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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.
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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