It really does get harder. Babies are not really that hard. They're a lot of work, but each individual thing you have to do is easy. Annoying or gross, sure, sometimes. But changing a diaper takes about a minute. Night time can be tough at first but if you do a good job with sleep training it gets better pretty quickly. My wife breastfed, so most mid-sleep wakeups just become "go grab the baby and hook him onto Mom, make sure everyone has what they need, and go lay back down."
My sons are 8 and 6 now and that's much more difficult on some ways. They're 'people' enough that you can reason with them sometimes, but also sometimes they get trapped in completely ridiculous loops of illogic and emotion and you just have to ride it out while trying to remain calm. There's all kinds of dramas, illnesses, places to go, one thing after another.
Mostly though, being a dad is great, and I recommend it. I meet lots of folks my age who seem kinda directionless, like they can't figure out what's missing, and I think for many of them, family is that missing piece.
I've also met many DINKs who seem like they're having the time of their lives, so YMMV. I don't want to tell anyone how to live their life.
But there does seem to me to be a cultural knee-jerk ruling out of family among my generation that puzzles and saddens me. Everyone seems to think there are a million qualifications they have to meet before becoming a parent. "We need to have a house, and 100k in savings, etc etc etc." And yes, it's good to be prepared. But also, as long as you're a semi functional human, you'll make it work.
If you think you want to have children, you should!
> Everyone seems to think there are a million qualifications they have to meet before becoming a parent. "We need to have a house, and 100k in savings, etc etc etc." And yes, it's good to be prepared. But also, as long as you're a semi functional human, you'll make it work.
Very true. I didn’t have my own place to live or any money when the first one was on the way. In fact, my kids are the reason I started a new career, worked my way up, bought a house.
It doesn’t all have to happen in a specific order. Like the parent post says, you make it work.
It just means what it means, I guess. You do the best you can to provide a good life for your child by whatever means are available to you. Sometimes you have to make compromises - even painful compromises.
Maybe you are living paycheck to paycheck so you don't buy the new game this week. You play an old game that you already had.
Maybe some mornings you have to give them a bowl of cereal instead of making eggs, because you don't have enough time.
Maybe some afternoon when everyone is exhausted from working, you let the kids play the tablets for 2 hours instead of 30 minutes like they're supposed to.
Maybe instead of renting out the trampoline park for the birthday party, you get a pavilion at your local nature park.
Maybe your kid might get a "cheese sandwich" in their lunch because you were out of turkey and didn't realize it until 11pm.
Maybe your kid desperately wants a dog, but your current living situation doesn't allow it and he has to go without.
Obviously we all want what's best for our children all the time, but life is full of compromises. I'm not saying that parents shouldn't do everything within their power to provide the best life possible for their kids - in fact, I think that's exactly the moral duty of parenthood. But there are many degrees of happiness between "pure utopian bliss" and "mere survival." And so many potential parents these days seem to think that if they can't do it absolutely perfectly then it's not worth doing.
Maybe this is just my own background, but I can't think of a single person I know whose childhood was perfectly ideal.
> But there are many degrees of happiness between "pure utopian bliss" and "mere survival." And so many potential parents these days seem to think that if they can't do it absolutely perfectly then it's not worth doing.
Where does being able to afford routine healthcare land? And I do not mean waiting in the few overcrowded clinics that take Medicaid because Medicaid reimbursed very poorly so providers do not accept it.
The only difference between now and before is that now we have very effective birth control. I think it is perfectly reasonable for people to say, for example, I am not likely to be able to pay for a child’s healthcare, and so it is not worth it for me to have children (yet). Or a home in a decent school, where the other kids are not likely to be in gangs. And so on and so forth.
My parents were poor, and I never received any healthcare as a child. My dad told me to play carefully, otherwise any injuries I incurred could derail the family. I also went to a different school in different states every year until high school. So I was fed and sheltered. But would I have kids if I predicted that is what their life would be? Hell no.
> I think it is perfectly reasonable for people to say, for example, I am not likely to be able to pay for a child’s healthcare, and so it is not worth it for me to have children (yet). Or a home in a decent school, where the other kids are not likely to be in gangs. And so on and so forth.
I agree.
What I'm arguing against is what seems to be a fairly modern conception: "oh, we can't possibly consider children until we own a home with 4 bedrooms and a pool and we've gone on a backpacking trip through Europe and we've unpacked all our own childhood trauma and come to terms with it and gone to therapy and etc, etc etc".
I'm not saying "yeah, fuck it, you live in a box, get all your money from hooking, and nurse a heroin addiction, but you should still have kids, it'll work out."
I'm just saying that nearly every human in history has been born into a situation that was non-optimal in some way. It's OK to have a kid when the house is too small. It's OK to not have a fully baked plan to finance every activity the child might ever want to do. A fulfilling and happy life can be found in less-than-ideal circumstances.
My parents didn't have much money. We were fortunate in many other ways. Some folks were born with more money and less parental kindness. Some sadly lacked in both.
As an adult, I can say that I am happy to have been born in spite of the many challenges that I faced growing up. I believe (hope) that most people on Earth can honestly say the same.
> And I do not mean waiting in the few overcrowded clinics that take Medicaid because Medicaid reimbursed very poorly so providers do not accept it.
Sorry you had a bad experience with that growing up. Really.
As a parent I can’t say I shared that worry with only having medicaid. That was our best option before I had a job with healthcare benefits, which took me years to get to.
But I would still say it was pretty far from just “survival”.
Babies are the worst. They take so much from you and you get so little back. Toddlerhood is when things start to get fun.
Babies cry for every reason and figuring out what’s wrong (if anything) was stressful. I felt that once my kids were able to communicate, everything got easier and waaaaaay more fun.
My kids are in college now and I’m so happy and proud of them but at the same time I realize that my parenting job is wrapping up. When I think about the past 20 years I’m a little sad because I should have been a much better parent. The deserved better. It’s also astonishing how quickly two decades passed.
The first baby is exhausting. The second one feels easy. The nervous stress that you'll break something is gone and replaced with "been there, done that". Which is really fortunate because the older one can run and climb now so you'll need that time back.
> Babies cry for every reason and figuring out what’s wrong (if anything) was stressful.
Yep, but it's important for would-be parents to know that that's normal and doesn't take all that long IF you are being an attentive parent. Some parents can tell by the "kind" of cry what their baby wanted. I could never do that, so I always just went through a mental checklist every time: Poopy diaper? (Usually you can smell one before it upsets the baby, though.) Hungry? Tired? Wants to play? Wants to sit down? Wants to get up? Etc.
When they’re a young teenager, and they’re trying to kill themselves, and you have to lock up all the sharp objects, including the knives you cook with every day, constantly watch them, which means working from home before everyone was doing that, keep them out of school because the school isn’t committed to keeping an eye on suicidal people, yet still informs you that they will call the authorities if you continue to keep them out of school, AND you’re also keeping them from being institutionalized, because that’s how the system is if you don’t do all this yourself to protect your children while they are in this window of time where you could lose them.
I wouldn’t say babies are the worst. They are simple beings.
It really depends, because children force us to negotiate.
Babies are dead easy. They are incapable of expressing their will. You put them in a stroller, that baby is in the stroller. Yes, you have to feed and clean the baby and it will sometimes be hard to wrangle into whatever situation you want. But it doesn't have a choice ultimately.
Adults are also relatively easy. You don't have to do any of the cleaning or feeding, and you also don't have to tolerate anything you don't want to. Bob is being a jerk? Fuck him. Sally doesn't come to your birthday party? Well, now she's not invited to Friendsgiving. Etc.
Toddlers who grow into children who grow into teenagers are a whole category unto themselves. You slowly divest yourself of the cleaning and direct feeding duties. But you also can't just abandon them. When little Billy is pitching a fit, you have to deal with that. And as they get older and get savvier themselves, you're going to have to navigate that. You are going to have a lot of responsibility with decreasing levels of authority.
So now you have to get your kid to do what you would like for them to do without physical coercion. Ideally without much coercion if you want to preserve a relationship with them. You are going to have to convince them. And you aren't allowed to quit.
It’s different. I would say for most people the infant age is the toughest just because it’s physically tough which is not something most people in the modern world are used to. The rest is mainly just dealing with a moody person who is learning about the world and themselves and can be completely infuriating about half of the time.
Right. Because that’s the easy part, when they’re babies.
At first I didn’t believe my friend’s dad when he told me it actually gets more difficult when they get older.