Having more than one child changes you in a very interesting way - you get a little more relaxed. Parents of only children IMHO are much more prone to getting helicopter parents.
- Start early to forbid things. My third don't talk yet but understands very well that I do not agree with him smashing his elder sister in the head with anything he found around. When this happens and I'm near enough to react immediately, the little thing will be slapped back, softly but enough for him to know that it is annoying.
- Be more often in the calmer mode than in the exiter mode with them. I need to work more on this because when I get home and hug the little third, I'm too quick to tickle his belly and throw him in the air. He it nice to sit often together and read a book or play lego for a while. This show them.
- Pick only a few rules and hold on them. I make no drama if one of them did not wash them teeth for one night. However, there's never a toy on the eating table. It happened to me to have forbidden something but thought the second after that it should have been ok. Then you can't revert easily. Less rules, but enforced, makes kid life safer than thousand of useless "be careful".
I tell them that commenting on someone's parenting, as though you have any experience or wisdom in the matter, is a bit like a white person telling a black person how to cope with racism.
Edit: oh look, here they come to give me their abundant wisdom.
Experience did not make me a better programmer or mathematician. Diving deep into the details to get a much better knowledge did.
Update typo
In fact, I'm actually skeptical about the effect of parenting in general, versus the influence of genetics.
The teacher is not up in the middle of the night with the child when they have strep throat. The teacher is not up in the middle of the night when their child has a nightmare. These are the sorts of things that only happen when you are a parent.
I understand your what you're saying, but this argument works against the argument that parents are automatically qualified by virtue of experience: a mother of a 2-year-old has no experience raising a 3-year-old either.
A childless teacher is a pseudo-parent 8-3:30, 5 days a week, 9 months a year. They honestly havent got a clue. They can head home and chill. While parenting is an endless grind.
Kids will wedge into every spare moment and literally consume all the space, physical and mental energy.
Try spending all night up with 3 kids with the stomach flu then having your boss push you to meet a deadline the next day.
These teachers, including my mother in-law can keep their `advice`.
Also aggravating: parents who call childless couples selfish. Like not spitting one out is somehow cheating life, and having kids makes you a kinder person. Both sides are equally self-interested, neither are totally selfless or selfish.
I'll concede that a lot of parents will shift their energy from themselves to their child's well-being, but that's where the selflessness ends and they often become a sinkhole for other people's energy. They're gifting no one except their own inner circle, which is fine - that's how life works for most people.
Existing social and fiscal expectations have a certain birth rate built in.
There is probably an ideal population count, but without actually figuring out what that count is and showing we're below it, that's not a worthwhile discussion.
School districts benefit from childless residents who pay taxes to support schools but don't impose any costs.
Also, there are many ways to contribute to the development of young generations other than simply having biological children. Even aside from adopting, lots of childless people I've known have been great mentors and teachers.
(Not that you'd necessarily disagree, just your post could kind of be interpreted that way).
Regardless, consider that your future comfort relies on someone else having a child. When you're old and everyone who cares for you is younger than you, thank those who had children and raised them well enough to be able to care for you.
It's great that you have kids but it's not like a it's a public service you're performing. Unless you adopted a bunch or something. We can always get younger immigrants to come fulfil those jobs.
My parents have served me more than any other human.
I am so glad our African neighbours still fuck like rabbits, in order to produce an extra +20 million people every year, on a land (and a society political organisation) that cannot support half of them, destabilising all countries there by internal migrations; and another million or so having to move to Europe every year, destabilising the social systems there which are not designed to accommodate such influx.
I'm so glad that people keep pretending the demographic problem is a supposed decrease in population when it is actually always increasing, and the continuous increase is the problem. I'm so glad they use 2-century old rhetoric on demographics and do not notice that there has been a small change in productivity per human being since those days.
People who don't have kids are no less selfish than I am, either - there's a reason any individual chooses to have kids or not, and the only moderately selfless reason (population control) is still selfish because you are making the choice for your own convictions.
The decision to have children or not is selfish period, everyone should stop giving a fuck about what choice they made, because none of them are "correct".
1. Do you produce kids?
2. Given your qualities as a potential parent, are your kids likely to produce more for society than they take?
If you answer those in the same way, you are not selfish. If your answers don't match, then you are.
Question 2 has virtually infinite factors impacting it, making it useless in any practical sense.
How about those who participate in activities that enrich the lives of others, such as volunteering, teaching, or giving aid?
What if their country has an overpopulation problem resulting in major constraints on resources and infrastructure?
It also ignores the fact that the vast majority of people don't make new humans as a selfless public service, thus "selfish" takes on a new definition which can be translated as "doing what people do", at which point it loses all meaning.
In poor countries making new humans is a necessity, in rich countries it's a natural desire, and in all cases it's a fundamental human right even if the offspring take more than they give as everyone is a product of circumstance. Exercising the option to not make any is equally valid.
I have no kids (and I don't want any), but I'm radically pro-freedom for the kids. So the boundary is not to be parents vs. not-parents, but people who desire safety vs. people who desire freedom.
So, I fundamentally think that all the parents who hate how others give advice are potentially just hypersensitive. Okay, really? Most of the non-parents are probably giving crappy thoughtless advice. I haven;'t experienced that too much myself, but I'm sure it happens.
In my case, I've always been very thoughtful about these things and I have lots of experience teaching young kids, so I knew far more than average about raising kids prior to having my own.
Still, I don't agree with the claim that non-parents have no wisdom here.
In other words, yeah, not being a pilot and lacking contextual knowledge of the helicopter DOES mean, at the very least, that you don"t know WHO fucked up - the pilot, the mechanic, the manufacturer, the designer, or whether the poor sucker just got shot down.
This is everything that's wrong with software today, and I mean that seriously.
What the poster said is "someone fucked up". He didn't say "the pilot fucked up".
If there is a mechanical failure on that helicopter while it's in flight, someone MOST DEFINITELY FUCKED UP. There are processes in place surrounding that helicopter specifically to make sure that pilot never has to make the decision of putting said helicopter upside down in a tree.
In otherwords, someone dun fucked up, and you don't have to be a helicopter pilot or helicopter mechanic, or a helicopter engineer, or anything related to any of it, to be able to identify that someone somewhere fucked up.
Is a parent of a single 2-year old really more qualified or experienced than someone who has 15 years of experience caring for siblings?
I'm pretty sure this is a root cause of so much conflict anymore. At the end of the day, almost all social media is inconsequential "goings-on".
What doesn't kill you may go on to make you chronically ill or permanently disabled.
A wise man once said: When you have one child it's a tragedy. When you have ten children the other nine will help the disabled one, or drown him in the pool.
Wisdom is knowing which saying applies to the situation.
"Many hands make light work" but "too many cooks spoil the soup".
"Birds of a feather flock together" but "opposites attract".
"Respect your elders" but "wisdom comes not from age, but from education and learning".
"Failing to prepare is preparing to fail" but "cross that bridge when you get to it".
(perhaps the most balanced aphorism on the virtues of preparation: "plans are useless, but planning is indispensable".)
Except smallpox.
These people honestly havent a fucking clue what they are talking about. As a father of three, I politely smile whenever someone like this tries to give me some advice. There might be some truth there, but there is a whole bunch of naiveté and ignorance as well. A battle-hardened parent actually does know whats best for their child, not some arm-chair person.
RAID is not just for computers...
It's not that children weren't loved as much back then, but when you had events like the Spanish Flu and World War II that claimed millions of lives, events well beyond your control, protecting kids from trivial risks probably didn't seem as big a deal.
Kids are tougher than we give them credit for, but they're also prone to do things that are more dangerous than they realize. I'm not sure as a society we've ever found a balance between letting them run wild and keeping them on a tight leash, we seem to flop from one extreme to another.
It might be taboo to say this, but "I have spares" really makes a difference. People who lose their only son or only daughter seem to fall apart, especially if replacement is no longer an option.
(I have two kids, love both dearly, but maybe in 50 years do we reach the stage where an individual life is not this gospel thing but a pragmatic one?)
(Granted how well you do on mile-high monkey bars doesn't predict your usefulness in subsiding global warming, but something along these lines. Perhaps it's time to start the conversation.)
(Granted why should "continuing some random genetic code" be considered "pragmatic" for anything but "continuing some random genetic code"?)
Maybe it's time for a change of Weltanschauung. Instead of having two kids and protecting the hell out of them, have a hundred kids and decide the two you want to keep. Wouldn't this be far more proactive than assuming the two fastest sperm (yours or your partner's) are a-priori the most useful kids you'll ever have?
I guess retroactively in a world of finite resources this is going to happen anyway.
And in other places, the total fertility rate is over 8x.
> Global population is expected to peak then decline
ORLY, "expected" by whom? Is it the same people who expected mosquitoes to be extinct by the end of the 20th century because people don't ride horses anymore?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub-replacement_fertility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birth_dearth
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/530866/un-predicts-new-gl...
There's a lot of problems in your old analysis, including the fact that sub-replacement fertility trends that affected Europe and East Asia aren't catching on in other parts of the world.
> Global population is expected to peak then decline
On what timescale? That's the most important question here that you conveniently glossed over.
You're grossly misinformed.
This was most of human history until recently. Disease, famine, war, and general lack of control over our environment and each other.