81–90 of 292 posts
Being a parent is hard no matter where you work. Those who talk about balancing their career with their desire for children might as well dream about winning the lottery.
All of your high minded ideals will be directly confronted by a screaming baby who can’t clearly express their needs for another 6-12 years.
I don’t think this problem is truly unique to startups.
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.
I still have downtime after having a kid, but I'm much less motivated to spend it on a side project because I'm that much more exhausted.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Ordinary working people don't spend a ton of quality time with their kids during the week. Quality time was a invention of the in-retrospect rather entitled parents of the 1970s who justified their neglect with the idea of "well I don't spend much time with my son but when I do it's quality time!". The truth is kids, particularly young kids just want time. They want to see you around and have you take a active role…
I could just as easily say that quality time is actually a useful metric and as a kid I definitely would've preferred a parent who spends more time with me on the weekends and wasn't "just around". Maybe I could bring a quote from a comedian too. I don't see what any of that would bring to the conversation though.
Taking your kid to school / after-school activities allows for bonding as well.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Ordinary working people don't spend a ton of quality time with their kids during the week. Quality time was a invention of the in-retrospect rather entitled parents of the 1970s who justified their neglect with the idea of "well I don't spend much time with my son but when I do it's quality time!". The truth is kids, particularly young kids just want time. They want to see you around and have you take a active role…
I could just as easily say that quality time is actually a useful metric and as a kid I definitely would've preferred a parent who spends more time with me on the weekends and wasn't "just around". Maybe I could bring a quote from a comedian too. I don't see what any of that would bring to the conversation though.
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 think the "traditional" family roles of mother stays home and father works are outdated but I think the train goes off the tracks when people want to throw the whole idea out completely. To me, the outdated part is just the gender roles. I don't think both parents can be CEOs, someone has to be the primary caretaker because, as so many mothers have said in the past, it's a full time job. Couples of any configuration need to have an understanding of who is going to take what responsibilities when they have kids and often/sometimes that's going to require sacrifices in both career and earning potential for one or both parents.
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…
>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 parts of your life to improving the efficiency of a cat picture delivery service. I cannot imagine how it would work in practice
A lot of these problems seem to me to have been created by very poor urban planning. If you work in a city it shouldn't be a big deal to have lunch with whoever/go down to the post office/ get away to the park for a bit. Been doing it my whole life.
I thought this was a great article, because it acknowledged a fundamental fact: life is all about choices, and for too long many people were fed the lie that "you can have it all". Time is finite. You can either spend some particular moment working at your job, or you can spend that moment with your kids - you can't do both. While some people may be better at balancing the two, the fact is in a competitive economy th…
I don't know if it's fair to classify this as just a mom problem. I'm having the same problems as a Dad.
A kid is a startup. Running multiple startups is paralles is inefficient. What else is new?