There is a high societal expectation that fatherhood (or motherhood) should look like the one in this article. Having had 2 babies in the last 5 years and observing most of our friends going through parenthood in the last 5+ years I think this is a very biased view that does not reflect reality.
My sample might be a bit biased as most our friends are PhD educated and in Tech or Academia.
My own observations:
- I was not terribly interested in our kids between ages of 0 - 2. This does not mean I did not fully participate in their life, but this was a muscle I had to exercise. I went to therapy as I thought I was somehow broken because thats not how people should feel. What I learned is that feelings are much more common than it is widely accepted.
- Once they started to speak, ask questions, and being more emotionally regulated it became very different. At this point I spend more time with my kids than my wife and generally love spending time with them, its almost effortless. Explaining things, buildings legos, became one of my favourite activities.
- Having daily help (live in nanny, live in grandparents) is an enormous help both from kids and relationship perspective. Seems like a trivial thing but if you do not have live in help you are likely to never be alone again as a couple for more than 24h (i.e. you can't go on a short trip).
Observations about my friends:
- Trying for a baby and being unsuccessful for years or going through multiple miscarriages can make couples extremely sad. You can reduce this risk by trying early.
- If your mental health is not amazing before kids it is likely get worse. This is about functional people that have mild mental health problems. Two of our friends developed severe mental health problems that in one case ended in a divorce and in second case multiple years of unemployment (father who was not primary care giver).
This were generally reasonable people that sought mental health help from both therapy and medicine perspective.
- The societal expectations that women should be super excited about motherhood is not always true. Within our friends group probably 50% women are less involved in raising their kids than fathers. Some (reluctantly) admitted that they don't really like how motherhood negatively affected their job prospects, bodies and mental health.
- If you do happen to get divorce with young kids it is likely going to be a life changing event. Situation has to be pretty bad to get divorce with young kids so most likely you will be better off but from the two cases we have seen this typically means severe financial burden and inability to sustain long term relationship afterwards. If you are a women and somehow loose custody there is also going to be pretty severe societal judgement against you even in very progressive locations.
It may sound as a little bit depressing view of parenthood but this is more reality check for those reading only the bright side. Overall, I am extremely happy we have kids and our relationship is stronger than it was before but thats not the case for everyone and it required work.
TL;DR: For me personally Ph.D. has been the greatest decision I have ever made.
I am not going to cover the typical discussion regarding the diminished lifelong earnings of Ph.D graduates as I don't think everyone is optimizing their life 100% around money. If that's the case I would recommend looking holistically including choice of life partner and their earning potential as well where you live and the job market there.
I have a PhD in Computer Science from one of the top 5 schools in the world and Masters from unknown university in a medium size city.
Through the years I have struggled with being an outlier at my unknown university where people did not understand my passion for CS. I took part in open source projects, went to meetups and read tons of CS books just to satisfy my curiosity. at the same time there was nobody I could talk to regarding my passion.
When I entered Ph.D this turned out to be the greatest social experience ever. Almost all my current friends I have met during Ph.D. They are geeks in their own respective area (CS, Chemistry, Biology, Social Science, Theatre studies) and we can talk for hours about our research which never happened with me before. I met my life partner there and chances of finding of someone who I can talk to about theorem proving in a "normal" world are close to zero. On top of it she also understands the value of hard work and long hours I commit to work which has always been a struggle with my partners from general population.
Now the bad parts. You should expect that Ph.D. is a long and lonely journey that you have to execute by yourself. You are likely to go for months without any tangible results and you need to be happy with that. I did not suffer any mental health problems during the Ph.D. but they were fairly common between my friends due to pressure to publish and loneliness of the pursuit. If during Masters you are already dealing with some anxiety Ph.D. may not be enjoyable. In the end all my friends turned out fine and graduated but expect ups/down during the process.
What are cost for GL, E&O and Cyber I could be looking at?
I doubt we need cyber as the only information we store that is not public is their name and email address, though this is typically available on their website as they are artists.
