331–339 of 339 posts
I know what the author goes through and it's hearth breaking to see your own child suffer. It's the worst kind of pain imaginable.
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I don't like your tone. I have no horse in the race and am not a doctor, but doctors aren't Gods. They learn certain foundational things (names of bones and muscles; organic chemistry) then they learn thing related to the practice that doesn't necessarily rely on any of that stuff. (Diseases; drugs) For diseases, you should try reading through the Merck manual (available online). Everything from gynecology, oncology,…
I think an analogy would be with the 9-11 "truthers" who trot out various facts and conclude that the towers were brought down by demolition charges rather than the plane strike. Their facts are not wrong, they are just misapplied and someone with a more general understanding of physics knows that. One of the facts quoted is that jet fuel doesn't burn hot enough to melt steel. By itself, that is true. But the tempera…
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This is answered here: http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=4038777 Short version: Basically, the evidence is to the contrary. Parents are "more happy."
Actually, it's not so cut and dried. I don't have a formal reference to hand, but this is discussed in the last chapter of Stumbling on Happiness - I can dig up the reference if required. Basically, what seems to happen is that having kids leads to many really extreme experiences - first steps, first words, as well as the sort of terrible experiences talked about in this article. We tend to remember these extreme exp…
Nothing ever is, but the GP asked for a citation, and I provided one, and a short version for those in a rush.
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Doctors are never going to be perfect; if you ask me following such a heuristic is probably going to work pretty well almost all of the time. As long as the doctor isn't a dick about it (with a god complex) and is willing to accept that they may be wrong.. In reference to my first comment: Mis-diagnosing "cool, rare diseases" as the flu by definition can only happen very rarely. Coupled with the fact that people are…
You must be parsing my sentence differently than I am. Clarified: It is far more common for a doctor to underdiagnose a patient that presents with flu systems but actually has the "cool, rare disease" [with the flu than it is to correctly diagnose them the first time]. In other words, within the ecosystem of "cool, rare diseases", it's far more likely to be mis- or under-diagnosed the first time than it is to be corr…
It is interesting about the 'bias' of doctors towards their own experience. I guess my point is that statistically this kind of 'bias' towards the most common syndromes is a net positive for society; it's an allocation of resources thing--we don't have so many doctors that we can afford them all to be running off on weird tangents investigating possible rare diseases that aren't there...
Again, sucks if you do happen to be the one in X thousand that has the rare disease. Am I being too utilitarian?
Regarding tone: apologies; I agree it was an overly flippant comment. It was more a reaction to some of the other doctor bashing that was going on in this thread that fails to see the woods for the trees. I see now that that wasn't your intention...
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Marriage is about compromise. Children, however, afford no such privilege. No, marriage is having one heck of a good time living your life with your spouse. Being a single parent is better than a bad marriage. And marriage can only be good if the parents know and acknowledge that they together go first, kids come second. Period. Your spouse is the person you spend rest of your life (or at least decades, if you're luc…
You're really reading a lot more into that than was intended. Indeed, you completely miss the point, which is clear with this: > you won't necessarily have a relationship once the kids move out in twenty years or so. Right here is the problem. You assume a healthy child, one that is capable of living on their own. But you have a responsibility to that child if they can't. This doesn't mean you give up your dreams. Th…
Now, your situation is exceptional and something like that can't be assumed when speaking generally. It's similar to your spouse getting seriously ill. From being a husband or a parent it turns a relationship or a parenthood partly into a special case of taking full-time care of a very ill person. So in that case we're not strictly talking about only parenthood anymore. It's partly patient care, not just parenthood.
However, I think I still carry the same opinion: taking care of yourself first is especially important in a situation like yours where you might have to take care of someone into his adulthood.
A person can only give as much as he's been able to receive himself. If you don't put yourself first ever then eventually you imperatively have no chance of giving anything to your son or anyone else in the long run. (You might be able to trick it for years in the beginning, though.) It's like you have to stop to fill up the gas tank while driving a long distance. Otherwise you just can't do it at all.
I also want to point out that I was not advocating taking a long vacation with your wife just like that: putting yourself or your relationship first doesn't mean leaving your kids in abandon. (Or maybe, naively, for some people, it means just that but it wasn't what I was thinking.) I did write that parents can't just do whatever they feel they need to do and ignore the kids. I'll try to reiterate my viewpoint.
What I mean by putting yourself or your marriage first is that in the worst cases, you do just that, but only in the worst case. If it's not the worst case you will have some energy left for others, too.
For example, if you're truly out of the game, you must be able to say to your wife "Honey, now I just can not do this anymore. I need a weekend alone at the cottage or with my friends or I'll just simply go mad somehow and I don't have anything left for myself or our marriage. I'm sorry I can't be more flexible now and you'll have to take care of all things but I'm so out of everything now that I just can't. I'll be back—but not today."
Or if you're exhausted with your kids, you're going to have to be able to say: "Listen guys, we're so worn out of everything that we're going to have to postpone the beach trip we planned with you and instead send you off to your grandparents for the weekend. You see, we need some adult time alone with your mother so that we'll have time to enjoy ourselves too instead of always working and taking care of others. If we didn't do that, we'd become quite uptight and just plain angry at everything, and you wouldn't like that either. So, we're going to have to take you out to the beach sometime later and you're going to go visit your grandparents for the weekend."
Of course you have the responsibility for your kids and you can't drop that. But kids can survive a night without a proper meal. They will live even if they don't have clean clothes for few days. And they can't always enjoy the privilege of your full presence. Doing such things repeatedly would be detrimental to their childhood but in the worst case it's better for them to suffer little than see their parents gradually losing their grasp on life.
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Marriage is about compromise. Children, however, afford no such privilege. No, marriage is having one heck of a good time living your life with your spouse. Being a single parent is better than a bad marriage. And marriage can only be good if the parents know and acknowledge that they together go first, kids come second. Period. Your spouse is the person you spend rest of your life (or at least decades, if you're luc…
I don't mean to be rude, but I think your comment illustrates the attitude prevalent in countries with 50% marriage failure rates. Your ideal is simply unsustainable and impossible. First: Are you married now (or have you been) and do you have kids? I'll assume you are married/committed but I'm not sure you are a parent, given your views. This is a tremendously important point to help frame this discussion. I fear yo…
Fair enough. I'm married, second time now. I have two kids. They're around 9-10 years old now so obviously I don't know everything yet, there's another decade to be seen.
This is a tremendously important point to help frame this discussion. I fear you probably won't understand my points at all with out first hand experience.
I tried to guard my post against extreme interpretations but nothing works out perfectly. I did follow up to the original poster, though, for some clarifications. You might want to read that.
I don't fully agree with what you wrote, though. For example, "Ensure the kids are alright (not necessarily that they get their way all the time), ensure your spouse is alright (happy wife, happy life after all) and ensure you are alright in that order, and you have a winning formula." is correct but in my view it goes in the exactly opposite order.
It might be just me but I see awfully many people who put everything else first and theirselves last. And they're bitter, resentful, exhausted, tired, and generally just giving the impression of asking the world go fuck themselves. They might momentarily glow in selfish proudness for doing so much for others but that doesn't last long when they figure out they're left with nothing much to themselves. Then they become martyrs and start fishing for attention, care, and attendance that they could've just provided themselves originally.
Maybe there are people who can just give and give, and think for other people first and genuinely be happy and energetic. I don't know. I've seen many who seem like that but a closer discussion with them reveals some leaks in their identity. Things that aren't working and things that they're not willing to face themselves.
I have a surprisingly good marriage; I'm not always so sure what I've done to deserve one but I can certainly attribute part of it to myself taking care of myself. There are times I have to ignore my wife's needs so that I can attend to them most of the other time. I first ensure I'm well-rested and happy myself before I do things with my kids because only then I can be relaxed and happy spending time with them, too. Otherwise I'll just be frustrated and unhappy and it always shows, and I don't want to give my kids the impression I have to force myself being with them. And there are times we want to do things together with my wife and tell the kids to just find something to do themselves, even if it wasn't exactly the best time to do that. Or if my wife needs me more badly than my kids (who, categorically, always need me if I only give them), then I'll just tell them that I'll be with my wife now as she needs me, and we will listen to the kids too again, but only later.
Only when we feel we're together again with my wife we can actually give something to the kids. And only when I'm whole I can actually give something to her, too.
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A 50% divorce rate is not a 'failure' rate. People change and move on - in some cases a divorce is an overall win-win situation, not a failure. Slavishly staying together because of obligation is a failure.
Divorce in itself is not failure, however in a culture with a 50% divorce rate I think this is a symptom of a much bigger problem: such a high divorce rate means that many people are not committed to their marriage or to the concept of family . If you take a look at modern societies, such as the US, you'll notice that people are more and more disconnected from their families and their place of birth and their culture…
Times have changed. Marriage used to be about survival, and that requires a forever committal. These days everyone can survive by himself but marriage is a vehicle for learning and growing in your life through intimately living with someone. Some marriages still last but many break down because either one of the spouses has learned something and moves on in his or her life. The other one doesn't so they don't sing the same song anymore, and there's nothing they can serve really by staying together anymore.
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Once again, just to make sure you are aware of the outcome of your posts, your account is dead. I cannot reply to your response to this comment, because it is [dead]. If you try and succeed getting your account unbanned, please consider posting more supporting evidence when giving advice of the form "Eat poison...because medical industry conspiracy!"
sevenstar 14 hours ago | link [dead] Give it up... what is your problem? Plain English... not banned. Stop lying, then read the link, please... ( http://www.naturalnews.com/010038.html ) They say don't feed the trolls, yet here I am... Look, I'm giving this one last shot where most other people wouldn't, because you're a human being and I believe all human beings deserve to know the world as it really is. As your own…