I can't imagine what a slow morning (or evening!) would even be like. I'd appreciate it if someone could add about 6 more hours to every day.
Forget burning out of a job, I'd burn out on life.
Mad props to you. You've got a hell of a lot more discipline than I do. Your kids owe you.
Should I also be giving people lots of slack for getting drunk and coming to work hungover? That was a choice too.
Don't respond with some biological need nonsense. Last time I checked we're not automatons that slavishly need to fulfill our biological needs.
Society benefits from people having (a reasonable number of) children. Without them, humanity is done. Perhaps you think that’s for the best anyway, in which case I wonder why you’re doing anything at all.
If it helps any, my experience is that it's hardest on the day your child is born, but it gets progressively easier as the years go by and the children become increasingly self-sufficient.
A 3-year-old definitely takes a lot more continuous attention than a newborn (assuming the newborn is healthy, eats and sleeps okay, ...).
I was able to get some amount of work done while taking care of my first kid up to about age 1. In the two years since then, not so much (I just pray for conveniently timed naps). The second one is 6 months old, and is way easier to take care of right now.
If you just accept that you will be doing no independent creative work, then a 2+ year old isn’t too bad. They can start to “help” with routine chores, can walk around for themselves, can feed themselves, eventually stop needing diapers, etc. The work is not really hard per se. More like relentless.
I wouldn’t describe anything (after maybe the birth itself, which I can’t answer about) related to our 6 month old so far as “difficult”. It is only “physically taxing” insofar as it takes a lot of time every day, and alongside other obligations (in particular, the 3-year-old) that leaves everyone a bit sleep deprived. I would say the 3-year-old takes at least twice as much time and 5x as much effort. (The work is stuff like reading books together, building block towers, running around the playground, preparing food, etc. Nothing especially challenging by itself.)
My wife gets burned out pretty quickly when I leave her with both kids on the weekend for most of a day. She’s generally relieved to get back to the office on Monday and leave them to me. :-)
Sometimes friends or family members ask me why XYZ projects are half completed, and it's hard to properly find the wording for "I want my wife to still like me at the end of most days".
This is an enormous assumption. Many babies are fussy, colicky, or otherwise high maintenance. The variation at this age is just ridiculous.
I think this varies enormously between kids, and to some extent between parenting styles as well. With my particular kids (5y and 3y) I can often spend a whole afternoon working on a project while they play individually or together; at younger ages the time commitment was far larger (nearly continuous).
And when it comes to "it depends on the kid", oh dear. I try to practice stoicism whenever I remember about it, and logically I try to remember that I should be grateful for his fussiness and rebelliousness, since they give me occasions to practice my stoicism. But it sure does feel a bit like stockholm syndrome sometimes.
My personal experience both from growing up and now raising three kids is that the kids will accept just as much independence as you are willing to give them.
Though they do get to be whiny sometimes. And I absolutely agree about the relentlessness of it all.
Not sure what kind of beings you're raising but my experience with three kids is that it gets progressively harder until around 5 and stays stable until 13 and gets much harder from there.
It’s crazy to me that people are willing to give so much of their life to their employer. Is your life not worth more to you than that? You’ll sell decades of your life just for a nice paycheck? Aside from the fact that it’s mostly all that’s on offer WHY do people do this?
EDIT: I definitely got very lucky finding this position. I’m not suggesting everyone can just do this. But if people don’t refuse to work 40-50 hour work weeks, then that’s what employers will expect.
I don't really know how it works in countries with better healthcare, but in the US you usually have to work fulltime to get any sort of benefits from your employer. And benefits through the marketplace (not through an employer) are generally expensive for what they offer.
Someone in the US would need to make quite a bit to be able to do part time.
Maybe some day we’ll get universal health care.
Obviously, if they need transport because you're 5+ miles away and there's no buses then I understand transporting them takes a lot of time. Regardless, shouldn't your children be somewhat self-sufficient by 10 years of age? You make it sound like you have to do everything for them for it to take 3+ hours every morning.
Back to you: If they're always expecting their parents to wake them up every morning - how are they going to fare when (if?) they move out?
Turns out, you can live a perfectly happy life in which others don’t dictate your morning routine.
With older kids I would imagine some sort of just "here's an alarm clock, getting up and ready for school is your job" would work, but I've never been a parent of older kids ;)
I don't mean to pry or be cheeky or sound judgemental, but how many kids do you have that it takes 3-4 hours to get them all breakfasted and ready for school? And is school far away or just a 10-15 min drive? What are you doing during that time?
I know kids can consume a lot of attention in the morning (especially the elementary lot), but that amount of time seems extraordinary.
I'm 52 and my folks were never up before 7:30am to get us fed and watered and ready for school and there was still plenty of time for banter, making packed lunches etc.
I'm genuinely interested.
"My wife lost the diamond in her wedding ring and we were talking about getting it replaced. I have two daughters in their early 20s and they were aghast at the idea..."
I'm not sure what age middle schoolers are (haven't heard of that term before), but shouldn't kids be capable of waking up, dressing, and going to school by themselves by they're hitting Gr.3 and up (and definitely by high school!).