
Why Parents Hate Parenting - gcv
http://nymag.com/news/features/67024/
======
pragmatic
Like everything in life, the thought of doing it, trumps the actual doing it.
Finishing the basement, writing a novel, building the next great web app,
raising kids all seem like great projects to embark on. But it's the dark
night of the soul, when you're up for the 10 night in a row (or you have
writer's block or you realize you shouldn't have cut that pipe, etc, etc).

Life isn't all rainbows and unicorns. Speaking as a member of GenX, our lives
are so damn easy most of the time, when we run into problems, we don't know
how to handle it. However, we adjust.

I just can't imagine how grandma raised 9 kids with no ER or acute care and
little money. Wars, the great depression, death of a child, she went through
it all. And they did hard physical labor every day.

The thing is we adjust, it's hard at first, but we persevere.

When you watch your kid doing something you taught him, that's just not a
feeling you get from purchasing a new iPad. When you sit in structure you
built or use a product you built you'll know the feeling. It's hard to explain
but in the end, it's worth it.

~~~
jasonlotito
Very true.

My wife and I are lucky, in a way. She's Italian. Like, born Italian, speaks
Italian, lives Italian. Okay, she lives in Montreal, but damnit, call her a
Frenchy and she'll punch me hard enough in that spot on the arm that she knows
will get a reaction.

Anyways, we live next door to her great-grandmother (nona), and below her
Mother and Father. I swear, her sisters are over often enough that it's
normal. Her older sister lived at home till she was 25/26 and got married.
Only then did she move out. My wife did the same thing. For them, their entire
culture, this is _normal_. Lawyers living at home with their parents, not
batting an eye. This is _normal_.

Now, I'm American. 18, and I'm out the house, fending for myself. Seeing my
cousins was something I did every few years (being a military brat didn't
help, neither did parents getting a divorce).

My wife sees her cousins all the time. Weekly. Not all the cousins, but often
enough that again, it's normal. It's not some super special event.

What's all this getting to? There is a point, I promise.

Anyways, we had our first son in 2008, and our second is due the end of the
month, beginning of August (yay!). Raising our son has been a joy. Ignoring
the fact that he is a very laid back and very happy child, having
parents/grand parent next door and upstairs, and a very close knit family
always present meant raising him wasn't difficult. Couple this with the fact
that Quebec hands you a years paid maternity (if you are working, of course),
and it's pretty smooth sailing. We could still go out occasionally, assured
that the grandparents would take good care of our child.

If we assistance, we literally knocked on the wall, and they'd come over.

Oh, we did our part. We didn't rely on them. And they took advantage, too.
When they needed to go to the market, my wife was able to take them instead of
having to take the bus or walk. All very practical.

So, you ask a good question: > I just can't imagine how grandma raised 9 kids
with no ER or acute care and little money.

And I give you an answer: Family.

It's odd. My family loved me, they cared for me, but family to me before I met
my wife was immediate. I didn't see grandparents but maybe one a year on
Christmas or Thanksgiving. I grew up away from cousins, and at 18, expected to
have to go out on my own.

My family wasn't bad. But in my wife's family, I fully realize how other
cultures see family.

I look at my brother, living in the US, married, with a second child on the
way. I won't go into to many details, but they are struggling, but they get
very little support from family. They live almost 2 hours from my father, but
rarely see him (compared to how often I see my wives family members), and they
get little help from his wives family.

This probably comes from the American cultural of independence. You make it or
break it on your own skill, and asking or getting help is seen as a weakness.
Children are thrown to the wolves at 18 and expected to thrive. Some do. Many
don't.

My son is happy. He makes his parents happy. He's constantly surrounded by
people that love him. Parenting is a joy, and we are in a good place. Our
biggest worries are silly when we think about them (seriously, we worry about
the stupidest things, and laugh about them when we realize what we are
worrying about).

I'm not religious, but that doesn't mean I can't feel blessed.

~~~
abstractbill
On the opposite end of the spectrum: We're expecting our first child in six
weeks. My wife's sister lives two hours away... and every other member of our
families lives _thousands_ of miles away, in France and the UK. I have to
admit it's a little daunting.

~~~
jasonlotito
It's not as hard as it seems. Patience is key, but it all comes naturally.
Really. I was nervous, but honestly, it's rather easy. Yes, having the
relatives close by helped.

The best way to look at the situation is to remember that people have been
having babies for thousands of years under much more difficult situations.

Just love the child. Everything else comes naturally.

Edit: Oh, and, of course, Congratulations! =)

~~~
pbhjpbhj
>Just love the child. Everything else comes naturally.

I disagree.

I agree with your encouraging sentiment but I don't agree that simply loving
your child is enough - parenting doesn't come naturally to those who haven't
grown up around it. Most people nowadays appear to only have their parents
model of parenting to rely on and this appears to lead them to polarise away
from how their parents treated them.

Watched Charlie and the Chocolate Factory with my lad J the other day wherein
the girl Veruca Salt is spoiled by her parents who simply love her and so give
her everything she asks for.

I'm not going to say that you need a degree in Ed-Psych or anything either ...

When you say "it's rather easy" that sends up a few flags for me. Perhaps you
can answer this one for me: my (now nearly 5yo) boy has enjoyed learning chess
with me and on the whole can move the pieces around and make some trade-off
decisions under close instruction, he messed up the board at our last game
(after a long chess _haitus_ ) because he was losing and then starting
flinging stuff around; in short he was upset not to win and said he wouldn't
play again. Should I encourage him to play or forget the game (that I know he
enjoys and has been nice to play together). If I get him to play should I let
him win?

My youngest is now 15mo and is getting fussy about his breakfast food, should
I give in and give him what he'll eat at the risk of limiting his palette and
enjoyment of a variety of foods or should I force feed him (and starve him if
he won't eat it)?

OT now, long post, sorry.

TL;DR I don't think it's easy nor that it all comes naturally.

~~~
kenjackson
Regarding your 15mo there's a good book called The Hungry Monkey. It's about a
food critic who is trying to get his child to eat well. The upshot of the
story, and from talking to various chefs in the story is that kids eat what
kids eat.

It seems that the palettes of people continuously evolves, so even if he
devours ice cream and doritos now, he may end up being the food writer for the
Times when he grows up.

The key seems to be to present good foods to him. Let him see you eat it. But
have something he'll eat too that you can bring out if he doesn't eat. It's
more important for his development to eat any food, and humans are
ridiculously resiliant to diets lacking in diversity (just use a multivitamin
for deficiencies in key vitamins and minerals). Probably the only thing to
watch out for is a LOT of sodium. But I'd be less concerned about things like
fat and sugars than I would be for an adult.

~~~
jasonlotito
My wife's grandmother has a garden out back.

I swear, the kid eats better then I do. He get's fresh pasta sauce all the
time. >_<

------
futuremint
The lens through which parenting is viewed here is too narrow. Parenting isn't
about being happier. It is about being a bigger and better person. Children
make your life BIGGER. You feel moments of happiness like you've never felt
before. You also feel moments of anger like you've never felt before.

It really is indescribable and not for the faint of heart or the selfish. The
beautiful thing about parenting is that it shows you who you really are (not
who you _think_ you are), and gives you chances every day to grow.

It makes you see what really matters in life, assuming you actually come to
this realization. I've seen plenty of people not realize this and fight to
keep their identity, their original idea of what they wanted for themselves
while also trying to be a parent. That doesn't work.

Part of parenting is a certain amount of ego destruction. You _have_ to go
through that if you want to genuinely care for another human being.

This is what makes the experience of parenting so great. It is a kind of Zen
experience of making yourself better by destroying your concept of self (and
putting another 'self' first more than your own self would like).

~~~
junklight
I so agree with this.

The whole "does it make my life happier" is such a shallow consumer thing.

When I was younger I led an interesting life in many ways but I have never had
the intensity of experience I have with and about my children. Another really
surprising thing was finding out how much I connect back with society - I want
to be part of society and change it and make it better - I get _what_ it is
for.

Children are not a lifestyle accessory and as the poster above says they push
you into all sorts of aspects of your self in all sorts of interesting ways.

The mixture of a startup and three small children has certainly been
entertaining and there have been times when I am so exhausted I have nothing
else to give but then to go and do something simple - like bathing the
children or doing something in the garden with them and it makes it all worth
while.

As I frequently find myself telling my children: Things in life that aren't
challenging aren't worth while (possibly hyperbole but you get my point)

~~~
pavel_lishin
Really? Happiness is shallow and consumeristic?

~~~
jimbokun
It is if you're dumb enough to have this as your definition of "happiness":

'When I mention this to Daniel Gilbert, he hardly disputes that meaning is
important. But he does wonder how prominently it should figure into people’s
decisions to have kids. “When you pause to think what children mean to you, of
course they make you feel good,” he says. “The problem is, 95 percent of the
time, you’re not thinking about what they mean to you. You’re thinking that
you have to take them to piano lessons. So you have to think about which kind
of happiness you’ll be consuming most often. Do you want to maximize the one
you experience almost all the time”—moment-to-moment happiness—“or the one you
experience rarely?”'

I mean, why let a little thing like "meaning" affect the decisions you make in
life, right?

We all know how well focusing on immediate pleasure works in areas such as
dieting, exercise, finance, career, etc. Why not apply the same logic to
having kids, right?

~~~
ashot
it seems quite logical to me.

------
milesf
I feel like a freak.

After reading this article I'm afraid my experience is much different. My wife
and I love being parents, and life with our 8 year old son and 6 year old
daughter is peaceful and full of laughter most of the time.

It wasn't always this way for me. I grew up in a home that screamed a lot, and
most of my family and relatives still live with too much manufactured drama
and bad life choices. After I converted to Christianity at the age of 20, I
spent the next decade "working out my salvation" before I met and married my
wife. We're celebrating our 10th anniversary next week, and I can honestly say
my life is fantastic.

I credit a lot of why I've managed to pull off what I have to this book
<http://amzn.to/9zILXE>

~~~
mcantor
Out of curiosity, why did you shorten that URL?

~~~
milesf
Force of habit from my Twitter addiction. No, it's not an Amazon affiliate
link :) I suppose the original wasn't all that long I could have used it
instead <http://www.amazon.ca/Boundaries-Pb-Cloud/dp/0310247454>

------
yason
Parenting is about showing the kid his boundaries.

And by showing the boundaries I don't mean canonically forbidding all nice
things and always being "the bad guy". Limits and boundaries have a bad rap in
some literature.

The concept of boundaries is universal: boundaries don't enforce anyone to
choose one option over another: they just enforce one to choose. Showing the
kid his boundaries is not an easy undertaking but on the other hand it is
something we all do to each other everyday. At work, at home, with friends,
with kids.

By letting one make choices—which is enforced by setting and keeping the
boundaries—allows him to gradually learn about himself, and eventually grow to
change himself.

Boundaries change as a person grows: first, with a toddler it might be about
not gaining anything by hitting or throwing things, not merely being forbidden
or removed from throwing things around. Later it might be about deferred
gratification: if the child chooses to have everything right away now and the
boundaries stick, thus enforcing proper consequences of the kids choice, he
will gradually learn that in the long run he gets less by having everything
immediately. In adulthood, showing boundaries might be about saying no to
someone known to ask around for favours, rarely returning them. The refusal
will force him to consider his options: he must either do this or that but no
longer both, as he can't get other people to do work for him anymore.

A parent can't change the kid's mind nor himself make the kid a good adult.
The kid is a person of his own anyway. A parent can only show boundaries and
hope that he manages to be a mirror to the kid's behavior well enough so that
the kid will learn something.

~~~
jtheory
Some of this I agree with, but be careful assuming that a child's reason can
function like an adult's. Giving them choices sometimes helps them take
control of their lives, but sometimes (if they're already cognitively
overwhelmed) being forced to choose is an unwanted stress.

Absolutely, consistency is important, and putting some thought into what
lesson the child is learning from your interaction (often not what you're
trying to teach them).

And the almost-always overlooked key to boundaries/rules is that the
boundaries that are _convenient_ to you are _cruelly restrictive_ to your
child, whose burning purpose in life is to do what you're doing -- reading
your book, using your phone, typing on your laptop, exploring your food,
putting on your makeup, etc..

This is learning; unfortunately it's inconvenient when they do physics
experiments with the juice glasses, etc..

I've found it very eye-opening how much easier my toddler is once I realized
that she could have access to almost everything as long as the interactions
were carefully controlled and she learned rules along the way (the same rules
we follow, really). Now she's far less excited by the laptop, phone, coffee
mug, dinner plate, etc. because she's had a chance to explore them instead of
being tormented by them put constantly just out of her reach. She has also
learned not to tear book pages (we started with things headed for recycling
anyway, and if she tore a page we were sad & took it away for "repair"), so
she can flip through "grown-up" books safely -- another thing off the
"frantically interested" list. She's most of the way to learning that she's
allowed to see almost anything as long as she is careful not to drop it or
mangle it.

No punishments involved -- why punish someone for something they didn't know
was wrong? -- it's all just learning, and she knows that things get put away
when she doesn't interact with them the "right" way, so she has lots of
motivation to learn the right way.

~~~
euccastro
And to play devil's advocate: I think it was Freud who traced his love of
books back to a childhood anecdote where his father had this big, shiny,
colorful book he despised, so he brought it to young Sigmund and they tore it
to pieces together.

------
david927
It's a lot of work. I think that's exacerbated by modern lifestyles. We're
pulled in a thousand directions and we're less likely to live near relatives,
which means that the support systems are not there like they used to be.

Kids demand _you_. Simple things like watching them playing is huge for them.
If you try to understand what they're saying (already at a few months old),
you'll be surprised to find it pretty cogent and clear. For example, in the
article, the little boy was literally hitting his mother over the head to get
her attention. But if you're not listening, you just get upset.

I didn't become parent because I think it will selfishly make me happier. I
became a parent because I felt I would have something to offer a child and I
wanted to give expression to that.

~~~
yardie
It's a lot of work, but not because of lifestyle. In reading the article you
see that parents, now, spend more time with their kids than previous
generations. But kids are coddled more than ever. Between shuttling them to
school, soccer practice, and piano lessons it seems like the parents have
decided to give themselves these tasks and are surprised! when they don't have
anytime for do what they want.

If anything I learned from the article it's these parents are wimps. The kid
almost takes the father's eye out and the strongest punishment is a timeout?!
The mother has to ask her son to do his homework?! I guess my family is old
school, but throwing anything at my mom would have my ass on ice. And if she
has to ask twice, that computer would be gone.

------
ivankirigin
I thought this article was a bit better about data
<http://nymag.com/news/features/67024/>

I have a 3.3 year old and a 3.5 week old. The trick to not being too pissed
off at a 3 year old is to remember that he is just fucking three years old. He
isn't going to listen to everything you say. Most things you tell your kid are
about long term socialization that he is certain to learn, so don't stress
about it.

You don't stress about it, but you do enforce it. You need to get good at not
caring about crying. Crying is the sound of weakness leaving their bodies :)

Having a kid is extremely satisfying. I can't imagine I'd be happier without
mine. If you average out these opinions across most of society, the amount of
information relevant to me approaches nil. So don't not have kids because of
some statistic with happiness research.

------
dugmartin
I think the parents in this article need to grow up. If you have so little
emotional maturity that your kid's tantrum makes you upset you have a problem.
They are the children, you are the adult. Act like one.

I have two kids, 3 and 6. My 3 year old is at a stage where she throws epic
tantrums, mostly when she is tired but this heat wave we are in on the east
coast doesn't help. When she is in full flail I look at her and smile and say
"you can do better than that if you try". I don't feel bad as a parent that
she is having a tantrum, she doesn't have the emotional control yet. She will
- my 6 year old went through the same thing and when the 3 year old starts up
my 6 year old now rolls her eyes and smiles.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
>When she is in full flail I look at her and smile and say "you can do better
than that if you try".

I have a friend who has 2 girls, he did this sort of playful taunting with
them and it had similar effects to yours.

This sort of thing has not worked at all with my eldest (and we're just
entering the tantrum zone with the youngest, hold tight!) who would simply do
worse, smashing, hitting, kicking, biting in response. When they are damaging
property and hurting people then IMO intervention is required.

Yes, standing back and letting him blow off some steam has helped on occasions
but has not been half as effective as for my friend's girls.

Not all kids are the same.

My lad brought me to tears once because he was hurting himself having a
tantrum and couldn't be calmed. I don't consider my response childish, but I'm
not an objective observer.

~~~
Tichy
I guess that is when you remember stuff like "never negotiate with
terrorists"?

Presumably it is kind of the job of kids to test their parents' limits...

------
sethg
The article has these little asides describing a videotaped interaction
between a mother and her son...

 _“I have to get it to the part and then pause it,” says the boy.

“No,” says his mother. “You do that after you do your homework.”_

Not that I haven’t been guilty of the same misparenting myself, but.... If you
_expect_ that you can ever get an eight-year-old to walk away from a video and
do his homework by _persuading_ him, you’re setting yourself up for
unhappiness.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
>If you expect that you can ever get an eight-year-old to walk away from a
video and do his homework by persuading him, you’re setting yourself up for
unhappiness.

So you let your kids walk all over you?

~~~
epochwolf
No, you turn the TV off and set the kid in front of his homework. (I don't
have kids but that's what my parents did to me. It worked well enough.)

~~~
cmars232
Completely agree. No small wonder parents who feel obligated to negotiate
every little thing with their children are so burned out. Kids need nurturing
and honest attention, but they'll turn into little controlling tyrants if you
let them.

------
brc
Well, as a parent who has to split time between child rearing (2.5 and .5
years old) and writing software, I can tell you that most of this article is
true.

The problems are many: for me the two main problems was about 17 years of
independent life and good times funded by good wages. Travelling, sports,
parties, all-night coding sessions. All of these have been put into the too-
hard basket.

The second main problem is the idealised view of parenting fed to us through
movies, TV shows and advertising. You're meant to enjoy the bonding times, but
running the bath for the 800th time to bathe a wriggling toddler is tedium no
matter which way you slice it, and cleaning up poo for the thousandth time is
horrid work you wouldn't wish on anyone.

The keys to success I think are a rock-solid partnership going into the child
raising, family support available, and lack of other stresses like housing or
income or illness. When your tired you just can't handle things in the same
way, and with young children in the house, you're going to be tired as you
battle to maintain your adult habits of staying up late while children take up
your waking hours.

Once you've done it, there's no going back, so you have to work on finding a
new level of happiness and honestly say goodbye to your old lifestyle for a
while. Friends will slip away, interests will be put on hold, careers might
slide for a few years, your house will be messy and ruined. That's the choice
you've made, might as well find new ways of getting joy.

------
mcknz
I certainly don't have all the answers, but part of why parents hate parenting
is a one-size-fits-all approach to what parents are "supposed" to do: issue
time-outs, "recite the rules of the house to a 2 year-old," or overuse the
good old "1, 2, 3...." There's no single golden path to parenting.

------
herdrick
What they left dangling were the serene Namibian parents. It just seems less
painful there and within our own past as well. Maybe the "slavishly respect
your childrens' thoughts and wants" was a big mistake. You know, phrases like,
"Children should be seen and not heard" and "Children should speak when spoken
to" used to be commonplace.

Maybe there's hope for modern rich societies. I've read that in the French
culture decisions that are made as much or more for the benefit of the
parents. The family goes on vacations that the parents are interested in,
enjoying art museums, sophisticated cities, etc, instead of what the kids
want: a theme park in the suburbs. Maybe this derives from an attitude that
children are born barbarians, that their natural tastes and desires are
stupid, and they need to have civilization pounded into them in order. Whereas
we in the Anglo-Saxon derived culture put more value on the natural impulses
of children.

I think the situation can be improved.

------
mcantor
There is so much talk in this article about how having a child does not affect
your happiness positively, and the cited examples range from dealing with the
financial burden to the psychological distress of trying to control a
misbehaving kid.

The author even notes with surprise that "housework" ranked above parenting on
the list of things that made women happy in a Texan study several years ago. I
bet video games are more fun, too.

But nowhere do I see a comparison between how it feels to look back on your
life after raising a kid for 18 years, and how it feels to look back on your
life after playing Xbox for 18 years.

We're all hedonists; the only difference is who has the patience to do what
makes them joyful tomorrow instead of what gives them chuckles today.

------
jpdugan
In my experience, parenthood is often challenging because we are given so
little good information in advance concerning what is actually challenging
about parenting.

When we talk about the difficulties of parenthood, we normally talk about
sleepless nights and tantrums and expense. We do this, I think, because these
are safe topics. They allow us to have ritualized conversations about
parenthood. We know what we are supposed to say and we say those things, even
though we often don't think they're true or important.

But the real crisis isn't something we talk about. Raising children requires a
huge commitment of time and energy--time and energy we can no longer give to
ourselves or our spouse. And while almost all new parents try to keep their
pre-baby lives intact for some period of time, eventually the futility becomes
so obvious that they relent and cull many activities out of their lives to
make space for the baby. The real crisis is one of identity. We fear that by
cutting so many of the things we care(d) about out of our lives, we risk not
being ourselves anymore. Am I the same person now? Is my wife the same? We
don't talk about these questions because many of us don't like the answers.

For me personally, any such fears were unwarranted. I love my new life. Having
children improved an already wonderful marriage--my wife and I are now an
unstoppable team. My toddler has become one of my best friends. The infant
just looks like a new buddy in waiting. But I'm a fundamentally happy person.
I suspect it's like winning the lottery. If you're happy beforehand, you'll be
happy afterward; if you're unhappy beforehand, you'll be unhappy afterward.

------
bitwize
A time out in his crib? No wonder she hates parenting. If I threw shit at my
parents it would have gotten me the mother of all whoopings.

~~~
zephyrfalcon
Same here, and I'm sorry that some of the commenters immediately play the
"child abuse" card. Teaching your kid that there are boundaries is a good
thing, or you will end up with, well, the current generation of teenagers and
college-aged kids in the US, who have a whole arsenal of excuses why there
aren't doing what they _should_ be doing, a sense of entitlement the size of
Montana, and _zero_ sense of responsibility.

Beating their ass when they deserve it should be a last resort -- a clear
signal that they have gone too far this time. And the fewer of those you have
to hand out, the better. If your kid actually listens to reason all the time,
great! But for most of them, sometimes this _is_ necessary, and assuming your
kid has a normal response to stimuli, it should work a hell of a lot better
than a "timeout" (how is that a punishment anyway?).

~~~
nollidge
Yes, you're right. It's millenial's own damn fault that unemployment in their
demographic has reached nearly Depression-era levels.

~~~
zephyrfalcon
Where did I mention unemployment?

------
kroger
one page version:

<http://nymag.com/print/?/news/features/67024/>

------
Tichy
This considering a kid to be a project seems to have a lot to do with this.
All these ideas of how a kid has to be (and also the perfect family with the
perfect family home and the perfect family car). I see it the other way round.
I am extremely curious to see what kind of person my kid will turn out to be.
Granted, there might be a pang of regret in case he wouldn't show any interest
in mathematics or science at all, but I don't see myself fighting over it. And
I hated school myself, so honestly, in school vs kid, I would side with the
kid.

------
rada
As someone who just moved from New York to Minneapolis (15 years in NYC, last
year with a newborn) I want to add that a LOT of the unhappiness has to do
with the city. It is truly hard to raise a child there for reasons too
numerous to discuss here. The writers didn't have to go to Scandinavia for
examples of happy parents, they just had to get out of the tri-state area.

~~~
metageek
Psst. Now that you're not in New York, you don't need to call it "the city".

~~~
rada
Your downvoters must not get the joke. What's funny, I did originally quote
"the city" but figured not everyone would get it :)

------
S_A_P
Is this more of a reflection of how much more selfish we generally are
compared with previous generations, or evidence that raising children really
is hard?

~~~
hugh3
Why should it be about selfishness? It could be about different things, like
changing fashions for disciplining children.

I get the impression that children were much better-behaved in the old days,
when they knew acting up would get them belted.

------
Oxryly
I'd say that becoming a parent will definitely come between you and your idea
of happiness. You'll have to re-evaluate your relationship to happiness and
satisfaction (and sleep and pain) and that in itself is difficult and not fun.

In the end you may be able to develop the skill of redefining happiness to
suit the state you find yourself in, which everyone can benefit from.

------
exit
i read articles like this now and then, and i never get it.

------
capital_omega
_Of course, this should not be a surprise. If you are no longer fretting about
spending too little time with your children after they’re born (because you
have a year of paid maternity leave), if you’re no longer anxious about
finding affordable child care once you go back to work (because the state
subsidizes it), if you’re no longer wondering how to pay for your children’s
education and health care (because they’re free)—well, it stands to reason
that your own mental health would improve. When Kahneman and his colleagues
did another version of his survey of working women, this time comparing those
in Columbus, Ohio, to those in Rennes, France, the French sample enjoyed child
care a good deal more than its American counterpart. “We’ve put all this
energy into being perfect parents,” says Judith Warner, author of Perfect
Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety, “instead of political change that
would make family life better.”_

This is an important note. Despite the "family values" posturing of the
American right wing, the "socialist" Europeans are actually far _more_ pro-
family than the conservatives who dominate (even now, having a sizeable
minority of the Democratic party) in American politics.

~~~
ja30278
This is contradicted elsewhere in the article by the observation that families
who could afford more childcare were _not_ necessarily happier.

~~~
Robin_Message
But things like paternity leave, maternity leave, requiring employers to
consider flexible working -- these kind of things Europe is doing are far more
family friendly than the republican party.

The family values line of "mothers should stay at home" espoused by Pat
Robertson et al. probably is better than both parents working, however much
childcare you can afford.

No reason it has to be the _mother_ though. And the actual family values line
is in conflict with Republican views on work. This conflict is partly historic
(Protestant work ethic), but partly an interesting indictment of the hypocrisy
of the religious rights' support for the Republican party. Their focus on only
a few moral issues does a great disservice to the actual morality of the
nation. They say mothers should stay home, but support a party who's economic
policies make that impossible.

~~~
hugh3
_But things like paternity leave, maternity leave, requiring employers to
consider flexible working -- these kind of things Europe is doing are far more
family friendly than the republican party._

Everything has consequences elsewhere. Make paid maternity/paternity leave
compulsory and you make it riskier for employers to hire. So you increase the
probability that your father gets three months off after you're born, but you
also increase the probability that your father is a long-term unemployed bozo
living in a housing project on the outskirts of Paris.

 _The family values line of "mothers should stay at home" espoused by Pat
Robertson et al. probably is better than both parents working, however much
childcare you can afford._

I agree.

 _No reason it has to be the mother though._

It doesn't have to be, but this seems to be the natural way things go if left
to their own devices. Most human societies have the other taking on the vast
majority of childcare duties -- it seems to be part of the way our minds are
put together that mothers _want_ to do a lot more childcare than fathers do.

~~~
euccastro
_So you increase the probability that your father gets three months off after
you're born, but you also increase the probability that your father is a long-
term unemployed bozo living in a housing project on the outskirts of Paris._

Employers wouldn't hire more than they need anyway. Even if that was the case,
the flip side would be job insecurity. You can theorize all you want about
these tradeoffs, but the experience shows that these measures do work in
Europe, and more so in Scandinavian countries. Never have I seen so many child
carts as in Iceland, and despite the crash their unemployment is 8% and going
down.

------
ergo98
Have only been a HN reader for a short time (though I've been linked from here
quite a few times), so please pardon my pollution of this story to ask a
question: Does this belong on Hacker News?

Is Hacker News turning into Reddit (minus the convenience of subreddits)? I
visit both because HN was always just solid tech links and news, but several
completely non-hacker stories (outside of the fact that we are humans, might
have families, may see someone possibly drown, and might be a white ninja)
have made the top in the past couple of days.

The HN mission is diluting.

~~~
mcknz
File under: gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

<http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>

"If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying
that HN is turning into Reddit. (It's a common semi-noob illusion.)"

~~~
ergo98
Meh. I'll bravely endure the downvotes and say that it isn't a noob illusion.
It's reality. It is the arc that almost every site follows when the users
start thinking "people here are interested in non-specific stuff as well!"

Reddit started as a HN. It became a general site. The programming subreddit
has become a grunty joke. Slashdot started as a differently managed HN. It has
become a joke. Digg....okay, forget about Digg.

HN is becoming Reddit. As short as 6 months ago I could say that every day I
visited HN I learned something new and interesting in this industry. I can't
remember a single thing new or interesting over the past two weeks, and
increasingly it is becoming a place for people to avoid work.

