Woke up at 6am. Child 1 woke up at 7am. Dropped her off at daycare at 8am. All the other children were being dropped off by their dads, too. Full day of work ahead. Dinner at 6pm. Bath at 7pm. Bedtime and story at 8pm. Usually calls with Bangalore from 9pm to midnight but it's Labour Day over there. Sleep at midnight.
My one concern with this is the risk of eventual burn out + mental health issues which will have its own impact on the children. Full time career + very present parent during the weekdays might just not be possible. WFH definitely helps make it significantly more possible though.
Also worth not forgetting that in most cases the fathers of millennials were a hell of a lot more present and emotionally available than their fathers etc. I'm sure we'll make plenty of our own mistakes that our children will try to avoid when their turn comes.
Those household structures aren'tpopular, they're just common when women have no other options. I have nothing against those structures, they work great for some families. But the reality is that they often force the wife into becoming an unpaid caregiver for her in-laws (who constantly criticize how she runs the household).
I don't really understand this mindset that being at home and raising your kids is only something you do when forced to. For my family, if we had more options -- ie, more money -- then both of us would be stay-at-home parents. It's much more of a joy than going to work.
Your comment's framing makes no sense to me. My wife pushed for me to go into engineering instead of academia so she could stay home and we could be comfortable. We're married. We have kids. The entire point is we're not independent. That's what married literally means. Unioned. Joined. There is no her and me. There is us.
Why would you need or even want to be independent? Why would you plan to form a family while keeping your options open/having one foot out the door?
Plenty of women (and men) end up in relationships they hate, and if they have no independence they are pretty much fucked. They have no way to escape. Women having options makes a huge difference.
What you are describing is pretty much ideal for a lot of people, but it's not what everybody gets.
How does this happen though? It's not like you wake up one day, look around and see you've started life in the middle, you're married and have kids, and you hate your spouse. Did your spouse have a stroke and undergo some massive personality change or something?
Assuming you want a family, your very top priority when evaluating someone for dating from the very beginning should be whether that person would make a good spouse and help you to form that family. Otherwise what are you even doing? Someone who can't commit is its own red flag for that purpose. If you have kids, that's it. You're in it. You need to be committed.
And having a job doesn't mean you're independent of your spouse anyway. If one of us died or we split, it'd be absolutely devastating to our family regardless of the money (e.g. if life insurance/social security covered everything). I would be hugely screwed trying to raise the kids without her, job notwithstanding.
I think the simple fact of the matter is that most people have absolutely no clue what they’re doing when it comes to relationships, and think their social media hot takes are indicative of what they ought to want.
This is on top of societal pressures. In more liberal parts of the US (and the world) it's accepted that you will take your time finding a partner, or even stay single if you want. In more conservative societies the expectation that you will marry young and start popping out kids is intense.
I think it goes both ways. I moved from a liberal to a conservative area. Maybe there are people shaming those who don't pop out kids, but more so I I've noticed it's that they're not shamed if they want to just let loose to their instincts and get impregnated as an 18-year-old and yield to their natural desires and interests. In a liberal city a 18 year old popping out a kid and is often viewed as a pariah.
I mean people do not naturally grow up wanting to stare at a desk/PC all day deciding to become a scientist or a doctor and study a bunch of shit that his almost no relation to what humans were adapted for for millions of years. Our evolutionary programming was to bang, have kids, and roam the jungle and grab the resources and satisfy our short brutish lives.
Now the fact that something is evolutionarily natural or historically normal doesn't mean it is good or right. But just letting loose on that particular natural instinct tends to be more accepted in conservative societies while in the city or liberal areas teenage (past age of consent) pregnancy is seen maybe more of something they will shame you for. You're supposed to do a pretty unnatural thing of staring at books until you're 22 or 26 and then stare at a computer screen so you can get a good job to pay a gazillion dollars for childcare delivered by minimum wage workers. You're supposed to take your time and maybe about the time your biological clock has run out, you pay $20,000 for IVF and you do a speedrun.
So which is a greater imposition of societal pressure? I won't claim conservative societies don't exhibit more social pressure than liberal ones. But on this point, it's not clear to me the conservative one is doing the greater of the pressuring.
We don't have a trust fund, of course, which is why I'm working to earn an income.
My wife currently stays home with the kids, although that might change down the road. She doesn't have any trust fund or inheritance either, of course.
However, although I'm earning the money, it's 100% a shared resource. It goes into a shared account. I'm pretty sure that's a legal necessity since we're married, but it's how we'd choose to do it anyway. There's no division between my finances and hers.
We married each other to be a team together forever, but even if we separated, our finances would be divided in half between us. If we'd wanted to fend for ourselves, we wouldn't have gotten married, and certainly wouldn't have had kids.
She feels sorry for me having to go to work every day, but it's a logical division of labor because I have much higher earning prospects.
I say this because I want to understand your definition; are we a traditional household in your view?
In the context of the original comment by pkaler, and subsequent replies from basswood, mschuster91, purplerabbit, and nradov, I understood "trad household structures" to be one where the man in a husband/wife relationship sells his labor to someone else and the woman does not.
So yes, but, I would note that there is probably a difference (for the purposes of this conversation) between the following:
A couple that earns median income per year and still chooses to have only one income earning spouse specifically so the other spouse can spend more time with the kids, whilst making significant sacrifices in other aspects of life such as school district, kids' activities, vacations, material goods, etc.
And a couple where one earns significantly above median income and can afford to have only one income earning spouse without making significant sacrifices.
In the context of the entire chain of comments, I would assume purplerabbit was referring to the first type of couple, who choose to forego many of life's luxuries in favor of child rearing, and that is the type of "household structure" that nradov was saying is not popular, except "when women have no other options" (i.e. women's rights allowing them to be financially independent).
>However, although I'm earning the money, it's 100% a shared resource. It goes into a shared account. I'm pretty sure that's a legal necessity since we're married, but it's how we'd choose to do it anyway. There's no division between my finances and hers.
There isn't in my marriage either, but I would still advise my wife to maintain her ability to earn income in case I were to go crazy, lose my job, or some other risk. And I would advise my daughter of the same.
For what it's worth, we're the first type, which is why my wife will probably join the workforce in a few years too, for want of money. But while the kids are young she thinks it's really important to stay home with them, even if it means living in a cramped basement for now.
But the point is, we both would prefer to be home with the children, and it's only for want of money that either (or both) of us would work. The privilege is being able to stay home; the sad reality is having to work at the office to earn a living.
It just strikes me (and her too) that the conversation around this issue is framed so backwards, as though everyone deeply wants to spend their waking days at an office desk / driving an Uber / etc, whereas spending time with your children is a miserable burden that people only do if forced it with no other options. I get that might be the case for some people, especially if they hate their family or have an abusive partner, but to me it's an alien mindset. Work is the abusive partner that we can't escape from, but tolerate for the kids.
>as though everyone deeply wants to spend their waking days at an office desk / driving an Uber / etc,
I don't think this is it, which is why I brought up a trust fund in one of my previous comments.
This comes down to personal risk tolerances, but it seems evident that many people feel that volatility in job markets and shrinking economic opportunities mean that there is a sufficient gain in security of housing/food/energy/healthcare/future economic opportunities such that it can be worth a sacrifice in spending time with children.
My parents moved to the US, along with their extended families from a developing country, and they almost all spent 24/7 working to develop businesses or whatever to ensure the kids had more opportunity than them. And they succeeded, most of my cousins do very well for themselves, and they can have a spouse that stays at home without decreasing their kids' future chances, but some don't (perhaps because their parents ended up in a stagnant metro rather than a growing one, that one factor is the single biggest difference in trajectories in my family).
It is easier than ever to be outcompeted by someone else around the world, so there is kind of an up or out situation for those that aim for maintaining a certain quality of life. It's also fine to opt out of that rat race, but from my perspective, the biggest cost is less access to healthcare.
I would note that the whole one spouse spending time with kids thing is probably a post world war 2 American/British phenomenon. Even in village life in developing countries, both the husband and wife are out working in factories or fields while grandparents who can't work anymore or older siblings and cousins are taking care of the kids. It's a grind for most people, most of the time.
Your framing makes perfect sense to me, and I agree with it. It comes down to economic forces requiring parents to sacrifice time at home with their children.
In this framing, being able to have a stay-at-home parent is a privilege to be treasured. Not everyone can manage it, which is a tragedy.
Of course, for those who don't want to be a parent and prefer their job, that's fine too. Some people, whether men or women, just yearn for the mines. I wouldn't say that any such people should be pressured to be a stay at home parent. Hopefully they can be happily childless, or else partner with someone who enjoys raising children, or else get support from grandparents or the community.
What I simply object to is a framing that views being a "traditional" stay at home parent as an intrinsically miserable or undesirable role, when it's what so many of us factory workers wish we could do ourselves but can't afford to. When a (loving, non-abusive) couple can afford to have one parent stay at home, my wife and I both view that stay-at-home parent as the lucky one.
My wife self-reports as very happy and talks a lot about how proud she is of the decision. I'll acknowledge that we are privileged in terms of support -- 3 relative families within 30 minutes and most people in a 100 meter radius attend the same church. Even in our setup, however, we really wish we could swing a multi-generational setup and have grandparents around all the time.
Women are just as responsible for enforcing traditions as men are. You could just as easily argue that men are the ones with less choice; after all, it is much more socially acceptable for a woman to work than for a man to be a stay at home dad.
It's also false that a stay at home has essentially resigned themselves to ruin in the event of divorce/disagreement. Someone who has been a stay at home long enough to be unemployable, in the vast majority of states, will be rewarded with alimony and if applicable child support to the point they will easily be taking about 50% of the spouse's salary for long enough to retrain.
Of course the spouse has the risk the other ex-spouse will sabotage themselves and end their incomes to avoid paying the order, at which point they may be thrown into prison if they are found. But are they worse off than the employee who can be fired at a moment's notice and go broke by a boss who isn't sabotaging himself at all and bound by no such judicial order? Maybe so, but it's not by some gigantic long shot.
Severely missing the point here. It’s about being criticised and not recognised while doing so. It’s about lack of choice – and no, when you’re 25, you don’t know what this does to you over time. And when you finally do, it’s too late, you’re not going to run away with your kids and no job.
My comment was a response to its parent, beginning:
> Those household structures aren't popular, they're just common when women have no other options.
I agree with what yours, and point out that it applies equally to men. I was 25 when we decided to have our first child and while I would make the same decision knowing what I know now, I didn't have anything near an accurate idea of what the impact would be on my life as a whole.
Basically, I wasn't taking exception to the idea of an irrevocable decision made with incomplete context; I was taking exception to the idea that it's somehow unique to women - because it's not.
I would add though that while making bad choices is not unique to women, when it comes to mariage, lots of society used to make it so much easier on men. Men could/can escape home in work, hobbies, etc with much less judgement than women. It’s gotten better in some parts of the world, definitely not all, and last years the trend is rather backward I feel.
Except "trad" households (full time SAHM in a nuclear home) are not traditional. Tradition is not something only the upper-middle class in a post-war boom attained for a short period of time.
Throughout human history, it was rare for only two people to raise a child, let alone one. Or for women to not bring money into the home.
Like many "trad" trends, it's based more on advertising and television than history.
At the very least, you need a whole society of aunts and uncles and grandparents and cousins, and deep friends to truly do any kind of traditional family structure in the traditional way. Otherwise it's just emulating an extremely narrow portion of the trad that didn't exactly exist in the first place.
> At the very least, you need a whole society of aunts and uncles and grandparents and cousins, and deep friends to truly do any kind of traditional family structure in the traditional way.
"It takes a village to raise a child" was meant literally. However, the glory of capitalism required people to move to where the jobs were, turning that millennia-old principle upside down ever since industrialization. And car culture was the ultimate fatal blow, when children can't even walk their own neighborhood any more.
I remember when Hillary Clinton said "it takes a village to raise a child" and she was mocked by conservatives and accused of undermining parental rights and wanting governments to control families.
And when BLM made it part of their charter to encourage community support for children beyond the typical nuclear unit they were accused of a radical Marxist agenda to "destroy families."
For some reason the very concept of extended families and community engenders deep anger and hostility from some Americans, and that's odd for a nation of immigrants considering how common the "whole society of aunts and uncles and grandparents and cousins" is in the rest of the world.
> For some reason the very concept of extended families and community engenders deep anger and hostility from some Americans
I think because excessive individualism plays into the hands of large companies. There is an individualist culture that has naturally grown over time in the US, but it has also been pushed by big corporations because if you can't depend on your neighbors and extended family, you need to spend money to fill the gaps.
But when leftists says things like community support, it doesn't bring up images of traditional villages and extended families. It brings up images of communists saying things like abolish the family. Naturally, due to their history.
It's not like leftists are known for their traditional family values now or then, so why should it be taken that way?
Yes, when you intentionally take what leftists say in bad faith and stereotype them negatively, then the bad faith interpretation and negative stereotypes make sense. But normal people don't hear "communism" when leftists say "community support."
Also given how many people espousing "traditional family values" among the right turn out to be abusers, pedophiles, rapists, deadbeats, etc, what you might consider "traditional" values don't actually mapped to the left-right political axis at all.
And I assume you didn't bother reading my comment or this thread very hard and just wanted to dunk on the left, but the American nuclear family isn't "traditional family values" to begin with.
Are the 9pm and later calls w/Bangalore an every day thing?
Here's my routine.
5am: wake up/coffee
5:30ish: gym
6:30ish: back, clean kitchen, take out trash, make lunch for 2 kids
7:30: nanny arrives, and I sit down at desk, and kids are now awake
8:30: walk older kid to school
9-5:30: work or whatever else. I run my own business so some days feel very busy, some the opposite. I just try to be intentional with my time.
5:30 p: start dinner
6:30 p: dinner (or earlier depending on demands)
7:30 p: kid bed time
8:15-8:30: done w/kids. time for a bit of TV or wind-down, catch up with my wife about her day for as long as I can manage to stay awake
9:30-10: bed time (ideal day)
I stopped working at night unless it is critical for a next-morning thing. That leaves me absent from some opportunities that I might otherwise get spending more time on work, but I also have more time to focus on me/marriage/non-work-life
My point in sharing is that I make space on purpose for me. Your schedule sounds (and I am presuming) like you don't have much time for you. Is that right?
Don't take this as criticism, but I wonder if you could ask the Bangalore folks to get to their point faster and get some more sleep. Very important for health.
As others have said, levels and titles are generally for compensation and performance reviews. Each company has their own bespoke ladder but it generally maps to:
Each company has their own numbers and names but it generally progresses like that. Impact and scope scales as you head up the ladder.
L5 or Senior is usually considered a “terminal” role. That means all engineers should be able to get to this role. And people without the headroom get managed out if they can’t get to L5.
Staff+ is usually “special”. It means that people count on you to drive initiatives and you have something special other than just writing code. You are able to make product and business impact.
Distinguished and Fellow are very rare. Large FAANG companies will only have a handful of these engineers. It means you’ve made industry-wide impact like inventing map-reduce or DynamoDB or Kubernetes.
You're describing a very small number of companies that all copied each other's systems. The idea of a terminal role, for example, is pure Facebook. These do not apply in general across the industry except where managers from those small number of companies came in and shoved them in before they were fired.
In all fairness, a LOT of this was copied over from the military. From ranks to "High Year Tenure" (aka "Up or Out") nothing here is particularly innovative.
> L5 or Senior is usually considered a “terminal” role. That means all engineers should be able to get to this role.
Doesn't it mean more like it's an acceptable end, a destination - obviously not everyone's career track is to take over the company as CEO one day, but nor is it necessarily to progress to Staff and beyond.
The idea being that it's a bit of a role change, to a greater extent than the levels before it which could be seen as advancement. Or, we've long had the idea of 'technical' and 'management' tracks, the more recent (I think?) idea here being that actually maybe they're both specialist tracks you switch onto, and you don't necessarily have to do either.
But I think, outside FAANG et al., whether companies subscribe to that sort of thinking is vastly more varied (or it's more niche) than titles and 'track' splits (or lack of them) already are.
This does remind me somewhat of military command structures with L1-L5 being enlisted ranks and L6-L10 either being NCO or Commissioned depending on your view of how much gatekeeping is involved.
Western militaries have a parallel commissioned officer and enlisted command structure where an O1 (junior officer) is technically senior to an E9 (senior enlisted NCO) and can order them around.
The idea is that command requires a separate set of skills and that experience needs to start early to have senior officers in their 50s.
In practice, junior officers are "advised" by senior enlisted on how to order people around and not taking that advice is a bad idea.
Kind of like how companies have managers and technical tracks where a line manager ignoring a senior technical person always blows up in their face.
> Each company has their own numbers and names but it generally progresses like that.
But the big difference, I believe, is that being at the top of a ladder in one company may be completely different from being at the top in another one.
It's easy to be the CTO of a company of 2, much harder for BigTech. Even if the company of 2 has the same levels.
I have met people being very very proud of their title of CTO, and when I asked, their company had a handful of developers.
How come it's so hard for people to drink water? Honest question. Like why don't you just wake up in the morning, take a whiz, brush your teeth, and drink a glass of water?
What gets in between? Because the first two are 99% success rate I'd bet.
But is that bad? Do people actually need to drink more than they are thirsty for? Why is it that our hunger sense is over-tuned, but conventional wisdom says that our hydration sense is under-tuned?
Honestly, I feel like "always be drinking" only appeared once bottled water did.
Honestly I forget brushing more than I should too, and I skip breakfast most days even though I'm hungry. The friction required to pour the glass or set things up can be a lot early in the morning.
It helped me to get a water cooler or something to fill a bottle?
Most orgs should just be shipping features. Before starting an Experiment Program teams should be brainstorming a portfolio of experiments. Just create a spreadsheet where the first column is a one-line hypothesis of the experiment. Eg. "Removing step X from the funnel will increase metric Y while reducing metric Z". And the RICE (Reach-Impact-Confidence-Estimation) score your portfolio.
If the team can't come up with a portfolio of 10s to 100s of experiments then the team should just be shipping stuff.
And then Experiment Buildout should be standardized. Have standardized XRD (Experiment Requirements Doc). Standardize Eligibility and Enrollment criteria. Which population sees this experiment? When do they see it? How do you test that bucketing is happening correctly? What events do analysts need? When do we do readouts?
That's just off the top of my head. Most orgs should just be shipping features.
Beg to differ. I live in Yaletown in one of the Concord Pacific towers. David Lam Park and George Wainborn Park are vibrant as is the whole seawall. My kid goes to the daycare along one of the parks.
I'm sitting at my desk in an office in Gastown in a low-rise. The streets are covered in feces and broken crack pipes.
"towers in the park" refers to a pretty specific layout where the towers are surrounded and separated by parks. Yaletown has parks that are surrounded by towers, which generally seems to work better
I have a 9 month old and we are drowning in toys. We have bought very few of them. The article is clearly not written by a parent because it barely touches on Buy Nothing Groups on Facebook.
We've barely bought any clothes either. They all come from Buy Nothing groups. Kids grow out of toys and clothes every 3 months. Parents are desperate to offload this stuff.
And my wife has become a hoarder as have other parents in the neighbourhood. Buy Nothing groups seem to set off some sort of hoarding affliction in parents.
My local group is not "buy nothing" but rather "zero waste" but yeah the amount of quasi-trash that my wife keeps bringing home ("this is broken but I'll fix it!") is crazy.
A few weeks ago she managed to offload a pink salt lamp to a lady, mentioned "this is not working but should be easy to fix" and the lady replied she's just gonna feed it to some goats and it was glorious.
> The article is clearly not written by a parent because it barely touches on Buy Nothing Groups on Facebook.
The author very clearly indicates they have children. I don't think the author wants to make it an article about themselves.
Keep in mind: Toys just show up from well-meaning people. There's a lot of social momentum around gifting; I started dreading Christmas because it means a bunch of toys my kids won't play with.
And, not only am I drowning in toys, I'm drowning in books too.
pretty much the only toys i get for my kids to get are lego compatible bricks. with those it doesn't make a difference if you have 1 or 10 kg of them. just add to the pile.
no books in my house because we are moving to often. but i grew up in a library. my dad probably has 10-15m worth of bookshelves. from my granddad we inherited 3 or 4 times as much. but they were both collectors, curating their collections with care. still, sorting through those books to figure out whats valuable is a lifetime occupation. and i can see how a lot of books can be overwhelming if you are not into that.
a year ago i heard about someone passing away leaving behind a house with a collection of 75000 books. the cost to sort through them would be higher than the value of the collection, so instead it all goes to a landfill because i a not even sure it can be recycled or the cost of getting it recycled was to much too.
There are a few types of toys that my wife and I are still ok with getting and Lego is one of them. She's started using the phrase "more really is more" to describe the category. Basically, it's systems where you build something and the more you have, the more things you can do: Lego, Brio, Magna-Tiles, Hot Wheels track, etc. Even things like Pokemon cards (if your kid actually plays the game) can fall into this. You do have to be careful not to end up with too many of these systems, especially really similar ones.
We're also still ok with getting books. We have a few too many for our shelf space, but at their current ages, our kids are aging out of books about as quickly as they receive new ones. I just need to do a better job of giving away the old ones more regularly.
Yes! I've run out of ways to tell MY parents not to get toys for my kids for Christmas/birthdays. I can ask directly for no physical things; I can suggest tickets to shows or evens, memberships to museums or zoos, etc; I can point out every time they come over that there's not enough space for the things we already have; I can tell them what sorts of clothes the kids could use instead. They're still going to get each kid a "showstopper" (toy workbench, Big Wheel, something physically large) plus several cheap plastic trinkets... plus the clothes.
And that's just my parents. I can politely talk to them about not getting physical things for my kids, but then there's all of the extended family that loves to get them big, cheap plastic stuff, too. I know they're trying to be generous and don't really understand the fallout, but I'm starting to reconsider the whole "it's the thought that counts" idea.
I need to do a better job of helping the kids periodically go through and give stuff away, but 1) try explaining to a 3-year-old why giving away your toys is a good thing, and 2) the influx of new things always seems to outstrip the rate at which I can find time to get rid of stuff.
Probably has something to do with the price of zero. The concept keeps showing up in random feeds for me, and it’s something both marketers and behavioral economists like to talk about. It seems free short circuits a lot of our normal cognitive pathways.
That said, I learned an interesting trick years ago. If you’re trying to get rid of junk, leaving it on the side of the road with a free sign is not as effective as using a sign with a slightly more than nominal amount. $25 used to be the sweet spot, $50 might be better today. Probably depends on the thing. Make it look like they’re getting a deal. Items tend to disappear after that, though I did once have someone knock and pay.
This is great. This reminds me of Chris Hecker's Rigid Body Dynamics series from GDMag/Gamasutra that I read (checks watch) almost 30 years ago! This is the classic/canonical set of articles.
(Aside: My goodness, Medium has gotten terrible. The article will not scroll for me because of some random overlay that won't dismiss. Why do publishers stay on Medium? I regret it every time I click a link.)
Woke up at 6am. Child 1 woke up at 7am. Dropped her off at daycare at 8am. All the other children were being dropped off by their dads, too. Full day of work ahead. Dinner at 6pm. Bath at 7pm. Bedtime and story at 8pm. Usually calls with Bangalore from 9pm to midnight but it's Labour Day over there. Sleep at midnight.
Rinse. Repeat.
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