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Swinx43 | 3 years ago

I think it is impossible to understand how much additional stress and anxiety being a parent of small children bring without being in that position.

I refer to it as the best kept secret of parenthood. No one tells you this until you are in it.

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afandian|3 years ago

They do try. But it’s impossible to communicate and understand completely. It can only be experienced!

Same goes for the upsides.

Silverback_VII|3 years ago

>I think it is impossible to understand how much additional stress and anxiety being a parent of small children bring without being in that position.

I have to disagree and I'm a father. I think it's exactly like in the book "the happiness advantage", some people will see the positive and use it as possibility to grow and to get more productive.

On the other hand, People who focus on the negative and didn't learn to cope with stress will have problems in every high stress environment no matter the circumstances.

no matter the crap life throws at them some people simply march forward and this is the mindset you need - and not a break, which will only get you right back where you were.

Tade0|3 years ago

Also a father, and I don't see it as a case of positives and negatives, rather how much energy you're putting into it.

There are many methods of minimizing the effort you're putting in and you can make it relatively easy, but like with everything it's a tradeoff.

Food is one major point. You can introduce a baby to solids early on and practice the BLW method, or you could just spoon feed them with ready-to-eat baby products - there's an order of magnitude difference in effort between those two approaches.

One thing I learned from this experience is that it's beyond the capabilities of a normal human couple to apply all the fancy, high-effort parenting methods - you'd need at least two grandparents cover just the more popular ones.

civilized|3 years ago

Some people have an easy time raising kids and some have a much harder time. There are a lot of reasons for this. Different kids, different parents, health issues.

The stress of a genuinely difficult parenting situation doesn't just go away with some superficial pop psych like focusing on the positive. That's such an astonishing claim, it's like telling a drowning person to use positive thinking to solve their problems.

ip26|3 years ago

Good luck “looking on the bright side” when you’ve had less than four hours sleep every night for the past week.

Some kids are just angels and sleep like champs, others fight every inch of the way and wake up constantly. As a result, different parents come up with wildly different “truths of parenting”.

ravishi|3 years ago

If you grow along with your kid everyone benefits. For me this is the greatest gift life has offered me.