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Comment by greymalik | Hacker News Reader

> small hurdles spike my anxiety, my anger flares at the slightest confrontation, I notice fewer jokes, fewer attempts on my part to make people laugh. My memory goes to all hell too and I can’t seem to concentrate on prolonged amounts of anything. Books fall off my radar, I stop listening to music. My phone is in my hand at all times, scrolly-anxiety-inducing apps become impossible to avoid.

This describes me perfectly. Unfortunately I can’t take a break because it’s entirely due to being the parent of young children.

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I wish I'd understood the degree to which small children destroy you. The amount of focus time you get falls by 90%+, you sleep horribly every night without fail, and you spend every quiet moment waiting for one of them to start screaming because they found some new and ingenious way to hurt themself.

Maybe a lot of that was having a 1-3 and 3-5 year old wfh during covid, but I feel like I'm broken ever since.

Nah my kids broke me before Covid. Covid just made it harder. Obviously ymmv but your kids breaking you happens without it without a pandemic.

I think the big question is once broken, and the kids finally start not completely breaking you every week... can you rebuild with the pieces left :)

We'll see! I have 10+ years to go before I'll find out for sure.

Anecdotal comment inbound, but you sound like you could benefit from a bit of hope: it really should get better, and soon. I have kids similarly distanced in age, the years you mentioned were the hardest so far and by far, even without a pandemic in the mix. That said, after they both were above age ~7 and able exist with a small bit of independence, things became easier. Like, an order of magnitude easier on my subjective and invented scale. Sleep improved, activities became fun again... in fact, I'm a bit sad when I can't convince one or the other to join me to do even simple things like picking up groceries.

Hang in there. Good luck.

Thanks. I'm not as miserable as I make it sounds but the life I had before is 100% gone and dead. I enjoy much of my days and adore my children but I do spend a lot of time realizing there's a lot of things I want to do that just won't happen. I also notice that every time a colleague talks about "working on something over the weekend" or learning more stuff after work I fall further behind professionally.

Honestly? They are doing something “productive” over the weekend but may be burning themselves out or won’t experience the good parts of parenting that weekend.

Don’t mean to put down those who don’t have kids - like myself - but I’m sure the grass seems greener elsewhere, especially when you’re tired.

Before I had kids, whenever I was tired at work, someone would say "you think that's bad? Wait til you have kids." I would roll my eyes and assume it was either hyperbole or that it was a mildly more intense version of what I felt. Of course, you know that I was wrong, and after 96 hours with a newborn I knew I was wrong too.

I compare the exhaustion you feel from parenting tothe effects of psychedelic drugs. It's pervasive, life altering, and impossible to explain to someone who hasn't experienced it.

Yeah, same, minus the phone bit. I absolutely hate the fucking thing. I keep it around because I need an app for communication with my twins preschool and it's undeniably a better point and shoot camera than most actual point and shoot cameras.

We have 3 kids, 3 years and under. I'm honestly more regimented in my personal life today than I was when I was active duty military. Things in (all of) our lives fall apart if I fall behind or start to slip. So I've become a sort of machine. I honestly think it's just a coping mechanism to deal with the fact that I've had to abandon entire categories of my self identity. I have 2, maybe 3 hobbies today. I get between 30 and 60 minutes of actual free time a day, but I like / want to spend time with my wife. I can't find time to maintain any relationships outside of my immediate family. I can't even really be more than 30 minutes from the house at any given moment, because my wife is still in recovery from the birth of our last child.

It's just very, very hard. We have little help, and most of the help we get is neither reliable nor consistent. My parents are visiting right now, from very far away, and this morning is the first real break that I have had in over a year. I stepped away 45 minutes ago and was able to get some much-needed cleaning done in the office. I plan to give my wife a break when her and our 1 year old wake up from their nap. That'll be the first time I've been able to do that on a weekend in longer than I can remember.

As a father of 3 (oldest at 4.5), I feel you. I have said, half jokingly, that the army was best practice I've had for being in this stage of life.

I think it is impossible to understand how much additional stress and anxiety being a parent of small children bring without being in that position.

I refer to it as the best kept secret of parenthood. No one tells you this until you are in it.

They do try. But it’s impossible to communicate and understand completely. It can only be experienced!

Same goes for the upsides.

>I think it is impossible to understand how much additional stress and anxiety being a parent of small children bring without being in that position.

I have to disagree and I'm a father. I think it's exactly like in the book "the happiness advantage", some people will see the positive and use it as possibility to grow and to get more productive.

On the other hand, People who focus on the negative and didn't learn to cope with stress will have problems in every high stress environment no matter the circumstances.

no matter the crap life throws at them some people simply march forward and this is the mindset you need - and not a break, which will only get you right back where you were.

Also a father, and I don't see it as a case of positives and negatives, rather how much energy you're putting into it.

There are many methods of minimizing the effort you're putting in and you can make it relatively easy, but like with everything it's a tradeoff.

Food is one major point. You can introduce a baby to solids early on and practice the BLW method, or you could just spoon feed them with ready-to-eat baby products - there's an order of magnitude difference in effort between those two approaches.

One thing I learned from this experience is that it's beyond the capabilities of a normal human couple to apply all the fancy, high-effort parenting methods - you'd need at least two grandparents cover just the more popular ones.

Absolutely this. You need to make sure they're clean, fed, safe (physically and emotionally), and are able to play (learn). Beyond that, choosing to parent on hard mode just gives you more stress for no benefit.

Looking back I see some benefit to doing extra - for example my toddler had no issue with weaning or adapting to daycare, which I heard is usually a problem.

We didn't implement independent sleeping and getting rid of the pacifier though(so far).

I believe that ultimately people usually try to do their best and there's no sense in beating yourself up about it or worse - someone else.

Yeah for sure try stuff out. But if it turns out to be hard, be willing to stop without feeling bad about it.

If you grow along with your kid everyone benefits. For me this is the greatest gift life has offered me.

Good luck “looking on the bright side” when you’ve had less than four hours sleep every night for the past week.

Some kids are just angels and sleep like champs, others fight every inch of the way and wake up constantly. As a result, different parents come up with wildly different “truths of parenting”.

This is true but also dependent on your "other circumstances". The US is decidedly a bad place to be a parent from what I can tell. Parental leave, even when graciously granted by the company is short and frowned upon nevertheless (generalizing here of course but this seems to be the overall majority of cases).

Taking a few months of parental leave right at the beginning was such a big help. All of the above becomes so much easier when you simply do not have to worry about work. Baby is not sleeping from 2a.m. to 5a.m. every night? Or only sleeps when having body contact, such as sleeping on your chest? So what! Stay up, do some chores, play some computer games or watch a movie w/ baby on your chest (yes there's ways where you do not have to worry about baby falling off and you have both hands available, so you definitely can get lots of computer gaming done in that time ;)). Go to bed at 5a.m. knowing you don't have to get up to get to work and be expected to have a fresh mind. You just fall asleep, exhausted and wake up for lunch time and it's fine! It just totally takes the extra stress out of that time (of course you're still gonna be tired from having your sleep rhythms effed up and such and sometimes baby just doesn't want to sleep at all, no matter what you do etc.) and I believe that can make for better parenting overall. Back in the day some of that would've been taken care of by living w/ your parents or in-laws.

Go to bed at 5a.m. knowing you don't have to get up to get to work and be expected to have a fresh mind. You just fall asleep, exhausted and wake up for lunch time and it's fine!

Baby wakes up at 6:30am like clockwork. Your move, parent.

Not to be a stick in the mud. You’re of course right that having additional responsibilities further increases the stress & difficulty.

Which in the case I described is not a big issue and basically entirely my point. 1.5 hours of sleep. Usually a killer. In the above mentioned situation it will still not be great, you'll be tired, groggy, irritable. But you won't snap at your PM for the 10th time in a row during standup and be cited to the boss' office or a formal warning or something.

As in I'm talking proper parental leave, meaning both parents can take 3-6 months off at the beginning, no questions asked, everyone is OK with it and it's totally normal. And you still get a reasonable amount of salary - in our case here in Canada from the parental leave part of E.I. meaning government guaranteed. Of course if I look at SV salaries, the maximums you can get under that program are laughable but here where we are it was totally workable at the time in our lives when we had kids.

Contrast that to what I hear about SV companies (I won't cite company names as that will draw the ire of the down voters here on HN, but I have inside knowledge i.e. new dads in such companies) where even if officially it's possible, nobody really does it. Sort of like "unlimited vacation", which sounds like it's better than the 30 days you get as a dev in most European countries but that in reality just ensures that nobody wants to be "the guy" that takes the most vacation and you still don't get more than you used to. If you were one of the "lucky ones" that had more than the minimum, you're now probably taking less time off than before.

> living w/ your parents or in-laws.

This does not help if your parents are working, which they usually are.

I am fully aware of that and that is why I wrote it the way I did. As in, you are quoting just one part, leaving out the most important part of that sentence:

     Back in the day some of that

This implies a time at which at least the mother (in-law) was probably a stay at home mom. Please take note of the word probably. Yes there are and always were exceptions. It's about likelihoods and how societal norms and such have shifted over time. In fact we should probably add "and/or grand parents". And while at it also making extra sure this isn't mis-understood as an absolute or a "current situation" statement: "or living very close by" vs. today where you're more likely to live further apart.

Some people have an easy time raising kids and some have a much harder time. There are a lot of reasons for this. Different kids, different parents, health issues.

The stress of a genuinely difficult parenting situation doesn't just go away with some superficial pop psych like focusing on the positive. That's such an astonishing claim, it's like telling a drowning person to use positive thinking to solve their problems.

My one year old is relatively easy compared to other kids. She’s generally not fussy unless teething, very happy and playful, can play by herself well (if necessary), etc.

My wife was out of town for a week and I had to single parent… even an insanely “easy” baby is so exhausting. I have mad respect for single parents.

I basically had to give up work during the day until she went down for naps and for the night - which meant my sleep was awful because I’d work at least until midnight each night just to catch up.

Parenting is surprisingly hard (wouldn’t trade it for anything, though).

Even a couple hours of a quality break helps. Especially if it’s regular. Not just when things are already out of control. My wife and I will be forever grateful to my mom for providing few hours break weekly-ish.

I don't really have anything to add except that I'm grateful you brought this up because reading your comment and its replies was a nice reminder that we're not alone. One day our young kids will grow up and be more independent, which is bittersweet, but 100% necessary if I'm to have any life. Hang in there, parents.

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