It really depends on what ones priorities are. If someone is really in the middle of starting up or even immensely enjoying the current work that she ends up spending most of the time in office, why the hell would you want kids?
Raising decent kids requires proper planning and you need time to observe them and change those plans accordingly if required. Only when you have decided to chill down on work and consider yourself ready for another interesting venture should you go ahead and have kids. Think about your priorities, period.
People with kids often have different priorities. Having a slam dunk, distraction free, high productivity work day tends to be lower on the priority list. Spending time with your partner, taking care of the kids, cooking and eating dinner with the family; these all tend to be higher on the priority list.
There are exceptions. Some people don’t respond well to the stresses of family life and want to escape to the office. Hopefully these people decide not to have children in the first place.
It's a question of priorities, not pragmatics. Your priorities seem to be career-oriented, and making your personal mark on the future. That's okay. Someone with different priorities would be asking things much more like "will my career path allow me to have the kind of family that I want?"
The people who "rush into" having children have gotten to a point where they feel like they can, and so they do. They're employed because they need money in order to have a family. They don't have a family because it's a nice hobby to add meaning to their work-oriented lifestyle.
Sample size one anecdote here: Having a child made me more focused, ambitious and productive at work. I had a moment of lucidity where I decided to drop all my tech related hobbies and instead split the new-found time between caring for my child and doubling down my efforts at work.
Having kids can reset your priorities to the benefit of your employer.
Kids are a big consideration whether you know it or not. An ambitious professional has better odds of not making time for that, and unfortunately due to biology and the effects of parental leaves this is quite one-sided still. Getting better lately, but still imbalanced.
I think this will be an unpopular opinion to some; but I have a pretty firm belief that when you do the family thing and decide to have kids and the like; you’d better have established, or at least started / somewhat put in motion your goals as an individual.
As soon as you’ve crossed that line and had said kid, you have just made a conscious choice to significantly reduced your own time, finances; and flexibility available to chase after personal goals.
Before anyone immediately @‘s me; this is not always the case…but usually the people who can do both are 1) the exception to the rule, not the average; and/or 2) were relatively wealthy. maybe you can afford a caretaker for your child.
But that begs the question - so you had said kid, and want to give said kid the best life they can. Cool. We need people.
Probably adopting is the more sensible option; since there are tons of kids in awful, hopeless situations that can use your help, and we also have an overpopulation issue; but honestly, some people just want to have the experience of having kids. Okay, cool.
So…Does starting your own business right now, rather than investing into your kid’s development, really make sense?
By having a kid; did you not agree to set aside a lot of your personal time and finances to them?
Shouldn’t you do this sort of thing before you have a kid or after they move out? What if it takes off and your kid loses a parent being present because the career took over? :/
Asking from the perspective of a 33-year-old woman who sees having kids in your early 30’s; or, God forbid, your 20’s, as suicide of independence.
If you have ever had children, you know they become 100% of your life and 110% of your time for the first year or so, and with multiple children that could stretch to several years.
I guess if that interferes with your immediate hedonistic needs you would just get rid of the children? Maybe just dump them on someone else whose time is less self-importantly valuable?
It's the same with running a startup. You make the choice to commit, you follow through, and in the long run you reap the rewards and live a fuller, better life.
I think it depends on your priorities. I was heavily career focused, then had kids and focus my time on family now. If i really wanted to i could pick them up from daycare late, i could get baby sitters, i could do what’s required to be more dedicated to work, but i wouldn’t get that time with the kids back ever.
In my experience, having kids has had the dual benefits of making my days purposeful and fulfilling, and also more appreciative of idle time. The mind does not do well with the extremes of unlimited idleness or unlimited work. Turns out the rhythm of child-raising can fit the perfect middle ground between work and idleness, and has the advantage of creating a more meaningful cumulative product than either realm. That balance of time is especially true if you're financially independent or have family willing to help during the first year or two of a new baby.
If you're that dedicated to your work, it's possible that you should not have children. Why start a family if you're not going to spend any time with them? The social pressure to spawn is strong, but not insurmountable.
Of course, it's an entirely reasonable thing to think.
A good parent spends more time with their children than anything else.
And I've dropped the ball on work stuff when I had more important life stuff to handle.
And I'd skip using some contracting firm (or anyone/thing else) if I thought they'd take off for greener pastures as soon as they found a better client.
Combine those things and nobody reasonable will enter into a critical deal with a new/upcoming parent where that person is in the critical path. It's not PC to say this, but you'd be a fool to discount it. And If that person doesn't prioritize their children you probably don't want to deal with them simply because of that.
fwiw, the same logic applies to anyone with any non-business focus that outweighs their business focus. From cancer to marathon running. This is your life too and blowing your chances on misguided charity doesn't let you take the time to raise your children or nurture your sick spouse.
I have to tell you that I'd rather the person who operates on a heart or a brain or flys a 777 (and there are many more I'm just picking a few obvious ones) focus on their job 100% and get rest to function at a top level.
Then those people should probably think long and hard about having families, right?
I'm of the opinion that if you really want to devote yourself to a career, you should skip having kids. Interestingly, the same traits that help in career advancement (hard work, willingness to sacrifice) are the same traits that help foster a successful marriage and family. Certainly, a few people can pull off both, but I suspect those people are the exceptions, not the rule.
Doing more stuff means you have less time for work. If you really like work and want to spend all your time doing it why have kids, pets, relationships, hobbies..?
In my case having children has made me more interested in my career. I need to provide for them and set a good example to an extent. Previously my focus was on whitewater kayaking, spending time with friends and travelling. I can't really do those things now anyway so it makes sense to spend more time on my career, but while the children are awake and I'm there I prioritize them.
You may want to think about the kind of companies you work for. If everyone else in your company has kids and family responsibility their priorities will be more aligned to yours. I found this out to my cost and would be unlikely to work with a small focused start up in the near future.
I'm noticing that it seems to be a serious competitive disadvantage to have children if you're in tech. You get more locked in to your path, can't take as many risks, and may have a lot less free time to experiment and improve. That doesn't even factor in time for more personal things like exercise, reading, having hobbies, meeting/making friends, vacationing, etc. You obviously have to commit to being a lot more selfless once you have children.
If someone is in their 30s, married, but hasn't hit their really time-intensive stretch goals (be it entrepreneurship, financial independence, becoming an industry leader, achieving a senior title, and so on), how should (s)he approach the decision? What are the ways you can stay competitive and dynamic? What compromises are unavoidable? Is it unreasonable to expect to be both professionally successful as well as a great parent? Under what circumstances would it be advisable to delay? How long? Should a really ambitious person seriously consider not having children at all?
Child birth is probably the most consequential inflection point in peoples' lives and yet many seem to rush into it headlong without asking the right questions. I'm sure there's some great collective wisdom out there on the subject. It would be especially helpful to hear from people who decided to remain childless.
Having family as priority compared to work is more than fine, it makes you (potentially, not necessarily) a good human being, a good parent or husband. This world needs that 10'000x more than another code ninja optimizing some corporation by nanofraction of a percentile.
The opposite is extremely valid too (to not leave any room for misunderstanding - folks prioritizing work over their kids are shitbags, no exception, and every single one I've met in their later years deeply regret that... apart from outright sociopaths and similar careless crowd).
Focus on career if thats your calling and spent whole live in it if you want, but then please don't have kids. Every kid with missing/bad father figure I've ever met later in their lives was a mess in one of myriad ways, endlessly compensating for this and never actually coming over it, permanently. If you know what to look for, you can start seeing it around you quite easily. It breaks my heart a little every time I see it. These folks often repeat same mistakes of their parents too.
If your first priority is your kids, your first priority is not your work. That's fine, it's a choice, but there is a frequent claim that the massive incremental time demand of kids makes one so much more time efficient at work that it more-than-compensates. Insofar as one is the same human being, with the same energy reservoirs and time management skills as before your child was born, this is unlikely.
I understand the reason this fiction is maintained: people with kids need the job even more than people without, and have an interest in denouncing people who claim kids make you less productive. There's also the second order effect in which "with kids" is correlated with "older".
The net of it though is that devs with kids tend to assign work a lower priority, to take fewer risks, to need more money, and to be older and hence less familiar with new technologies (and too busy to learn in their free time).
Society doesn't have a good answer for this situation yet. In times past, technology didn't move so fast that experience was mostly obsolete (and hence useless) in a decade's time. A 40 year old farmer with kids in 1713 would probably have much to teach a young whippersnapper. The same isn't true for a 40 year old programmer with kids in 2013.
It seems like you're firmly on the side of the one with kids, but outside the rhetoric this is an interesting personal question to ask yourself. It puts the opportunity cost of working into perspective and makes you re-evaluate the importance of your work.
Raising decent kids requires proper planning and you need time to observe them and change those plans accordingly if required. Only when you have decided to chill down on work and consider yourself ready for another interesting venture should you go ahead and have kids. Think about your priorities, period.
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