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A post is blowing up on my part of twitter where a guy is saying he only wants to spend 10 minutes a day with his kids.. This has a surprising amount of scissor power, with people coming down on all sides.
Relevant quote:
The one straightforward argument is that, well, he's a shitty dad. Especially since he says he wants to be working, accomplishing something, and what is his work? Well, he's a creative director at some random tiny crypto business working on "building digital gold." So... easily mockable.
The other side says that modern parenting norms are fucked, as he aludes to, and that kids used to be a lot more free range. Normally I'm sympathetic to this, but the guy's kids are below five, so idk. I think infants and toddlers definitely need a lot of attention.
Either way I'm curious how parenting norms might break down along culture war lines, and what people here think?
ETA: Also, a great and extremely sassy quote tweet:
I don't have children, and other than largely raising my one brother I don't have a clear and visible "childcare pedigree". The end result of this is that a lot of my friends and acquaintances who do have kids tend to confide in me because I appear to be an uninterested party.
So far as I can tell, what this guy is saying is true for a majority of men who have young kids. Pretty much every father I know has admitted that he can't wait until his kids are older, and that simply being around them is exhausting.
If you go in for evo-psych, that makes sense. In an ancestral environment, the man would be away from children, hunting. He probably wouldn't be interacting with them regularly until they were old enough to be taught.
I think this guy's mistake is simply being either too honest or too autistic for his own good. A solid 90% of modern society functions on rampant lying - no normal guy wants to admit that they'd rather work a sixteen hour shift getting his balls crushed at the ball crushing factory than take care of a toddler, and whether they consciously recognize it or not, they don't admit it because they know it'll make everyone else around then experience an uncomfortable amount of self reflection about their own life. It's better to just say Kids Are Wonderful And There Are Absolutely No Exceptions Full Stop so everyone can feel like they are good people doing good things.
A guy like this breaks the social contract, which is probably part of why it blew up. This is pretty much the childcare equivalent of saying that yes, that dress does make you look fat.
I retract my post above.
@sarker has a link below that disgusts me enough that I can't even pretend to give this guy the benefit of the doubt.
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It's not just men, many women feel the same, it's just not productive to bring it up in public.
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I'm a father of a one-year-old and I'm also an attorney who works a lot of hours. It's true that taking care of young kids gets exhausting or boring at a certain point. On the other hand, it's still way less exhausting and stressful than working an actual job.
If I had to choose between spending 12 hours a day with my kid and 10 minutes a day working, or spending 12 hours a day working and 10 minutes with my kid (assuming all other things, including income, remained equal) I would certainly choose to spend 12 hours a day with my kid. Yes, it would get exhausting at times, but it's still way more fun and rewarding than work. I have a hard time understanding the psychology of anyone who would choose otherwise.
I would agree 100% with this - kids are lots of fun. However, that caveat is a big one. The trade-off isn't 12 hours of play vs 12 hours of work; you have to include all the other things you don't get to do in order to hang out with them. As someone who is childless (but has a niece and nephew who I adore spending time with), my schedule looks something like:
If I were parenting my niece and nephew instead, it would look more like:
This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but there definitely isn't as much room for deviation in it. If I wake up and I've got a migraine, I still have to do the morning routine. If I get off work and I'm super stressed because my boss is hinting at layoffs, I still have to prep and cook dinner. I can't decide I'd rather go out to the bar with my wife for drinks; we have to put the kids to bed or they'll be hell the next day.
(Before anyone asks; I'm assuming both parents are working in the above, and that some of the time blocks (like dinner) could be done by either parent, but the other parent is almost certainly in charge of managing the kids during this time. I didn't schedule pickup from school, for example, because I did dropoff and presumably my wife is doing pickup in this hypothetical).
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All parents talk about children being exhausting, and it's not any sort of secret. I am the father of 4 young children. The easiest way to start up a conversation with another parent (at a park/school/cub scouts/whatever) is to observe that their children have a lot of energy and commiserate with them. I've easily had this conversation with >100 different people.
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