alt Hacker NewsI would also add that, at least in my experience, those who are professionally ambitious and maximizing professional success, while being highly confident they are also succeeding at home, often have an inaccurate view of their home life. It's not until the kids are grown and openly fighting their demons that they realize the bargain that they made.
It's that old adage of, anyone who thinks they're a great parent, probably isn't. And almost all kids would be happier with a less wealthy (or even poorer) upbringing, and a tighter family.
The number of wives who have complained to me privately about the lack of family commitment of rock star husbands whom everyone admires (often precisely for their apparent family commitment) was a real eye-opener.
I'm not convinced that stratospheric success in business is very often compatible with high levels of parental and spousal involvement. It is sometimes, but those are anomalies we shouldn't build our fairy tales around. I know very few old-timers who wish they'd spent less time with their families when they could have made the difference of a lifetime.
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There’s a pretty interesting self-help book that is designed to help couples share domestic and family work equally; I thought it was an interesting read. It makes exactly the same point about rockstar husbands that contribute less than their spouses.
https://www.fairplaylife.com/the-book
The central idea is a set of 100 cards representing various tasks that are necessary for running a household, that you split up between the two partners. Supposedly women tend to hold ~80 of the cards in most relationships.
The online discourse around this book can be kinda vitriolic (lots of examples of it starting arguments) but I do think that it’s a good starting point if you want to genuinely try to contribute equally.
A good example is the crushing stories of Frank Zappa's kids. Here is the guy touring the world making millions of dollars, releasing albums non-stop. His kids, barely saw him. For instance, his daughter Moonunit said the most time ever spent with him was recording lines for the song Valley Girl, beyond that he was fairly absent.
I have heard similar stories from many you wouldn't know, they say the same thing about their partner or parents. The desire to have it all ends up trading one thing over the other.
This is a conversation that ambitious women have been having for decades. To the point where it's a cliche. Having it about men and women is valuable, having it be about them separately I think masks some of the structural problems- e.g. better childcare, more and better laid out parental leave(1), etc.
Two things I've heard from different ambitious women: "To really achieve, you need a wife" is something I've heard a lot- that it takes one parent sacrificing some of their career priority; traditionally that was the woman but it in theory could be the man (2), it just rarely is.
The other thing an ambitious woman told me once is that her mom told her "husband, career, kids, pick two." Basically, there is just only enough energy for a given person per day to invest in two of them. I've seen some women who managed, from the outside, to at least look successful at all three, but it's rare indeed.
1: When my kid was born the software company I worked for (I'm an American at an American company, but this was an area of competition for software devs at the time) offered a 14 week paid parental leave, even for men. Most men took a four week ("secondary caregiver" leave) and overlapped it with their wives 12 week unpaid FMLA. I took mine (14 week "primary caregiver") after my wife's leave expired, such that our kid had one of us caring for him every moment of his first six months. I remain convinced that was absolutely vital as the basis for both my relationship with my son and with my wife- she had to rely on me, trust me to care for the kid, and I couldn't hand him off, it was all on me every day. And so we both developed the parental muscles, could trust that the other one understood the reality of the situation, in a way that many father's don't get a chance. And that experience convinced me that the US needs maternal leave, obviously, but it also needs paternity leave- and the policies need to be designed such that the woman has to be back at work for at least some of the paternity leave, it can't all be used concurrently.
2: In a recent survey of American households https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2023/04/13/in-a-gr... about 55% of American heterosexual marriages the man makes 60% or more of the household income, about 30% both halves of the couple were between 40-60%, and just 16% saw the woman make more than 60% of the household income. In the majority of the 16% the woman still spent more time on unpaid household chores and carework than the man they were out-earning. Only in the 6% of heterosexual marriages where the woman earned 100% of the income did the number of hours per week in unpaid labor of men even equal that of their female partner.
> we shouldn't build our fairy tales around
Being self-aware and self-critical is one of those changes that instantly improves everyone's life around us, including our own.
I don't know what the right answer is but I do kind of feel this desire for equal effort might be misguided. My sister wanted to spend her time raising kids. Her husband less so. That is decision they made together. It's no different than any other difference. He like working on cars. She likes knitting. She doesn't require him to spend equal time on knitting and he doesn't require her to spend equal time on cars. Why are children any different?
Further, many cultures, past in particular, seem to be very different in terms of parent involvement. To take an example from fiction, Harry Potter goes to Hogwarts at 11 years old. Yes, that's fiction but it's based on current and past cultures. It's still a thing in the UK for "elite" kids as young as 7 or 8 to go to boarding school, away from their parents. Kids in places too far for a public school are often sent to other cities, to boarding schools. East Asia & India also have famous boarding schools.
The point being, this idea that parents must be with their kids many hours a day until they kids move out of the house at 18 or 21 is not a fact of life, it's a cultural choice. I am from that culture and wish to spend as much time as possible with my kids. But I can also see it's a cultural choice, not some universal way things must be or else bad stuff happens.