The OP clearly doesn't have kids for how glossed over the point is. Amazing that they come up with just 10 spare hours a week without even really factoring kids into the equation.
For those of us who have kids, you just sit back some days and wonder... How little we recognized at the time, the sheer freedom of being able to just head out for dinner or a drink any day of the week, plop down and watch whatever movie we wanted, sleep in on the weekends, etc.
OP does acknowledge the workload of having children is "indefinite" but doesn't really do justice to the reality of raising children.
The funny thing is how that theoretical 10 hours per week of free time will somehow make way for the ~40 hours per week spent on the children. Shopping for new shirts because they don't excite you anymore? Yeah, parents ain't got time for that BS!
1) You may be good at this or have some situation in terms of support structures or lifestyle where this is particularly easy, but this is not at all what many parents I know/encounter express to me (as a person who's openly childfree). The combination of more than one kid and 2 parents working FT out of the home, seems to equal an absolutely exhausting long-term grind for many unless they've got a lot of family nearby who are both willing and able to share that load.
2) To be replaced by endless after school activities/sports, events, and other child-related things. Fine if you like them, but if not you're not seriously getting your free time back until maybe the teenage years. A decade+ in the prime of your life is not a "mere blip" to many.
3) You do (which is great - clearly you're the sort of person who should have kids). There are a lot of people who have children and....don't suddenly find an appreciation for children. The vast number of children in the world with a willfully absent, abusive, or simply disinterested and not loving parent stand as a clear counter-argument, and the statistics on child abuse/neglect are pretty awful.
On the anecdotal side - It's pretty heartbreaking how many of those I grew up with (who had outwardly normal, upper middle class families) turned out to have those sorts of terrible parents and traumatic childhoods...and those are just the ones I know about. I'm thankful I didn't have that childhood, but a shocking number of children do.
I think it's misleading to promote this ideal like it's just going to happen for everyone who has kids and leads to people who shouldn't have children having them and resenting them or worse.
Same here! I don't even have kids and I can barely fit in 8-10 hours per week. For my demographic, they're claiming 30+ hours per week. Next time my friends with kids complain about "not enough time in the day," I think I'm going to smack them!
Raising kids takes an infinite amount of time and resources.
Or to put it another way, the ROI of investing additional time into raising your children remains high as you go from spending 5 minutes a day up to 1,000 minutes a day.
So I think it’s natural and beneficial that parents try to invest the maximum amount of time into their children as physically possible, and career will come second to that.
I’m not at all saying the choice shouldn’t be available to work and raise children, or passing any moral judgement on families who take that path. Just that it doesn’t surprise me that a lot of people decide they will focus on one or the other and not try to do both.
Advancing in a career and parenting a child are both extremely onerous (and rewarding) tasks. There are only 24 hours in a day, and in both employment and parenthood you are “competing” against other people who are 100% committed to one or the other.
Speaking for myself as a 36 year old male, the number of hours I work is probably 50% what it was before I had my two children. I used to be the #1 contributor at my job, no task couldn’t be done, no customer couldn’t be blown away, no deal couldn’t be closed through mastery and shear force of will.
Now my priorities have shifted. That level of focus and exertion simply isn’t possible anymore with the number of hours a day I spend with the kids.
Yes, you’re right and I’ve been obscene and annoying. I’m sorry. I have kids and know many parents. I think it’s odd to use these ancillary reasons as motivations for having kids because the change to your life is so huge and profound (and the implications of creating a new human are even bigger!), so that the idea that a person would embark on that as a mechanism to solve their social problems is a baffling way to look at it to me. Words can’t even describe the profundity of the impact. It would be like joining the military to get green clothes. Also, it doesn’t even work. Sure, you’ll talk to other parents at bbqs and kid birthday parties. But you mostly won’t have time for a meaningful social life, because it’s work, kids, bed for many years. And the social events you do have are severely constrained by the presence of kids. You just wait to find out how much nap and eating schedules dominate your life, and how meaningful of a conversation you can have with these parents while you’re both parenting. Not only do you have little social time, but you will not having YOU time and will lose a big part of your current identity as a result. A major part of your life is redirected into serving the needs of your kid, and you and your pleasure, and your social needs and whatever else go on the back burner. So forgive me for being snarky, but this strikes me as overwhelmingly absurd. And also I probably have low emotional energy due to taking care of kids after working all day…. But yes, fast forward 10 years and I’m sure it’s a different picture. But that’s quite the investment. I’d just join a trivia group or something.
It's interesting the assumptions you make about when I see my kids, how much I see my kids and how I balance that with a job I deeply enjoy. Also interesting to see the assumptions made about what kind of people are passionate enough to work more than 40 hours a week. My only point in commenting was to help people challenge their false assumptions. Trust me, I've stared death in the eye, and had a tube hanging out of me for weeks. I am at peace with my priorities - and I spend lots of quality time with my children, thanks for your concern.
> 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 want different balances between time spent working and time spent with kids, and that's fine as long as it remains a balance. There are different ways to divide up time and attention that don't require sacrificing everything for the children. It took me a while to learn that having both parents available on demand 100% of the time isn't necessarily great for the child's development as they grow up. Dropping your kid off at daycare is hard the first few times, but watching my child have fun and develop relationship skills with other kids and people was eye-opening. There are many ways to split the load between parents that are fine in the end.
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. I don't mean to downplay the effort involved, but the situation continues to change as they grow up and become more independent, eventually spending more time at school, on independent activities, with their friends, and so on.
It's very difficult for anyone trying to balance demanding startup needs with demanding infant needs, but I also know many people in the startup world who simply had young kids and did startups at different stages in their career rather than overlapping the two. There's nothing wrong with working for a relaxed, big company while your kids are young and need attention, then switching gears to startup mode after they're more independent.
I think raising kids is meaningful work. Having raised 3 kids I can tell you I rarely had 2 hours of free time for myself, let alone having that kind of time every day! It's just not going to happen.
Now that I've become an empty nester I have more time to myself than I probably ever had in my entire life! And I have great kids who've turned into awesome people that I can visit and enjoy doing things with.
I would argue you reap what you sow. Put the time and work in now and enjoy the fruits later in life. Don't worry about silly things such as "free time."
I'm not complaining. I love my children and wouldn't change it for the world. The parent comment stated I've got so many hours I could be using to be productive. I was stating why that isn't the case.
When they're older, I'll have more time. Whilst they're young, I'm enjoying being a present father.
So you work 80 hours a week, meaning that you have almost no time to enjoy life with your kid... so that he can grow up to be like you and do the same thing, and presumably educate their children to do the same as well.
So your ideal of how things should be is to have a saga of people working their asses off, in theory for the good of the next generation, but in practice for nothing because the next generation will work their asses off for the good of the next one, etc.
Maybe it's culture shock (I'm a European) but honestly, how can anyone think that is "worth it"?
> these times were the best times ever. my kids are grown up now and I'm proud of them. but those moments will never return.
I think the complaint is not about having to spend too much time with kids, but rather that "work + kids" is too much. Like, a part-time job would improve the situation a lot. But finding a part-time job can be quite difficult.
I think the point is that parents spending more time with their children might be more important than squeezing every last ounce of productivity out of people.
Of course raising children requires time and money, just like any other activity.
I have a friend who competes in Iron Man. It takes a huge commitment of time and energy, and every time I talk to him he has just spent $1000 for some new attachment to his super-bike. Iron Man negatively impacts his "available time and money". Oh, and he has a startup. And it's very successful.
I suspect that most of you have hobbies that consume 3-4 hours of your weekday and several hundred dollars of your monthly budget.
Now, in my case, my family is my hobby. Spending time with my kids is how I relax and unwind. I don't go out, or watch TV, or play a musical instrument, or compete in Iron Man, or participate in Renaissance Festivals. My life might seem empty and boring to you, if your idea of relaxing and unwinding is different than mine.
Having a family is one choice -- amongst many -- for how to spend your free time and disposable income. I'm not claiming that you can have it all -- for example, I don't think anyone could do startup + family + Iron Man -- but I do think that startup + family is eminently doable.
Even without kids I work like this. Just because I'm not a parent doesn't mean I'm going to take on work that could potentially stress me out eat into vacation time...
It seems like more of a work-life balance philosophy thing than parenting thing, I simply couldn't imagine working more than 50% of the year but others are content doing 60hr weeks with 2 week vacation.
If that's what makes them happy then power to them.
Young kids are an 80 hour per week job. The only way anyone has time for paying work normally is school, daycare/relatives, or one partner dedicated to child-raising. Even for the non-child-caring parent the kids fill in the remaining 30-40 hours after the "real" job and commute. I don't think most people have much left after being switched "on" 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, week after week.
How does anyone get stuff done beyond the requisite 40, with kids? Two proven strategies: 1) ignore the kids a lot, 2) hire help. That's what all those famous old guys who discovered all kinds of cool stuff or wrote amazing literature or philosophized or whatever, while also having kids, did. Probably there are super-humans out there who manage without doing those things, but I'm not convinced they're common enough to count on or to give much consideration. Nb some people will hire help but not really want to tell people they have—don't assume someone blogging about raising kids while doing 100 other things, or crushing it at work, hasn't hired help just because they don't mention it. Decent odds they have.
Having young kids is like working 80 hour weeks. In fact it basically is that, just at two jobs rather than one. Plus you spend a lot more time keeping house, on top of it.
Most people don't have much left to give working those kinds of hours. Personally, I've had to dramatically cut back on hobbies and keeping up with various media, even, and all but drop some categories (I bet I spend 5% as much time gaming as I used to, for instance, and haven't even bothered to set up my gaming PC since a move about 1.5 years ago). I got a ton of reading done when each kid was young because you can just read them whatever, they don't know the difference, and you spend a lot of time feeding them or watching them in the bath so they don't drown or whatever, but now? Hahaha, so, so little reading.
Mostly I just watch movies or TV or read garbage on the Internet (ahem) because I don't mind as much being interrupted while doing those things.
The other thing everyone is forgetting is how much TIME kids require; it's not just about the money. As someone else in this thread said, poor people get their entertainment from their families and communities, whereas richer people have other ways to entertain themselves (travel, etc.). Raising kids is a huge time-sink; you never get any time to yourself, you never get to do anything that isn't kid-friendly, etc. It's a huge lifestyle change if you're used to being able to take weekend trips, go to fancy restaurants, go on international travel, etc.
For those of us who have kids, you just sit back some days and wonder... How little we recognized at the time, the sheer freedom of being able to just head out for dinner or a drink any day of the week, plop down and watch whatever movie we wanted, sleep in on the weekends, etc.
OP does acknowledge the workload of having children is "indefinite" but doesn't really do justice to the reality of raising children.
The funny thing is how that theoretical 10 hours per week of free time will somehow make way for the ~40 hours per week spent on the children. Shopping for new shirts because they don't excite you anymore? Yeah, parents ain't got time for that BS!
reply