Was the stress primarily because of sleep deprivation/multitasking with a new baby? I am just trying to understand.
Stress factors include:
1) Getting very, very poor sleep, which can last anywhere from 2-12 months depending on your kid and your parenting technique.
2) Higher monthly expenses, plus a potentially-giant bill for the birth, on top of a year of smaller but still substantial bills for various things. This will be worse if the pregnancy is split over two years of insurance deductible (probably irrelevant in countries with medical coverage systems that aren't totally broken, but very relevant in the US)
3) Having your free time (including kid-free time that you have to use to keep the house in something that resembles order if you squint at it really hard) drop to ~25-30% what it was pre-kid. (you can gain a bit more by making your sleep even worse, though. Hooray?)
4) Your house will be kinda messy and gross even if you try hard to keep it clean, which is discouraging and stressful.
5) Leaving the house and getting out of the car now being A Whole Thing instead of something that barely takes any time or effort at all. Everything you do that isn't sitting at home in your pajamas is much more difficult. Even that is, in a way.
6) You no longer actually have time off, ever. Not in the sense you did before kids.
7) If you're a woman and want to breast feed... oh god. It's bad. Even worse sleep, and you'll have either a baby or a noisy milking machine attached to you seemingly all the damn time, which is incredibly inconvenient if you need to do anything else at all ever.
Go ahead an multiply the stress of the above by a factor of 10 if your new kid has serious health issues.
It boggles my mind that we consider the US a first-world country when I read things like this.
Also not sure I agree about the breastfeeding being so bad. Sure, it's a bit of a chore, but most mothers I know (including my wife) found it to be a positive experience that increases attachment.
And the leaving the house/car part I also don't follow. You have one more person to dress and one more item of luggage to carry; it's hardly an exponential increase.
Otherwise I agree, esp. about stress if kid has serious health issues. (We have two kids, aged 1.5 and 4).
(Edit: The full presentation is pretty relevant to the topic too if you are interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1cFt2tWsI4)
It's mainly that something so easy you barely think about it becomes something you do have to think about. It's a vanishingly tiny value being acted upon such that it is many times larger than it was, though still not huge. It does get worse with older kids—newborns are in many ways very easy, sleep and constant feedings aside—and I understand that some people have lots and lots of trouble with the process, though for us it's not that bad, just a non-issue that is now a once-or-more-a-day minor issue.
We had a hospital stay before the birth, emergency c-section (the cord was around my son's neck), hospital stay after the birth, and about 2 weeks of him staying in the neonatal ICU. I think the bill came to around $30,000 (covered by insurance), and I think we paid a couple of $20 copays.
> And the leaving the house/car part I also don't follow.
Exponential? No, but I don't think anyone claimed that. But compared to a couple going out, a couple and a child takes several times more time to do each step. Everything takes more planning, and nothing is completely spontaneous.
If you that's the case and you hadn't already hit a larger yearly out-of-pocket-max through other bills, then your insurance is uncommonly good to put it mildly. If you additionally didn't have to fight with insurance to get that stuff covered so completely then you have ZOMGWTF good insurance.
There was a stress-related stay in the hospital for her for several days with a $250 copay, around late January. Then the whole birth+surgery+NICU+breast pump rental was judged as one incident, with a $250 copay.
Individual doctor visits are $20. Hospital stays are $250. Medication is heavily subsidized, and most of it that we've ever gotten had a copay under $10.
There was an with a demand for payment for the entire bill+interest. A series of calls to their billing department led to them finding the mistake in their system and sending us the bill for just the copay.
I'm positive that we fall under the "uncommonly good" category.
For comparison, my wife and I are on a marketplace plan, and out of a total of $60k in expenses for our newborn daughter, we were responsible for ~$12k.
We want to have more children, but I would move from the US to a first world country to do so.
First = US/W.Europe + Allies
Second = Soviet Union/China + Allies
Third = Non-aligned
As a first world resident I am not sure about the prevalence of this usage in developing countries. I know I would not be thrilled to have my country--and, by extension, culture--referred to as "third world". I wouldn't be surprised if it is common in developing countries to note this original sense to both blunt the pain of being dissed by denizens of rich countries and to establish a sort of reverse superiority by insisting on and noting the original sense of the word.
And when you're all finished and ready to get into the car, the person has a full diaper that needs to be taken care of, so when you've done that you're back to square one.
(but as I say, if one chooses it and feels like being a parent, I can guarantee a hell of satisfaction, those kids are just marvelous eyes openers)
The toll on household finance and peace of mind of the US insurance system is incredible. The births of two daughters, including a couple of days at the hospital, peridural, pre-birth prep and post-birth followup, cost us a grand total of 30€. Of course nothing is free, we pay it through other means (taxes), but not having to think about cost at that moment is so relieving.
But the actual cost reduction is that the system is not a bloated for profit world with what resembles monopoly powers (well, you are free to not go to the nearest hospital...) but instead a public good, serving the people not the shareholders.
In reasonable prices a birth in western Europe will cost something like €2000 including a few days stay and possibly pre- & post-natal care. That's the amount paid by the insurance to the hospital. In the US you easily get to $30000 for a normal birth, of which then anything up to the full amount might be billed to the patient.
If you to real cost you could calculate eg the amount of taxes that pay for tuition free medical degrees, lots of pharmaceutical research, or similar things that would in the US be part of the justification for the huge cost (high tuition -> need for high earnings for doctors -> need for high prices). But in the end it's just absurd and the US system should be a warning to anyone who thinks that such a vital public service would be better if privatised.
3 years ago our then-19 month old was diagnosed with type-1 diabetes - and we haven't had a decent night's rest since. For anyone not aware, type 1 diabetes is a condition where your body stops producing insulin and as a result unable to process carbs into energy. This is not type-2 diabetes that is a result of not taking care of yourself.
Our son could die in the middle of the night from his body not having enough glucose in his system and as a result starving his brain of the energy it requires - ('dead in bed syndrome.') We're up at least 3-4 times in the middle of the night to make sure he's OK.
As a software developer I've been fortunate enough to be able to "afford" the best insurance ($20,000/year (our share) + more than 3-4k/year in out of pocket costs) which affords us the latest and greatest technology - insulin pump with integrated glucose monitor. The tech is ancient by my standards, relative unreliable (his glucose monitor can get a 'weak signal' for seemingly no reason and as a result could fail to report potentially fatal blood glucose levels.
In an ideal world the tech would be more reliable, better connected, services to monitor his blood glucose levels 24/7 would alert us by phone/emergency services/etc when at critical levels.
The stress levels are high because we never have a moment 'off.' In effect we are human, manual versions of a thermostat for his glucose levels. If it's too high he faces the long term consequences of diabetes (loss of vision, neuropathy, etc.) If it's too low he can die.
Next year the stress gets even worse - we have to trust that the school system will be able to manage his diabetes. Up until now he's always with my wife or myself, 24/7 (and occasionally with my parents, who can keep an eye on him for a couple of hours with text messaging as a 'support system' as needed.)
Needless to say there are situations that are much worse than ours, and we're thankful to be able to take care of our son in the interim until technology catches up to make his situation more manageable for him as an adult.
The stress and sleep deprivation have certainly taken their toll. Weight gain, short term memory, etc.
Good luck with your son. On the positive side hopefully trusting the school system can at least give you some time off of this stress :-/
I don't think they are differentiating between stress, that this study discusses, from lack of sleep, which also affects memory.
However, stress is a result of, and not the cause of the sleep deprivation that comes with nursing and changing a child throughout the night.
> "I don't think they are differentiating between stress, that this study discusses, from lack of sleep, which also affects memory."