Anecdotally, I feel that experience; consequently, business tasks have become much harder. I don't believe it'll be anything more than temporary, but it is certainly substantial.
Interesting. My experience was the opposite. After the initial sleep deprivation, once our child was sleep trained, I achieved a new level of productivity in my life.
Before children, I wasn't as focused. Now, I'm more efficient. The knowledge I have a break coming where I know I'll be giving my family my undivided attention helps motivate me through the day.
There's always the knowledge that if I fail to maintain a job, it is statistically associated with divorce, and that divorce is statistically associated with child support, and that child support is statistically associated with prison and revocation of passport/property/licenses keep me going. If I fail to be productive enough I will be tossed in jail, that wasn't really the case before. But unlike some other people, I lived an exceedingly free (and low-cost) life before children, often just being homeless and hitch-hiking around the country, fighting for foreign militia, spending months living in forest or hiking trails, etc.
We spend all the weekend together, the week is for me-time.
But heaven forbid you expect your wife to keep up the pretenses set when you married her.
Nothing generates focus like “I have this exact 45 minutes to do X this week, or it isn’t going to happen”.
For good and Ill, I suppose .
I think that's a valid question -- one likes to assume that it's some adaptability trait, but the reality is that it could just as well be evidence of sub-standard conditions facilitated by the scenario.
It's almost as if 90% of their brain is dedicated solely to making sure their children are safe and looked after. It's like - at any moment - they think their children could just spontaneously combust or something. And I'm not talking infants. These are like 3 & 4 year olds...
As a non-parent, this is so bizarre. We all grew up with parents that weren't perfect, and we all ended up just fine.
I'm not sure if this is what's always happened to people when they become parents or if it's something new.
But the complete irrationality of their constant fears - something MUST have happened to their brains.
The girl began to wobble and myself and two other dads, without coordination or communication all instinctively began to lunge towards her (maybe 15 feet away).
We barely got two steps before we harnessed ourselves, noticed what happened and had a laugh. Then went back to being hermits.
I really felt like I was part of this ancient order. We didn’t know each other and yet we all understood each other.
I mean, we kind of are, right?
I couldn’t, I had these same ignorant ideas based on my fleeting, non-accountable contact with small kids.
Now let me tell you about the time my 10 month old, in the blink of an eye, managed to get a handful of her own poo into her mouth.
The struggle is real.
Plenty of us didn’t.
Never happened with other family/friends before.
1) a little bit dumber than I used to be
2) a lot more tired than I used to be, even after a rare full night sleep
3) a lot less self serving than I used to be
4) a lot more anxious than I used to be (which was already pretty high). I definitely visualize the “worst case scenario” in every situation I’m in
5) (stealth edit in) a lot less career motivated than I used to be. I predict this returns when the kids are older but maybe not
All that to say: yes, my brain has definitely rewired itself.
Also I used to think parents whose kids were throwing a tantrum in the middle of the grocery store were doing a bad job but now I get it.
I suspect any drop in cognitive ability is largely a symptom of this, not a permanent rewiring.
Many non-parents experience memory, concentration, computation, and anxiety problems, when operating under the pressure of low (or low quality) sleep.
The first time they throw a tantrum to get something just walk away and don't buckle .. especially if it's in a very public place.
Avoid providing feedback that throwing a fit in public will bend you to their will and it won't happen much more.
Personally I don't indulge tantrums but that doesn't make them stop. I assume the child does it to punish me to try and make me feel as bad as they do, as she seems to understand the tantrum won't result in me actually doing anything. Like a tic-for-tac, not as a way to actually get something (she knows I don't give anything or really acknowledge a tantrum).
If you got a toddler to make tantrums 'not happen much anymore' I think either you have an exceptional child or they just grew old enough to grow out of it.
It's worked fine with my own children, my grandchildren, and various nieces and nephews.
I agree that the the "not indulging" in tantrums doesn't make them stop on a dime .. but they peter out faster and anecdotally appear less frequently in the future.
It's good to have cool calm collected kids down the track so you can teach them to pull molten glass from a 1000C furnace when they're five, to use an angle grinder safely at nine, and start driving by ten.
None of these offspring of mine are exceptional BTW, they're kind of typical for rural WA (W.Australia).
I'm 100% sure my kid would just start ripping and destroying the items on the shelving in that aisle. And that if the child were seen unsupervised in the aisle, at best the kid would be taken to the front and at worst police would be called (my country, USA, is extremely paranoid about children which means even if you are not paranoid about your kid you have to be paranoid about CPS and the criminal charges).
At any rate I wish more places were mroe like rural Australia in that regard. Even relatively minor independence for young children is effectively illegal in much of the US.
You think .. but you don't actualy know is what I hear you saying :-)
In my experience small people indulge in a lot of performance art for the benefit of the faces they recognise in order to gather reactions and learn from that feedback - not as a front of brain delibrate strategy, more as innate "born to learn" pattern.
If you get in a Mexican standoff with you're own kid you're almost certainly going to lose .. I know I would with mine .. you start "daring them" not to do something and they'll start inching that jar ever closer to the edge until it drops.
"Young enough" kids will generally pull into best behaviour in a sea of faces they don't recognise, that's pretty much the time that you have a window to treat poor behaviour by simply walking away.
After that period they're more confident in front of strangers AND (uh-oh) understand that behaviour not seen by you is still behaviour known by you .. and that can manipulate you.
Child-parent relations are a non stop conveyor of escalating mirror awareness | peek-a-boo interactions .. and then puberty hits and you're into full Cold War MAD scenarios :-).
But yeah, independence for kids is pretty essential, it's good to have them walking | riding to school, looking after pets, growing food, building radios etc.
I’ve loved before. But once my first came things were very different. It was a new kind of love. I suddenly had such a clear mission in life: protect and nurture this baby.
I definitely changed.
"This pram needs to have suspension system. What if you got a pot hole too hard and the baby bounces out and hits the ground causing brain damage? Happened to a cousin."
I see this and push back on my wife almost every day (I don't have social media, so I'm blissfully unaware of what dangers lurk)
There is a constant on-edge aspect where you find out in the span of a minute they can:
- open or climb over a gate to the stairs - reach on the counter to grab a glass jar - open a door by grasping the door knob
> we all ended up just fine.
It's probably once bitten, twice shy - every parent screws up and then remembers that one accident.
Children that age have the _potential_ to do a lot of damage and no _foresight_ whatsoever. They literally cannot see the potential consequences of running into the street.
It’s fine to not understand, but please think twice about calling something you don’t understand “irrational.”
If you don't believe in letting natural selection sort if you child will get past 2 yo, you 'll either recenter your whole environment and routines around the kid, or spend 90% or your time make sure they don't stab themselves with your antique knives collection or soldering iron.
Fo that for a few years and you won't be switching back to what you were before just because your kid can now read your phone password from your finger movements from across the room.
I think the same thing happens when you're looking after your elderly parents.
PS: > We all grew up with parents that weren't perfect, and we all ended up just fine.
I talked to my parents a while after my kids were out of the "let's gob anything that can fit in my face hole", and I also basically robbed a few years of their life where they basically frozr their career and couldn't do much outside of making sure we're not dying. Some parents forget how hard it was though (and it's normal. Your brain is really in a bad state all that time)