Ask HN: How do you balance having kids and improving your skills? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you balance having kids and improving your skills?

13 pointsdev_021 comments

I have a toddler right now and it is sucking up too much of my time. I struggle to compete with unmarried colleagues and learn new skills slower as my free time have to be spent on taking care of the toddler.

How does other HN parents cope with this?

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> I struggle to compete

Let me stop you right there. Don't compare yourself to others. Only compare yourself to your previous self. And even then be generous.

Personally I cope with this by realizing that the few years I have with this little human before he goes and gets ground up by school are precious. To that end I put my own ambitions on hold.

Might be a cultural thing, but I wouldn’t want to work where I have to compete with colleagues like it’s some kind of Gladiator type of gig.

Right? Let's build each other up. It's a little jarring, but good, when a colleague is brilliant beyond my personal capabilities. It's great when I can learn from them and great when I can mentor them. Let's work together.

Compete with your colleges on who's the better father of his child. You'll destroy them by existing. Now that you won you can stop worrying work and start worrying about parenting. You have 6-7 years of bonding before you are over the golden age of parenting and your child starts to open up to they friends instead of you. You don't have to worry about who know the latest fads in tech but how to behave yourself and show example so that your child wants to talk to you when you get old.

Well, suck it up. This is part of being a parent. You now have to learn a new skill. Being a guardian. Guiding and coaching a human being. Helping them up when they fall down, celebrate their wins. Accompany them in growing up into being a decent adult. That’s not an easy thing to do. You will want to cry and rip your hair out watching them struggle. If you are invested in them and really care. Or you skip that, go off to work and in a couple of years they are out of the house and you won’t have to see them again.

I know this is coming across very harsh and your reality most likely falls somewhere on the spectrum, but I am serious. Your time with your child is not coming back. Every day is a day with something they do for the first time and with some they do for the last time. I hope you take naps with them. It’s the one thing I miss the most.

Remember, nobody ever said on their death bed: I wish I had worked more.

Work will still be there when your kid grows up. And they will, faster then you’ll want them to.

I cope with this by shifting my priorities. I’m a husband first, father second and then some other things, one of them being an employee.

My private time is spend with private things and I have an employer who understands learning is part of the job description, so I am learning on company time.

And I work in a company that is living a culture of “together” instead of some kind of competition.

I have a clear defined career path within my company that I can advance at my own pace.

Of course, since I am not coding 12 hours a day, I don’t expect to ever win a coding Oscar. Good thing, there is none.

Father first, hobbies second, etc.

Lower the expectation of doing anything personal in the first couple of years. When baby goes to daycare you can start some physical training to build up energy reservoir.

I think it's more about not enough energy than not enough time. Once the baby is sleep trained and goes to daycare you will have some free time but will need some energy to do anything.

I have a two year old. Although I do have some free time I have zero energy. I wish I went through some rigorous physical training before.

When your kid is sick, the entire schedule get disrupted

Yeah exactly.

I don't balance it. I prioritized my kids. I stagnated while they were young, and just worked my jobs, collecting my checks, taking care of my family. When they got older, I did catch up on skills and got some salary boosts in my career.

Are there people more successful and more skilled than I? Absolutely. But I don't regret the stagnation, nor the time spent with family, and we're doing just fine at the older end of the story.

So..,

Never had this problem as a single parent raising my infant son but it puzzles me when I’ve seen others say it occasionally.

I’d ask how do you spend your time?

For me, it was pretty simple once he started sleeping through the night.

- Wake at 7; feed ourselves

- Around 8am: Playtime for him; I check and respond to email. Sometime he’s in my lap while i do this. we also work from the bed or floor. I might write code or documentation, etc.

- Sometime before 10: We take a walk; have a snack

- 10am: first meeting. tell team it’s me and the kid. proceed with meeting as normal

- 11am: More meetings or i work on a thing with baby in tow

- 12noon-2pm: lunch and siesta; this varied and sometimes was a bit later or shorter depending on the project. the key thing is that if you put baby down for a nap; you should get at least an hour yourself

- 2pm-5pm: playtime, emails, coding, meetings with lots of 15-30 minute breaks for walks, tummy time, feedings, singing

- 6-7pm ish: dinner time and 1:1 time with no distractions

- 7pm-8pm: bathtime, book reading, kid stuff, start winding down for bed

- 8-9pm: adult exercise or television

- 9-11pm: stay up later if you have energy and do work stuff or work on a personal project.

- sometime before midnight: go to bed!

WEEKENDS:

- ship the kid off to grandma or an aunt for the whole or partial weekend and grind out 8-12 hours on your passion project or just go have fun

And if your kid isn’t sleeping through the night yet, then just break everything up into smaller units.

Don’t forget to set expectations with work, schedule units into your calendar as reminders and use timers if you need to.

For example: 30 minutes every four hours you work on X. If there’s an interruption no worries just skip and catch the next one

I feel like you are working 3h/day, is it a part time job?

What if you have a kid who misbehaves alot

My toddlers were like productivity superchargers in some ways. But I guess it's worth defining:

- Level, type, and amount of competitive time needed per your chosen time unit

- Scheduled boundaries between work and child care

- Appropriate level of child care

I do remember at first I was a pretty fussy parent. But after a while things got easier as I calibrated the fuss a bit more :-)

Good luck to you.

You have to accept that being a parent is a second full time job, and you are just going to be slower for a little while. It's now on you to compete with being a great parent.

The free time will slowly return as the kiddo gets older.

First off, I have to say, one toddler is much easier than two by far. The amount of effort with two in non-linear.

Look for opportunities to kill two birds with one stone.

For example, if you want to improve your Javascript or Typescript, can you develop a browser that works on a touch based tablet that teaches letters, numbers, colors, or the names of objects?

Or say you wanted to improve your story telling or writing skills. Could you create stories that entertain and teach your child?

I often get up at 5 to have my top 2-3 hours of energy and calm. Let me note that I gained in perspective and THIS is something invaluable and productivity-enabling. Other than that, try to resist.

I managed to self teach myself web dev like that. Get up at 4:30 to study. Around 7 make kids ready for the day. Go to work and in bed at 22:00. Rinse and repeat until I was able to break out of mind numbing drone work into my first web dev role.

Thanks for the inspiration!!

having kids will improve your skills.

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