Comment by intergalplan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by intergalplan | Hacker News Reader

> I remember chatting with a woman at a work event one night and asking if she needed to go home soon because of her kids. She replied, “No, I see my kids on weekends.” I couldn’t help but cringe thinking about what it would be like to only see my son on weekends. It seemed horrible!

If you work 9-5 (really 8-5 most places) this is basically true anyway. Most of the time you get with them on weekdays may have some quality just for existing, but is really pretty poor. Rush around in the morning, send them off to wherever, get back home at 5:30 or later just in time to throw together or eat dinner (depending on whether your spouse stays home), then bed-time routine, or they run off and do their own thing for an hour or two (friends, bike riding because god knows they don't get enough time outside at school for e.g. basic eye health, homework, whatever) while you try to get the house in something resembling order for the next day, then bedtime routine.

Any way you slice it, weekday time-with-kids for someone with a normal job is pretty crap. If you're a super-parent you might be able to make some of it a little better or more valuable. Finding maybe an hour a couple nights a week is doable, especially if you shift all your clean-up into your "alone time" and basically live kids, cleaning, and work all your waking weekday hours (ugh, no).

If you're in the founder set and see loss of weekday time as a huge sacrifice, then I'd guess you're paying someone to handle a bunch of the bullshit in your life. At least regular cleaners and maybe you don't do much of your own cooking, and possibly you have one of those kid-chauffeur services. Ordinary working people don't spend a ton of quality time with their kids during the week. Again, seeing them at all may have some value, but you're not gonna hang out undistracted by other life-junk for any serious length of time.

Weekends? That's where the good times are. Morning and evening weekday hours are just too eaten up with trying to get by. About the best you get is a smooth routine that's at least not a negative experience for all concerned.

> Ordinary working people don't spend a ton of quality time with their kids during the week.

Quality time was a invention of the in-retrospect rather entitled parents of the 1970s who justified their neglect with the idea of "well I don't spend much time with my son but when I do it's quality time!".

The truth is kids, particularly young kids just want time. They want to see you around and have you take a active role in their lives. You can be around and clean the house and cook dinner at the same time, have the child help. Kids would much rather have a parent who sits on the couch to watch TV with them for a half hour every night then one that takes them to Disneyland one Saturday a month.

EDIT - Jerry Seinfeld on the topic: “I’m a believer in the ordinary and the mundane. These guys that talk about ‘quality time’ — I always find that a little sad when they say, ‘We have quality time.’ I don’t want quality time. I want the garbage time. That’s what I like. You just see them in their room reading a comic book and you get to kind of watch that for a minute, or [having] a bowl of Cheerios at 11 o’clock at night when they’re not even supposed to be up. The garbage, that’s what I love.”

I could just as easily say that quality time is actually a useful metric and as a kid I definitely would've preferred a parent who spends more time with me on the weekends and wasn't "just around". Maybe I could bring a quote from a comedian too. I don't see what any of that would bring to the conversation though.

Research has indicated that there is an immersive quality to just "being there". Part of a relationship is rapport - hard to build that when you're only there 2 days of the week - the bonding will go to the actual caregiver.

Taking your kid to school / after-school activities allows for bonding as well.

What research?

You could just as easily say that but it wouldn't be equally plausible.

It would be equally as sourced, though.

Kids of even really young ages are more capable than we give them credit for. A four year old is perfectly capable of helping prep dinner, provided you line up the right tasks. ("Tear up this lettuce, get 5 forks out, ...."). By six years old, a child should easily be comfortable handling more complex tasks like emptying/loading dishes, cutting up ingredients, kneading dough, or measuring out items from a recipe. (Provided they can be loosely measured.)

My parents kicked me out of the kitchen when I cooked, and I got really good at playing videogames to pass the time but today I have zero relationship with either parent. Cooking and doing chores with my kid is incredibly rewarding time, and we both seem to get a lot out of it.

If they're going to have screen time, you can make it a show that they are fully engaged with, but you watch while cooking/cleaning/etc so you can share the experience/discussion with them. My kids got very keen on the survival show Alone which prompts loads of conversations about survival choices, gear, building, the wild environment, etc. And it's not so fast paced that you can't keep up with the season's stories while hanging washing or cooking.

> [...] get back home at 5:30 or later just in time to throw together or eat dinner [...]

I generally get what you're saying, but the difference between

a) sharing dinner with your kids, putting them to bed, and reading them a bed-time story, and

b) not seeing them at all in the evening,

is huge.

Not only that, but kids notice it when you're not there, and they grow to resent you for it regardless of what your explanation for being gone is. This can either be a physical absence or an emotional absence.

When I was a kid, my dad went through a religious conversion. My mom, remaining a good Catholic, stayed with him regardless of his life choices. One morning in a fit of rage, she told an 8 year old me "if you go to church with him then I'm not your momma anymore."

Now, she didn't mean it. She has always been more loving and caring than I had any right to. But the words "I love you" were absent from her vocabulary. With an adult's perspective, I see that it's how my grandparents were in their personal relationships with their kids, too, although my grandmother had a great deal of warmth and love to express to us.

It wasn't until I was in a van with my sisters and my dad and we got into a roll over accident that I heard those words again from my mom. Covered from head to doe with bandaids and bandages and in my bed, she came by to comfort me and I shrank away. She asked me if I was alright, and if I needed her to stay with me that night, but then she asked "do you think I don't love you?"

To which I replied: "That's what you told me when I was sitting at the kitchen table getting ready for church." She had forgotten about the moment, because she was one who made ultimatums to kids whenever she had lost her patience. I never did. And so from 8 to 12, I spent my childhood believing that my dad was crazy and my mom didn't love me.

It matters. It affected my early childhood. I was a straight C student with a penchant for being incredibly disorganized and distracted. I also read over 400 books my 3rd grade year because it was my escape from reality.

Today, I know my mom would have done anything for me, but she had to she tell me that she loved me, first.

>Any way you slice it, weekday time-with-kids for someone with a normal job is pretty crap.

It's not crap for the kids, and that's all that's important.

Right, being there at all has some value, but both the quantity and quality of actual time with them, rather than just near them but entirely distracted by other life-crap, isn't high.

I'm just saying that "I mostly see them on weekends" isn't that drastic, IMO (and I suspect it was a bit of an exaggeration anyway). Weekends represent like 80-90% of the time that I'm not just badgering my kids to get stuff done so their room's clean / we aren't late / they don't look like we don't provide them real clothes / they don't entirely wreck the house / they don't get hurt. The hours during the weekday are high-friction and low-freedom because they fall around transitions.

[EDIT] of course, again, having a large amount of money can enable one to buy one's way to much higher-quality weekday time with kids, that may be a factor. If you don't clean or tidy (much), if you don't have to cook to provide healthy food, if the kids have an actual nanny(!)—if any of that's true, then I'm sure the character of that time at least can be very different, if you don't instead use that extra liberty for your own non-kid purposes.

> badgering my kids to get stuff done so their room's clean / we aren't late / they don't look like we don't provide them real clothes / they don't entirely wreck the house / they don't get hurt

AKA, parenting. Not "having fun with my kids". The quality to which you refer is based on how much you benefit from the time, not how much they do.

Children need consistency and reliability from their parents. It becomes even more apparent as they get older- they will not be able to take risks in their lives if they have been looking over their shoulders their whole lives trying to adapt to a capricious world of 'this week Mommy wants to be X, and Daddy's moving to be closer to his new girlfriend'. There is no amount of 'quality' you can add to a couple of afternoons that will replace the work done of being there day in, day out. It has nothing to do with quality of food or cleanliness of the bathroom.

It's not crap for parents, either. I read my kids stories every night before bedtime. It was one of the highlights of my day for almost two decades. We finally stalled out 100 pages from the end of Diary of Anne Frank when the last one was 13. It's not just Cat in the Hat. ;)

I have fond childhood memories of my dad on weekday evenings: card games; scrabble; quick swims in the ocean; sneaking out of bed if he made nachos late at night.

Of course I have weekend memories too (more of the above, plus also trips/camping/whatever). But they actually stand out less in my memory than the almost-habitual kind of weeknight stuff.

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