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Comment by aklemm | Hacker News Reader

Kids are a distraction to intense work. At the same time, becoming a parent is a potential growth experience that is unrivaled and brings value. Healthy kids are a value to society. Non-parents benefit from a society full of healthy children. Parents should be rewarded--or at least equally as compensated--with pay and/or status that tracks with the successes those unburdened with parenting achieve.

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Pay/status/compensation from your employer? If that's what you're suggesting, I strongly disagree. That's hardly the role of any company. And it implicitly ties value judgments to your workplace, which is a very sad state of affairs. You don't need corporate recognition to validate your decisions.

Corporate recognition very nearly makes the world go ‘round any more. I’m not really sure what to make if your comments, but I’ll clarify that in terms of status and compensation, I’m thinking more about public policy as a starting point.

that's unfortunate, I didn't think I was that unintelligible. In any case we do agree that this is the realm of government. That wasn't very clear to me in your original comment since pay and status are typically conferred by employers in American society.

I think one thing the aristocracy got right was that your children are a reflection of you as a parent. That seems to have been lost nowadays in the US. Nowadays, a problem kid is due to video games, school, peers, you name it. No, it's the parent, 95% of the time. But we let the parents off with they did their best..but did they?

While I agree with you that it's mostly the parents, I think we poorly equip and support parents. Many have had poor role models to begin with and without external influence are doomed to repeat history. Support for parents is quite poor IMO and should be massively increased. Unfortunately, our society requires children to continue the next generation but we seem to value child-less people more (in our rewards to them).

Most people have kids because they see it as a positive personal trade off (when you are older and you have a family that will come to visit you for example). Most people are not thinking about the benefits to society when they decide to have kids.

Well, it certainly may be a net positive for the individual parent, but it’s no doubt a service to society. I’d suspected your opinion was out there, but it’s still disheartening to have proof.

> Kids are a distraction to intense work.

For what it's worth, I've done my most intense productive work after having children.

Same for me due to the growth I talked about, but many people report not being able to do as much work as they want to while parenting.

Kind of a post hoc ergo propter hoc situation.

Note that I did not claim that I did my best work because of my kids. Only that my work is an existence proof that the presence of kids does not prevent intense work.

Yeah and your original comment wasn't worth much. How do you know your work wouldn't have been better if you hadn't had kids? Maybe your definition of intense changed when you had kids?

> Yeah and your original comment wasn't worth much.

Having a rough day, or are you usually this unkind?

> How do you know your work wouldn't have been better if you hadn't had kids?

Still waiting for my time machine to arrive, but in the absence of that, I can state that I believe my work is better because of having kids.

When I felt like I had a less bounded quantity of free time, I was more inclined to squander it. Once kids made it clear that my time is extremely limited, I experienced a much stronger motivation to get something productive out of the small time I had left.

Also, the kids themselves are a motivation to make more out of my life so that I can provide for them better.

> Healthy kids are a value to society

Kids have a massive carbon footprint and are probably the worst thing the average person in a first world country can do to the environment.

> Kids have a massive carbon footprint and are probably the worst thing a person in the first world can do to the environment.

This is true in exactly the same broken sense of value “to the environment” that mass murder (especially of the young and rich) is the best thing one can do to the environment.

Yeah, see, there’s a shocking proliferation of really misguided ideas on this topic. It’s fascinating.

I don’t think that’s what I’m saying at all.

I’m saying that a new kid is not a no-brainer net gain for society. There is clearly an environmental cost to adding more high-consuming people to the planet. See: the planet.

I never said that killing people is good for the environment. While (possibly) technically true, it’s not an argument I’m making.

My argument: Cars are bad for the environment, so maybe ride a bike.

Your attempt to twist my argument: You said cars are bad for the environment so you are saying to destroy all cars.

> I’m saying that a new kid is not a no-brainer net gain for society

There’s a pretty big excluded middle between “no-brainer net gain for society” and “he worst thing a person in the first world can do to the environment”. If you just mean not the former, don’t actually write the latter.

> I never said that killing people is good for the environment.

Nor did I say you did. What I did say is that what you did say is only even arguably true from the same perspective under which killing people is the best thing you can do for the environment. Because, it is.

No, you’re right. I did mean that having a biological kid is the worst thing a person in the first world can do to the environment.

I was trying to give you the benefit of the doubt that you weren’t intentionally making a ridiculous trolly argument as a reply. I guess I was wrong.

This is of course a pretty troll-y argument. Mass murder is massively wrong and unethical, procreation choices are at worst arguably defensible.

(Unless you're a religious fanatic of the contraception=murder variety...)

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