I made the opposite choice. I'm a single father and I've prioritised my children over my career. I'm not going to pretend it's an amazing lifestyle. If you're intellectually driven then looking after two young children isn't fascinating. However, I love them and they rely on me. I made a choice to bring them into the world and I'm not going to neglect them. I have the kids more than their mother does, and I also pay significant child support as I earn far more than her.
It's affected my career choices. I started studying Comp Sci, as I felt it's a field where I can have more flexibility than my current field. This degree is getting closer and closer to completion and it's looking 95% likely that my career will be changing in January.
It's affected my love life too but I won't go into detail here.
One thing this article misses the mark on is the quote " I also remind myself that if I were a dad, I would be getting accolades for all the times I scheduled a doctor’s appointment or arranged a play date.".
My experience as a dad is that people simply don't trust my parenting skills or assume I'm simply helping the mum out. It's incredibly sexist and somewhat hurtful. There has been times I've been battling with my workload and then people drop innocent comments which feel like a knife in the back.
>If you're intellectually driven then looking after two young children isn't fascinating.
I've never understood this viewpoint - children are simply the most fascinating things!
They're born with next to no inborn knowledge and yet have the potential to learn about quantum mechanics. Someone with the same potential would only have learned about fire some hundred thousands of years ago.
In the early days you get to see a baby slowly mentally program the things we take so for granted we forget that you actually have to learn them - how to walk, how to speak, language.
YMMV but for me to see the world indirectly through the eyes of children is like rediscovering everything there is to the world we live in!
I have worked in health care for 15 years primarily taking care of elderly. The biggest message basically they all make is to not let time pass you by when you are young and to enjoy the time with your kids when they are young. Because before you know it they grow up and it’s never the same. I am a single dad as well. I too sacrificed my career so they got the time they needed. My love life is non existent also but I don’t mind. It won’t be like that forever. You are doing the right thing by the sounds of it so good job. When we get to our death beds our kids will be at our sides and there will be no doubt you and I made the correct choice. As for the lady in the article, the entire time I read it as her trying so hard to convince herself her choices were worth it but I fear from my experience she will later regret it. Though I truly like her cause, her own kids lost a family member much like these people going to jail away from their family. I hope she can make the balance her children seek from her.
> I also remind myself that if I were a dad, I would be getting accolades for all the times I scheduled a doctor’s appointment or arranged a play date.
> My experience as a dad is that people simply don't trust my parenting skills or assume I'm simply helping the mum out. It's incredibly sexist and somewhat hurtful.
You and the author are talking about the exact same pervasive sexism from opposite perspectives.
> If you're intellectually driven then looking after two young children isn't fascinating. However, I love them and they rely on me.
I feel you. My wife and I are managing two kids and I work from home, meaning I am home almost 24x7. I help my wife taking care of our children and I often get annoyed by the whole bunch of dumb or repetitive things we need to do to take care of them. Still, I love them more than anything in the world.
I'm a single father of five who obtained full-time custody last year, and trying to balance work and parenting is a never-ending challenge.
Some of my observations:
1) Kids have a great time with other kids, so don't feel bad about daycare. Having them at home full-time past the age of 2 is, I think, more about the parent than the child.
2) Sometimes kids just suck, and work can be a glorious escape.
3) School life in my culture (NZ) is still modelled like there's always one stay at home parent, which means you'll never be able to be there for every certificate, every kapa haka performance, and kids are okay about it so long as you communicate, and do get to the occasional one.
4) You can fit a lot of effective parenting into dinner table discussions and bedtime discussions
5) I'm really glad I'm a single Dad and not a single Mum because there are very few cultural expectations of me beyond working, and everyone acts like I'm amazing for just raising my kids. It's kinda insulting to both genders.
6) It's impossible to perfectly balance a 40 hour working week and family. Best you can aim for is a kind of homeostasis where work suffers for family one week and then family suffers a bit for work the next.
> I also remind myself that if I were a dad, I would be getting accolades for all the times I scheduled a doctor’s appointment or arranged a play date.
1000 times this. If I take the kids to the store, or through airport security, or pretty much anywhere, women are practically running over to "help" me. Thank you but I got it. Go help that poor mom over there with three meltdowns to deal with, she needs it a lot more than me.
The other day we had a birthday party for my daughter, and some of the moms saw me prepping food and doing work while I gave my wife a chance to relax and talk to the guests. They actually told her they were surprised that I would "allow" her to take a break like that. Seriously?! First of all, she is "allowed" to do whatever they hell she wants, and secondly, how messed up is it that their immediate expectation is that mom should be working the whole time while dad gets to relax?
But my favorite story of all was I was in the bathroom at Newark airport, changing my daughter's diaper. A man walks in wear the most "New Jersey" outfit ever -- expensive suit, slicked hair, gold chains, etc. He said, "Where's the mom?"
"Outside."
"Why isn't she changing the diaper then?"
I said, "She didn't want to?"
He didn't even know what to say after that, his mind was so blown.
This is very cultural too. Some places it's expected that dads take care of kids equally with mums.
I heard a great anecdote about a Manhattanite visiting Stockholm on vacation. Lots of men pushing prams all around town. "My goodness, look at all the young male nannies in Sweden!"
Not my experience (in Germany). Sometimes people (mostly women) assume I am taking a day off for daddy time and give me some sort of mini applause. But that is pretty rare.
More notable is perhaps the gender distribution on the playground. I do think it is easier for moms to connect/bond with each other. Like if I plan an excursion and wonder what friends of my kids could join, I find it more difficult to simply ask another mom. Might just be me, though.
> I had picked the [trial] date, not the judge, [to coincide with my kid's seventh birthday] because I knew that the other side wasn’t ready. Delaying even a few days would have meant losing a crucial advantage. I wasn’t going to risk it knowing what was on the line for my client.
I would just like to say that picking the most inconvenient time for all counsel involved is one of those tactics you see in the practice of law too often. And for what? So all the lawyers can miss every major holiday, and their kids birthdays? To make the other lawyers beg for the time off everyone else takes for granted? The article-writer lost me on this one, and I'm sad to see this person is a professor teaching this same toolkit of antisocial tactics to the next generation of lawyers.
Gosh. This is me. I sacrificed almost ten years of my career to be there for my sons as a divorced dad. Work travel, sales, meetings - much of it missed so the boys could have me as much as possible. Doctors, judges, lawyers, mom's were hostile & cold throughout it all. It was the single biggest contributing factor to the failure of my business this year. And... It was worth it. The boys are turning out to be fantastic young adults, our relationship is strong, and they both fought hard to get even more time with me. Hard road, great destination. The courts are total shit btw.
We've made our lives around a "kids first" policy since they were born. We run our own business (together) and consistently and deliberately put this second to our children. We know it's going to hurt in a financial sense later - we are very much living for now, knowing that the eldest who is 14 may be leaving home in 4 years and the youngest who is 12 will be off in 6.
We're in a fortunate situation, in that the work we do is profitable and relatively low stress, but we also make decisions frequently that keep our work in balance. For instance, we could grow and take on employees, but have chosen not to; we consistently say no to new work even if it's hugely profitable if we know it is going to impact on holiday or family time - or our sanity!
Kids seem to me to be the single, unequivocally most important thing in the world. Creating them and nurturing them is after all what evolution is solely interested in. Making a new generation who is loved, balanced, ready to step out into the world on their own - this is, and will always be, more important to me than work.
The subtext - and it's a really important one - in the article, is about the empowerment of women. This is horribly unbalanced; for biological, social, whatever reasons. This is broken, and women get a terrible deal: this needs addressing.
But at the heart is just being with your kids and loving them, and for me that means putting work second.
I should also just add: actually, we put us as a couple high up in importance too. Too many people forget this when raising children: you need time to be you and to be a couple, and it's easy to forget this after years of nurturing kids!
Even without kids I work like this. Just because I'm not a parent doesn't mean I'm going to take on work that could potentially stress me out eat into vacation time...
It seems like more of a work-life balance philosophy thing than parenting thing, I simply couldn't imagine working more than 50% of the year but others are content doing 60hr weeks with 2 week vacation.
If that's what makes them happy then power to them.
Parents spend too much time apologizing for prioritizing their careers, and it’s particularly unfair to women. Studies repeatedly fail to show significant and durable results from different kinds of parenting styles. But you know what is shown, in study after study, as highly correlated with children's’ long term prosperity? Parental income.
>Parents today spend more than twice as much time today with their kids today than fifty years ago
That's a good point but there's some detail missing here: how are the kids being raised. Historically, kids were raised within a tribal or quasi-tribal structure. When you have grandparents, siblings, cousins, uncles and aunts always around, room to play and explore, you don't need parents to be there 24/7 hovering over you. You learn independence as well as a way to interact and negotiate with others.
What this looks like is the worst of all words. The kids are abandoned to a set of nannies and managed activities, while the mother and father live their own lives.
What's the definition of a child's long term prosperity? Is it grades or does it take into account emotional/physical well-being? And do those studies go into adulthood?
Why is it particularly unfair to women? Is a man's place in the home? TBH I see a lot more grousing over men prioritizing their careers in the advice columns and popular media today while women are exalted for going into the same soul crushing rat races (ie in this article) that men are told to spurn for the more important things in life.
"Pick your sacrifice" applies here. I think you need to know where your red lines are in your career and family life. Having a schedule helps you keep on track.
Other than that, my Dad once said something along the lines of, "Life is a constant juggling act; you have your work ball, your family ball etc. However, your family ball is made of glass, so if you drop it, it will shatter and you may not be able to put it together again."
I am that child. My parents were very eager to make a great career. Today I suffer from the emotional neglect with some issues such as ADHD.
Being a father myself today, I do think kids can do with relatively little facetime. But the time that is devoted to them must be exclusive quality time that makes it clear you love them and that you are present. There are studies that have shown that if fathers take 30 minutes of exclusive attention for their kids every day, it has great benefits for the child‘s development.
It may be helpful to look into the Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE) test and the research around it. It helped me gain an objective perspective and overcome patterns of family dysfunction that impacted my psychology.
If you have children and then choose to work over doing the legitimately full time job of being a parent (full time being at least 40 hours a week, not that you can't do anything else ever) you need to provide them at least a parent to do that job or else you are neglecting them.
Psychology is pretty uniform in the observation that children need parents, preferably both, but just one is a massive developmental influence. There are minor benefits from they/them being biological but it isn't absolutely necessary, but a care worker, teacher, etc is not filling the same social niche with a child that a parent is. Its a job title in its own right that also has by far the most impact on developing functioning healthy human beings than any other. Its also a job you don't just quit or substitute for without lasting consequences, the role of a parent is to anchor children and provide an immovable stake upon their foundation.
You can absolutely hire a parent if you don't want to or have the time yourself to parent the children you make, but it is substantively harmful to deny them having parent(s) when they need them. If a mother wants to work a full time job while a spouse or even just long term domestic partner? wants to take on the job of being a (or more) parent(s) that works. If a father wants to do the same, that works. But kids still need parent(s), preferably two, and that is two full time positions to fill.
One quandary to think on is that society really doesn't organize or optimize for parental efficiency. We organize schools to lecture and teach to try to balance between quantity of children to a quality of education, but adults are just en masse making new lives and mostly playing it by ear on fulfilling parental responsibilities. We haven't tried to promote good parents to be parents by getting them more children - biological or not - to parent. As a civilization it feels backwards to me how what might be the most important job there is - developing future generations - is the one that is the least recognized for its value and importance. It isn't a career, it isn't prestigious, it isn't treated with the same scrutiny you would want to see in getting your plumbing fixed. But broken pipes are a much less substantive issue than mental malaise or physiological complications brought about by poor or absent parenting in the development of the billions to succeed us.
My mother was amazing in that no matter when I called her on the phone, it was impossible to tell if she was in an important meeting.
I'd call her after school and chat for a while, only a to find out a bit later that she was in the middle of closing a huge deal!
This made me feel like a million bucks - to know that even though she was very busy, I was still important enough to have her full attention whenever I called her.
I always "felt" like I was more important than her work.
Coincidently I just saw a convincing interview with a father from the Greatest Generation where he shares his regrets on being a famous yet absent father:
I'm not judging her preference on having a successful career - I'm the same actually - yet I don't plan to have children because of that very reason...
I remember that Dr Gabor Maté also talks a lot about the scars and potential trauma a child can be left with when neglected. I remember presence of both parents to be of paramount importance. And that's not "only" a problem for the child but for society at large.
I made the opposite choice. I left a 7 figure a year (but 70% travel) job to take a few years off with my kids. I'm under no illusion that my kids will be that much better for it, but I will be.
I am consuming this time with just absolute relish. A relationship is the sum of small things. And driving them to school is part of that overall cumulative time that ... just... matters. For me. I'm sure the kids would be great if their mom did it without me. But I only have one shot here, only a few years where the kids are 12 years old. So yeah, I'll spend my 7 figures a year for this. (Bezos test: would I make the same choice on my death bed looking back?)
She is in a unique situation in that she could choose to live any way she wants; she's not some working stiff. And she is choosing something else. It's not going to hurt her kids, but I think it's a tradeoff she may regret later.
I would want to be her kid, because I was homeschooled and hated it, and she would have certainly been too busy to homeschool her kids, or be any other sort of helicopter parent.
One morning, about 2am in one of the Mission Control rooms at JSC, I was sitting next to two semi-retired flight controllers managing a simulation. They went back to Apollo.
One of my 20-something peers walked back to our row where the pizza boxes lay, ruffled through them, sighed “its all cold” and walked back to his terminal.
Now, we’d been doing this for weeks.
Old fart #1 turns to #2 and says under his breath “You know, I gave up my marriage and kids to get us to the moon”
I sold my previous company and started a one man company mostly because now I can now be at home when my kids get out of school. Best decision ever. I work when they’re at school. And I work when they go to bed. No stress, no guilt, no worries. It’s awesome.
I grew up on a farm. My parents were home 24/7. I liked that.
I feel like the author is using one part of her story to excuse other unrelated decisions. Sure, defending a man she believes was improperly convicted and a victim of racism is important. Very important. It seems perfectly reasonable to weigh that responsibility against that she owes to her kids (though I might still make the opposite choice myself). But another student to teach? Another story to write? Nope. Other people can do one, and the other might not need to be done at all. The incremental benefit to anyone but the author herself is minimal, compared to the major incremental benefit of being there for her children. Which brings us to this.
> If I didn’t write and teach and litigate, a part of me would feel empty.
This sounds like the real reason, and it's not a bad one. Self-care is important. It's hard to be a good parent (or spouse BTW) if you're not a healthy person. But that's a different argument from the one about all of one's work being important to others. Some seems to be, and some less so. When a facile reason is given, even if good reasons also exist, it seems like unhealthy rationalization. But then, picking and promoting a most favorable narrative is exactly what trial lawyers do. I guess it's an easy trap to fall into. I just hope she's right that the choice to favor her career really will prove most fulfilling in the longer term.
I don't think it's for us to pre-judge which rationalisations are good ones and which aren't. Some of them seem pretty compelling, but for others such as the student needing help we just don't know enough about the specific circumstances to know.
Individually I can agree that yes this task is important enough to give up that event with her children. They might all be reasonable. I think the problem comes when you look at the aggregate.
One lawyer can't save every victim of injustice or teach every student. Does she actually need to get into every one of these demanding situations one after the other, with no gap? Even then, maybe the answer is yes if that's what it takes to get ahead in her career to achieve the things she wants to, but that's really the tradeoff not the individual instances.
Prioritizing clients over kids seems misguided if there's a conscious choice being made, but in my childhood I think I benefited a lot from benign neglect: not having everything micromanaged by my parents who let me figure things out on my own, just because they didn't feel like they had to help me the moment I have the slightest hint of a problem. Thanks to this I could pursue things that _I_ (rather than my parents) wanted to pursue, and I had vast stretches of free time to do it. I joined a volleyball team on my own, I learned electronics and programming on my own, I've read basically all of "golden age" science fiction worth reading, I got our math teacher at school to give a few of us extra lessons to prepare for the college entrance exam, etc.
This autonomy had two interesting effects. On the one hand it definitely benefited me later in life, because I felt like I had a built-in direction. On the other I don't like it when people tell me what to do, particularly if they have an unearned position of power and don't really know what to do themselves, but have to "lead", by hook or by crook.
The title should have been "I've picked getting unjustfully condemned people out of prison, over my kids". It would make 2/3 of the comments irrelevant.
Prioritizing a more "normal" job over raising own kids is a very different subject.
>I had picked the date, not the judge, because I knew that the other side wasn’t ready. Delaying even a few days would have meant losing a crucial advantage.
Doesn't our paradigm of adversarial justice require that lawyers subscribe to an idea of fair competition? I don't see any difference between using the trial date or venue setting to attack your opponent and, say, using trick make-up and a wig to make your client look nothing like the person the witnesses saw.
I would imagine that adversarial justice would work best when each side is vigorously preparing and putting forth their strongest arguments.
We enumerate that a defendant is under no obligation to help the prosecution as just an extreme example of this. That almost all patent infringement cases were held in a backwater East Texas district is evidence that the system doesn't work as that description of "fair competition" would suggest.
[+] [-] MRD85|6 years ago|reply
It's affected my career choices. I started studying Comp Sci, as I felt it's a field where I can have more flexibility than my current field. This degree is getting closer and closer to completion and it's looking 95% likely that my career will be changing in January.
It's affected my love life too but I won't go into detail here.
One thing this article misses the mark on is the quote " I also remind myself that if I were a dad, I would be getting accolades for all the times I scheduled a doctor’s appointment or arranged a play date.".
My experience as a dad is that people simply don't trust my parenting skills or assume I'm simply helping the mum out. It's incredibly sexist and somewhat hurtful. There has been times I've been battling with my workload and then people drop innocent comments which feel like a knife in the back.
[+] [-] yomly|6 years ago|reply
I've never understood this viewpoint - children are simply the most fascinating things!
They're born with next to no inborn knowledge and yet have the potential to learn about quantum mechanics. Someone with the same potential would only have learned about fire some hundred thousands of years ago.
In the early days you get to see a baby slowly mentally program the things we take so for granted we forget that you actually have to learn them - how to walk, how to speak, language.
YMMV but for me to see the world indirectly through the eyes of children is like rediscovering everything there is to the world we live in!
[+] [-] 14|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jumelles|6 years ago|reply
> My experience as a dad is that people simply don't trust my parenting skills or assume I'm simply helping the mum out. It's incredibly sexist and somewhat hurtful.
You and the author are talking about the exact same pervasive sexism from opposite perspectives.
[+] [-] icu|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xondono|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] strooper|6 years ago|reply
I feel you. My wife and I are managing two kids and I work from home, meaning I am home almost 24x7. I help my wife taking care of our children and I often get annoyed by the whole bunch of dumb or repetitive things we need to do to take care of them. Still, I love them more than anything in the world.
[+] [-] vmurthy|6 years ago|reply
This is probably the most heartwarming thing that I'll read in a long time. Made my day :-).
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] cheez|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EdwardDiego|6 years ago|reply
Some of my observations:
1) Kids have a great time with other kids, so don't feel bad about daycare. Having them at home full-time past the age of 2 is, I think, more about the parent than the child.
2) Sometimes kids just suck, and work can be a glorious escape.
3) School life in my culture (NZ) is still modelled like there's always one stay at home parent, which means you'll never be able to be there for every certificate, every kapa haka performance, and kids are okay about it so long as you communicate, and do get to the occasional one.
4) You can fit a lot of effective parenting into dinner table discussions and bedtime discussions
5) I'm really glad I'm a single Dad and not a single Mum because there are very few cultural expectations of me beyond working, and everyone acts like I'm amazing for just raising my kids. It's kinda insulting to both genders.
6) It's impossible to perfectly balance a 40 hour working week and family. Best you can aim for is a kind of homeostasis where work suffers for family one week and then family suffers a bit for work the next.
[+] [-] jedberg|6 years ago|reply
1000 times this. If I take the kids to the store, or through airport security, or pretty much anywhere, women are practically running over to "help" me. Thank you but I got it. Go help that poor mom over there with three meltdowns to deal with, she needs it a lot more than me.
The other day we had a birthday party for my daughter, and some of the moms saw me prepping food and doing work while I gave my wife a chance to relax and talk to the guests. They actually told her they were surprised that I would "allow" her to take a break like that. Seriously?! First of all, she is "allowed" to do whatever they hell she wants, and secondly, how messed up is it that their immediate expectation is that mom should be working the whole time while dad gets to relax?
But my favorite story of all was I was in the bathroom at Newark airport, changing my daughter's diaper. A man walks in wear the most "New Jersey" outfit ever -- expensive suit, slicked hair, gold chains, etc. He said, "Where's the mom?"
"Outside."
"Why isn't she changing the diaper then?"
I said, "She didn't want to?"
He didn't even know what to say after that, his mind was so blown.
[+] [-] lukego|6 years ago|reply
I heard a great anecdote about a Manhattanite visiting Stockholm on vacation. Lots of men pushing prams all around town. "My goodness, look at all the young male nannies in Sweden!"
[+] [-] bubblewrap|6 years ago|reply
More notable is perhaps the gender distribution on the playground. I do think it is easier for moms to connect/bond with each other. Like if I plan an excursion and wonder what friends of my kids could join, I find it more difficult to simply ask another mom. Might just be me, though.
[+] [-] drtillberg|6 years ago|reply
I would just like to say that picking the most inconvenient time for all counsel involved is one of those tactics you see in the practice of law too often. And for what? So all the lawyers can miss every major holiday, and their kids birthdays? To make the other lawyers beg for the time off everyone else takes for granted? The article-writer lost me on this one, and I'm sad to see this person is a professor teaching this same toolkit of antisocial tactics to the next generation of lawyers.
[+] [-] rrggrr|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dmje|6 years ago|reply
We're in a fortunate situation, in that the work we do is profitable and relatively low stress, but we also make decisions frequently that keep our work in balance. For instance, we could grow and take on employees, but have chosen not to; we consistently say no to new work even if it's hugely profitable if we know it is going to impact on holiday or family time - or our sanity!
Kids seem to me to be the single, unequivocally most important thing in the world. Creating them and nurturing them is after all what evolution is solely interested in. Making a new generation who is loved, balanced, ready to step out into the world on their own - this is, and will always be, more important to me than work.
The subtext - and it's a really important one - in the article, is about the empowerment of women. This is horribly unbalanced; for biological, social, whatever reasons. This is broken, and women get a terrible deal: this needs addressing.
But at the heart is just being with your kids and loving them, and for me that means putting work second.
I should also just add: actually, we put us as a couple high up in importance too. Too many people forget this when raising children: you need time to be you and to be a couple, and it's easy to forget this after years of nurturing kids!
[+] [-] eertami|6 years ago|reply
It seems like more of a work-life balance philosophy thing than parenting thing, I simply couldn't imagine working more than 50% of the year but others are content doing 60hr weeks with 2 week vacation.
If that's what makes them happy then power to them.
[+] [-] rayiner|6 years ago|reply
Parents spend too much time apologizing for prioritizing their careers, and it’s particularly unfair to women. Studies repeatedly fail to show significant and durable results from different kinds of parenting styles. But you know what is shown, in study after study, as highly correlated with children's’ long term prosperity? Parental income.
[+] [-] macspoofing|6 years ago|reply
That's a good point but there's some detail missing here: how are the kids being raised. Historically, kids were raised within a tribal or quasi-tribal structure. When you have grandparents, siblings, cousins, uncles and aunts always around, room to play and explore, you don't need parents to be there 24/7 hovering over you. You learn independence as well as a way to interact and negotiate with others.
What this looks like is the worst of all words. The kids are abandoned to a set of nannies and managed activities, while the mother and father live their own lives.
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] fooddood|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] frankbreetz|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cybersnowflake|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] icu|6 years ago|reply
Other than that, my Dad once said something along the lines of, "Life is a constant juggling act; you have your work ball, your family ball etc. However, your family ball is made of glass, so if you drop it, it will shatter and you may not be able to put it together again."
[+] [-] n1000|6 years ago|reply
Being a father myself today, I do think kids can do with relatively little facetime. But the time that is devoted to them must be exclusive quality time that makes it clear you love them and that you are present. There are studies that have shown that if fathers take 30 minutes of exclusive attention for their kids every day, it has great benefits for the child‘s development.
[+] [-] icu|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zanny|6 years ago|reply
Psychology is pretty uniform in the observation that children need parents, preferably both, but just one is a massive developmental influence. There are minor benefits from they/them being biological but it isn't absolutely necessary, but a care worker, teacher, etc is not filling the same social niche with a child that a parent is. Its a job title in its own right that also has by far the most impact on developing functioning healthy human beings than any other. Its also a job you don't just quit or substitute for without lasting consequences, the role of a parent is to anchor children and provide an immovable stake upon their foundation.
You can absolutely hire a parent if you don't want to or have the time yourself to parent the children you make, but it is substantively harmful to deny them having parent(s) when they need them. If a mother wants to work a full time job while a spouse or even just long term domestic partner? wants to take on the job of being a (or more) parent(s) that works. If a father wants to do the same, that works. But kids still need parent(s), preferably two, and that is two full time positions to fill.
One quandary to think on is that society really doesn't organize or optimize for parental efficiency. We organize schools to lecture and teach to try to balance between quantity of children to a quality of education, but adults are just en masse making new lives and mostly playing it by ear on fulfilling parental responsibilities. We haven't tried to promote good parents to be parents by getting them more children - biological or not - to parent. As a civilization it feels backwards to me how what might be the most important job there is - developing future generations - is the one that is the least recognized for its value and importance. It isn't a career, it isn't prestigious, it isn't treated with the same scrutiny you would want to see in getting your plumbing fixed. But broken pipes are a much less substantive issue than mental malaise or physiological complications brought about by poor or absent parenting in the development of the billions to succeed us.
[+] [-] EdwardDiego|6 years ago|reply
When am I neglecting my kids exactly? In the two hours of after school care between school ending and my coming home?
You're implying that there's a direct correlation between quantity and quality of parenting, that's a bold claim.
[+] [-] aidenn0|6 years ago|reply
> They were lovingly cared for by their father, their grandmother, my son’s preschool teacher and my daughter’s babysitter.
Sounds like there were at least two family members watching the kids on a regular basis.
[+] [-] proee|6 years ago|reply
I'd call her after school and chat for a while, only a to find out a bit later that she was in the middle of closing a huge deal!
This made me feel like a million bucks - to know that even though she was very busy, I was still important enough to have her full attention whenever I called her.
I always "felt" like I was more important than her work.
[+] [-] musha68k|6 years ago|reply
https://youtu.be/GJMciK6xWrk
I'm not judging her preference on having a successful career - I'm the same actually - yet I don't plan to have children because of that very reason...
I remember that Dr Gabor Maté also talks a lot about the scars and potential trauma a child can be left with when neglected. I remember presence of both parents to be of paramount importance. And that's not "only" a problem for the child but for society at large.
[+] [-] milliondollar|6 years ago|reply
I am consuming this time with just absolute relish. A relationship is the sum of small things. And driving them to school is part of that overall cumulative time that ... just... matters. For me. I'm sure the kids would be great if their mom did it without me. But I only have one shot here, only a few years where the kids are 12 years old. So yeah, I'll spend my 7 figures a year for this. (Bezos test: would I make the same choice on my death bed looking back?)
She is in a unique situation in that she could choose to live any way she wants; she's not some working stiff. And she is choosing something else. It's not going to hurt her kids, but I think it's a tradeoff she may regret later.
[+] [-] ulfw|6 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] tanakachen|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] benatkin|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abledon|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hindsightbias|6 years ago|reply
One of my 20-something peers walked back to our row where the pizza boxes lay, ruffled through them, sighed “its all cold” and walked back to his terminal.
Now, we’d been doing this for weeks.
Old fart #1 turns to #2 and says under his breath “You know, I gave up my marriage and kids to get us to the moon”
And so they did.
[+] [-] permatech|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spiderfarmer|6 years ago|reply
I grew up on a farm. My parents were home 24/7. I liked that.
[+] [-] electriclove|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notacoward|6 years ago|reply
> If I didn’t write and teach and litigate, a part of me would feel empty.
This sounds like the real reason, and it's not a bad one. Self-care is important. It's hard to be a good parent (or spouse BTW) if you're not a healthy person. But that's a different argument from the one about all of one's work being important to others. Some seems to be, and some less so. When a facile reason is given, even if good reasons also exist, it seems like unhealthy rationalization. But then, picking and promoting a most favorable narrative is exactly what trial lawyers do. I guess it's an easy trap to fall into. I just hope she's right that the choice to favor her career really will prove most fulfilling in the longer term.
[+] [-] simonh|6 years ago|reply
Individually I can agree that yes this task is important enough to give up that event with her children. They might all be reasonable. I think the problem comes when you look at the aggregate.
One lawyer can't save every victim of injustice or teach every student. Does she actually need to get into every one of these demanding situations one after the other, with no gap? Even then, maybe the answer is yes if that's what it takes to get ahead in her career to achieve the things she wants to, but that's really the tradeoff not the individual instances.
[+] [-] m0zg|6 years ago|reply
This autonomy had two interesting effects. On the one hand it definitely benefited me later in life, because I felt like I had a built-in direction. On the other I don't like it when people tell me what to do, particularly if they have an unearned position of power and don't really know what to do themselves, but have to "lead", by hook or by crook.
[+] [-] ido|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] minipci1321|6 years ago|reply
Prioritizing a more "normal" job over raising own kids is a very different subject.
[+] [-] danielscrubs|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dang|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Causality1|6 years ago|reply
Doesn't our paradigm of adversarial justice require that lawyers subscribe to an idea of fair competition? I don't see any difference between using the trial date or venue setting to attack your opponent and, say, using trick make-up and a wig to make your client look nothing like the person the witnesses saw.
[+] [-] sokoloff|6 years ago|reply
We enumerate that a defendant is under no obligation to help the prosecution as just an extreme example of this. That almost all patent infringement cases were held in a backwater East Texas district is evidence that the system doesn't work as that description of "fair competition" would suggest.