841–850 of 1001 posts
With half my team taking some kind of pandemic related leave or reduced hours we're just simply ineffective and treading water. That's just a fact the rest of us have to deal with but you can't deny that it's disappointing if you're motivated by achievement.
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…
As a mid 30s childless man I completely agree. We essentially sent people home on a Friday, told them to figure out a work from home situation, and then they were told welp your kids aren't going to school either, and whatever childcare you had lined up has now vanished too- and this is all happening in the course of a few days at most. So now you have kids to worry about all day, home schooling to oversee, focusing…
That said, the lockdown in April when he had to basically homeschool our kids was tough. It was tough despite the fact that our normally one-evening-every-two-weeks babysitter was helping out three days a week (she lost all her other jobs and couldn't go to university, so this helped her too), and we've got a big house. I can't imagine what it must be like for families in small houses without this kind of help.
This week we're keeping our youngest home from school again because he has a cough (probably just a cold, but you can't send him to school this way), and again it's incredibly disruptive to our work. But you've got to deal. There are people who have it much worse, we just need to be understanding towards each other until this is over.
Maybe this is a badly needed course in empathy.
There is a lot of talk about the extra hours non-parents are finding themselves working but I have found most of my resentment comes from the reduced ability to get things done. With half my team taking some kind of pandemic related leave or reduced hours we're just simply ineffective and treading water. That's just a fact the rest of us have to deal with but you can't deny that it's disappointing if you're motivated…
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A BIG chunk of all that drama is due to the US social safety net not including childcare. That's the thing disturbing thing about these stories: employees are turned against each other when it's a) the company; and b) your tax dollars, not providing any kind of built-in childcare for society. In France, kids can go to preschool and have pre- and post- school childcare, which has to be paid, but it's only like $500/mo…
The problem with that is two-fold: first, the median childcare worker is less concerned with the child’s long-term success than is the median parent (that’s not a slight against childcare workers!); second, that the presence of state childcare makes it less competitive for parents to spend time taking care of their children themselves rather than to work and earn money, which means more and more folks are likely to u…
> Parents have an animalistic, senseless love for the children, which confuses themselves with the child all the time, the educator has respect, and this is much more valuable for education, even if there is no love present at all. I repeat: valuable for education, because even though I call parental love animalistic and senseless, that does not value it lowly, it is just as much a unknowable mystery as the artful, creative love of the educator, only in the context of education however it cannot be valued low enough.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A BIG chunk of all that drama is due to the US social safety net not including childcare. That's the thing disturbing thing about these stories: employees are turned against each other when it's a) the company; and b) your tax dollars, not providing any kind of built-in childcare for society. In France, kids can go to preschool and have pre- and post- school childcare, which has to be paid, but it's only like $500/mo…
The biggest chunk is due to the US's (and much of the rest of the world's) lock-down policies. I am not a parent, but I am disgusted that so many in society would wish to knowingly ruin childrens' lives all over the world just to continue living through this obscene assault upon humanity. Even if we were to buy the absurd notion that we will save substantial numbers of lives by forcing kids to go to school remotely,…
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IMO the real broken part of this system is that people are not getting legally-protected personal time. A big part of the resentment is that a person who chose to have children ends up being able to be excused from work to take care of children, while a person who has no children is not as easily excused to do what they want to do, because it is deemed low priority compared to children. We need to be prioritizing peo…
>It's when people are working till 11pm and someone says "I need to leave at 6 to make food for my kids" that the resentment happens. If everyone got off at 6, there wouldn't be any resentment. What would you propose then? The parents starve their children? What an absurd thing to have resentment over. Do you believe the parents don't feel guilt over having to duck out early while others without children continue to…
The proposal is right there: everybody should go home at 6.
I do not feel guilty for going home after I put in 8 hours of good work. The employer should be feeling guilty if it's demanding more than that.
This thread is absolutely bananas. I actually read most of it at 759 comments. The short version is that people with kids are insanely defensive about it. In many cases, they have literally rewritten their brains to see reproduction as exclusively good and necessary. If you suggest anything else, you will be swiftly brigaded and condemned. Those without children are all over the place. Their opinions vary from comple…
If reproduction was bad and unnecessary you, me, none of us would exist. Reproduction is fundamentally essential and necessary for life itself. Bananas indeed.
7/10
It's simply depressing how parent/kid-hostile society has become... I'm not saying we need explosive population growth. But I feel one of the main purposes of society is raising and protecting children. If you're a human-future-optimist, you want some kind of generation that's better than us to continue on.... I'm not saying you NEED to have kids, but I feel it's part of society's collective duty to consider the next…
It’s mathematics. Your society ceases to exist surprisingly quickly if people don’t have kids. And as one of the immigrants folks in the first world are counting on to perpetuate their society, the child hostile culture still sucks. I don’t think my parents appreciated this aspect of moving to America—raising kids without the network of parents you can count on in other countries. My wife and I had kids at a pretty n…
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Taking care of a child isn't time off, it's work. And it's not even time away from work because you're still getting pinged on Slack, still expected to review Google docs or leave people blocked, still missing meetings or dialing in (poorly) because they can't be rescheduled, and generally feeling guilty that you can't get enough done. All while trying to handle a baby, or monitor a first grader attending live school…
as a single I'd love to get a kid and take care of it during the pandemic. will feel much less lonely.
Dogs give 80% of the happy good time feels and require 5% of the effort.
Source: have a child and a dog.
Those raised by wolves should be allowed wilderness time.