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Comment by yomly | Hacker News Reader

>If you're intellectually driven then looking after two young children isn't fascinating.

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!

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On the scale of months and years children are amazing, and I agree it’s fascinating to watch as they develop into their own people.

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.

Damn, maybe I should have kids. I've played the first hour of Civ V over 500 times now and never finished a game.

Sounds like you need to try some Minecraft mods :)

I think Adventure Mode and also the stuff available in Education Edition might make Minecraft a bit more of a long-term prospect there. You can make stuff for your kids to explore or do (either on rails or unguided), and there's quite a decent body of work out there shared in the education space.

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.

I don’t think parents were ever meant to play hide and seek with their children for hours on end, but to let them go play with the other 4 year olds and relatives in the village, give them bandaids and hugs when they fall, have them be back by sundown, feed them food and tuck them into bed by 8pm.

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.

Yes. Parenting is fascinating, wonderful, but also exhausting to do it well.

Childhood is long days and short years.

I cannot remember my parents ever playing hide and seek with me. I don't think adults need to feel that they need to play with children for hours on end. That's incredibly dull. Find your kid a playmate.

That happens like 10% of the time if you are lucky.

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

A paying job is usually stressful and mnotonotous and the main upside is the salary.

Literally apples and oranges

I donno. I love my paying job. I find it generally very stimulating.

I agree. There are lots of things about raising kids that are intellectually stimulating and fascinating. I really enjoy seeing them grow mentally and figuring out ways to help them along, and also think up ways to make things fun of course, because everyone needs fun.

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).

Are you doing this solo or do you have a partner? My experience as a single dad is that I can go entire days without having a single conversation with another adult. My adult friends aren't too interested in hanging out parenting. They are also demanding enough that I'll get zero time to do anything I wish to do while they're awake.

I have a partner yeah, and the kids are reaching an age now (5 and 7) where they don't need as much help anymore. Dressing, eating, tidying etc they can do on their own so things are also getting easier. With them, at least. We also have a 2-month old now ;)

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.

After spending some time working with machine learning and AI, the early development of the human brain is just fascinating to me.

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.

You also have to remember that our brains have millions of years of evolution to learn from, so we have had far more than thousands and thousands of images and other perceptions recognized by the DNA of our ancestors, which gets passed down to us.

Yes, but that's the programming. There aren't any penguin references in the DNA that we know of yet.

In my experience the long term experience of parenting is fascinating and incredibly rewarding. The day to day is tedious.

> I've never understood this viewpoint - children are simply the most fascinating things!

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.

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