Living a double life: being a parent at an early stage startup
alyssaaldersley.com
alyssaaldersley.com
This is what made a difference for me between chaos and depressive thoughts to happiness and success: Alway Be Present.
When you spend time with the kids, be present and have a good time. That means no checking email, no thinking about the future, no thinking about the past. Be with them, as they know and feel when you're physically present but not mentally. This is good for everyone; spending no-guilt time with your kids will reenergize you and make you a better (smarter even!) person.
When you are working, be present too. If you are pretending to work but thinking you should be with your kids, drop everything and go play with them. What will make your life miserable is trying to work while feeling guilty for being a bad parent. You won't get anything useful done, and you won't be a good parent either.
Also, when you hang out with the kids, make it also a fun time for yourself. Get out of the house, do fun stuff, be a kid with them. You'll be killing two birds with one stone.
VCs reading here might not like this: companies are disposable and kids will be with you for all your life. Chose wisely where you want to make the bulk of your mistakes.
1 - Whatever is happening, just go with it. Sometimes the kids are going to be sick, or its a great day for playing, or your in a super productive space with your business. I've found that I really just need to allow myself permission to do what needs doing at the moment, without feeling guilty about what I had planned to be doing.
2 - All those super important things you HAVE to finish. It probably won't matter if they don't get done. E-mails left un-answered. Dishes left in the sink. After a few years of this, I'm starting to realise that the world doesn't actually come to a screaming halt. I think the true trick is realising what is really important and what you can leave out for later.
It's funny but I think having kids has taught me these two things, which should apply very well to the startup world. It's kind of ironic that the 'stereotypical' startup founder is young, without kids. There are a lot of lessons to be learnt from children, and I think the maturity that has come with having kids has been a great help for me.
Even though they are not old enough to realize it yet, my kids were the ones who inspired me to start something, and they are still my biggest inspiration. When they're older, I want them to look back and be proud of the (albeit tiny) dent that their dad made in the universe.
I really do hope that the concentrated effort now will lead to much more shared time and adventures down the road.
Are my parents the only ones that locked their door at night? My brother and I couldn't wake them in the morning, because we couldn't get in. We learned at a very early age to entertain ourselves until Mom and Dad got up.
I'm not saying you're doing anything wrong, I'm just saying that it seems like no one thinks of this solution. :)
I see this complaint quite often about the kids being bothersome in the morning and when I tell people about the "door lock" it seems to blow their mind.
Also if you read your kids stories (and I highly recommend it) and you include a generous helping of stories about kids who are independent and loving it (Little Britches, the Boxcar Kids, etc) they too will look forward to being independent. All three of my kids got a checking account when they were 5 (USAA is great for this), they were doing their own laundry by the time they were 10 and making their own lunches. By the time they reached 13 we started a program where each night one person was responsible for dinner that night for all five of us, didn't matter what it was, just had to be reasonably nutritious. Spaghetti? Pretty easy. Mac-n-Cheese, whitesauce with cheeses and some boiled noodles. Croque Madam? Ham sandwhiches with an egg. Steamed vegetables? straight forward. Etc. The goal of my wife and I was that our kids when they hit 18 needed to be able to manage a checkbook, cook their own meals economically, and manage their own laundry/hygiene. When they went off to college that was going to be expected after all.
The benefit to the parents is of course that the kids require less "time critical" time (its really handy to be able to say, "I'm going to be late, you're on your own for dinner." and to know that they will be able to make themselves a nice dinner.) And to not worry about whether or not they have a healthy lunch for school or clean clothes to wear.
By the time they are 18 they pretty self sufficient and that is a huge win. The trick is realizing that kids are much more capable than we often give them credit for, and they feel better about themselves when they feel they are in control of their own lives.
But I have a question that will sound condescending no matter how I phrase it: How many of you are developers vs product managers, business people, designers etc?
The reason I ask is because development is hard. It takes time to figure things out, and it's difficult to half-ass your way out of something when the clock hits 6pm without it coming back to get you the next morning.
What I was objecting to was the implication that the GP made that people with kids must be one of those "businessy hangers-on" because development itself is too difficult to balance with family. The vast majority of development is not that demanding - most developers are not building the equivalent of suspension bridges, and even if they are, it's not impossible to leave at 6pm most of the time unless something critical is down.
Some people have bursts of real productivity, for a few hours tops.
If you don't have kids in your life, what else are you doing? Most are browsing the internet.
if you're in the position to do so. Recognize those bursts and use them to code. Then the time where you're looking at pictures of your cats, use that time for the kids.
When i was younger, i would hack at stuff very quickly until it worked (IE thousands of lines of code a day, it turns out,), and be proud of the result. 3 years later i'd look at the code and wonder what the hell was wrong with me.
Now i write code, if i hit a hard problem or things aren't working like i think they should, maybe i'll go take a walk for an hour to think about the problem and the code, then come back and code some more. I still end up getting more done at the end of the day, and the code looks better.
The extra time you get doing this kind of thing is the time you spend parenting.
You also get a much more acute sense of your limits as you get older, and know when you need to say "i just won't have time to do that, someone else needs to". Just because it's a startup doesn't mean people should try to take on every task. It doesn't help anyone if you say you can do something you can't :)
But that shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone.