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If you don't want to prioritise your kids over your job... don't have kids. Contraception is pretty damn effective, and people often have children for entirely

If you don't want to prioritise your kids over your job... don't have kids. Contraception is pretty damn effective, and people often have children for entirely selfish reasons. A dog isn't for christmas, and your kids aren't just cute toys until you get bored of raising them. There are plenty of people who are willing, enough that we won't have population problems.

rayiner 7y ago
That’s terrible advice. Kids are great (they’re also not, at societal scale, really optional). According to a Pew study, about 7% of people who had kids would, if they did it over again, have had no kids. By contrast, more than half of those who didn’t have kids would’ve chosen to not have kids again: https://news.gallup.com/poll/164618/desire-children-norm.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/164618/desire-children-norm.asp.... Indeed, out of people who didn’t have kids, a greater proportion wish they would’ve had 3+ kids than people who had kids who wish they had no kids. If you impose artificially high hurdles for parenting, you’re encouraging people to possible forgo a fulfilling life choice, because they fear they can’t live up to artificially inflated expectations for parenting. And that’s damaging.
- yulaow 7y ago
  A thing is "inflated expectations for parenting", another thing is the person who wrote the article which has three different jobs (she could easily drop two and still manage to bring home more than enough money, but she doesn't want to for selfish reasons... Which are totally ok if you are not a divorced parent of two very young kids) and, as she herself said, prioritize all of them over her children because she prefers that way.
  - rayiner 7y ago
    The “selfish” remark rings pretty hollow when you’re talking about someone that is literally spending her time freeing wrongfully convicted people. What Ms. Bazelon is doing is the opposite of selfish. She’s providing for her family, serving her profession, and serving her community. She’s teaching her kids good morals by example: hard work and service. What kind of terrible lesson would it be to her children if she taught them that their school camping trip was more important than those things?
    - wishinghand 7y ago
      > What kind of terrible lesson would it be to her children if she taught them that their school camping trip was more important than those things? That you can rationalize anything to fit your choices.
      - AstralStorm 7y ago
        The more important part will the kids both understand it rationally and handle it emotionally. Nobody can really know that without being an oracle. Neither choice is clearly superior but one is considered natural and the other is not.
    - refurb 7y ago
      It’s still selfish because she is sacrificing her children’s upbringing to help wrongfully convicted people. Sacrificing some other person for a cause you believe in is certainly not a selfless act.
      - zamfi 7y ago
        Why do you think the kid is “sacrificed” by the parent pursuing meaningful-to-them work over attending a school event?
- Dayshine 7y ago
  Well, I think all the lawyer + law professor + writers can not have kids and we'll be fine. I'm not saying people that want to work 40/50 hour weeks shouldn't have kids. I'm saying people who want to work 80 hour weeks shouldn't have kids. They probably shouldn't have dogs either...
  - rayiner 7y ago
    If you’re going to assert that a group of people should forgo a major aspect of life, it’s incumbent on you to actually provide evidence that shows concrete and major harms from that combination of life choices. And that evidence just doesn’t exist. In most situations, if you tell people they shouldn’t do X without citing concrete evidence that X is bad, your viewpoint won’t be taken seriously. In the area of parenting, however, we switch off our brains, because we assign some mystical importance to biological parents spending time with kids, instead of alternative caretakers. In the case of the author: > They were lovingly cared for by their father, their grandmother, my son’s preschool teacher and my daughter’s babysitter. Many children, often in low income families, are raised primarily by grandparents and school. Are you prepared to say that those families shouldn’t have had children?
    - Dayshine 7y ago
      It's 1am so you get the first result I found. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277953604000279 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027795360... Let me know if you don't have access to the journal. That's 2-3 times increased chance of measurable mental health problems if parents work outside of 9-5
      - barry-cotter 7y ago
        The long run effects of adoption on personality attributes and IQ is indistinguishable from zero. People are as like their biological siblings whether they ever meet them or not, and as like their adoptive siblings as any random stranger. Outside major abuse and genetic contributions parents have limited effects on adult outcomes. If the worst parents working more does to children is a less happy childhood on average that’s a hard choice to condemn. Normal people send their children to child warehousing facilities where they’re taught to sit down, shut up and do as they’re told while subjected to busywork, boredom, ranking and the ennui of meaninglessness for over a decade instead of letting them grow and play and they don’t get judged much for it.
- justforyou 7y ago
  I'd rather have a planet of people raised by people committed to doing the best job possible than people who have made a fulfilling life choice due to a lack of proper expectations. It's not like underpopulation is a problem.
hrktb 7y ago
Following this advice I feel more than half of our generation wouldn’t be. Perhaps there’s already too many people on earth, but it’s something I’d think about.
xapata 7y ago
> There are plenty of people who are willing. Willing to what?
dragonwriter 7y ago
> If you don't want to prioritise your kids over your job... don't have kids. Having kids while prioritizing job over direct care and attention to them has been an accepted (and often expected) pattern for men for centuries. (And for much of that time for upper and often middle class [0] women, too, though their primary vocations weren't “jobs” in the usual sense.) Should it be surprising or any worse that when women are sole or co-equal breadwinners, that the same is often true of women with jobs? [0] “middle class” in the sense of the petit bourgeoisie, not the other common modern American usage, where it refers to the middle income segment which is almost entirely within the working class.
- refurb 7y ago
  Sorry, but men prioritizing their jobs over their kids has never been historically accepted. Sole breadwinner is not by definition prioritizing job over kids. Working 80 hours per week when 40 hours could provide your family with enough, is.
  - dragonwriter 7y ago
    > Sorry, but men prioritizing their jobs over their kids has never been historically accepted. Men (and for that matter upper and often also middle class women in roles that aren't actually jobs, though that's also true of upper class men in either the hereditary aristocracy or th e capitalist haut bourgeiosie) prioritizing their job—or, where they don't have a job as such, their externally-focussed class role over personally providing direct care and attention to their children (which is what I said and what is, despite the less precise language, actually being discussed in the article), has, in fact, been widely historically accepted.
- tathougies 7y ago
  > Having kids while prioritizing job over direct care and attention to them has been an accepted (and often expected) pattern for men for centuries. (And for much of that time for upper and often middle class [0] women, too, though their primary vocations weren't “jobs” in the usual sense.) False. Most men throughout history had to work or their children would starve. Their requirement to work was forced legally by laws allowing wives to sue husbands that did not work and support their family. For most of history before the industrial revolution, the standard model would have been a farm, where both mom and dad worked, but worked at home. The ideal has always been for moms and dads to stay home, until relatively recently -- certainly not centuries. Lastly, if we even accept your claim to be true at all, it really would only be limited in scope to the very rich or at least the upper middle class, where men actually had careers 'worth' sacrificing for. Perhaps an attorney sees his work as meaningful and a source of advancement. I highly doubt a coal miner wanted to be in the mines longer because of career advancement. In fact, history is actually littered with the opposite -- working men demanding that they work less (see the labor movement).

rayiner 7y ago

That’s terrible advice. Kids are great (they’re also not, at societal scale, really optional). According to a Pew study, about 7% of people who had kids would, if they did it over again, have had no kids. By contrast, more than half of those who didn’t have kids would’ve chosen to not have kids again: https://news.gallup.com/poll/164618/desire-children-norm.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/164618/desire-children-norm.asp.... Indeed, out of people who didn’t have kids, a greater proportion wish they would’ve had 3+ kids than people who had kids who wish they had no kids. If you impose artificially high hurdles for parenting, you’re encouraging people to possible forgo a fulfilling life choice, because they fear they can’t live up to artificially inflated expectations for parenting. And that’s damaging.

yulaow 7y ago
A thing is "inflated expectations for parenting", another thing is the person who wrote the article which has three different jobs (she could easily drop two and still manage to bring home more than enough money, but she doesn't want to for selfish reasons... Which are totally ok if you are not a divorced parent of two very young kids) and, as she herself said, prioritize all of them over her children because she prefers that way.
- rayiner 7y ago
  The “selfish” remark rings pretty hollow when you’re talking about someone that is literally spending her time freeing wrongfully convicted people. What Ms. Bazelon is doing is the opposite of selfish. She’s providing for her family, serving her profession, and serving her community. She’s teaching her kids good morals by example: hard work and service. What kind of terrible lesson would it be to her children if she taught them that their school camping trip was more important than those things?
  - wishinghand 7y ago
    > What kind of terrible lesson would it be to her children if she taught them that their school camping trip was more important than those things? That you can rationalize anything to fit your choices.
    - AstralStorm 7y ago
      The more important part will the kids both understand it rationally and handle it emotionally. Nobody can really know that without being an oracle. Neither choice is clearly superior but one is considered natural and the other is not.
  - refurb 7y ago
    It’s still selfish because she is sacrificing her children’s upbringing to help wrongfully convicted people. Sacrificing some other person for a cause you believe in is certainly not a selfless act.
    - zamfi 7y ago
      Why do you think the kid is “sacrificed” by the parent pursuing meaningful-to-them work over attending a school event?
Dayshine 7y ago
Well, I think all the lawyer + law professor + writers can not have kids and we'll be fine. I'm not saying people that want to work 40/50 hour weeks shouldn't have kids. I'm saying people who want to work 80 hour weeks shouldn't have kids. They probably shouldn't have dogs either...
- rayiner 7y ago
  If you’re going to assert that a group of people should forgo a major aspect of life, it’s incumbent on you to actually provide evidence that shows concrete and major harms from that combination of life choices. And that evidence just doesn’t exist. In most situations, if you tell people they shouldn’t do X without citing concrete evidence that X is bad, your viewpoint won’t be taken seriously. In the area of parenting, however, we switch off our brains, because we assign some mystical importance to biological parents spending time with kids, instead of alternative caretakers. In the case of the author: > They were lovingly cared for by their father, their grandmother, my son’s preschool teacher and my daughter’s babysitter. Many children, often in low income families, are raised primarily by grandparents and school. Are you prepared to say that those families shouldn’t have had children?
  - Dayshine 7y ago
    It's 1am so you get the first result I found. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277953604000279 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027795360... Let me know if you don't have access to the journal. That's 2-3 times increased chance of measurable mental health problems if parents work outside of 9-5
    - barry-cotter 7y ago
      The long run effects of adoption on personality attributes and IQ is indistinguishable from zero. People are as like their biological siblings whether they ever meet them or not, and as like their adoptive siblings as any random stranger. Outside major abuse and genetic contributions parents have limited effects on adult outcomes. If the worst parents working more does to children is a less happy childhood on average that’s a hard choice to condemn. Normal people send their children to child warehousing facilities where they’re taught to sit down, shut up and do as they’re told while subjected to busywork, boredom, ranking and the ennui of meaninglessness for over a decade instead of letting them grow and play and they don’t get judged much for it.
justforyou 7y ago
I'd rather have a planet of people raised by people committed to doing the best job possible than people who have made a fulfilling life choice due to a lack of proper expectations. It's not like underpopulation is a problem.

hrktb 7y ago

Following this advice I feel more than half of our generation wouldn’t be. Perhaps there’s already too many people on earth, but it’s something I’d think about.

xapata 7y ago

> There are plenty of people who are willing. Willing to what?

dragonwriter 7y ago

> If you don't want to prioritise your kids over your job... don't have kids. Having kids while prioritizing job over direct care and attention to them has been an accepted (and often expected) pattern for men for centuries. (And for much of that time for upper and often middle class [0] women, too, though their primary vocations weren't “jobs” in the usual sense.) Should it be surprising or any worse that when women are sole or co-equal breadwinners, that the same is often true of women with jobs? [0] “middle class” in the sense of the petit bourgeoisie, not the other common modern American usage, where it refers to the middle income segment which is almost entirely within the working class.

refurb 7y ago
Sorry, but men prioritizing their jobs over their kids has never been historically accepted. Sole breadwinner is not by definition prioritizing job over kids. Working 80 hours per week when 40 hours could provide your family with enough, is.
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > Sorry, but men prioritizing their jobs over their kids has never been historically accepted. Men (and for that matter upper and often also middle class women in roles that aren't actually jobs, though that's also true of upper class men in either the hereditary aristocracy or th e capitalist haut bourgeiosie) prioritizing their job—or, where they don't have a job as such, their externally-focussed class role over personally providing direct care and attention to their children (which is what I said and what is, despite the less precise language, actually being discussed in the article), has, in fact, been widely historically accepted.
tathougies 7y ago
> Having kids while prioritizing job over direct care and attention to them has been an accepted (and often expected) pattern for men for centuries. (And for much of that time for upper and often middle class [0] women, too, though their primary vocations weren't “jobs” in the usual sense.) False. Most men throughout history had to work or their children would starve. Their requirement to work was forced legally by laws allowing wives to sue husbands that did not work and support their family. For most of history before the industrial revolution, the standard model would have been a farm, where both mom and dad worked, but worked at home. The ideal has always been for moms and dads to stay home, until relatively recently -- certainly not centuries. Lastly, if we even accept your claim to be true at all, it really would only be limited in scope to the very rich or at least the upper middle class, where men actually had careers 'worth' sacrificing for. Perhaps an attorney sees his work as meaningful and a source of advancement. I highly doubt a coal miner wanted to be in the mines longer because of career advancement. In fact, history is actually littered with the opposite -- working men demanding that they work less (see the labor movement).