6 ms·

Everytime these come up, I am reminded how little time we have for extracurricular activities as parents (outside of things you'd do with the kids, e.g. hiking,

Everytime these come up, I am reminded how little time we have for extracurricular activities as parents (outside of things you'd do with the kids, e.g. hiking, swimming, etc) But raising children is an investment in itself and the years where the demand for attention is higher (0-5 especially) are short in comparison to the future time you have for yourself. I suppose you gain perspective and over those years an ability to optimize for time :)

xwdv 6y ago
The problem is when you have multiple children spaced over a few years, you get a decade or more of time eaten up.
- lb1lf 6y ago
  -My brother-in-law coined the phrase micro-holiday to keep himself sane when having kids - a micro-holiday is the time you have to yourself during a day. Most often, it occurs in the time span between closing the rear door after packing the young 'uns in and opening the driver's door after walking around your car.
jedberg 6y ago
> Everytime these come up, I am reminded how little time we have for extracurricular activities as parents This is interesting, because it's only a problem for non-rich people. Rich people solve this with nannies and babysitters and other home staff to take care of chores and child-rearing so they have more time for work or leisure activities. It really puts a point on the whole "everyone has 24 hours in a day, but not everyone's 24 hours are equal".
- whatshisface 6y ago
  Isn't paying someone else to raise your children... not raising children? It's like comparing a bank with actual gold in a vault and many expensive physical security measures with someone who owns a futures contract with no delivery.
  - VLM 6y ago
    I raised some kids and a unquantified "lot of" time is spent teaching them to gradually be independent adults by occasionally making sure they're safe while they do their own thing. An excellent analogy is I spent some time in a minor leadership position in a boy scout troop and beyond a certain age the kids do all the work, the adults are there to explain "and that's why the wood lot area is fenced off", "and that is the correct archery range safety procedure", "and no that is not a safe way to maintain a campfire" and so on and so forth. As the actual troop leader often said, if the adults are sweating something is not being done correctly; the kids should be doing all the work and the adults are mere safety advisor guests of the kids. Some kids in some subcultures are able to safely with minimal adult supervision, for example, whittle wood sticks into smaller theoretically artistic sticks at age 8 whereas others STILL cannot responsibly whittle at age 24. I spent a lot of time as a dad parenting at a laptop on the deck occasionally saying "no, there's a buried gas line there, dig for fossils over there" and the kids would make their own "discoveries" underground. Its kinda like being in management where some folks (or kids) need near hand-over-hand supervision sometimes, yet others you just kinda check on every day or so. Ideally by the time the kids are adults (16, 18, 21, ..., ?) the parents shouldn't be doing much other than occasional management checkins and providing of advice. There's a big difference between leading and enabling the kids while knowing exactly what they're doing in a safety sense, vs not being involved at all. For example I know next to nothing about welding (well, I know a little but I'm no certified nuclear boiler welder...) so I was quite happy to have one of the boy scout dads who's all certified up in welding teach that badge "in my place". He teaches older apprentices how to weld gas pipelines so he's certainly qualified to teach... All I really did as his partner was make sure everyone stayed hydrated LOL. For little kids a lot of parenting is you just need a parent figure at the park to occasionally say "no" and redirect. "Yeah I see the league has a ball game at the diamond so you can't play there, but no you're not playing baseball in the busiest street in the city get back on the grass now" A better analogy is something like you're claiming if a bank hires a security manager who enforces security policies then the bank is not providing actual "uniformed dude standing at attention" security. Yet some kind of manager role may be the most important time/money the bank can spend WRT security... When they're younger toddlers they need a lot of parenting until they discover lego or whatever, but that's a rather short phase in their lives.
- luxurytent 6y ago
  > It really puts a point on the whole "everyone has 24 hours in a day, but not everyone's 24 hours are equal". Great point. Further driven by the pandemic
  - jedberg 6y ago
    Funny you mention that. Because of the pandemic, a lot of people had to drop their in home help. Only the richest of the rich, who had in-home help that lives with them, were able to keep using in-home help.
    - maxerickson 6y ago
      Also people who decided not to worry about the consequences of having someone coming in and out of their home. Seems to be lots of them really.
      - laumars 6y ago
        In the U.K. the government guidelines have been that they’re still allowed to work. And given the kind of contracts many of them are on, if they don’t come in they don’t get paid. So it really puts added pressure on everyone to work.
nyxtom 6y ago
Investment indeed! I think it all depends on how you define what amounts to a “good day” Maybe it means you have put in some meaningful work into having quality time with your kids, or teaching them something new, reading a book to them, or cooking with them and/or your spouse. Side note I can definitely empathize with the lack of time for extracurricular. For our family it is generally something we do together - which tends to fill multiple “cups”. Outside of that my spouse and I trade off for time to do these type of things for ourselves.

xwdv 6y ago

The problem is when you have multiple children spaced over a few years, you get a decade or more of time eaten up.

lb1lf 6y ago
-My brother-in-law coined the phrase micro-holiday to keep himself sane when having kids - a micro-holiday is the time you have to yourself during a day. Most often, it occurs in the time span between closing the rear door after packing the young 'uns in and opening the driver's door after walking around your car.

jedberg 6y ago

> Everytime these come up, I am reminded how little time we have for extracurricular activities as parents This is interesting, because it's only a problem for non-rich people. Rich people solve this with nannies and babysitters and other home staff to take care of chores and child-rearing so they have more time for work or leisure activities. It really puts a point on the whole "everyone has 24 hours in a day, but not everyone's 24 hours are equal".

whatshisface 6y ago
Isn't paying someone else to raise your children... not raising children? It's like comparing a bank with actual gold in a vault and many expensive physical security measures with someone who owns a futures contract with no delivery.
- VLM 6y ago
  I raised some kids and a unquantified "lot of" time is spent teaching them to gradually be independent adults by occasionally making sure they're safe while they do their own thing. An excellent analogy is I spent some time in a minor leadership position in a boy scout troop and beyond a certain age the kids do all the work, the adults are there to explain "and that's why the wood lot area is fenced off", "and that is the correct archery range safety procedure", "and no that is not a safe way to maintain a campfire" and so on and so forth. As the actual troop leader often said, if the adults are sweating something is not being done correctly; the kids should be doing all the work and the adults are mere safety advisor guests of the kids. Some kids in some subcultures are able to safely with minimal adult supervision, for example, whittle wood sticks into smaller theoretically artistic sticks at age 8 whereas others STILL cannot responsibly whittle at age 24. I spent a lot of time as a dad parenting at a laptop on the deck occasionally saying "no, there's a buried gas line there, dig for fossils over there" and the kids would make their own "discoveries" underground. Its kinda like being in management where some folks (or kids) need near hand-over-hand supervision sometimes, yet others you just kinda check on every day or so. Ideally by the time the kids are adults (16, 18, 21, ..., ?) the parents shouldn't be doing much other than occasional management checkins and providing of advice. There's a big difference between leading and enabling the kids while knowing exactly what they're doing in a safety sense, vs not being involved at all. For example I know next to nothing about welding (well, I know a little but I'm no certified nuclear boiler welder...) so I was quite happy to have one of the boy scout dads who's all certified up in welding teach that badge "in my place". He teaches older apprentices how to weld gas pipelines so he's certainly qualified to teach... All I really did as his partner was make sure everyone stayed hydrated LOL. For little kids a lot of parenting is you just need a parent figure at the park to occasionally say "no" and redirect. "Yeah I see the league has a ball game at the diamond so you can't play there, but no you're not playing baseball in the busiest street in the city get back on the grass now" A better analogy is something like you're claiming if a bank hires a security manager who enforces security policies then the bank is not providing actual "uniformed dude standing at attention" security. Yet some kind of manager role may be the most important time/money the bank can spend WRT security... When they're younger toddlers they need a lot of parenting until they discover lego or whatever, but that's a rather short phase in their lives.
luxurytent 6y ago
> It really puts a point on the whole "everyone has 24 hours in a day, but not everyone's 24 hours are equal". Great point. Further driven by the pandemic
- jedberg 6y ago
  Funny you mention that. Because of the pandemic, a lot of people had to drop their in home help. Only the richest of the rich, who had in-home help that lives with them, were able to keep using in-home help.
  - maxerickson 6y ago
    Also people who decided not to worry about the consequences of having someone coming in and out of their home. Seems to be lots of them really.
    - laumars 6y ago
      In the U.K. the government guidelines have been that they’re still allowed to work. And given the kind of contracts many of them are on, if they don’t come in they don’t get paid. So it really puts added pressure on everyone to work.

nyxtom 6y ago

Investment indeed! I think it all depends on how you define what amounts to a “good day” Maybe it means you have put in some meaningful work into having quality time with your kids, or teaching them something new, reading a book to them, or cooking with them and/or your spouse. Side note I can definitely empathize with the lack of time for extracurricular. For our family it is generally something we do together - which tends to fill multiple “cups”. Outside of that my spouse and I trade off for time to do these type of things for ourselves.