1) Getting very, very poor sleep, which can last anywhere from 2-12 months depending on your kid and your parenting technique.
2) Higher monthly expenses, plus a potentially-giant bill for the birth, on top of a year of smaller but still substantial bills for various things. This will be worse if the pregnancy is split over two years of insurance deductible (probably irrelevant in countries with medical coverage systems that aren't totally broken, but very relevant in the US)
3) Having your free time (including kid-free time that you have to use to keep the house in something that resembles order if you squint at it really hard) drop to ~25-30% what it was pre-kid. (you can gain a bit more by making your sleep even worse, though. Hooray?)
4) Your house will be kinda messy and gross even if you try hard to keep it clean, which is discouraging and stressful.
5) Leaving the house and getting out of the car now being A Whole Thing instead of something that barely takes any time or effort at all. Everything you do that isn't sitting at home in your pajamas is much more difficult. Even that is, in a way.
6) You no longer actually have time off, ever. Not in the sense you did before kids.
7) If you're a woman and want to breast feed... oh god. It's bad. Even worse sleep, and you'll have either a baby or a noisy milking machine attached to you seemingly all the damn time, which is incredibly inconvenient if you need to do anything else at all ever.
Go ahead an multiply the stress of the above by a factor of 10 if your new kid has serious health issues.
It boggles my mind that we consider the US a first-world country when I read things like this.
Also not sure I agree about the breastfeeding being so bad. Sure, it's a bit of a chore, but most mothers I know (including my wife) found it to be a positive experience that increases attachment.
And the leaving the house/car part I also don't follow. You have one more person to dress and one more item of luggage to carry; it's hardly an exponential increase.
Otherwise I agree, esp. about stress if kid has serious health issues. (We have two kids, aged 1.5 and 4).
> It boggles my mind that we consider the US a first-world country when I read things like this.
We had a hospital stay before the birth, emergency c-section (the cord was around my son's neck), hospital stay after the birth, and about 2 weeks of him staying in the neonatal ICU. I think the bill came to around $30,000 (covered by insurance), and I think we paid a couple of $20 copays.
> And the leaving the house/car part I also don't follow.
Exponential? No, but I don't think anyone claimed that. But compared to a couple going out, a couple and a child takes several times more time to do each step. Everything takes more planning, and nothing is completely spontaneous.
> We had a hospital stay before the birth, emergency c-section (the cord was around my son's neck), hospital stay after the birth, and about 2 weeks of him staying in the neonatal ICU. I think the bill came to around $30,000 (covered by insurance), and I think we paid a couple of $20 copays.
If you that's the case and you hadn't already hit a larger yearly out-of-pocket-max through other bills, then your insurance is uncommonly good to put it mildly. If you additionally didn't have to fight with insurance to get that stuff covered so completely then you have ZOMGWTF good insurance.
I don't think everyone realizes just how much worse health insurance has gotten in the past couple years for many of us. When my kids were born (10+ years ago), I'm sure the whole pregnancy and birth was covered by just one co-pay. Now, with a $5k deductible on the best plan we can afford, it would be a different story.
My wife actually handled the bills and tends to have a better memory for this stuff than I do.
There was a stress-related stay in the hospital for her for several days with a $250 copay, around late January. Then the whole birth+surgery+NICU+breast pump rental was judged as one incident, with a $250 copay.
Individual doctor visits are $20. Hospital stays are $250. Medication is heavily subsidized, and most of it that we've ever gotten had a copay under $10.
There was an with a demand for payment for the entire bill+interest. A series of calls to their billing department led to them finding the mistake in their system and sending us the bill for just the copay.
I'm positive that we fall under the "uncommonly good" category.
> I'm positive that we fall under the "uncommonly good" category.
For comparison, my wife and I are on a marketplace plan, and out of a total of $60k in expenses for our newborn daughter, we were responsible for ~$12k.
We want to have more children, but I would move from the US to a first world country to do so.
I find your comment an important reminder of the original sense of the phrase, but I disagree that third world has nothing to do with economic prowess. You are referring to both the etymology and formal definition of the phrase "third world" country. Political journals will generally use third world in this restricted sense, and dictionaries may even list the original definition first. Nonetheless, in modern parlance it has everything to do with economic prowess. It is used--in developed countries at the very least--as the pejorative analog to "developing country".
As a first world resident I am not sure about the prevalence of this usage in developing countries. I know I would not be thrilled to have my country--and, by extension, culture--referred to as "third world". I wouldn't be surprised if it is common in developing countries to note this original sense to both blunt the pain of being dissed by denizens of rich countries and to establish a sort of reverse superiority by insisting on and noting the original sense of the word.
My wife and I have had 3 kids (now 8,6 and 1), all 3 were C-sections with extended hospital stays and all 3 births were covered, in their entirety, including pre-birth obstetrician visits, my wife's follow-up visits and initial pediatric appointments for the kids with zero co-pays. Literally we paid nothing to the doctors or hospitals for the entire year. We've had various flavors of Blue Cross/Blue Shield "HMO Blue" Massachusetts. This is not even the top tier plan Blue Cross offers from my employer - that's the "PPO" plan which has significantly better out of network coverage.
Medical billing in the US is a nightmare. Even if an insurance looks very good on paper, the entire health industry finds ways to screw the patients. Claims are rejected that should've been covered and it requires endless forms and phone calls (and the phone calls always have long wait times) to correct the issue. It's all a big mess.
> And the leaving the house/car part I also don't follow. You have one more person to dress and one more item of luggage to carry; it's hardly an exponential increase.
It's mainly that something so easy you barely think about it becomes something you do have to think about. It's a vanishingly tiny value being acted upon such that it is many times larger than it was, though still not huge. It does get worse with older kids—newborns are in many ways very easy, sleep and constant feedings aside—and I understand that some people have lots and lots of trouble with the process, though for us it's not that bad, just a non-issue that is now a once-or-more-a-day minor issue.
Well, you might have one more person to dress but it might be a person screaming and crying and not wanting to be dressed.
And when you're all finished and ready to get into the car, the person has a full diaper that needs to be taken care of, so when you've done that you're back to square one.
Just to make sure those wanting to become parent don't get things too wrong. Having a child is a choice most of the time (if you are OK with contraception). Therefore, since it will effectively replace yourself by your child in your life equation, be sure you want the little kid. If you want it, then it'll feel much easier (but not completely easy nonetheless, the OP is right about 75% of your spare time disappearing :-)). If it's a choice for you and your lover, then it'll be ok and bring a lot of satisfaction. But having a child is usually not the good time to start this new business you dreamt off :-)
Right, totally, and I've got three of the little devils so clearly I'm not entirely down on the experience, but having a kid could well be the single most stressful (and possibly expensive—childcare or having one partner stay home is really really expensive) event/decision in an HNer's life for a variety of reasons that aren't always obvious to non-parents. It's no picnic.
Damn! Three ! You must love that :-) I'm more than happy with 2. And besides, 3 means that there are more kids than adults in the family :-) It's like playing a football game with on player excluded :-)
(but as I say, if one chooses it and feels like being a parent, I can guarantee a hell of satisfaction, those kids are just marvelous eyes openers)
> 2) Higher monthly expenses, plus a potentially-giant bill for the birth,
The toll on household finance and peace of mind of the US insurance system is incredible. The births of two daughters, including a couple of days at the hospital, peridural, pre-birth prep and post-birth followup, cost us a grand total of 30€. Of course nothing is free, we pay it through other means (taxes), but not having to think about cost at that moment is so relieving.
Taxes and insurance contribution taken from your salary.
But the actual cost reduction is that the system is not a bloated for profit world with what resembles monopoly powers (well, you are free to not go to the nearest hospital...) but instead a public good, serving the people not the shareholders.
In reasonable prices a birth in western Europe will cost something like €2000 including a few days stay and possibly pre- & post-natal care. That's the amount paid by the insurance to the hospital. In the US you easily get to $30000 for a normal birth, of which then anything up to the full amount might be billed to the patient.
If you to real cost you could calculate eg the amount of taxes that pay for tuition free medical degrees, lots of pharmaceutical research, or similar things that would in the US be part of the justification for the huge cost (high tuition -> need for high earnings for doctors -> need for high prices). But in the end it's just absurd and the US system should be a warning to anyone who thinks that such a vital public service would be better if privatised.
> Go ahead an multiply the stress of the above by a factor of 10 if your new kid has serious health issues.
3 years ago our then-19 month old was diagnosed with type-1 diabetes - and we haven't had a decent night's rest since. For anyone not aware, type 1 diabetes is a condition where your body stops producing insulin and as a result unable to process carbs into energy. This is not type-2 diabetes that is a result of not taking care of yourself.
Our son could die in the middle of the night from his body not having enough glucose in his system and as a result starving his brain of the energy it requires - ('dead in bed syndrome.') We're up at least 3-4 times in the middle of the night to make sure he's OK.
As a software developer I've been fortunate enough to be able to "afford" the best insurance ($20,000/year (our share) + more than 3-4k/year in out of pocket costs) which affords us the latest and greatest technology - insulin pump with integrated glucose monitor. The tech is ancient by my standards, relative unreliable (his glucose monitor can get a 'weak signal' for seemingly no reason and as a result could fail to report potentially fatal blood glucose levels.
In an ideal world the tech would be more reliable, better connected, services to monitor his blood glucose levels 24/7 would alert us by phone/emergency services/etc when at critical levels.
The stress levels are high because we never have a moment 'off.' In effect we are human, manual versions of a thermostat for his glucose levels. If it's too high he faces the long term consequences of diabetes (loss of vision, neuropathy, etc.) If it's too low he can die.
Next year the stress gets even worse - we have to trust that the school system will be able to manage his diabetes. Up until now he's always with my wife or myself, 24/7 (and occasionally with my parents, who can keep an eye on him for a couple of hours with text messaging as a 'support system' as needed.)
Needless to say there are situations that are much worse than ours, and we're thankful to be able to take care of our son in the interim until technology catches up to make his situation more manageable for him as an adult.
The stress and sleep deprivation have certainly taken their toll. Weight gain, short term memory, etc.
Your insurance premium is $20k/year plus $4k/year copay? That would for me probably be a reason to try and emigrate to a country with good public healthcare. As a programmer youll likely earn a bit less outside the US but with this cost your cash in hand and quality of life would probably still improve. A place like Berlin or London would probably make you happy with as little as possible adaptation pain.
Good luck with your son. On the positive side hopefully trusting the school system can at least give you some time off of this stress :-/
on 7) there are lots of different experiences amongst the women I know, breast feeding can be an incredibly positive aspect of having a baby, while it's not easy for all, most get the hang of it (babies and mums), and their are numerous health benefits for both that extend well beyond the period of nursing, so, if you're supporting someone who is trying, keep flying the flag and make sure they know you're supporting them to do something well worthwhile, as a mum if you cannot then I feel for you, yet that is how it is, don't miss the opportunity to get close while you nurse and the magic will be there :)
Hope things are better now. Yes, this is totally understandable. Coping with a new baby is difficult, but any other complication just makes it super difficult.
I find getting too little sleep very stressful. I'm required to keep doing the same things, but less able to handle those demands. When I don't get enough sleep, I've got worse health, constant headaches, and neck aches. It's its own stressor, as well as having separate negative effects.
Yes, but that's a specific physical stressor, resulting in mental stress. It's not what is being examined in the article and modeled in the experiment.
In practice the two will be impossible to tease apart at any rate. Stress and lack of sleep make a feedback loop. The more you feel like you're drowning, the harder it gets to find sleep. Adding nighttime feedings just throws gas on the fire.
