How are families coping? In my friend group:

- Homeschooling at-home parents take on a side hustle (teach piano lessons, mobile notary, dog sitting)

- Buy a side of beef

- Buy beans in bulk (25# boxes)

- Grow a small garden for salad greens and herbs

- Don’t eat out

- No extracurriculars that cost money

- Use the library whenever possible

- Vacations are now camping with 2nd hand gear

- In general, buy used. As a result, prices in 2nd hand market are also inflated.

Engaging with small children is an actual skill set. - Play dates have been mentioned, and those are great ideas. - Go for a walk or a hike. Start small, take a water bottle. See if you can go longer next time. Have a theme: can we find a toad, shelf fungus, beetle, duck…? - Take advantage of library story time, check all local libraries - Join the local pool, there is nothing that will cheer up a grumpy 4 year old like swimming, and they sleep well afterward - Bath time can be any time and an hour long if they are having fun - Read picture books from the library and take them back when you’re tired of them - Give them simple tasks like tearing lettuce for dinner, folding wash cloths and towels, putting away books or toys when you’re done with them. 4 year olds are eager to help because that makes them feel big. - Ride the bus for a loop and talk about what you see - Do a collaborative drawing (look at artful parent website) - Learn a song with motions. Invent new words and motions for it. - Playdough - Watercolors - Kick and throw balls - Enormous cardboard box with markers and dollar store stickers - Puzzles - Puppets (read the bio of Mr. Rogers for inspiration) - Silly music dance party

Hopefully you will start a virtuous cycle of positive and fun interactions, so you aren’t so fatigued by the end of the day. In 2011, I left my software engineering career to be a stay at home, homeschooling mom to (now) 4 kids. I’m old too.

We are big fans of Bedtime Math: https://bedtimemath.org/

Part time work for developers would also help women who don’t want to work full time when they have small children. If I had a part time option when my children were small, I would have embraced it. My career was thriving, but there was no “step back” option for me. If you want more women in tech, recognize that the first shift of daycare & school prep, the second shift of work, and the third shift of cooking, cleaning, and caring, is exhausting and unpleasant, even when both parents try to share the burden.

> Part time work for developers would also help women who don’t want to work full time when they have small children.

And men with the same wish.

> Part time work for developers would also help women who don’t want to work full time when they have small children.

How about "parent" instead of "women"?

1. Tech has small percentage of women. The ridiculous under representation of female coders is widely recognized as a problem and something that should be fixed. There are programs for recruiting women into CS Majors. But the imbalance will remain when women have babies and are given only the choices of the third shift or leaving their careers. 2. Women who choose breastfeeding, which can be 3-4 hours a day total, are then in place to be the primary infant caregivers.

I still don't see how this is an argument to say that it would benefit "women" instead of "parents" in general.

In the Netherlands almost all women work parttime. Which is a major reason the country has such a high rate of parttimers. Men work more fulltime.

This is both a serious problem and a solution to social imbalance. Again and again, polls show many of the women would stop working alltogether¹ if their only option is fulltime.

This does give men some unfair advantage in career options or pay raises, though. It is cited as an important reason for payment inequality between men and women.

¹ The irony is that this would change the parttime ratio: one reason why it is this high in the Netherlands, is because those mothers in many other European countries, simply don't have a job at all. The Nordics being a positive, exception, by the way.

“Sure, I may have been a failure in classical music”

This breaks my heart, and it’s exactly how I felt for 15 years. Being a violin failure, when I loved violin more than anything, was so painful. But when it comes to things like playing violin, we have the power to decide for ourselves what success and failure are. Success might be practicing five hours a week and mastering four new pieces a year and enjoying the transcendent beauty of playing violin.

I left the pre-professional violinist track and ended up with an MS in CS. Now I’m a homeschooling mother teaching her kids to play violin and piano, among other things.

Our culture is obsessively utilitarian when it comes to music and sports. Playing music, playing sports is anything but playful, and it is such a shame.

I think it's a question of models (the only classical musicians that are visible in most families are professionals) and ends (most parents directing their kids to music are thinking of college admissions and the like).

The idea that it's normal for most people to know how to dance, play an instrument, sing, and play a pick up game of ball is strangely lost.

I am a woman and do NOT want to be (or viewed as) a token diversity hire. It affects my job because it means I get less interesting work, in practical reality. Diversity programs mean that equally & highly qualified women operate under the cloud of an assumed diversity hire, and are thus, viewed as less-competent.

Are you working in a competitive field? I know and have worked with many women and minorities in highly competitive fields (medicine, engineering) where diversity programs were in effect and the idea that there's any kind of stigma or that they could be remotely correlated with a less competent team is simply a joke.

I'm a homeschooling SAHM (was a software engineer for 6 years, have a MS in CS) expecting our 4 child, born in 1982. This is not surprising to me, I know many women choosing being at home over a lucrative & promising career. Both my parents are MDs, and I was raised by nannies. Here's the thing about nannies - you don't know a situation is really bad until it's too late. Also, the second shift is a very real, exhausting phenomenon. Lots of smart women with smart early wave feminist moms have looked at our own childhoods and said, "I'd rather be significantly poorer and spend the time with my kids. I missed my mom when I was a kid and it hurt. I don't want the stress of working a full day followed afterschool pickup followed by homework and extracurriculars followed by dinner and cleaning." Not shockingly, I married a guy who agrees with me on this.

I started coding as a teenager, ended up with a Masters in CS. Had a great career as a software engineer mostly in start-ups and companies with a start-up-like culture, until I was 28, when we moved for my husband's job. Where we live now, almost all the jobs are in banking. I became pregnant with my first child a few months after the move, and now I am a housewife, homeschooling my Kindergartener, and expecting our fourth child. I do miss coding, and I have lots of ideas for open source educational software projects, but no time/energy to pursue it currently. I hope when my children are a bit older to get back into tech, mostly via open source projects and hackathons, since I hope we will be homeschooling long term. I miss being a software engineer, but my financial software stint taught me that corporate culture is hugely important to whether I enjoy my job and can do it well. I love being home with my children and teaching them, going to the park with them on a nice Tuesday at 10am has yet to lose its novelty and pleasure.

I still read HN because I am still deeply interested in coding & tech culture. It's been a strong interest for over 20 years, I don't think it will go away.

I'm a white woman who has been going to naturallycurly.com for at least 5 years. Naturally curly hair is different to cut & style than straight hair, and there are surprisingly few stylists who cut curly hair well. I don't see how race plays into it other than I've never met a black woman with naturally straight hair. The beauty market is huge, and naturallycurly is a great resource for the many women currently underserved because conventional beauty standards dictate straight or wavy hair.

I would like to know how you handle this, because I am expecting my first child in July (missizii@yahoo.com). I am fortunate that my husband can support our family and if I wanted to, I would never have to work outside the home again. But I don't want to completely give up the personal satisfaction of building interesting software that is used by lots of people. I live in a low-tech area, and there is no such thing as a part-time software engineering position. My current plan is to use a half-day Montessori preschool starting at age 2 and use that time to work on an android application (I'm a jack-of-all-trades, but I started my career in Java). Is a half-day preschool an option for you?