if you think that way, there's only "mine", and it sounds like a better summary for your outlook is just "fuck you got mine", which doesn't scale.
One day, maybe you will be so lucky as to have children, completing your own obviously-incomplete journey into mature adulthood, and at that time I hope you think back on your previous mindset. As someone who never dreamed of children when I was in my early 20s, I can see that I might too have produced some cringeworthy posts like yours, but with more perspective it's clear that community effort, sensitivity, and understanding is crucial to making sure we produce a new generation that can take on the challenges handed to it by the old. You'll get there too.
This reminds me of local retirees who are resentful that their taxes are paying for public schools. They seem to have forgotten that someone paid for them to attend school. Regarding parental time off, it's conceivable that their own parents never had that support. Maternal/parental leave is taking decades to roll out - perhaps as long as it took for public schooling to become universally available.
The problem with this analogy is that everyone uses the school system at some point in their life, but not everyone is a parent at some point.
I am a middle-aged adult with no children who's worked at tech firms for the past couple decades. To be honest, the "resentment" of those without children have for "benefits" those with children get strikes me as extremely selfish, immature and displaying a total lack of empathy. This is time off specifically to take care of children, something now that has become exceedingly more difficult in Covid times. What's nex…
Cancer isn't something people choose to inflict upon themselves.
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Someone has to provide the goods and services you'll consume when you're old. Those people are today's kids, whose parents are doing you a big favor at considerable expense to themselves. Raising children isn't like smoking, a hobby, a side hustle, or other miscellaneous personal obligations. It's more like military service and jury duty -- an essential service that some people perform to ensure that society as we kn…
Then is it cool if I skip a few meetings to volunteer to help the homeless? We already heavily subsidise child-rearing through taxes and other benefits. As I said elsewhere, there are mechanisms for supporting parents already. If you tried to let any other charitable endeavour take over your work schedule, you wouldn't expect your compensation to remain unaffected. I'm not resentful at parents. It just seems complete…
You fail to realize that most people (as in 99%) work in order to earn a living, not for the sake of work itself. You hold a job to earn money and use that money to pay for the needs and wants that let you live the best life you can afford (with or without children). And if your job gets in the way, you quit and find a job that better fits your needs.
Now, if you personally are in the 1% who derive a sense of fulfillment from your work itself, good for you. You ought to be aware that you are an extraordinary employee, or at least have the potential to grow into an extraordinary employee. If your salary does not reflect that, it is because of your lack of negotiation skills.
In other words, it is not fair that people that do not give their all get the same compensation as those that go far beyond duty. The solution, however, is not to force the majority to meet exceptional expectations; it is to pay a fair price for exceptional labor.
I am a middle-aged adult with no children who's worked at tech firms for the past couple decades. To be honest, the "resentment" of those without children have for "benefits" those with children get strikes me as extremely selfish, immature and displaying a total lack of empathy. This is time off specifically to take care of children, something now that has become exceedingly more difficult in Covid times. What's nex…
Where is your empathy for the "middle-aged adult with no children"? Are you sure you are a "middle-aged adult with no children" because you sound like a person with children.
> If anything, I'm thankful for all those people with kids who will (a) take care of the continuation of the human race, and more selfishly (b) support our society and economy when I am too old to do so.
Then aren't you being selfish by not having kids?
We had another thread a few days ago and almost the same comment
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I disagree with your last bit. >'Given the extreme change we are going through, the “if you can’t handle it, don’t have kids argument” is just not realistic. A pandemic isn’t “just how life goes”.' Maybe not a pandemic but it shouldn't be any shock that children make things much more complicated. It's, most of the time in the US today, a choice to have a child. The unexpected nature of a pandemic isn't really an excu…
> The unexpected nature of a pandemic isn't really an excuse for me. Companies, Governments, Healthcare System all failed to prepare for this pandemic but parents are expected to? Should they be considering breast-feeding during a nuclear winter before having children? What's a sufficient about of global life-altering change before they get the free pass?
And yet plenty of companies and healthcare organizations had prepared and are now doing fine. Nobody is asking anyone to consider every possible failure mode of society, that's absurd. It's not a crazy thing to plan for your kids in case something happens to you, as the parent. Having adequate finances in place to handle a year or two without income isn't some wild notion when we start discussing the well being of children, in my opinion. The idea is to be prepared in case something outside of your control prevents you from earning income. Heaven forbid on the ride to work you are struck by a drunk driver (or w/e uncontrolable accident) and are now stuck without the ability to work for the next two years. Having no plan for catastrophe when raising a child is simply poor judgement.
> What's a sufficient about of global life-altering change before they get the free pass?
Why should anyone get a free pass for their choices in life? Is it also the companies fault when the minimum wage they pay doesn't support a family of 6? What's a sufficient amount of servitude a company should pay to their employees past what is agreed upon in contract negotiations?
Maybe someone else forgot that _shit happens_ and didn't prepare or negotiate well, sucks to suck. The parents have very simple options. Renegotiate or tell the company to pound sound and go somewhere that will play ball with your demands. The people I truly feel sorry for is the children, they get throw into a terrible deal through no fault of their own.