I think it's unquestionably true that fathers spending more time with their children is, on the whole, much better for those children.
But it's also true that it's a huge problem for society that people are having fewer children. And I think you can make a reasonable argument that increasing expectations around the quality of parenting are party of that trend.
Screw the economy, love your kid (or kids).
they easiest because of our needs. we don't exist to meet its needs.
As it turns out, I don't enjoy extended time with children. My bad, but I power through it for the sake of the child. In older times that would be no problem, my wife would deal with that. Instead I stopped at 1 when I realized I am not the kind of person who enjoys being equally involved with children.
I can tell you that my wife and I are both exhausted of taking care of them 24/7. It is not something we do for funsies.
It doesn't have to be the wife per-se. When I was building our house, I did most of the carpentry. My wife hated it and did very little of that. My wife hates driving the tractor. My wife hates driving any vehicle. My wife hates doing the plumbing and electric. My wife hates taking care of the pets, so I take care of them. My wife doesn't like practicing self-defense and security for the house, and there are lots of dangerous animals and criminals here, so I handle that. I do not ask my wife to do any of those things except at worst a few small % of the time compared to when I do them. This does not bother me at all because different people prefer different things.
Modern society has brainwashed people to think they need to share child-care and ideally equally. I think this is highly misinformed utopian vision. Voluntary preference based division of labor is smart and helps us all enjoy our lives more. Very rarely do couples have absolute equal relative preference for all the tasks, even if they dislike all of the tasks.
It seems obvious that if you brainwash people to think labor sharing by exchanging tasks is "avoidance" that you increase the chance one of the two parties will just veto any additional children. But if you bring this up then it's straight to whataboutism but women also don't enjoy it which totally misses the mark about relative preference that results in imbalanced childcare, which can be evaluated even when both people dislike a task. Unless you totally reject sexual dimorphism, you should be at least open to the possibility as well that females on average might have higher relative preference for child-rearing than other things, as long as feminists aren't shaming them left and right with artificial impositions that somehow they're being robbed if a man is "avoiding" it by exchanging labor to do something else.
I watch my friends raise young children, and to be blunt it largely looks miserable to me. You effectively are babysitting children activities 24x7. Basically running a tiny daycare.
The families and adults seem to simply exist as caretakers for their child's lives.
I ascribe to "the kid is just now part of your general life" for 90% of your adult activities. Could be working in the shop, outdoor chores, cleaning the house, fixing the car, shopping, whatever. The point is the kid primarily exists in your life and does whatever it is you are doing, not the other way around.
Yeah, some things are impossible to do with a kid of course. But not nearly as many as currently believed for most children. If properly socialized, kids can exist non-disruptively in plenty of situations. And the danger to them in a lot of spots is wildly exaggerated. I brought my 5 year old into warehouses and lumberyards with a bit of instruction and teaching them to pay attention. They pretty quickly adapt.
If I have another kid I'd plan on not modifying my life a whole lot. The kid will simply come with to most things and liberal use of babysitting and such will happen. I have friends who are terrified to even leave their toddlers with babysitters these days for a few hours - it's absurd.
Kids imo do best in a balanced life where the get to learn by watching and doing. Not catering to their every whim and desire and shielding them from every possible danger.
There are certainly some age ranges (infant through ~3 or 4 years old or so) that are much more difficult, but after that parents seem to prefer life on hard mode these days for some reason. Paranoia and peer pressure from my standpoint drives most of it.
My older (25 now!) son would have been a miserable experience for me if every single day was a "rainy weekend" style thing where we're stuck inside playing children's games and the like with near constant 24x7 attention and direct interaction at his level. I'd have gone insane. Having him "around" most of the time while I did things with an hour or two of direct "kid time" engagement was totally sustainable, and he seems to have gotten a lot of enrichment from most of it. Note that wasn't staring at screens though - it was physically and actively doing stuff. And part of learning as a parent and a child of a parent is the parent making mistakes. Shit happens, just correct for it moving forward. So long as no major injuries occur life moves on and typically everyone is better off for it.
Three are running around yelling and I can’t even join in, as they want me to be “the base” apparently.
I have two children and I find parenting to be utterly draining. They are 4 and 6. They are *constantly* fighting. They play together a bit, but when they do, after 5-10 minutes it leads to real fight where we need to intervene. And they still demand an enormous amount of attention.
It turns out I am one of those fathers with a personality that doesn't deal well with constant sensory overload. I was medicated for ADHD myself as a child and one of my children is AuADHD. It isn't his fault and we're trying to find ways to help him (and everyone else), but his meltdowns make life so, so hard for the whole family. He wants to control and dominate every situation, whether it is his brother or his parents.
I was wondering if the dynamics of three would have made it easier because he couldn't dominate his brother so eaily, or if that would just mean he became the isolated child.
i can relate. when my kids were young i didn't know what to do with them. but it's not that i didn't like spending time with them. before we had kids, working part-time so i could spend a lot of time at home was my dream. it was what i wanted. when the dream became real my inability to initiate play with the children was unexpected.
i figure it was because i had no rolemodels from my time growing up, no childhood experience that i could replicate because i grew up with a single dad who wasn't as close to me as i wanted to. every interaction was initiated by my children. it got easier as they got older because our interests became more compatible. (we could play games together that i also enjoyed, etc)
all the other stuff, taking care of them, feeding, putting them to sleep, etc. was easy because it's clear what needs to be done. and it wasn't/isn't exhausting either. i relish every interaction and moments of success where we achieve something together.
