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Comment by dividefuel | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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>

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