9 ms·

"One great thing about having small children is that they make you spend time on things that matter: them. They grab your sleeve as you're staring at your phone

by jdkee 4y ago

"One great thing about having small children is that they make you spend time on things that matter: them. They grab your sleeve as you're staring at your phone and say "will you play with me?" And odds are that is in fact the bullshit-minimizing option." This. He is right about this.

tropicalbeach 4y ago
I mean most of the time there running around breaking things and being loud wouldn't say that's great. It's better when there older.
- hackernewds 4y ago
  You will miss these interactions as they outgrow you. No one looks back at their time when their kids were little, to miss that didn't tap more in their screen
  - dinosaurdynasty 4y ago
    There are way more things to do than "raise kids" and "tap on screen"
- Ma8ee 4y ago
  That mostly happens when they feel they don't get enough attention from you. Sometimes you really are busy with something else, like trying to prepare food for them or answering messages from your pestering boss. But often it is because you are trying to be clever at HN instead of giving them your undivided attention.
  - isoprophlex 4y ago
    Or when they're hungry. Or over-stimulated, under-stimulated, tired, anxious over something that happened at school, hyped for the holiday season. Guilt-tripping someone who shares that they're not always having a good time as a parent is not cool. Your comment is over-generalizing, and IMO quite mean.
    - Nomentatus 4y ago
      Yet there is a very large societal problem here worth pointing at. Parental time with children in this society is bizarrely low by anthropological standards. You can get a look at the stark difference by reading the book "The Old Way," about a nomadic society.
      - taneq 4y ago
        I don't think parental time is that much lower, but 'village time' is almost nonexistent outside of school.
      - Viliam1234 4y ago
        I suppose a typical nomadic society is not like "mother and father with kids, the nearest relative a few miles away". Childcare is easier when you have a group of adults taking care of a group of kids. And of course, parents have the primary responsibility, but it is not a 24 hour duty.
        Nomentatus 4y ago
        That counts, but parents spend most of their time with their kids. Moms gather and the kids come along and help to an extent. If you can take your children to work and interact with them while you're working, that's huge. The upshot is that we have to do everything we can to give our children more of our time; we aren't a desperately poor society, we can do more. We have wandered far from our "species essence" and now wonder why so much is going wrong.
      - watwut 4y ago
        Traditional life involved kids being unsupervised at ages we find it unacceptable now (4 years old) and kids being in packed unsupervised for hours.
        Nomentatus 4y ago
        'Tis true. Even sixty years ago, kids (7 or 8 and older) walked long distances in cities to school and then hung out in packs for hours 'till the streetlights came on. Not every day but a lot. This does seem to be a pretty good (substantial) substitute for parental supervision/contact; and may well be normal for nomads some of the time (in high visibility terrain only lone predators could hide.)
  - taneq 4y ago
    I'm curious just how many hours of undivided attention per day you think you have to give? Because most small children will drain you entirely dry within a week, and you have half a decade or more of that to deal with.
ramraj07 4y ago
This may be true, but this is not the majority of your life - unless you’re on some mission to repopulate the earth, you’ll have maybe 8-10 years when you have children who aren’t babies who want to play with you. Apparently people become magically wise during those years and then quickly forget these wisdom after. If that’s not true then you should be seeing a glut of extremely wise people who’ve been “corrected” by their child raising experience decades ago. The reality is, kids trigger happiness centers in our lizard brains. Enjoy the short time with them, but let’s not fool ourselves that children fundamentally change your life view in any way. If anything the person you should be working to prioritize is your partner, who if you do it right will be with you fairly unchanged all your life. Given the divorce rates though, most people don’t seem to have gotten that memo however.
- toomuchtodo 4y ago
  +1 based on (n=1) having two kids and being married 15 years. Being with your kids is a flash in the pan compared to decades with a partner. Don’t neglect your kids, but the evidence is strong they’re mostly on rails you don’t control and as long as you care, that’s most of where the effort needs to be. Finding good partners is hard. Keeping them is work. Losing them can be catastrophic (emotionally, logistically, financially) and leave you in a place it can be difficult to come back from. Operate accordingly.
- xyzelement 4y ago
  I think you misunderstood the point. Most of the time, the things that are screaming for our attention are not the truly important things, so it's easy to get distracted and waste time. When we have little kids, they happen to be both important and screaming for our attention, which makes it much easier for us to focus on what's important. That's the point he was making. I actually observed this in my life a week ago. We just moved our toddler from the crib to a bed and he's been waking up in the middle of the night asking for attention. When this happened, my first instinct was like "ugh. I have to go lay down w him rather than doing advent of code". Then I realized that laying down w my 2 year old is so much cooler and meaningful than anything else I could be doing w that time. I heard the phrase sometimes "you don't have to do this, you get to do this". That's what I think the quote is about.
thenoblesunfish 4y ago
Be careful about the rosy picture he's painting for himself and others here. When he wrote this he was probably already rich and into the pontification phase of his career. I'm going to go ahead and bet had plenty of ways to escape his kids when desired, plenty of help with childcare, etc. If you are really just looking at your phone while you're at home, great, but if you are (like many people here , I'd guess) interested in doing creative or focus-intensive, non-kid things while at home, those things are seriously going to suffer when you have kids.
fortuna86 4y ago
Is being a caretaker for a small human the most important thing in life? Or is this some kind of default no one questions.
- parthianshotgun 4y ago
  See, antinatalism for probably a first principles reproach to the standard belief.

by jdkee 4y ago

tropicalbeach 4y ago

I mean most of the time there running around breaking things and being loud wouldn't say that's great. It's better when there older.

hackernewds 4y ago
You will miss these interactions as they outgrow you. No one looks back at their time when their kids were little, to miss that didn't tap more in their screen
- dinosaurdynasty 4y ago
  There are way more things to do than "raise kids" and "tap on screen"
Ma8ee 4y ago
That mostly happens when they feel they don't get enough attention from you. Sometimes you really are busy with something else, like trying to prepare food for them or answering messages from your pestering boss. But often it is because you are trying to be clever at HN instead of giving them your undivided attention.
- isoprophlex 4y ago
  Or when they're hungry. Or over-stimulated, under-stimulated, tired, anxious over something that happened at school, hyped for the holiday season. Guilt-tripping someone who shares that they're not always having a good time as a parent is not cool. Your comment is over-generalizing, and IMO quite mean.
  - Nomentatus 4y ago
    Yet there is a very large societal problem here worth pointing at. Parental time with children in this society is bizarrely low by anthropological standards. You can get a look at the stark difference by reading the book "The Old Way," about a nomadic society.
    - taneq 4y ago
      I don't think parental time is that much lower, but 'village time' is almost nonexistent outside of school.
    - Viliam1234 4y ago
      I suppose a typical nomadic society is not like "mother and father with kids, the nearest relative a few miles away". Childcare is easier when you have a group of adults taking care of a group of kids. And of course, parents have the primary responsibility, but it is not a 24 hour duty.
      - Nomentatus 4y ago
        That counts, but parents spend most of their time with their kids. Moms gather and the kids come along and help to an extent. If you can take your children to work and interact with them while you're working, that's huge. The upshot is that we have to do everything we can to give our children more of our time; we aren't a desperately poor society, we can do more. We have wandered far from our "species essence" and now wonder why so much is going wrong.
    - watwut 4y ago
      Traditional life involved kids being unsupervised at ages we find it unacceptable now (4 years old) and kids being in packed unsupervised for hours.
      - Nomentatus 4y ago
        'Tis true. Even sixty years ago, kids (7 or 8 and older) walked long distances in cities to school and then hung out in packs for hours 'till the streetlights came on. Not every day but a lot. This does seem to be a pretty good (substantial) substitute for parental supervision/contact; and may well be normal for nomads some of the time (in high visibility terrain only lone predators could hide.)
- taneq 4y ago
  I'm curious just how many hours of undivided attention per day you think you have to give? Because most small children will drain you entirely dry within a week, and you have half a decade or more of that to deal with.

ramraj07 4y ago

This may be true, but this is not the majority of your life - unless you’re on some mission to repopulate the earth, you’ll have maybe 8-10 years when you have children who aren’t babies who want to play with you. Apparently people become magically wise during those years and then quickly forget these wisdom after. If that’s not true then you should be seeing a glut of extremely wise people who’ve been “corrected” by their child raising experience decades ago. The reality is, kids trigger happiness centers in our lizard brains. Enjoy the short time with them, but let’s not fool ourselves that children fundamentally change your life view in any way. If anything the person you should be working to prioritize is your partner, who if you do it right will be with you fairly unchanged all your life. Given the divorce rates though, most people don’t seem to have gotten that memo however.

toomuchtodo 4y ago
+1 based on (n=1) having two kids and being married 15 years. Being with your kids is a flash in the pan compared to decades with a partner. Don’t neglect your kids, but the evidence is strong they’re mostly on rails you don’t control and as long as you care, that’s most of where the effort needs to be. Finding good partners is hard. Keeping them is work. Losing them can be catastrophic (emotionally, logistically, financially) and leave you in a place it can be difficult to come back from. Operate accordingly.
xyzelement 4y ago
I think you misunderstood the point. Most of the time, the things that are screaming for our attention are not the truly important things, so it's easy to get distracted and waste time. When we have little kids, they happen to be both important and screaming for our attention, which makes it much easier for us to focus on what's important. That's the point he was making. I actually observed this in my life a week ago. We just moved our toddler from the crib to a bed and he's been waking up in the middle of the night asking for attention. When this happened, my first instinct was like "ugh. I have to go lay down w him rather than doing advent of code". Then I realized that laying down w my 2 year old is so much cooler and meaningful than anything else I could be doing w that time. I heard the phrase sometimes "you don't have to do this, you get to do this". That's what I think the quote is about.

thenoblesunfish 4y ago

Be careful about the rosy picture he's painting for himself and others here. When he wrote this he was probably already rich and into the pontification phase of his career. I'm going to go ahead and bet had plenty of ways to escape his kids when desired, plenty of help with childcare, etc. If you are really just looking at your phone while you're at home, great, but if you are (like many people here , I'd guess) interested in doing creative or focus-intensive, non-kid things while at home, those things are seriously going to suffer when you have kids.

fortuna86 4y ago

Is being a caretaker for a small human the most important thing in life? Or is this some kind of default no one questions.

parthianshotgun 4y ago
See, antinatalism for probably a first principles reproach to the standard belief.