I’ve Picked My Job over My Kids
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
It's affected my career choices. I started studying Comp Sci, as I felt it's a field where I can have more flexibility than my current field. This degree is getting closer and closer to completion and it's looking 95% likely that my career will be changing in January.
It's affected my love life too but I won't go into detail here.
One thing this article misses the mark on is the quote " I also remind myself that if I were a dad, I would be getting accolades for all the times I scheduled a doctor’s appointment or arranged a play date.".
My experience as a dad is that people simply don't trust my parenting skills or assume I'm simply helping the mum out. It's incredibly sexist and somewhat hurtful. There has been times I've been battling with my workload and then people drop innocent comments which feel like a knife in the back.
I've never understood this viewpoint - children are simply the most fascinating things!
They're born with next to no inborn knowledge and yet have the potential to learn about quantum mechanics. Someone with the same potential would only have learned about fire some hundred thousands of years ago.
In the early days you get to see a baby slowly mentally program the things we take so for granted we forget that you actually have to learn them - how to walk, how to speak, language.
YMMV but for me to see the world indirectly through the eyes of children is like rediscovering everything there is to the world we live in!
However, on the scale of hours and days they can be mind-numbingly boring, as anyone who’s played hide and seek with a four year old who repeatedly goes and hides in their bedroom cupboard can probably attest. I love my boy dearly, but I am so, so, bored of playing the first hour of Minecraft now - he loves it though, so every few days we start up a new world, and we mine our way down to some diamonds, at which point he loses interest.
But in todays atomized and helicopter parenting with liability world, you can’t do that and thus parenting is a lot more work than it should be.
I personally love Education Edition for the coding interface, but there is some other neat stuff in there as well.
Mind you, my first daughter is coming up on 2 years old, so there's a ways off until I get there. I'm just speaking as a teacher who uses it. My daughter is fascinating though - it's really interesting watching her figure out skills like sorting, and also discovering all the little ways my wife and I have unconsciously confused her with our use of language, which she then picks up without us realising it.
Childhood is long days and short years.
Rest of it can be kinda monotonous? Like, getting my daughter from bed through breakfast, dressing up, and walking to kindergarten. Or getting her to walk all the way to her friends house for a play date. Or getting her dinner, showered, and to bed ...
I still like it, but the day to day is stressful and monotonous
For us, this has meant quite a lot of shared cultural consumption. I've bought hundreds of story books 2nd hand, and read to them, and I think it has helped their vocabulary (which is amazing). We've seen tons of children's movies together, we've played Minecraft and other comp. games together, we often play board games. I have also built things for them, like a huge outdoor swing set and a crossword puzzle game to help them get started with reading - https://puzzlepirate.net (also available as a free Android app).
There are so many things you can do with or for your kids that is fun or challenging to you also, if you just use some imagination (and have the time).
Anyway, your comment about friends not being interested makes it sound as if you have no adult support whatsoever. It would probably help a lot if you could make new friends w people who have kids the same age. Where I am (Stockholm) it seems this tends to happen when people go on a longer stretch of parental leave - you automatically meet and start hanging out w families w small kids, whose parents are also on parental leave. I think it really helps having other adults around who understand - as emotional support if nothing else.
I bet there are parents groups, or even single-parent groups you can join, to get in touch w others like you.
With our best algorithms, you have to feed thousands and thousands of images for ML to be able to identify things like a certain type of animal.
And yet, my 14 month old can see a cartoon drawing of a penguin in her books a few times and then days later, recognize an actual photo of a penguin from a completely different source.
The human brain, even on an infant level is just so spectacularly amazing.
Yeah seriously. My wife and I have a six month old and simply because we want to educate her, we've both been reading way more than normal. My wife (who stays at home with our daughter all day) has already completed a university lecture series + read many books on ancient civilizations. I've started reading about philosophy on my bus ride to/from work.
Having children has only expanded our desire and ability to learn.
Is that guaranteed though?
> My experience as a dad is that people simply don't trust my parenting skills or assume I'm simply helping the mum out. It's incredibly sexist and somewhat hurtful.
You and the author are talking about the exact same pervasive sexism from opposite perspectives.
GP is correct; these are in many ways two sides of the same sexist coin.
I feel you. My wife and I are managing two kids and I work from home, meaning I am home almost 24x7. I help my wife taking care of our children and I often get annoyed by the whole bunch of dumb or repetitive things we need to do to take care of them. Still, I love them more than anything in the world.
This is probably the most heartwarming thing that I'll read in a long time. Made my day :-).
Some of my observations:
1) Kids have a great time with other kids, so don't feel bad about daycare. Having them at home full-time past the age of 2 is, I think, more about the parent than the child.
2) Sometimes kids just suck, and work can be a glorious escape.
3) School life in my culture (NZ) is still modelled like there's always one stay at home parent, which means you'll never be able to be there for every certificate, every kapa haka performance, and kids are okay about it so long as you communicate, and do get to the occasional one.
4) You can fit a lot of effective parenting into dinner table discussions and bedtime discussions
5) I'm really glad I'm a single Dad and not a single Mum because there are very few cultural expectations of me beyond working, and everyone acts like I'm amazing for just raising my kids. It's kinda insulting to both genders.
6) It's impossible to perfectly balance a 40 hour working week and family. Best you can aim for is a kind of homeostasis where work suffers for family one week and then family suffers a bit for work the next.
7) You will feel, at times, like you're letting down everyone equally, workmates and children both. And you just have to ride with it.
And I've found that workmates will notice your child related late starts or early finishes, and resent them. The only solution is communication. And a decent employer.
Our work culture also assumes two people families to an extent.
My girlfriend struggles with that quite a bit. And now that we're fully cohabitated and my work-from-home / lack-of-commute situation allows me to participate in more kids things that aren't accomodating to parents with traditional work schedules and typical commutes... I get heaps of praise from everyone, including her, for basically just not being a dick.
It's the flip side of the "women with careers are neglecting their children" and "men at the park are paedos!" mindset.
It's nice having positive feedback, but I'd prefer a society where it's unremarked upon.
And then we talk. Things that happened at school, on the bus, at work, in the news. Any teachable moments come up, you use them - especially good for reinforcing the values you're trying to impart by running through scenarios based on what happened.
Bedtime is the important one. Having 15 minutes alone with them, in a muted environment where they feel safe, is where they feel best able to express emotional stuff. Once again, easy to skip and do the multitude of other tasks, but too valuable.
And in terms of cooking, buying in bulk and cooking in bulk. Pastas, risottos, pies etc. I like stuff that's quick for after work, or can be cooked the night before and reheated. I'm not a very organised person so the last year has been a definite learning experience.
Yeah you’re getting praise for being there for your child, sometimes overbearingly so, like you were rare and precious.
Maybe it’s because you are rare and precious. Maybe most men are shits. Maybe you are one of the very few who aren’t.
Personally, I like children about as much as I like cats, but much less than I like dogs.
But I hate the unruly ones. Almost makes one yearn for the days of ritual infanticide.
We have an excellent daycare. My daughter spends three days a week crafting, playing outside with kids, baking, doing make-up etc. The carers have skills that I don't have and my kids get to enjoy that.
We both work four days a week so the kids get lots of parent time and we get a bit of a rest from them.
I just learned another one; leikskoli. Beats our 'barnehage' for kindergarten, that's for sure!
Førskole is a bridge between kindergarten and primary school - typically a few hours a week for the last few months in kindergarten.
We've been pretentious at least since I attended førskole some 35 years ago! Hah! :)
1000 times this. If I take the kids to the store, or through airport security, or pretty much anywhere, women are practically running over to "help" me. Thank you but I got it. Go help that poor mom over there with three meltdowns to deal with, she needs it a lot more than me.
The other day we had a birthday party for my daughter, and some of the moms saw me prepping food and doing work while I gave my wife a chance to relax and talk to the guests. They actually told her they were surprised that I would "allow" her to take a break like that. Seriously?! First of all, she is "allowed" to do whatever they hell she wants, and secondly, how messed up is it that their immediate expectation is that mom should be working the whole time while dad gets to relax?
But my favorite story of all was I was in the bathroom at Newark airport, changing my daughter's diaper. A man walks in wear the most "New Jersey" outfit ever -- expensive suit, slicked hair, gold chains, etc. He said, "Where's the mom?"
"Outside."
"Why isn't she changing the diaper then?"
I said, "She didn't want to?"
He didn't even know what to say after that, his mind was so blown.
I heard a great anecdote about a Manhattanite visiting Stockholm on vacation. Lots of men pushing prams all around town. "My goodness, look at all the young male nannies in Sweden!"
More notable is perhaps the gender distribution on the playground. I do think it is easier for moms to connect/bond with each other. Like if I plan an excursion and wonder what friends of my kids could join, I find it more difficult to simply ask another mom. Might just be me, though.
I also know a lot of fathers that took parental leave for months at a time.
These are our kids, of course we take care of them.
I would just like to say that picking the most inconvenient time for all counsel involved is one of those tactics you see in the practice of law too often. And for what? So all the lawyers can miss every major holiday, and their kids birthdays? To make the other lawyers beg for the time off everyone else takes for granted? The article-writer lost me on this one, and I'm sad to see this person is a professor teaching this same toolkit of antisocial tactics to the next generation of lawyers.
It seemed rather strongly arguable that 1) she takes cases she is passionate about 2) she seems to deal with cases where the state was abusive.
I get that sometimes we all have to roll out of bed early to serve a client's interest, but I also think it was clearer with the generation of lawyers that started in the 60s and 70s that in the mine run of administrative and scheduling issues, jamming attorneys like this does not generate a substantive advantage and, as one local luminary would have said, 'generates heat, not light.'
We're in a fortunate situation, in that the work we do is profitable and relatively low stress, but we also make decisions frequently that keep our work in balance. For instance, we could grow and take on employees, but have chosen not to; we consistently say no to new work even if it's hugely profitable if we know it is going to impact on holiday or family time - or our sanity!
Kids seem to me to be the single, unequivocally most important thing in the world. Creating them and nurturing them is after all what evolution is solely interested in. Making a new generation who is loved, balanced, ready to step out into the world on their own - this is, and will always be, more important to me than work.
The subtext - and it's a really important one - in the article, is about the empowerment of women. This is horribly unbalanced; for biological, social, whatever reasons. This is broken, and women get a terrible deal: this needs addressing.
But at the heart is just being with your kids and loving them, and for me that means putting work second.
I should also just add: actually, we put us as a couple high up in importance too. Too many people forget this when raising children: you need time to be you and to be a couple, and it's easy to forget this after years of nurturing kids!
It seems like more of a work-life balance philosophy thing than parenting thing, I simply couldn't imagine working more than 50% of the year but others are content doing 60hr weeks with 2 week vacation.
If that's what makes them happy then power to them.
Parents spend too much time apologizing for prioritizing their careers, and it’s particularly unfair to women. Studies repeatedly fail to show significant and durable results from different kinds of parenting styles. But you know what is shown, in study after study, as highly correlated with children's’ long term prosperity? Parental income.
That's a good point but there's some detail missing here: how are the kids being raised. Historically, kids were raised within a tribal or quasi-tribal structure. When you have grandparents, siblings, cousins, uncles and aunts always around, room to play and explore, you don't need parents to be there 24/7 hovering over you. You learn independence as well as a way to interact and negotiate with others.
What this looks like is the worst of all words. The kids are abandoned to a set of nannies and managed activities, while the mother and father live their own lives.
Mostly untrue in Western Europe for more than 500 years[1] and very much untrue in North America, to an even greater extent, since after WWII especially, but also before. Relatively late marriage and forming a new household upon marriage has been the norm in Western Europe since the 1500s in the North Sea region. North America was different in having earlier marriage because of labour scarcity and land abundance but nuclear families rather than extended family households were the norm in every decade and century among European descended peoples and those who assimilate to their culture.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_European_marriage_patt...
This mother describes the worst of all worlds. She's not involved in the lives of her kids. The kids are shuttled between her and her father. The nanny and her preschool teacher are the primary caregivers. It just isn't great. The fact that she wrote this article in the nyTimes to pat herself on the back for what a great job she's doing for society (Hint: She's not that important and society will survive without her) - is distasteful.
> This research examined the association between parenting style and life satisfaction in adulthood (N=112). Participants responded to an online survey, called the Parenting Style and Life Satisfaction Survey, which included questions pertaining to parenting style experienced in childhood, parenting style used in adulthood, and levels of life satisfaction. A chi-square test was conducted to determine if there was a relationship between parenting style experienced in childhood and the adult's own parenting style. Analysis of variance tests were conducted to determine how parenting style experienced in childhood was connected to life satisfaction in adulthood and how the adult's parenting style was related to their life satisfaction. Correlations revealed that there were no statistically significant relationships between parenting style and life satisfaction. Results were interpreted and implications were discussed.
> Taken together, the results of these analyses suggest that ma- ternal employment early in a child’s life is not commonly associ- ated with decreases in later achievement or increases in behavior problems.
The other one says a similar thing. They both seem to say that for the first year or two having a stay at home parent is beneficial, but beyond that it doesn't really matter.
These seem like significant and durable results on how to raise a child beyond parental income
Other than that, my Dad once said something along the lines of, "Life is a constant juggling act; you have your work ball, your family ball etc. However, your family ball is made of glass, so if you drop it, it will shatter and you may not be able to put it together again."
Being a father myself today, I do think kids can do with relatively little facetime. But the time that is devoted to them must be exclusive quality time that makes it clear you love them and that you are present. There are studies that have shown that if fathers take 30 minutes of exclusive attention for their kids every day, it has great benefits for the child‘s development.
Psychology is pretty uniform in the observation that children need parents, preferably both, but just one is a massive developmental influence. There are minor benefits from they/them being biological but it isn't absolutely necessary, but a care worker, teacher, etc is not filling the same social niche with a child that a parent is. Its a job title in its own right that also has by far the most impact on developing functioning healthy human beings than any other. Its also a job you don't just quit or substitute for without lasting consequences, the role of a parent is to anchor children and provide an immovable stake upon their foundation.
You can absolutely hire a parent if you don't want to or have the time yourself to parent the children you make, but it is substantively harmful to deny them having parent(s) when they need them. If a mother wants to work a full time job while a spouse or even just long term domestic partner? wants to take on the job of being a (or more) parent(s) that works. If a father wants to do the same, that works. But kids still need parent(s), preferably two, and that is two full time positions to fill.
One quandary to think on is that society really doesn't organize or optimize for parental efficiency. We organize schools to lecture and teach to try to balance between quantity of children to a quality of education, but adults are just en masse making new lives and mostly playing it by ear on fulfilling parental responsibilities. We haven't tried to promote good parents to be parents by getting them more children - biological or not - to parent. As a civilization it feels backwards to me how what might be the most important job there is - developing future generations - is the one that is the least recognized for its value and importance. It isn't a career, it isn't prestigious, it isn't treated with the same scrutiny you would want to see in getting your plumbing fixed. But broken pipes are a much less substantive issue than mental malaise or physiological complications brought about by poor or absent parenting in the development of the billions to succeed us.
When am I neglecting my kids exactly? In the two hours of after school care between school ending and my coming home?
You're implying that there's a direct correlation between quantity and quality of parenting, that's a bold claim.
> They were lovingly cared for by their father, their grandmother, my son’s preschool teacher and my daughter’s babysitter.
Sounds like there were at least two family members watching the kids on a regular basis.
I'd call her after school and chat for a while, only a to find out a bit later that she was in the middle of closing a huge deal!
This made me feel like a million bucks - to know that even though she was very busy, I was still important enough to have her full attention whenever I called her.
I always "felt" like I was more important than her work.
I'm not judging her preference on having a successful career - I'm the same actually - yet I don't plan to have children because of that very reason...
I remember that Dr Gabor Maté also talks a lot about the scars and potential trauma a child can be left with when neglected. I remember presence of both parents to be of paramount importance. And that's not "only" a problem for the child but for society at large.
I am consuming this time with just absolute relish. A relationship is the sum of small things. And driving them to school is part of that overall cumulative time that ... just... matters. For me. I'm sure the kids would be great if their mom did it without me. But I only have one shot here, only a few years where the kids are 12 years old. So yeah, I'll spend my 7 figures a year for this. (Bezos test: would I make the same choice on my death bed looking back?)
She is in a unique situation in that she could choose to live any way she wants; she's not some working stiff. And she is choosing something else. It's not going to hurt her kids, but I think it's a tradeoff she may regret later.
Dang, according to wiki, he has 5 living kids.
"Their first son, Nevada Alexander Musk, died of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) at the age of 10 weeks."
More interestingly, the five are two twins and three triplets.
One of my 20-something peers walked back to our row where the pizza boxes lay, ruffled through them, sighed “its all cold” and walked back to his terminal.
Now, we’d been doing this for weeks.
Old fart #1 turns to #2 and says under his breath “You know, I gave up my marriage and kids to get us to the moon”
And so they did.
Beating the Russians to the moon isn't what caused their failing political and economic system to collapse. The Russians are still the ones who keep the ISS alive, and it's not meaningfully harming USA or helping Russia in geopolotical hegemony
I would posit that this mindset is broadly a disease and not a cure.
I grew up on a farm. My parents were home 24/7. I liked that.
> If I didn’t write and teach and litigate, a part of me would feel empty.
This sounds like the real reason, and it's not a bad one. Self-care is important. It's hard to be a good parent (or spouse BTW) if you're not a healthy person. But that's a different argument from the one about all of one's work being important to others. Some seems to be, and some less so. When a facile reason is given, even if good reasons also exist, it seems like unhealthy rationalization. But then, picking and promoting a most favorable narrative is exactly what trial lawyers do. I guess it's an easy trap to fall into. I just hope she's right that the choice to favor her career really will prove most fulfilling in the longer term.
Individually I can agree that yes this task is important enough to give up that event with her children. They might all be reasonable. I think the problem comes when you look at the aggregate.
One lawyer can't save every victim of injustice or teach every student. Does she actually need to get into every one of these demanding situations one after the other, with no gap? Even then, maybe the answer is yes if that's what it takes to get ahead in her career to achieve the things she wants to, but that's really the tradeoff not the individual instances.
This autonomy had two interesting effects. On the one hand it definitely benefited me later in life, because I felt like I had a built-in direction. On the other I don't like it when people tell me what to do, particularly if they have an unearned position of power and don't really know what to do themselves, but have to "lead", by hook or by crook.
Prioritizing a more "normal" job over raising own kids is a very different subject.
Doesn't our paradigm of adversarial justice require that lawyers subscribe to an idea of fair competition? I don't see any difference between using the trial date or venue setting to attack your opponent and, say, using trick make-up and a wig to make your client look nothing like the person the witnesses saw.
We enumerate that a defendant is under no obligation to help the prosecution as just an extreme example of this. That almost all patent infringement cases were held in a backwater East Texas district is evidence that the system doesn't work as that description of "fair competition" would suggest.
I grew up with absentee parents. This is an unwelcome spin on that situation. I can't even give an opinion on this that doesn't immediately fly into rage. I just hope I don't try to pair off with someone who ends up getting hoodwinked by articles like this. This is disgusting.
> I had picked the date, not the judge, because I knew that the other side wasn’t ready. Delaying even a few days would have meant losing a crucial advantage. I wasn’t going to risk it knowing what was on the line for my client.
I don’t think this one counts as “absent because they had a lot to do.” This one is just prioritizing the kids second.
I wouldn't ever disparage him for it. He provided well for his family, and most of my favorite childhood memories are the times we spent together. To this day, I try to spend as much time with him as possible while I still can.
I can only hope that I give my kids as much of myself as he did.
That doesn't sounds like the author. Kids will understand if a parent is away because they are working to make their (i.e. the kid's) life better. My father worked long hours, sometimes multiple jobs, all his life for little money, as did my mother. Even though they weren't around for some of my recitals or Christmas pageants, I respect them both that much more because I knew why they were doing it ... even as a kid. Kids aren't stupid though. If the parent is absent for selfish reasons, in order to fulfil their life and their goals, it will lead to bitterness and resentment. It will.
For me that’s the critical part. Her kids could still feel they don’t get enough of her time, but they’re not just abandonned.
As a kid I spent a lot of time with my grand mother and other outer family members, without my parents. It was fine, actually fun, and everyone seemed to feel responsible for my well being while I was with them.
I also feel this mother chose to prioritize her job because she actualy could, and wouldn’t be doing so if her kids were miserable.
I have sacrificed significant portions of my career to be there for my kids. There are some of my male peers that are less attentive than me but universally we would think they are simply bad fathers. I don’t know anyone these days that wouldn’t think that an absentee dad was also a bad dad.
If you prioritize your job over your children then by definition you are a bad parent. If you don’t have the means and are forced to work then I get it, you have to do what you do. It doesn’t sound like this is the case for the author. She has the privilege to chose her work over her kids which is different.
I hope she also didn’t selfishly choose to have joint custody with her ex-husband only to neglect the kids for her job.
I'm going to challenge you on this one, especially since the post currently right above yours is from a single father of 5 with this quote:
"I'm really glad I'm a single Dad and not a single Mum because there are very few cultural expectations of me beyond working, and everyone acts like I'm amazing for just raising my kids. It's kinda insulting to both genders."
I'm not saying fathers wouldn't experience any criticism, but I still believe that there is a strong difference in cultural expectations and it would be a mistake to if ignore it: women are "generally" expected to be the primary caregivers, so sacrificing children for career is looked on relatively negatively, while men are "generally" expected to be the primary breadwinners, so any additional time spent with children is praised as being a great dad.
Among my dozens of friends with children, there’s a couple of friends who don’t spend very much time with their kids and they are universally looked on as the “shitty” dads. One likes to do his sports on the weekends and regularly abandons his children and wife to do that. The other plays video games all the time “to unwind” and his children are basically ignored.
The rest of the dads I know feel a lot of pressure trying to be good dads (and husbands) and split child duties. I don’t know many females who would accept it, since they have demanding careers as well. I don’t know very many dads who thinks it’s okay that the mom does most of the child rearing and I’m probably 15-20 years older than the average HN reader.
Maybe at lower income levels or lower costs areas it’s more true that women take more of the child rearing duties. In expensive areas like SF Bay Area, most women work except among the very rich, so you will see a complete split of duties most of the time.
At least at the same income level as the author in the same area, I don’t believe that women are still considered the primary child rearer. And given the author’s successes and writings, I highly doubt she would have chosen a mate who would assume that she would do most of the child rearing.
Century of the Self: https://youtu.be/eJ3RzGoQC4s
Hypernormalization https://youtu.be/F8YqRaZSZWo
Adam Curtis: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Curtis
I love programming and that is why I got into my choice of career. However, that program I spent so much time writing/crafting, at the expense of family time, will be obsolete/decomissioned before long. Hell even I won't care about it after a while.
The kids are not going to be decommissioned though. If we don't care about them now, they don't have any obligation to care about us then.
They don't have such an obligation in any case.
It sounds like this person is like any other distant parent. She’s responsible and no doubt her kids will be ok. But for her, despite her bluster and the importance of her work, I’m sad for her, and if she is like most attorneys like this, she will be too.
This choice isn't unreasonable when, as in this article:
1. There are other loving caregivers to help fill in any gaps
2. The job has very high value-add to others, i.e. it's not just about selfish value-capture
I find the western disinterest in raising their own children (and having them) fascinating. There seems to be a widespread ideal of trying to leave a legacy through deeds rather than through your own children. Much of the right wing is agitated at the whole thing because this is gradually reducing the population of an ethnic group they're quite fond of.
Good luck lady, and good luck kids. We all bumble through this life as best we can, hope it's good enough for your family...
Be with your kid one whole day a week.
Be with your kid one weekend a month.
Be with your kid one week a year.
And by being with your kid it is meant really to be there, fully present, attentive.
Sometimes I wonder if I made the right choice because finding part time or freelance gigs are kinda hard right now. But at the end of the day I know I made the right decision because my little boy is just gonna be young once and I don’t want to miss out on his milestones and growth.
All mine did was fill me with anxieties and neuroses.
We probably would have felt differently with a good mother.
Her comment about playing the advantage by choosing early date is a bit worring.
Parenting would also be easier on people if the US had sensible maternity/paternity policies and free childcare like we ought to have.
Providing for your kids is important.
I hope that you find a rhythm in your role and are able to make more time for your family.
And why would you, if you both have jobs. However, the father should pay support to his kids for sure.
In such discussions, the image is always of a mother resigning from an interesting and important academic job. Presumably it is mostly academics who discuss such things, and NYT readers are also mostly academics. So when they think of mothers and careers, they think of interesting academic jobs.
In reality, most women (and men) don't have such interesting jobs. The most common job for women is shop assistant, followed by nurse (or vice versa, don't remember for sure - numbers from Germany a couple of years ago). Now nurse might be reasonably interesting, but not irreplaceable like that lawyer. And arguably, you would be doing the same job as at home (changing diapers), only not with your children.
Sorry it annoys me that this women styles herself like some sort of hero, when other people are forced to make that choice out of financial necessity.
Obviously it is a valid choice to prioritize her job, like she did. The annoying part is the claim between the lines that she is somehow special and going against the societal pressure.
Did you seriously just equate the work that nurses do with changing diapers?
Contraception is pretty damn effective, and people often have children for entirely selfish reasons.
A dog isn't for christmas, and your kids aren't just cute toys until you get bored of raising them.
There are plenty of people who are willing, enough that we won't have population problems.
If you impose artificially high hurdles for parenting, you’re encouraging people to possible forgo a fulfilling life choice, because they fear they can’t live up to artificially inflated expectations for parenting. And that’s damaging.
What Ms. Bazelon is doing is the opposite of selfish. She’s providing for her family, serving her profession, and serving her community. She’s teaching her kids good morals by example: hard work and service. What kind of terrible lesson would it be to her children if she taught them that their school camping trip was more important than those things?
That you can rationalize anything to fit your choices.
Nobody can really know that without being an oracle. Neither choice is clearly superior but one is considered natural and the other is not.
Sacrificing some other person for a cause you believe in is certainly not a selfless act.
It's not like underpopulation is a problem.
I'm not saying people that want to work 40/50 hour weeks shouldn't have kids.
I'm saying people who want to work 80 hour weeks shouldn't have kids.
They probably shouldn't have dogs either...
In most situations, if you tell people they shouldn’t do X without citing concrete evidence that X is bad, your viewpoint won’t be taken seriously. In the area of parenting, however, we switch off our brains, because we assign some mystical importance to biological parents spending time with kids, instead of alternative caretakers. In the case of the author:
> They were lovingly cared for by their father, their grandmother, my son’s preschool teacher and my daughter’s babysitter.
Many children, often in low income families, are raised primarily by grandparents and school. Are you prepared to say that those families shouldn’t have had children?
Let me know if you don't have access to the journal.
That's 2-3 times increased chance of measurable mental health problems if parents work outside of 9-5
If the worst parents working more does to children is a less happy childhood on average that’s a hard choice to condemn. Normal people send their children to child warehousing facilities where they’re taught to sit down, shut up and do as they’re told while subjected to busywork, boredom, ranking and the ennui of meaninglessness for over a decade instead of letting them grow and play and they don’t get judged much for it.
Having kids while prioritizing job over direct care and attention to them has been an accepted (and often expected) pattern for men for centuries. (And for much of that time for upper and often middle class [0] women, too, though their primary vocations weren't “jobs” in the usual sense.)
Should it be surprising or any worse that when women are sole or co-equal breadwinners, that the same is often true of women with jobs?
[0] “middle class” in the sense of the petit bourgeoisie, not the other common modern American usage, where it refers to the middle income segment which is almost entirely within the working class.
Sole breadwinner is not by definition prioritizing job over kids. Working 80 hours per week when 40 hours could provide your family with enough, is.
Men (and for that matter upper and often also middle class women in roles that aren't actually jobs, though that's also true of upper class men in either the hereditary aristocracy or th e capitalist haut bourgeiosie) prioritizing their job—or, where they don't have a job as such, their externally-focussed class role over personally providing direct care and attention to their children (which is what I said and what is, despite the less precise language, actually being discussed in the article), has, in fact, been widely historically accepted.
False. Most men throughout history had to work or their children would starve. Their requirement to work was forced legally by laws allowing wives to sue husbands that did not work and support their family.
For most of history before the industrial revolution, the standard model would have been a farm, where both mom and dad worked, but worked at home. The ideal has always been for moms and dads to stay home, until relatively recently -- certainly not centuries.
Lastly, if we even accept your claim to be true at all, it really would only be limited in scope to the very rich or at least the upper middle class, where men actually had careers 'worth' sacrificing for. Perhaps an attorney sees his work as meaningful and a source of advancement. I highly doubt a coal miner wanted to be in the mines longer because of career advancement. In fact, history is actually littered with the opposite -- working men demanding that they work less (see the labor movement).
Willing to what?
I understand above are rare cases and that women gets sharp end of rope far more often. However still this would be like saying that it’s ok to sacrifice those minority men who lose everything including their life’s work and even their children when women simply decides to wave magic wand of law.
I don’t want to derail the conversation but Western society has only accepted one side of view and sexism on other side gets laughed off to oblivion.
But yes, suicide, custody in divorce etc are issues where men deserve recourse. That said, historically women have been on the receiving end of physical violence from men far, far more often than vice versa and were told to suffer in silence. They still suffer far more but can at least talk about it now.
When people mock Men's Rights they aren't mocking men who campaign for divorce law reform. They mock men who sit around in online communities and say "but muh feminists!"
> Western society has only accepted one side of view and sexism on other side gets laughed off to oblivion.
Western society had tried to rectify the unfair treatment women have received for hundreds (thousands?) of years. And in areas it has overcorrected. That's fixable. It doesn't mean the entire endeavour is misguided.
(All of this applies mainly to the western cultural context. Some places in the world are still at the stage of needing suffragettes)
I'd be fascinated to see a historical account of that. Many suffragettes (including the founder Emmeline Pankhurst) were married. Perhaps they all hated their husbands, but I'd be interested to know more.
> Arguing about who has it "worse" is probably counterproductive now.
It's kind of unavoidable, though. Encouraging women to report domestic violence, and taking action when they do, has a knock-on effect of there being more false accusations and innocent men punished. So it's a direct tradeoff. The key is to try to minimise those tradeoffs as much as possible.
Well, not a hard-source, but having been alive in the 90's most women didn't consider themselves feminists in the 90s. And if pressed they'd say things like "I believe in equality but I wouldn't call myself a feminist."
Anecdotally, there was a perception that those who most loudly and immediately identified themselves as "feminist" (not unlike those who most loudly and immediately identify as men's-right-activists) had a HUGE emotional investment in the topic and saw unfairness/oppression everywhere.
Additionally, with 90's feminism at least, some women associated loud self-proclamations of feminism as a move more common to "butch" women.
Hopefully the conversation on treatment of men will make as much progress in 20 short years.
But that is only relevant if the situations are similar. But for example, it is the most "feminist" countries that grants the most paternity leave. And the reason why the US have unwavering laws on divorce, custody and alimony is to protect the traditional family model where divorce is discourage and women didn't have career to fall back on.
The point is, toxic hatred for the "other side" is a distasteful but not uncommon feature of movements in a particular stage of their existence. It doesn't invalidate their complaints.
The idea that women are always better caretakers is something most feminist theorists would call "benevolent sexism". It has some advantages for women, but it also hurts them in the workplace, and promotes unreasonable divisions of labor in private life.
It is funny how statistics works. If we look at questioners, women and men report the same amount of physical violence from partners. If we look at households the rate of police reports for domestic violence is identical regardless of what gender the inhabitants has.
There is no gender difference in who is on the receiving end of physical violence. There is however a gender difference in the method of physical violence. Women mostly use knives and makeshift weapons. Men mostly use their hands. As is, knives and makeshift weapons don't actually do a lot of damage on average when wielded by someone not trained. Fists however almost always causes damages, especially when repeated.
Statistically, this is not true. In relationships where there is one-sided violence, the violence is (something like) 70/30 with the woman initiating the violence. In relationships where there is two-sided violence, the woman initiates the violence more than half of the time. These studies are hard to find and often have no funding because they get shouted out of the mainstream consciousness.
Here is a study that covers part of this: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1854883/
Ask yourself why you've never heard of it.
If you are speaking historically, surely you are not suggesting incarceration of men as reparations for things we didn't do?
However, the statistics on murder are pretty fucking clear: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/07/homicides.... Given the frequency with which murder is preceded by a string of violence requiring medical attention, I'd wager that's similarly unbalanced.
https://www.health.harvard.edu/newsletter_article/In_Brief_D...
The article's own summary suggests against making the kind of conclusions the article you linked to makes.
> If you are speaking historically, surely you are not suggesting incarceration of men as reparations for things we didn't do?
Not even slightly and it's an absurd reading of my post to suggest that I am.
Of course, they have to. Do you think 30% of men murder their wives? No, clearly it's some small percentage that severely batter. Therefore, those are the statistics that I would ignore and rather focus on the remainder who are the men that suffer as a result of this type of conflation. It's politically easy to conflate the two, of course. But it isn't intellectually honest.
> Not even slightly and it's an absurd reading of my post to suggest that I am.
So why should historical events I have no responsibility for serve to restrict my freedom? In an argument with my wife, I am the batterer, in divorce court, I am simply a pocket to be picked.
Let's make sure we understand the power dynamics at play. This is about reducing my autonomy to benefit a certain segment of society.
>> These studies are hard to find because they get shouted out of the mainstream consciousness.
Abstracts for studies are pretty easy to find on the internet (even the one you mention that is "hard to find").
Are you saying that there are legitimate academic studies which have been deleted? Serious assertions require serious evidence. Do have any beyond a screen shot of a study taken out of context inside a PDF written by a defunct tabloid?
Men murder intimate partner women at 4x the rate of women murdering men intimate partners, per https://www.ozy.com/acumen/us-domestic-violence-murder-rate-...
Men are big and strong. No amount of mental gymnastics will fix that. So you absolutely should not engage someone stronger than you in a physical manner because retaliation would be bad.
Historically, men have been on the receiving end of violence far, far more than women. Far more likely to be assaulted/murdered on the street, convicted for a crime they did not commit, or drafted into and killed in war.
Doesn't make either more acceptable, but it would be nice if prison violence got a little more air time.
You're creating a false dichotomy by claiming women suffer more from physical violence from men. History and context are important for understanding reality as a whole (as best as we can).
In all honesty we should be framing these issues as human problems. Creating false dichotomies, dividing men against women, and then trying to play victim olympics under false pretenses is disingenuous not helpful to humanity.
Without the "from men" it would presumably not even be true. And the "from men" doesn't really justify retaliating against modern men in general.
Some men are rapists, most men fight rapists and many risk their lives in the line of defense (policemen, fire fighters, soldiers...). Yet they also get blamed for the deeds of the rapists. It's just weird.
The article refers to things like:
> But there is always another client to defend, story to write or struggling student who just can’t wait. Here are things I have missed: my daughter’s seventh birthday, my son’s 10th birthday party, two family vacations, three Halloweens, every school camping trip.
She didn't even try to balance...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
(We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20315373)
I was really responding to what I saw as the GP breaking other guidelines by not responding to the article, so I quoted the only relevant part of their comment and the appropriate part of the article.
I suppose I should have flagged their comment instead if I thought it was bordering on off-topic?
For example, someone sharing their personal experience about a marginally-related point may be off topic but isn't generic. But turning a thread like this into an argument about, say, the men's rights movement (as happened elsewhere)—that's generic and therefore breaks the guidelines.
A less clear case is the subthread right here that goes into a long discussion about birthdays and Jehovah's Witnesses. That's pretty off topic, and crossing perilously toward religious flamewar. On the other hand, it was weird enough not to count as generic—except where it swerved into atheism vs. religion stuff at the end.
What we're trying to avoid is getting sucked into the black holes of the hottest controversies that online forums can't seem to resist but that people never have anything new to say about. That's the purpose of the rule. On HN, the organizing principle is intellectual curiosity, and there's no curiosity in repetition.
I haven’t studied other children, so I can only make statements about myself. The only negative of my childhood regarding the lack of birthdays and whatnot is the inability to feign excitement for others’ celebrations as much as might be expected, simply because I don’t care about it for myself in the first place. It probably has hampered my ability to socialize or make networking connections in some situations where I wasn’t able to fit in.
Based on my experience going to college with a few kids like that, yes. They all resented their childhood and the fact that the only way to see their parents was to work in the restaurant.
One of my fears is that my kids will learn these bad American ideas from media. I saw my daughter watching a Disney show (Bunk’d), where a high achieving Asian girl was telling her parents they “pushed her too hard.” No wonder China is eating our lunch.
The only way for the US’ relative position not to decline with China’s rise involve megadeaths, just as after WWII it’s relative power could only decline.
That's an uncomfortable idea - growth of a nation being dependent on a few people working their ass off. Like sacrificial lambs. Though almost all of these people probably do it willingly.
I watched my poor Sikh friend exasperated with his two young daughters who desperately wanted a Christmas tree like all the other kids and bugged him endlessly about it. He lost. It was pretty funny. They've both now grown into fine young women who are proud of their Sikh religion, so no harm done.
My parents absolutely should have emphasized academics and my need to go to college to break out of the poverty trap my family was in. But they did that in violent and traumatic ways. They did that by using guilt and shame and burden as the primary engine to drive me to act. They are not alone in this. Friends of Asian-American heritage (East and South Asia) tell me their parents did the same.
Those things work when you're fighting for survival and then turn out to be incredibly harmful when you're not. It's taken me years of work and will take years more to undo that damage.
I understand your sensitivity to your daughter's situation. If you live in upper middle class America, and I suspect you do, your daughter is observing a deeply unnatural form of childhood. But there is a middle ground between squeezing performance out of young brains and being coddled into doing nothing. I hope for both of your sakes you look for it.
Slave like conditions can do that to a more moderate work-life balance culture.
The thing is, such a phenomenon exists. And kids pushed too hard may grow resentful or plain reject parents ideas and rebel. Not all them grow super succesfull. Plenty just grow feeling like failures.
It is possible to push children just right, of course. But there is such a thing as too much and those adults then complain (that is how I know).
China is eating our lunch? Excuse me?
But the folks criticizing the article aren’t just asserting that these things are good. They’re claiming that not having these things is so damaging that a woman who prioritizes her career over attending birthday parties and school events is a bad mother. But many children grow up to be perfectly well adjusted despite not having those things. That is evidence of the fact that, even if those things are “good,” they’re not “essential.”
Those scenarios are what you make of them. They're not always doom and gloom. :) Honestly I think a family business is a better situation than a draconican employer that expects one to devote their life to them.
According to my children who went from not celebrating birthdays to celebrating them - yes.
I’ve read if you accuse someone in the religion of abuse and the only thing you have is he said she said, then the accuser is essentially iced out and ostracized from their religious culture/society. This includes children.
Unless I’m mistaken, it does seem like the Witnesses are having children miss out on what you stated and in general seem like a bad example to bring up.
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For both parents working all the time, it is a negative for most children.
Communities demand and give different things. Birthday parties seem a very small thing to give up if an actual community is what you get in return.
Regarding accusations why should making accusations be costless? If you’re trying to drum someone out of a community and fail to bring convincing evidence they kick you out. It’s just a community deciding on its internal norms. The US legal system has different burdens of proof and punishments when it comes to slander but the US system is still available to them. Communities exist outside the state.
Even BYU, the church-owned school, now sells fully-caffeinated Coke on campus. This was a fairly recent development.
As well, members are encouraged to avoid any media that includes sexually explicit, violent, or otherwise negative content -- not only avoiding R-rated movies. The church teaches that people should be careful about their media choices and consume media that enlightens or edifies, not just entertains. Active members of the church definitely vary in how they interpret that, of course.
I do love your point about sacrificing some things and getting a community in return. I work as a software engineer and at the age of 25 I already have two kids. My wife and I definitely sacrifice for them, but I hope we can build a loving family that will give us social returns that are lifelong. Growing up, I had a large network of cousins and siblings that were closer to me than friends were. I know much of this is because of the influence of the church.
It is also true that being a member gives you a network of people -- people are always around to help you move in and out, they're always there every Sunday, etc. Members are assigned "ministers", two people who check up on them, are officially assigned to love them, and report back to the leadership of each ward (congregation) regularly about any problems the people they minister to may have. All this in addition to the friendships that naturally form with people you see once a week.
Sacrificing alcohol, swearing, and other things -- tithing, Sundays, a two year-mission -- seems like a small trade in comparison for the creation of relationships with people who love you and who you love in return.
I have friends who left the mormon church after decades because of these "ministers". They were always asking when the couple was going to have another baby and constantly prying into their lives and reporting back. They found it creepy.
When they finally decided to leave, it got so bad (mormons ambushing them in the strangest places with aggressive questioning) that they had to file for a restraining order to keep them away.
The churches stance on homosexuality didn't help either, but it was the ministers that were the most invasive part.
This has nothing to do with being a community in my mind. A community would help it's people develop and not keep them in (mental) chains.
Are younger generations in the age of social media who are eager to share their b'day celeb pics set their value right? That's a thing to be pondered upon.
She may come to regret not building a closer relationship with her children in the future, but it sounds like the children have other loving adults in their lives so they'll do okay.
It has some great ideas and pretty much somesup every thing. Watch little bit longer as he goes from one subject to another and then come back to point.
He is clinical physiologist and he has good depth of this kind of subject and I'm not right person to translate his views. But what I get is this
"Life is sacrifice at every level (He quotes and decipher bibles story) and you have to sacrifice the some things for your family and loved ones"
But I feel these above lines do not do justice for the video as I said it has so much to get and everyone has their own perspective to get the things.
Sure you might disagree with me or him but you have your own perspective and you should decipher the meaning by yourself.
You can't have it both ways. If you are trying to "decipher and get" his thoughts how do you know he has a "profound and deep" understanding?
>> Sure you might disagree with me or him but you have your own perspective and you should decipher the meaning by yourself.
This is a discussion. The above sounds like you are prostelizing or advertising without participating.
1) Making sacrifice for Loved ones by giving priority to them instead of career.
2) Making sacrifice in personal lives(like children and your home duties) for greater good or humanity (giving priority to career).
Also he is saying lot of things about religious believes and stories which I am unaware of because I do not belong to same religion.
I can not make argument for you. It's very sensitive and deep topic and you should think and priorities as per your free will.
Everybody is responsible and capable of making their own decisions. We should listen to everybody but should take action as per our own beliefs and value.
Edit: I did not posted this because I am advertising him. I find it interesting and thought provoking as god(it might be made up) asks for sacrifice and we need to sacrifice to find our true-self.
If you are not able to summarize and explain someone else's point, then you don't actually grasp it intellectually. You only have a sense for it emotionally, and that is the fundamental problem with Jordan Peterson and his bread and butter. He preaches, not makes logical arguments, and is attractive to an emotional audience. Which is ironic given his premise.
How does that bring anything to the table ? I doubt 99% of the population would be as interesting if they gave speeches.
There are only a handful of people knowing their shit and sharing it in public for free. I don't see many people running around saying "Yoh Plato is shit no one should ever listen to him" even if they don't agree with his views.
Did you actually study him, as you seem to imply by making such strong statements ? I don't agree with a lot of his points but I have to admit that he has very interesting things to say about postmodernism, personal meaning, religions, &c. and as far as I know no one else is addressing these issues with that kind of depth in these days.
But his identity politics argument and his equality of outcome is very true. In my country I am seeing the consequence of identity politics and groupism. Everyday lot of people being violent and some time it leads to deaths and lynching.
Another thing in my country is some group have certain quotas (equality of outcome) which leads to degraded products and performance and competent people are being ignored which can contribute much better.
Other than that I find some of his interview thought provoking.