Make that 6 months into two years and the sleep time to an average of 5 - 5.5 hours a night and you have parenthood of a crybaby.
You have to add in a boss who spends 2/3rd of the time you're home screaming at you to the mix.
You have to add in a boss who spends 2/3rd of the time you're home screaming at you to the mix.
And crapping their pants while staring at you to show you who's really the boss.
A year later, both children are still extremely demanding. It's all about setting limits and knowing when to bend them, like last night when my daughter finally figured out how to wake herself up in the middle of the night to go poop. That's one of the rare sleepless nights that's worth it.
Otherwise, knowing how you sleep is also important. I fumble around in the dark, use extremely dim lights, and have no problem letting my kids sleep with me for an hour or two. A full night's sleep is vital. I'm really good at falling asleep after giving a bottle because I make them before going to bed, turn on no lights, and keep my eyes closed once I'm in the rocking chair.
> You have to add in a boss who spends 2/3rd of the time you're home screaming at you to the mix.
You really need to learn modern discipline techniques. We use 1-2-3 magic. When our toddler screams at us, it's usually an immediate "ONE!" If it's really bad, there's a time out with no counting. It really works.
I even help my wife learn by shouting "ONE!" "TWO!" ... when I'm out of the room and hear my toddler get tough. The 1-2-3 magic technique requires a lot of disciple to not get sucked into a toddler argument.
See https://www.amazon.com/1-2-3-Magic-Effective-Discipline-Chil...
Your extrapolating from your experience with 2 children. Children are difficult and often respond differently to the same techniques. However if you wanted to show that a particular technique is superior in the majority of cases, some data would be useful.
In general, the workload of parenting is underestimated. This is somewhat problematic in the tech industry (male dominated) when the majority of childcare is still performed by women [1]. It leads to a lack of understanding and devalues childcare work.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/jul/05/childca...
It comes off as judgemental ("you're doing it wrong", "you really need to learn to"), and you're generalizing your own children's behavior as if it applied to every child.
Every child is different, their sleep cycles, reactivity, personalities, etc.
I'm not even going to comment on the 1-2-3-timeout technique apart from saying I think it's disrespectful towards children; it is basically conditioning them to fear certain words you say and to force them to do something. Isolating them when they "misbehave".
You're free to raise your children how you want, but perhaps be mindful of how you.. "give advice"
It's why parenting advice is so common. No one can evaluate parenting skills and exceptional parenting and good parenting don't have that much of a difference between them.
Though I guess poor parenting can be pretty bad with abuse and whatnot, so let's say we exclude the malicious things.
Look at this guy. He saw some limited effect size with a sample size of two and decided he's a guru.
I get what you are saying, but this is not a universal truth. Life gets complicated.
Regardless, children are optional, full stop. There are certainly reasons why people who don't plan to have kids end up having them anyway, but that doesn't change the fact that it's an optional activity.
Except if you don't have a kid, you have better chances of staying well and healthy. That's the whole point. That's what is meant with parenthood being optional and work not.
> And for society to continue to function having children is actually not optional.
With the rate at which world population is increasing[1], I think the opposite is true. It wasn't that long ago that we reached a world population of 7 billion. Now, we're apparently more than halfway to 8 billion. How in the world can the earth support so many of us?
Yesterday, there was a post here that talked about the absolutely brutal conditions that we're raising livestock in[2]. We wouldn't need to be so god damn efficient in working livestock if we didn't have so many mouths to feed.
Fun Fact I learned from that link: Supposedly, we'll be reaching our first trillion sometime between 2050 and 2060. That's actually pretty close.
> Especially with global warming and everything.
Yes, you're also right about that. I just didn't want to throw global warming into the mix.
[1] https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/POP/TOT/
Second, ever single time someone has said that overpopulation was going to be the end of us, they've been wrong. To quote Wikipedia, which go so far back as Ancient Carthage and Greece:
Concern about overpopulation is an ancient topic. Tertullian was a resident of the city of Carthage in the second century CE, when the population of the world was about 190 million (only 3–4% of what it is today). He notably said: "What most frequently meets our view (and occasions complaint) is our teeming population. Our numbers are burdensome to the world, which can hardly support us.... In very deed, pestilence, and famine, and wars, and earthquakes have to be regarded as a remedy for nations, as the means of pruning the luxuriance of the human race." Before that, Plato, Aristotle and others broached the topic as well. [1]
Finally, to answer your question of "How can the world support so many of us?", I would like to point at that with every new person born, that is a new person thinking of scientific advancements that can be made, producing stuff for others, for their kids, etc.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_overpopulation#History_o...
Smarts for scienfic advancement is not evenly spread across global populations.
It's possible to have population growth while the high IQ fraction shrinks. All evidence says this is the current state of the earth.
Each group is improving but mix of groups is changing.
High IQ populations have low fertility vs low IQ groups having high. South Korea with IQ 106 has TRF of 1.17. Nigeria IQ 84 has TRF of 5.53.
A gain of IQs within groups will be dwarfed by the change between groups.
If you think IQ tests are bogus we can use other metrics, eg Europe had 2x the population of Sub Saharan Africa in 1950, now Africa is bigger but has produced no hard science Nobel prizes and no new technology (like South Korea's smartphones)
However, it is changing, as the world develops, fewer people are born and within a century our population growth will flatten and our global population will even decline to the 2000's level.
Children should not be made just to keep society going. That's quite a selfish reason to have a child, to be honest.
Having kids is not essential to society. Actually, society would be better off if we just maintained our current population level and learned to live with the resources at hand instead or ever expanding and depleting the ocean, the underground and the forests until there is nothing left.
If you consider having kids as an individual sacrifice, then maybe you are having kids for the wrong reasons.
People should not be forced to have kids to perpetuate society or because its good for the economy or because the government( of any country) says we should.
Could you please explain what happens in, say, 80 years (or so) if we collectively stopped having kids? The answer is this: human beings cease to exist. Now, that may be something you view as a goal to achieve, and in the absolutely trivial (and meaningless) sense that everything (including our existence as a species) is optional you'd have a point. Beyond that trivial and meaningless sense, however, you're simply arguing about how many children we should have.
But most people's desire to have children center around selfish things, like continuing their family line, or because their parents want grandkids, or because "that's just what you do to get to the next life stage", or because their religion pushes them to, or "John and Jane have such a beautiful child and I want one too", or because they want a small version of themselves that will love them, or truly foolish things like believing a child will save a bad marriage.
And I'm not even saying selfish acts are bad! People do selfish things all the time, and as long as those things don't harm anyone else, so what? But I wish people would give more thought to the social, financial, physical, emotional, and mental implications of having a child before doing so, rather than just taking it as a given that it's what they're supposed to do.
At least there are some people who have kids because they genuinely want to nurture, educate, and mentor a new human, but I'd be hard pressed to find someone who'd say "to ensure the future of humanity" is one of their top reasons for having children.
What you describe might be considered selfless, most parents have kids for fairly selfish reasons. There's (usually) nothing wrong with that, of course, but let's not try to paint a rosy picture that doesn't exist.
You must live in a very different world than most people do if that's the norm among your peer group.
> And for society to continue to function having children is actually not optional.
At a macro level, sure (though a slow, steady reduction in population over the next few generations might do the planet some good), but on the individual level, it's absolutely optional.
A high percentage of children are not planned. They are a natural consequence of sex, which Mother Nature sneakily designed to be desirable in its own right, whether people wanted babies or not.
Most of human sexual morality seems to be rooted in this inconvenient, annoying fact of life.