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Comment by jwdunne | Hacker News Reader

Exactly the same :) the guilt of not spending time with my kids and my wife is too much. There have been times where I've tried to sit down and work on something but it's no fun when there's a strong feeling of "I should be spending this time with my family".

The other thing I've noticed is that the separation and challenge of raising children has made me more productive. You don't know stress until you've had a newborn. There are things at work that used to affect me and I look back now and think "how was that even a problem?"

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> There have been times where I've tried to sit down and work on something but it's no fun when there's a strong feeling of "I should be spending this time with my family".

That doesn't sound like a recommendation for becoming a parent. In fact it sounds the opposite - "don't have children, or you'll guilt yourself out of every other thing you could be doing".

Well it's not for me to recommend. I don't recommend it if you don't feel you've got where you need to be and that matters very much.

There's tonnes of reasons why I wouldn't recommend parenthood. I don't think I was ready by any margin. All I'm saying is that I don't regret it and I consider it the best decision of my life.

I'll say the selfish thing. There isn't (and rightly so) any law that requires us to have children. I say use it. Let the suckers who want children raise the children we need to take care of us when we are to old.

My personal recommendation us when in doubt, err on the side of not having children. Don't make life harder on you than it has to be.

Sensible advice if not coloured with the chalk of Ayn Rand!

Hopefully I do a good job and it'll be my honour when my children look after the old when they grow up.

Ideally, they won't look after the old; their robots will.

Well life is about choices. People are free not to have children. But yes, when you do you bear a certain level of responsibility to them. I think a lot of people would characterize sitting in your office building CRUD apps every night so that you have a sweet green GitHub calendar while your kids sit alone on the couch watching TV as an abdication of that responsibility.

Teach them to code and do it together! ;)

You don't know stress until you've had a divorce due to all of these after hours spent studying the latest fad. That is real stress and that happens to a lot of programmers. I am dealing with that personally, I have had 2 kids and I have done the best I could. Newborn stress is nothing compared to a divorce from a long term marriage.

Well there is that. One other thing I've learned is that no matter how stresses I get, there's always someone going through worse and here we are.

Sorry to hear that man, cannot imagine what you're going through - I've come close with my Mrs and it's not nice.

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