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This is a very high quality comment and I suspect will capture many parents’ feelings. Something that shocks me, even as an experienced parent, in caring for two small children is how physically and mentally tired I am at the end of the day without having done anything particularly challenging. The level of alertness required to track and monitor several mobile toddlers is quite draining.

Actual mental rest can be quite hard to come by and the need to get parents breaks that are not simply “being at work,” is real. I often get to the end of the day, particularly on weekends, and I realize that I have maybe an hour of downtime to eat and get to bed to achieve a reasonable amount of sleep.

I'm already hearing the comments on Monday, people asking me how my "break" was, since I took off all of last week (I mean, I had to since the preschool our twins attend and the daycare our singleton attends were closed). Work is typically a break from what happens in the home, but when things at work are stressful it feels like coming out of the frying pan and into the fire.

We also have a similar experience, where adding families (with kids) is greatly beneficial for everyone, but the folks who have kids that we are truly good friends with live far away. Nearby we have playdates and dinners with other families but I wouldn't want to cohabit with them, not even for an overnight stay. So we also only get the holidays or special occasions with other families and then we can finally get a break.

In a very similar situation too, but add in that both sets of grandparents have one with Alzheimers so instead of extra care givers we actually have even more work with having to actively baby sit parents. Holidays are pretty stressful and this year we threw a nice thanksgiving stomach bug into the mix!

> the folks who have kids that we are truly good friends with live far away. Nearby we have playdates and dinners with other families but I wouldn't want to cohabit with them, not even for an overnight stay

many such cases

> In my experience caring for your small children is really demanding work. On the one hand you need to be focused on the situation in order to protect the children

I expected this going into having children, but I was surprised at how much I actually enjoyed it. Yes, it’s more active work than sitting in front of a computer, but for me personally I’ve found it much less demanding than my jobs.

> and on the other hand there is not much going on for entertaining yourself.

Honestly, I don’t identify with this either. At least not since my children were more than 6-7 months old. Playing with kids is a lot of fun once you get into it. We go on a lot of adventures around the neighborhood and beyond where everything is new and exciting to them. It’s like they’ve re-opened the wonder of the world for me.

On the other hand, I have some friends who struggle with parenting because they approach it more as babysitting than as quality time with their kids. For them, it’s just a matter of passing time until they can go do something else. That’s a minority of my friends, though.

My big discovery was I underestimated how different kids could be. I watch some two year olds happily draw for hours, and lay themselves down for nap. Meanwhile, mine possessed a natural talent for destruction, boundless energy, and refused to sleep more than about eight hours a day.

> go on a lot of adventures around the neighborhood and beyond where everything is new and exciting to them.

I mean, first time and second time. But when they get excited 55th time over exactly same hedgehog, it just was not so exciting to me anymore.

well, if you can't get excited over seeing the same hedgehog again and again (which would be a comparable experience to having a pet) then you just have to pick something else. the challenge is to find things that you and the kids enjoy. and i sympathize. this can be hard.

In our Montessori school, parents do pick up other kids occasionally, and the kids would just stay with the family for the afternoon. Ideally, kids take turns so sometimes parents get an afternoon off.

Another thing that sometimes works (lots of preconditions) - living in walking distance of grandparents or siblings, and let the kids visit family frequently.

> Another thing that sometimes works (lots of preconditions) - living in walking distance of grandparents or siblings, and let the kids visit family frequently.

If you are not sufficiently rich such that you can afford personal services such as live in nannies and flights to visit family and whatnot, I find that living walking distance to close family is one of the biggest quality of life upgrades one could make (obviously assuming you get along with them).

The redundancies it provides makes for much less stressful living, along with many other benefits.

> living walking distance to close family is one of the biggest quality of life upgrades one could make

And yet those with the power to change this situation choose not to. We have to work in office buildings located in expensive commercial districts with small homes/accomodation and no real community, or spend hours commuting each week if we want to live in the suburbs.

After a few decades we earn enough money to escape and retire to a small town with greater space and more community, but our now adult children are forced to trek back to the big city to earn a living.

The grandchildren get to see granny and grandpa a few times a year, if they're lucky. One of the few developments improving this situation, remote work, is sadly considered a privilege.

If there weren't so many cars and the associated danger, it'd be easier to use public spaces and not feel like your "small" apartment is cramped.

I bought a house and miss my 2-bedroom apartment. Enough that my wife and I are considering moving back into an apartment and renting out our house.

It doesn't help either that outdated fire codes pretty much dictate apartments in the US to follow the double-loaded hallway pattern which makes apartments less pleasant and makes it hard to build ones that are pleasant for families. https://www.niskanencenter.org/how-to-build-more-family-size...

> If you are not sufficiently rich such that you can afford personal services such as live in nannies and flights to visit family and whatnot, I find that living walking distance to close family is one of the biggest quality of life upgrades one could make

Being able to choose housing with that level of granularity still requires wealth that exceeds most incomes. For most, just finding housing without lots of significant negative impacts - this is about the edge of possibility. For even that minimal outcome, the odds aren't terrific.

A saying most black Americans will be familiar with is, "It takes a village to raise a child." It resembles proverbs common to cultures across Africa; one could say that it's cultural knowledge embedded deeply within the African diaspora. American black culture is often derided as being inadequate, particularly in efforts to raise well-adjusted and pro-social children, but what's rarely mentioned by these commenters is how frequent and widespread are the historical and contemporary destruction and dissolution of black communities in America. In the too-common case of single mothers rearing children alone (the absence of the father often itself a product of poor social support), the difference seems to be in the presence or absence of older siblings, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and supportive teachers, especially when the mother is forced to work multiple jobs in order to cover ever-increasing expenses. (It should also be noted that when the father is present, married or not, he tends to spend more time with his children than fathers of other ethnicities.)

I bring this up in order to maybe open some minds as to why we see racial disparities of certain types - and also because, as mentioned by another commenter, the increasing atomization of families and communities of other ethnic groups threatens to replicate the aforementioned dysfunction. Common and widespread understanding of the dynamic could head-off tragedy; they hit us with crack before they hit y'all with opioids, after all.

The only thing I would like to add to this thinking is that it also explains cultural norms. If a child is getting input from that many different adults it becomes an averaging of the culture norms.

> If a child is getting input from that many different adults it becomes an averaging of the culture norms.

More directly, it greatly softens the inevitable blows from highly-concentrated, inexperienced parenting.

I would also add that by the time of becoming a parent every girl was already familiar with most of the chores and tasks of raising a child and most likely familiar with giving birth because no one went away to hospital to give birth - it happened at home.

The child situation in that group vacation sounds like the shared child raising in a Kibbutz:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibbutz