61–70 of 292 posts
Up all night with baby and always-on work. Its a recipe that will drive anyone to the brink.
What is unacceptable to me is why this question is never asked of Fathers. I don’t think anyone would blink at hearing that a dad only sees his kids on weekends, but is it not just as harmful? Ultimately though, I fail to understand why anyone without the proper time to devote to a child would chose to have one.
I noted the article unquestioningly accepted the stereotype that men have less interest in spending time with their children than women. It strikes me that questioning this assumption would be a very good thing for improving the situation of women in the workplace.
This line reads harshly on women's ability to make critical career decisions. Real advice is from your grandmother: make ye bed and lay in it.
If a person wants children, that's a conscious choice with happiness, sacrifice and burdens garuanteed. There is no fairy dust, wanna-have-it-all solution. I feel like people of all cultures and ages understood this and it's our generation that's perplexed at everything like chimps let loose in a city.
> Everyone knows kids consume your time. But what people without kids may not realize is the extent to which people with kids want their time to be consumed by them. This is one of the hardest parts of parenthood to communicate to non-parents: Yes, children demand a lot of time and attention. However, as a parent you actually enjoy spending that time with your children. To the author's point: Different people will wa…
I think a lot of that comes from parents often expressing all the negatives of parenthood rather than the positives. Even the ones who love spending time with their kids, in my experience, talk more about how much attention the kids need, taking them to school, the diaper changes, the crying, and so on. This isn't to say that all parents are like this; I've met some really passionate parents, and my parents relished…
I think they just want to vent. Which is why it doesn't make sense to me because I see complaining for the sake of complaining as a negative-utility activity.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It also helps to remember that "they grow up so fast" is cliche, but it's true. The most demanding early years of child raising fly by quickly. It blew my mind when I heard someone say "kids are only toddlers for a couple of years". As a kid you feel like childhood lasts an eternity, and their developmental stages are so significant, but in comparison they spend less time at each phase (infant, toddler, little kid,…
> It blew my mind when I heard someone say "kids are only toddlers for a couple of years" In your early 20s, a couple years of hard work sounds like an eternity. In your 30s and later, you realize a couple years is barely a blip on the radar. The infant/toddler phase is only a couple percent of your overall lifespan. Yes, it's work, but it's not subscribing to a lifetime of sacrifice and misery.
>In your 30s and later, you realize a couple years is barely a blip on the radar.
Another way to look at this is that when your youth is rapidly diminishing you really care about how you spend it but once that ship has sailed you rationalize whatever path you took.
People probably assume that women are more likely to spend more time with their kids by observing the way that parents interact with their children in primate species (including in humans). Maybe we should be doing more stuff that supports women being able to have their kids at work with them (if they chose to work) instead of somehow implying that there is worth in forfeiting substantial portions of the healthy part…
I cannot imagine how it would work in practice
The focus on "start-ups" here, while not exclusively, does sway far toward the VC-model, of course because that's also YC's model. Is that model nearly incompatible with parenting? It might be. But that doesn't mean that there aren't parallel eco-systems of "start-ups" for those with various lifestyles (I know, lifestyle b**** is a dirty word here.).
According to the author, pretty much.
Here’s the thing - you shouldn’t have to choose between a career and having children. In the US we’ve created a set of incentives which work to put women at a disadvantage in the workplace if they become parents. Men, not so much, and largely because of this imbalance, even progressive couples fall into this paradigm. In the EU they mandate equal paid leave for both parents and require holding a job for them when the…
What is unacceptable to me is why this question is never asked of Fathers. I don’t think anyone would blink at hearing that a dad only sees his kids on weekends, but is it not just as harmful? Ultimately though, I fail to understand why anyone without the proper time to devote to a child would chose to have one.
I noted the article unquestioningly accepted the stereotype that men have less interest in spending time with their children than women. It strikes me that questioning this assumption would be a very good thing for improving the situation of women in the workplace.
less interest or less opportunity?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think they are quite incompatible. Me and my wife have a 1y4m old and we mostly don't do anything else nowadays. Other than that we have (had?) a startup that is now mostly on hold, except for some hacking that we do now and then when one of our mothers is around. We are very lucky that we are mostly financially independent from before our son was born, otherwise I would have to go work in an office and it would be…
I really do not mean any offense by this - but how is a nearly one and a half year old requiring full-time attention from two people? I ask this as a single dad of two kids, one of them since they were < 1.
> Everyone knows kids consume your time. But what people without kids may not realize is the extent to which people with kids want their time to be consumed by them. This is one of the hardest parts of parenthood to communicate to non-parents: Yes, children demand a lot of time and attention. However, as a parent you actually enjoy spending that time with your children. To the author's point: Different people will wa…
> It also helps to remember that "they grow up so fast" is cliche, but it's true. The most demanding early years of child raising fly by quickly. It blew my mind when I heard someone say "kids are only toddlers for a couple of years". As a kid you feel like childhood lasts an eternity, and their developmental stages are so significant, but in comparison they spend less time at each phase (infant, toddler, little kid,…