I get up at 5am to start getting the kids up and ready for school (high schoolers first, then elementary schoolers, then middle schoolers). Everyone is finally at school by 9:15am and I can head in for work. I get home around 6pm and get the little kids in bed by 8pm. 8-8:30pm is me time. Then I get ready for bed and am asleep by 9pm.
I can't imagine what a slow morning (or evening!) would even be like. I'd appreciate it if someone could add about 6 more hours to every day.
How do you do this? I would literally die. I can't live life so breathlessly with what sounds like no room for breaks. Are weekends even enough for you to recover?
Forget burning out of a job, I'd burn out on life.
Mad props to you. You've got a hell of a lot more discipline than I do. Your kids owe you.
I thought the same until I had kids. This sort of thing is part and parcel of having children, you really do learn not only to handle it, but to derive enjoyment from the situation overall.
If it helps any, my experience is that it's hardest on the day your child is born, but it gets progressively easier as the years go by and the children become increasingly self-sufficient.
> hardest on the day your child is born, but it gets progressively easier
A 3-year-old definitely takes a lot more continuous attention than a newborn (assuming the newborn is healthy, eats and sleeps okay, ...).
I was able to get some amount of work done while taking care of my first kid up to about age 1. In the two years since then, not so much (I just pray for conveniently timed naps). The second one is 6 months old, and is way easier to take care of right now.
If you just accept that you will be doing no independent creative work, then a 2+ year old isn’t too bad. They can start to “help” with routine chores, can walk around for themselves, can feed themselves, eventually stop needing diapers, etc. The work is not really hard per se. More like relentless.
Amen to this... 3.5 yr old and twin infants here... I haven't been able to concentrate in years. When I have attempted to produce anything of value (in job or hobby), it's been at the expense of my family...
Gotta love the "this project needs to get done, so who's going to be mad at me and how far can I push it?" feeling.
Sometimes friends or family members ask me why XYZ projects are half completed, and it's hard to properly find the wording for "I want my wife to still like me at the end of most days".
> A 3-year-old definitely takes a lot more continuous attention than a newborn
I think this varies enormously between kids, and to some extent between parenting styles as well. With my particular kids (5y and 3y) I can often spend a whole afternoon working on a project while they play individually or together; at younger ages the time commitment was far larger (nearly continuous).
Ha! My boy (almost 3) may be playing with his legos for whole afternoon, but the moment I peek in the general direction of my laptop, he wants to bang on the keyboard. Not any keyboard (tried that), but my keyboard specifically.
And when it comes to "it depends on the kid", oh dear. I try to practice stoicism whenever I remember about it, and logically I try to remember that I should be grateful for his fussiness and rebelliousness, since they give me occasions to practice my stoicism. But it sure does feel a bit like stockholm syndrome sometimes.
I think of our three year old as more or less self sufficient around the house at this point. Though I guess she will be four in two months.
My personal experience both from growing up and now raising three kids is that the kids will accept just as much independence as you are willing to give them.
Though they do get to be whiny sometimes. And I absolutely agree about the relentlessness of it all.
As a father, support of the mother takes lot more work when she's taking care of newborn than a 3 year old. As a mother, a newborn is certainly a lot more difficult, if not more physically taxing, than a 3 year old. Also, it takes months for the mother to recover from birth trauma.
This seems to vary from family to family / child to child.
I wouldn’t describe anything (after maybe the birth itself, which I can’t answer about) related to our 6 month old so far as “difficult”. It is only “physically taxing” insofar as it takes a lot of time every day, and alongside other obligations (in particular, the 3-year-old) that leaves everyone a bit sleep deprived. I would say the 3-year-old takes at least twice as much time and 5x as much effort. (The work is stuff like reading books together, building block towers, running around the playground, preparing food, etc. Nothing especially challenging by itself.)
My wife gets burned out pretty quickly when I leave her with both kids on the weekend for most of a day. She’s generally relieved to get back to the office on Monday and leave them to me. :-)
> If it helps any, my experience is that it's hardest on the day your child is born, but it gets progressively easier as the years go by and the children become increasingly self-sufficient.
Not sure what kind of beings you're raising but my experience with three kids is that it gets progressively harder until around 5 and stays stable until 13 and gets much harder from there.
This is the real life of folks with kids, so if you have coworkers with kids be a bit emphatic, now imagine them doing all this and having to worry because maybe one or more of them happen to be sick. If you have kids, either you become good with time management or life will beat the crap out of you.
I can’t tell if you’re trolling, but some people do believe this.
Society benefits from people having (a reasonable number of) children. Without them, humanity is done. Perhaps you think that’s for the best anyway, in which case I wonder why you’re doing anything at all.
What is a weekend? Honestly, weekends are super busy. I actually look forward to Mondays when I can go back to work and sit in front of a computer for much of the day.
I definitely couldn’t do it. After a few years at a corporate gig I’ve taken a new job with extremely flexible hours. I work 20 hours/4 days a week. Four five hour work days a week. It’s a HUGE difference.
It’s crazy to me that people are willing to give so much of their life to their employer. Is your life not worth more to you than that? You’ll sell decades of your life just for a nice paycheck? Aside from the fact that it’s mostly all that’s on offer WHY do people do this?
$100 an hour as an independent contractor developing farming robots at a place that feels very very good for me.
EDIT: I definitely got very lucky finding this position. I’m not suggesting everyone can just do this. But if people don’t refuse to work 40-50 hour work weeks, then that’s what employers will expect.
Even though people claim to work 40-50 hours many times they are spending half that time watching videos or messing around, this is a generalization of course.
It’s true. It’s frustrating because when I was hourly at Google I was extremely mindful to always be working when I was billing. Don’t bill for lunch. Don’t bill for long coffee breaks, etc. But when I billed 30-35 hour weeks it felt like my manager thought I wasn’t working hard enough. It’s like... I was probably working just as much as many full time employees who don’t count their hours. My managers manager told me they expect people to sometimes work 50-60 hours on big projects and I was like “nooope”. 20 hours a week suits me nicely.
I don't really know how it works in countries with better healthcare, but in the US you usually have to work fulltime to get any sort of benefits from your employer.
And benefits through the marketplace (not through an employer) are generally expensive for what they offer.
Someone in the US would need to make quite a bit to be able to do part time.
I’m in the US and I pay about $550 a month for health insurance. I’m a 34 year old white male. I factored the cost of insurance in to my bill rate when negotiating this position.
Meanwhile I'm over here having trouble getting up before 9am, I make up for it by spending time coding at night and on the weekends sometimes instead of paying video games. I figure if I bring something to work useful on Monday and say "hey! look at this cool thing I built over the weekend" people seem to leave me alone about coming to the office at 10/11am
I can understand getting the kids up for elementary school (especially if they're very young) but even when I was in 5th grade - I was getting up myself, eating breakfast I made, and walking to school by myself. My parents were frequently gone by the time I woke up because they had to be at work before I had to be at school. In middle school (6th - 8th) - it was no different for the rest except that I walked or biked across town. High school was a bit closer but I still walked or biked. Bus was an option but I skipped it because it took too long (I was the first stop on a long many stop route).
Obviously, if they need transport because you're 5+ miles away and there's no buses then I understand transporting them takes a lot of time. Regardless, shouldn't your children be somewhat self-sufficient by 10 years of age? You make it sound like you have to do everything for them for it to take 3+ hours every morning.
I'm a nightowl, and so are my kids. They will happily stay up to the early morning hours reading. Getting them out of bed in the mornings is a major pain in the butt. But, they will happily sleep in and miss the start of school if I'm not there.
But isn't learning how to get up in the morning a part of growing up...? (Same with going to bed on time) Couldn't it be taught just like cooking their own food and grooming themselves? I learned pretty quickly the consequences of tardiness by getting detention, lower grades, etc. Now - if they don't care one damn about school then I think that's a separate problem and them avoiding school by sleeping in is just highlighting a separate problem. If they have a really hard time getting up every morning and can't sleep at night then they could have insomnia and do well with at least some acknowledgement of it. I suffered with insomnia for over a decade. It was due to horrible amounts of stress.
Back to you: If they're always expecting their parents to wake them up every morning - how are they going to fare when (if?) they move out?
I was just like the kids the op described. Turns out, I never could make it to early college classes (so I got Cs in anything pre 9AM). I quickly learned to only sign up for later classes. Then, I entered the workforce as a software engineer, working for companies where I could head in late. Life’s worked out ok for me.
Turns out, you can live a perfectly happy life in which others don’t dictate your morning routine.
My kids are 5y and 3y, and the oldest has just started kindergarten. I'll wake them up if need be, and then if they're ready for breakfast on time they each get a penny. Boy do they want that penny!
With older kids I would imagine some sort of just "here's an alarm clock, getting up and ready for school is your job" would work, but I've never been a parent of older kids ;)
> I get up at 5am to start getting the kids up and ready for school
I don't mean to pry or be cheeky or sound judgemental, but how many kids do you have that it takes 3-4 hours to get them all breakfasted and ready for school? And is school far away or just a 10-15 min drive? What are you doing during that time?
I know kids can consume a lot of attention in the morning (especially the elementary lot), but that amount of time seems extraordinary.
I'm 52 and my folks were never up before 7:30am to get us fed and watered and ready for school and there was still plenty of time for banter, making packed lunches etc.
I actually went and read part of there post history and
"My wife lost the diamond in her wedding ring and we were talking about getting it replaced. I have two daughters in their early 20s and they were aghast at the idea..."
I did notice the plurals. If so then I probably get it. That said, High Schoolers, if in their teens do tend to sleep in longer (unless they're those annoying up-with-the-lark types), and can be a bit more self sufficient when trained properly :) so you could knock an hour off that schedule.
I'm curious about what you need to do to get your kids ready for school?
I'm not sure what age middle schoolers are (haven't heard of that term before), but shouldn't kids be capable of waking up, dressing, and going to school by themselves by they're hitting Gr.3 and up (and definitely by high school!).
This is baffling. After elementary school, my parents didn't have to think about me at all in the morning. During elementary school, my mom gave me a ride to school on the way to work, and if anybody needed waking up, it was her. A few times in middle school, I missed the bus.
I could, but I don't need to. My work is super chill. I show up when I want to and leave when I want to. We are encouraged to use the fitness facilities every day, so I usually spend an hour or so working out midday as well.
I can't imagine what a slow morning (or evening!) would even be like. I'd appreciate it if someone could add about 6 more hours to every day.