When I attend EA events, I usually list on my profile that I’m happy to talk with people who are considering whether to have kids. Some things several people have wanted to talk about:
My mother stayed home, and I’m having a hard time imagining feeling like an adequate parent if my partner and I both work full-time.
If your main picture of parenthood is from your parents’ generation, I think it can be helpful to get a picture of what parents closer to your own age are doing. One example I like is Vika’s updates (she’s a researcher at DeepMind, and also has two kids).
I knew I didn’t want to be a full-time parent for any long period of time. I enjoyed the baby stage more than I expected to with my first child, and spent 8 months home with her. (I had quit my social work job expecting to find a new one, but couldn’t find anything better and went back to the old job that they hadn’t filled yet.)
Especially for babies, a full day at daycare is a long time, and a lot of parents find it hard to send their babies to daycare. We did that for financial reasons for about a year but after that had in-home care (first from au pairs and later from nannies). Because I work from home, that’s worked well for me. It was easier to continue nursing my children into the toddler age because I could go upstairs and feed them during breaks (long after it was a nutrition thing — at this point it’s just a connection / cuddles thing). Unless I’m on a call, I see my big kids as soon as they walk in the door from school. If the kids get sick or hurt during the day, I’m steps away. It costs me some focus, but I also don’t commute.
This is one model. This isn’t practically or economically viable for everyone — for example, when you can’t or don’t want to work from home. But I do think it’s worth considering if the alternative is “don’t have kids because I won’t live up to my mother’s level of availability.”
At times, another adult like a daycare teacher or a nanny will have spend more waking time with your child than you will. I’ve been both a daycare worker and a parent, and it’s clear to me that longer hours together isn’t the same as the strength of the connection or attachment. It’s good when that relationship is deep and strong; my two-year-old asks excitedly on weekend mornings if she’s going to see our nanny today. But Jeff and I are are the ones who can most reliably understand what she’s saying, the ones she most wants when she’s sick, the ones whose genes and interactions shape her the most.
I guess it does sometimes happen that a child has a stronger relationship with their paid caregiver than with their parents, but I’ve personally never seen it.
I’m scared I won’t be that good at it.
In the early period when the job was “keep the baby alive”, I found it comforting to remember that I’m descended from a long line of mammals who kept their children alive. Of course there were lots of others who didn’t, but child mortality is really low now. I also periodically looked up child mortality statistics and statistics for things like losing an eye to remind myself that these are also really low.
Most people I talk to have already read Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, and largely buy that it’s not worth extensively managing your child’s life with the hope to cultivate them into a different person than their genetics are going to more or less do.
But the experience matters, and there are a lot of interactions between now and adulthood. You won’t be able to prioritize all the experiences a childhood might optimally have (stability, warmth, self-expression, independence, downtime, developing talents, friendship, safety). You have constraints like your own needs, work, and the needs of other people including your other children. But you can pick a few. I’m a fan of the approach in Emily Oster’s The Family Firm about the middle years of parenting: figure out a few things you particularly value, and base decisions (about education, activities, etc) around those.
I’m scared about childbirth / loss of bodily autonomy.
That’s legit.
People have a wide variety of experiences. For me, birth was on the easier side (but still hard).
A thing that surprised me was that there was satisfaction in using my body for a completely new use. I was used to my body being my home, and a kind of decorative object. It was kind of magical to be able to use it for a whole new purpose, like a superpower.
On the flip side, it can also be very difficult if pregnancy, birth, or breastfeeding isn’t going well and you feel frustrated with the mismatch between what you expected your body to do and what’s actually happening.
One moment that boggled me was looking at the tiny blood vessels under the skin of my first baby. I have no idea how to build a circulatory system with its tiny perfect network of vessels, but my cells do, and my cells built and nourished her cells. I found that amazing.
What surprised you?
1. At least in the US, childcare is very expensive. People talk about saving for a child’s college education, but the more immediate cost is childcare until they start school.
I thought I could raise children more cheaply than other people by getting clothes and other items secondhand or from friends, but that’s a small portion of the expenses. The largest expenses by far are housing and childcare (either actual payments, or lost income).
2. In many ways my parenting methods are pretty similar to what I expected, but eating was one where we did something different. I thought things like
- It’s silly that people heat up baby bottles; you should get the child used to cold or room-temperature milk so it’s easier.
- I won’t be one of these people who caters to picky eaters and ends up with a child who only eats 5 foods.
- The line my parents quoted from my childhood pediatrician: “No child ever starved in the presence of food.”
One of our children was a difficult eater — she didn’t gain weight well, and went through different stages of accepting or rejecting breastfeeding, formula in bottles, or breastmilk in bottles. At three months she would only nurse if I was lying down. (We made an odd scene when traveling because sometimes the only solution was to lie down on the grass somewhere to feed her.) She failed out of daycare at age 8 months because she wouldn’t take a bottle for anyone except Jeff and his sisters. When she was late to walk, the pediatrician’s guess was “not enough calories.”
It’s gotten better over time, as it became clear there was nothing medically wrong with her except pickiness and low appetite. It’s not all resolved — recently we realized she hadn’t gained weight in a long time, because there was almost nothing she was willing to eat for lunch either from the school lunches or brought from home. Low calorie intake doesn’t do anything to improve her mood or ability to focus.
So we’ve become those parents we didn’t expect to be, providing her with whatever variant on starch-and-dairy she’s currently willing to eat.
If we’d lived in a different culture, had a different pediatrician, or had a different approach, she would not literally have starved. I do have doubts about whether we served her wrong at times by catering to a narrow range of foods. But mostly my takeaway is “stuff turns out differently than you expected.”
3. I thought if the local school didn’t work out, maybe I’d somehow homeschool the children while working.
(My mother was a preschool teacher who also considered homeschooling, but once I was old enough to have opinions she concluded “We would have murdered each other.”)
When we tried to oversee our six-year-old’s education during remote schooling, it became clear she responded much better to other teachers than to her parents. So many tasks that she was well capable of doing became a power struggle. We just stopped trying to force her to compete assignments, and waited until she could go back to school in person.
4. Children of parents who are unusual in some way will regress toward the mean. Jeff and I were both nerdy kids who loved reading, and we were surprised when our kids took a long time to get into it despite no particular impediment. Our eight-year-old just got into graphic novels, which I once looked down on, but now I’m thrilled.