As the parent of a 2 month old, it's a difficult question we're facing right now. Who? How? When? Should my wife, with a doctorate in biochemistry, abandon her career completely and stay home? Should I? I'm not enthusiastic about those options. Should we hire someone? Not wild about that either. I think the best would be to kind of try and switch off, but it's going to require a lot of flexibility, and perhaps earning less money. The second is probably ok, depending on wherever it is we settle, the second may not be forthcoming from many employers. Sigh...
Here in Slovakia, the most common way to solve it is that mother will stay at home for two or three years (it is also called "mother's vacation"), and then resume her career. I think that in most cases, this is the most sane option. Some mothers would stay at home for 6 years - but even in this scenario, it doesn't mean the abandonment of the career, does it? Can't she return to work after a few years and resume where she left?
I believe the first years of a child are most magical for the parents to watch...and those moments will not return: if your wife will miss them by being in the workplace, they just will be missed forever. So take care and enjoy being with your kid as often as you can afford!
If you quit your job for 3-6 years, you lose a large part of what it takes to make money: if you are technical, you lose skills, if you are in sales, you lose contacts, etc. The truth of the matter is, in Slovakia (as well as most other places) the men want the women to take care of babies, and the women agree. It has nothing to do with it being "the most sane option", or the "first years being the most magical". If it were that simple, the men would be lining up to quit their jobs for a few years of magic and then come back, no harm done.
In reality, the men are not keen on staying at home, and for good reason - you lose your marketability, and poetic ideas of parenthood aside, it's not all that magical to take care of a screaming, pooping kid who is too young to engage in activities that adults find interesting.
If am probably coming across a little harsh but having grown up female in the Eastern Block, I am predictably annoyed that the men from my part of the world are quick to preach to women what they don't want to practice themselves. If you think staying at home is so great, why do you immediately say David's wife should do it?
> I believe the first years of a child are most magical for the parents to watch...and those moments will not return: if your wife will miss them by being in the workplace, they just will be missed forever. So take care and enjoy being with your kid as often as you can afford!
Austria, where we are now, is similar, and we've both taken several months "off" (or as much 'off' as I can force myself to do:-) to spend time getting used to the new situation, and enjoying her. It's difficult to say that it should be entirely the woman's responsibility though, especially as my wife is also quite talented in her field, and taking something like three years off might put her permanently behind the curve.
Without a doubt, though, we both firmly believe in spending as much time as possible with her!
lisper, I hope you must be 21 or something. Maybe when you have kids, you will understand the difficulty of raising them, while trying to have some kind of career.
There are a lot of difficulties when raising kids, and both parents are well educated, and can have potential good careers.
I don't have kids, but my sister has, and she decided to stay for half a year home, then they got a nanny. She had to find a job that had flexible hours, so she could be home early enough, and she works hard. She has a masters in finance, and an MBA, and she decided to get a job that pays less, but that has better hours, and a lot of her salary goes to the nanny.
Before having kids, their planning was different, that they were going to send the kids in day-care, but the local options were not that good at all, and my niece was getting sick very frequently, so they had to change the plans, and for a month or so they were in a dilema on what to do.
Your comment had a very arrogant tone, and it came out preachy and self righteous. Maybe you didn't mean it, but that's how it came.
Wow, I don't think I've ever been so offended by something on this site. Your implication that I haven't thought about the future of my daughter is... something I hope you never say to any other parent.
We've done our best to think about the future, but it's unknowable.
I don't think he meant to be so offensive. He may just not realize how hard this problem is.
The fact is, finding a perfect solution for taking care of small children in an industrial society is probably an insoluble problem. And if so it's not one you can solve before having kids, or after them.
You still haven't thought about what his words meant.
You said you were facing a certain problem "now", 2 months after the child was born.
You could have made your decision about how to handle it prior to the child being born. If you'd done that, you would not be facing the problem now, it would be decided. But you didn't.
He asked about why you didn't decide in advance. You got offended by the implication that you hadn't decided in advance. That was something you said yourself, so it's unreasonable to be offended by it, or to blame him for noticing you said it.
Do you have any kids? Do you realize how unpredictable it is to plan things for your child, for example, how sick the child is going to be, or how well-tempered?
My post is simply about logic and who said what. Nothing more. Why can't you read it rationally?
And, BTW, if you and other parents can't read it rationally, why should I believe you handle parenting matters rationally? Parenting matters are more difficult and more emotional than reading a simple forum post.
Here is the rational answer you seem to want. (a) This problem is so hard you can probably never solve it satisfactorily, and (b) you can't know what it's going to be like to have kids before you have them, or what your kids will be like. So however much thought you expend on the question before having kids, you're still going to be working on it afterward.
Society has a response to (a) and (b). It is called a social net, based on solidarity: it works like insurance schemes should (not speaking of fraudulent market schemes, e.g. the US health insurance).
I think the biggest problem is, that you despise pooling resources into social systems purportedly designed to help in (a) and (b). "Old" Europe has suffered enough in WWII to recognize the importance of it, and erect such a system, which is frowned upon by "risk tolerant entrepreneurship" (they have enough personal wealth to fall back on). This social net you are missing is being therefore dismantled in the EU as well, since it is regarded as uncompetitive compared to the US or China. It is a race to the bottom (if you compete with slaves, you become a slave*), of which the GOOG kindergarten is just a sign.
We live in Europe, and no, handouts not really the answer we're looking for. We're aiming at a flexible schedule for both of us in order to both have time with our daughter. The safety net stuff is nice in some ways, but it's not really what we're after.
I didn't argue with that, or ask for an answer of that type, or say that davidw did anything wrong other than misread lisper's post.
I thought the waterfall development link basically answered the question about advanced planning. I'm mostly interested in the emotional fragility of parents and wanted to see what would happen if I pointed out that logic does not back up his reaction.
"I'm mostly interested in the emotional fragility of parents and wanted to see what would happen if I pointed out that logic does not back up his reaction."
The form of my post was to make correct, logical points. That is not trolling. The fact I had an honorable motivation -- learning -- does not suddenly make my posts worse.
The thing is - one of the biggest factors in making the decision is the child! And you cannot know what the child is like, until it is there, and even then it takes a while to get to know it. Children are unique, and very different, one from another. What will be best for one will not be for another.
His tone was harsh, but I don't think that indignation is a fair response to the question. Did something change in your lives that made this problem unpredictable? Were one of you planning on staying home with the children, only to have finances shift such that you both have to work?
Obviously, you don't have to answer him in detail, but you could do more than simply scold the guy for asking. I know plenty of couples who never thought deeply about finances before they launched into parenthood.
> Obviously, you don't have to answer him in detail
I don't mind talking about my own job situation, but don't really feel comfortable talking about my wife's.
To keep it brief, my wife and I could live in any number of countries and both of us could find jobs in most of them. With choice comes a lot of thinking and a great weight of responsibility. Live in Italy, make less money, and have the grandparents nearby to help out? Live in the US, make more money at better jobs and pay someone? Stay in Austria with a nice social welfare system, and reasonable jobs? All of those have further variables and derivatives and basically end up being very much impossible to calculate a priori (and there are elements that are private and I don't wish to share publicly).
In any case, I think most parents would respond with some indignation if their commitment to their children were questioned. It's just something that's probably not very polite to do outside of a small circle of friends and family.
Ah...that's a more difficult problem than your original post made it seem. I can see how you'd be upset by the response, since you know the details of the situation.
For what it's worth, I don't think he was questioning your commitment to your children, so much as the forethought you put into the process. He just didn't do it in a diplomatic way.
Being someone who probably overthinks some things in my life, I tend to equate "not thinking about" with "not placing much importance on something". However, being something of a complex system, between family, work, society, and other factors, it's just impossible to calculate, even though we have clear, if rough ideas about what we'd like, and how we think things ought to be.
He wasn't really asking it was a rhetorical question and he was the one "scolding". I don't think he is "entitled" to an answer and think "davidw" was extremely polite in response to the tone of the previous comment.
Oh, come on. His question was obviously in response to your statements about what happens to your careers, not about whether or not you had thought about your daughter's future.
It's not like the career question is unforeseeable. Many people put off having kids due to that exact issue.
You can be offended all you like, but if you really didn't have a solid answer to that question before you had your child, I do think you were being irresponsible.
If you put off having kids until things are 'perfect', you may never have any. Even then, something might go wrong - say a serious, chronic illness, a company tanks at the wrong moment, or any number of other completely unforeseeable events. We've thought long and hard about any number of things, but there are simply too many variables. And I think it's extremely presumptuous and unfriendly to go casting aspersions about someone you don't know on a site like this that aims to have a strong, friendly community.
Hopefully he just dashed off a quick response without really thinking about it.
You're broadening the scope of the debate again. I said you should have a plan in place for issues like who compromises their career. How does that balloon into "put off having kids until things are perfect"?
Of course, there are extenuating circumstances which can waylay any planning; I never intended to imply that there weren't. Go back and read my post, and you'll see that my criticism was conditional. If you did have a plan in place, and then extenuating circumstances derailed those plans, then fine.
Twice now you've taken statements that were pointed at a specific issue and acted as if they were broad indictments of your parenting skills that amounted to nothing more than ad hominem attacks. False umbrage hardly contributes to a strong and friendly community.
The debate is very broad in scope because many things are interconnected.
My umbrage was anything but false: the idea that we had taken the arrival of a child so lightly as to not consider and plan for the future most certainly implies negative things about me and my wife, especially considering that people here really don't have that much knowledge of our situation.
pg's response was quite astute: we thought and planned beforehand, but things change rapidly, and in ways that are unpredictable. One small, simple example is that I thought at this stage, since our daughter is basically in the eating/pooping/sleeping phase, it would be easy to get back to work, and leave most of it to my wife, since she has to feed her in any case. However, it's quite difficult to concentrate on work, and I really enjoy helping out and spending time with the baby, even if she doesn't do much. There are plenty of other things that aren't like we'd imagined them either.
Basically, unless you have experience with kids yourself, I think that it's not so easy to understand what it's like.
I haven't said anything outside of "If you had no plans for post-baby career changes, then you were being irresponsible." If the debate is any broader than that, it's only because you are taking that simple, focused statement and falsely taking it to mean something else. And I don't need (or want) any more information about your oh-so-unique situation, or kids of my own, in order for my simple statement to be true.
If you and your partner didn't make plans for your careers before having a child, then suck it up and accept that you were irresponsible. If you did make those plans, then put your reading comprehension hat on and stop with the broken-heart act. Christ.
One of my old bosses had a similar problem. When she has her twins, both her and her husband had excellent carrers. What they decided was that she would stay home with the kids for two years, while the other worked. The idea was that should would be "out of touch" for a short enough time that she could get back in without much loss.
Then when it was her turn to work, her husband arranged to work part time from home. The kids were self sufficient enough that he could focus on his programming for short stints during the day and for longer periods at night when his wife got home. He was able to do enough work to "stay in the game." In fact, he liked it so much he decided to do it for another 2 years.
At that point the girls were in pre-school, so had about 3 hours each day to get work done while they were gone, could then play with them the rest of the day, and finish his work at night when his wife was there.
The girls are now 6 and in school for most of the day. He's looking at going back to work full time, but given how much he enjoys working from home, he may just keep doing that for a while.
In my utopia it would be very much usual to be able to pursue a career part time/job-sharing while your children are young (or if you just prefer to be able to do other things outside your job). So each parent could work half- or three-quarters- time and thus share child care (with a moderate amount of external help), whilst still both pursuing their careers.
I imagine it is tough, but on the other hand, is it not only a couple of years (3 to 4 - then kids go to kindergarden and school)? Abandoning one's career might not be what is called for, merely taking a little break?
Who else is in a better position to take responsibility and care, than you (& partner)?
How else could you do it if not with love?
Your partner + you: 20% off is 1+1 days a week. Make grandparents happy, that makes +1+1 days. Each of you can take 2 days off a month. And this is even without parental leave for three years.
After that, daycare is your answer: socializing is an essential need for humans.
