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Comment by jvanderbot | Hacker News Reader

Not to the direct thesis of the article, but I want to share one absolute 180 I had after having kids.

Before kiddos I took the apriori belief that it would kinda suck. The belief was unassailable because I thought, evolutionarily, if it was fun to have kids it wouldn't be fun to make them - otherwise we'd endure unfun "making" because we know the having would be fun.

I know now how stupid that was on many levels. Just specifically that belief has changed for me: its fun to make kids because having them is self reinforcing and wonderful and intrinsically motivational.

Perhaps I'm a data point.

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I also have been surprised by how fun fatherhood is.

When kids are days, weeks, months old, they're constantly experiencing new things. That's the first tree she ever saw! It's amazing to experience the world through them.

When they're a couple years old, you see them learning and connecting and developing a unique personality. I love it when my two year old picks up on things that I missed, or teaches me something. And it's kind of awesome to be someone's superhero for however long this lasts.

I don't know how it goes after this but so far the trend has been that they get more fun as they grow...

> I also have been surprised by how fun fatherhood is.

Same here. My son is approaching two, and he's a blast. He can be tiring, he can be a big ol’ mess, but he's never boring.

He's healthy and he eats well and he's a good sleeper, so he doesn't give us much to worry about. He charms everyone he meets, he explores everything, and every day is just a fireworks show of new delights and discoveries. I go on a business trip for 2-3 days and I come back to him doing new things.

Looking forward to the second kiddo!

There's all sorts of fun and exciting milestones ahead, but in my experience around 18mos - 4yrs is sort of a sweet spot. Enjoy it while it lasts!

  Before kiddos I took the apriori belief that it would kinda suck. The belief was unassailable because I thought, evolutionarily, if it was fun to have kids it wouldn't be fun to make them - otherwise we'd endure unfun "making" because we know the having would be fun.

And you were right. Subjectively, having and raising kids is fun. Objectively, it's not fun at all, but your mind convinces you that it is otherwise no-one would do it. This has been extensively studied across different demographics, cultures, age groups, evaluation methods used, etc, and the result is robust, i.e. consistent across all of them. Starting at a baseline life satisfaction level, it drops drastically when the baby arrives, slowly recovers a bit, then there's another big drop at age three, another recovery when they start school (but still not back to the baseline again), a huge drop as they become teenagers, and finally recovery back to the baseline when they leave home.

One thing I'm not aware of any work on is how the perception goes when the parents know about this in advance, a bit like being told how the magic trick works before it's shown to you.

So, what is "objective" fun. (Vs enjoying your subjective experience). Having kids is not "objectively fun" even though its "subjectively fun" because "my brain convinced me I'm having fun?"

Pull at that thread and you'll land on the central mistake I made with my prior beliefs, and also a ton of things like, you know, stoic philosophy, cognitive behavioral therapy, and mindfulness. etc etc. The subjective is all you have.

What you just told me contradicts the studies. Return to baseline happiness with some temporary dips does not match "you're not having fun stop believing you are".

It means "all the enormous and sudden life changes and things you give up to have kids are a momentary blip in the radar, made up for by the pleasure of having kids".

  Return to baseline happiness with some temporary dips does not match "you're not having fun stop believing you are".

The "temporary dip" is the entire time you have the children, let's say 20 years or so, and it's a pretty serious drop, not just a small blip. I'm not telling anyone to stop believing, it's just nature's way of making sure that we keep procreating and at the same time a very interesting phenomenon to observe. Nothing wrong with it.

Oh a 20 year dip is new to me.

Here's a few cherry picked studies[1] there's a _bump_ in happiness that regresses to pre-kiddo levels permanently.

[2] Happy people with money have more kids, and people who have kids after 30 and with non-poverty wages are happier.

1. https://www.demogr.mpg.de/papers/working/wp-2012-013.pdf

2. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5505668/

3. bonus: A heavily biased study showing overall increases https://ifstudies.org/blog/life-with-kids-is-better-analyzin...

There's a decent book on the baseline phenomenon called Happiness Hypothesis: Largely speaking you'll return to baseline levels of subjective wellbeing, but recall that fufillment is not subjective wellbeing.

Of course if you read The Atlantic (the same magazine that tells you to throw your kids art away and never get married, they'll say the opposite [4]

4. https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2021/11/does-havi...

You wont be convinced. That's ok. I think we'll just disagree here. But, if you let these articles direct your life, or if I were to let them direct mine, we'd be fools.

This whole thread is honestly hilarious. "No sir, you are not happy, you are not fufilled, here is the data, sir"

Ah I wish I could agree. I've found having kids to be a major challenge. Maybe I just need to wait for them to get a little older.

I also agree.

"Making kids" is fun, duh.

Raising kids, however, can be very challenging in all sorts of ways. Physically, mentally, socially, etc. I became aware of just how much sleep deprivation affected me and for the sake of myself & my family I just sacrificed everything else to ensure I got good quality sleep. Fortunately, I was helped in this and I made damn sure everyone was supported when I was awake.

Me too. I'm an active father, love my daughter and don't regret our choice. But damn I would never opt to go through this again and can't wait until she's a little older. I see parents having orderly lunches in restaurants with their older children and it just seems like the most beautiful and civilized thing in the world.

The whole experience is too much noise and not enough signal to me.

This is a trend, perhaps with most parents, but definitely with fathers and especially with the sorts of hyper focused, contemplative, creativity/engineering-minded fathers who might hang out on hacker news. At least in my anecdotal experience.

What I've found is that as my 2.5 year old gets older it gets easier and easier for me. The ratio of cool shared experiences to frustrating noise gets higher and higher.

We've just had another child, still very much a newborn, and now that I have something for contrast I see how much harder that was. To some degree the frustration and grind of very young kids had faded into the background of my memory.

The older kid helps though as a concrete vision of what we're moving towards.

Yeah, this is highly dependent on the child and parent. Some kids just require attention, are more stubborn, or are just terrible sleepers and that's definitely gonna take a greater toil on the parents.

Sure there's Bringing up Bébé, sleep training, etc. but sometimes you just get difficult kids at no fault of the parents. And some people are just okay with the chaos of children.

I've found the challenges, personally, are related to my lackadaisical prior life. Casual workouts after my job. Working whatever hours I wanted so I could take it easy at the job knowing I could just stay late. Completely open evenings and weekends so no need to plan ahead. Plenty of leisure time to tidy up while doing anything or nothing. Seeing friends several times a week so no need to make effort to reach out or block time.

I never learned to be busy. I thought working 60-70h and studying weekends was busy, but that was just laziness-compensation.

Now I know how and the pure joy of having kids can be appreciated. Getting used to that was hard.

So we sorted out that challenge. There are many more ahead.

Don't worry, you're not alone. I get depressed when I read stories from gushing fathers online. It isn't their fault, of course they're allowed to report how happy fatherhood makes them, but my experience has been very different to what others report.

Every day with children for the last 6 years has been filled with crying, screaming, meltdowns, barely eating any type of food, and what they do eat changes from day to do, exhausting endless requests, so little free time. As a couple, my wife and I barely cope and our marriage is just about clinging on because we're exhausted and scrappy all the time.

I just don't recognise the life that online dads seem to have. I wish I was like them.

It's a challenge though that, as I posted already, gives my life a purpose for something outside me.

Worst though (spoiler), it may have become an even a bigger challenge as they have become starting adults. In many ways they were so much easier in elementary school… <lé sigh>

Yeah, that never happened for me. Before and after, I felt pretty much the same. Now she's an adult and it's weird.

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