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Comment by laumars | Hacker News Reader

It very much depends on how valuable your time with the kids is. How many days of holiday do you get and do you spend nearly all of the weekend playing with the kids?

I only have a 45min commute and I still only get to spend around 1 to 2 hours with my kids during the week. Some days I'm too tired to even make best use of my time with them. I'm currently looking for a new job in London which will put my commute just shy of "extreme commuting" knowing I might not see much - if any - of my kids during the week. But I can live with that because of the opportunities it creates for our family and the most valuable time I spend with them is the days I don't work anyway.

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It isn't about you, it is developmentally harmful to children to only ever see one of their parents. Even just seeing the father at breakfast and dinner for 10 minutes of chatting is magnitudes better. Even if your routine gives you extra days, the younger the children the more consistency is important. Having 3 days to see your children and 4 where you are missing from their lives can cause developmental complications even if it is done for noble causes.

The scientific data on this is at best controversial, there are plenty of studies claiming the effect is real, and a bunch of counters that the data is fundamentally flawed in complex ways, and doesn't appropriately account for a lot of other variables that can affect child development. It is also likely that high income offsets many of the most correlated negative effects, i.e. educational attainment.

My first career was in education, I worked with and saw many kids with a breadwinning parent who was absent most of the week, and they generally developed on the same spectrum as parents of equally present two parent households.

Anecdotally, my mother worked extremely long hours from her first child (I'm the youngest of my siblings by a decade) until I was a teenager, I routinely only saw her to say goodbye in the morning and on weekends. My siblings and I all ended up pretty far ahead on any developmental scale you choose, even though we basically only saw her on weekends.

My point was looking at it from the benefit of my kids. Weekdays my eldest wants me to run around the garden and play with him when I get home. Most weekdays I'm too knackered to really maximize my time with him which sometimes leaves him thinking I don't want to play with him.

I would gladly work longer hours but see less of him during the week if it means I get more days off because the time I spend with him will be more positive overall.

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