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"Be ambitious enough to be an ambitious dad." - agreed! Being an ambitious dad IS exhausting. And the successful people telling you that you can't be a present,

by mholt 29d ago

"Be ambitious enough to be an ambitious dad." - agreed! Being an ambitious dad IS exhausting. And the successful people telling you that you can't be a present, ambitious dad and be successful -- that you have to trade successful fatherhood for professional success -- are weak. They are not heroes. The real heroes are the ones ambitiously raising the next generation while changing the world right now. That's what I aspire to be... and those are my role models. Not the ones who abandon their kids or wife to pursue their own dreams and make excessive amounts of money. If you really can only muster enough time or energy to be ambitious about one thing, be ambitious within your home/family.

handedness 29d ago
I 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.
- ignoramous 29d ago
  > 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.
  - alansaber 29d ago
    Yes, for most I would guess it's hard to get criticism in the right dose/frequency
- senkora 29d ago
  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 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.
  - quadrifoliate 29d ago
    > The online discourse around this book can be kinda vitriolic (lots of examples of it starting arguments) Yeah, no wonder given that it starts with an unrealistic view that the average man is a lazy slob that sits around playing video games while his wife has to handle everything with children and the household. You keep waiting for her to mention that anything else might be possible throughout the book, but that never happens. I think gay couples were mentioned maybe once.
    - senkora 29d ago
      Yeah... I do have some issues with the book. I think that the cards tend to be weighted towards things that women care more about, which naturally means that women end up being responsible for more of them. And different cards require different amounts of time to handle. The way that I’ve tried to handle this is to focus on equalizing “total time per week spent on managing cards”, which requires time-tracking but is more fair, and also negotiating a modified set of cards. The book kinda suggests both of those but I think that in practice most people don’t implement them. And, as you said, the tone of the book can be off-putting at times. I still feel like it’s the best available resource for this problem.
      - quadrifoliate 29d ago
        I had no problem with the cards or the system, I like and have tried them with my partner.
- mandevil 29d ago
  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-growing-share-of-u-s-marriages-husbands-and-wives-earn-about-the-same/ 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.
- ColdStream 29d ago
  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.
- socalgal2 29d ago
  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.
  - stephbook 28d ago
    Those boarding schools make for some quality upbringing! "Winston Churchill would recall the floggings, done until pupils “bled freely” and screamed loudly. In “Such, Such Were The Joys”, George Orwell writes of being beaten so violently that his headmaster broke his riding crop and “reduced me to tears”." Sad little boys: the backlash against Britain’s boarding schools https://economist.com/britain/2023/05/28/sad-little-boys-the-backlash-against-britains-boarding-schools https://economist.com/britain/2023/05/28/sad-little-boys-the... from The Economist
    - socalgal2 28d ago
      Love your anecdata. Would you like me to list abusive parents as counter examples?
      - stephbook 28d ago
luqtas 29d ago
> The real heroes are the ones ambitiously raising the next generation while changing the world right now. so pedagogy and psychology researchers? giving that having biological children is the worst ecological offense someone can do in an ever increasing worldwide population? [0] how about adopting and getting into voluntary programs or even do pro-social things with your money? giving birth on the current societal status-quo not only screws with the future of our own specie but also a bunch of others which may go extinct because of our greed [0] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541/meta https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541/...
- entech 29d ago
  Things are considered important in the context of humanity. Environmental concerns only exist because of its impacts on humanity. The planet does not care. Calling having children an ecological offence is like saying that best way to reduce emissions is for all people to die.
  - leoedin 29d ago
    Yeah, sometimes I think people lose track of why they support environmental movements. I've had people question my choice to have kids along these lines before. I just don't understand it - surely we only care about all this stuff because it is observed by humans? For humanity to continue, someone has to have children. I can sympathise more with the idea that humans are destroying everything and life won't be worth living for my descendants. But that feels like giving up on the possibility of humans. I don't want to do that. In any case, it turns out that global fertility rates are in freefall and we're facing population decline faster than anyone predicted.
- scns 29d ago
  giving that having biological children is the worst ecological offense someone can do in an ever increasing worldwide population? Have you ever heard of fracking? Or mining Gold using mercury?
  - 29d ago
richardlblair 29d ago
"People telling you" That's the real problem. People need to stay in their damn lane.
ip26 29d ago
I've started peering behind the curtains when I get the chance, and I've not yet found someone wildly successful who is also a model parent. Time after time, their spouse is quietly shouldering an enormous load, or their children spin their wheels and wind up rudderless, etc. You can certainly be successful and be a good parent, but one of the first steps is recognizing and picking out the false prophets. You can't hold yourself to a superhuman standard, which is what a parent maximizing career while letting family malinger will present. They will say, Look at me, a captain of industry with vaults of gold, who has the physique of a twenty-five year old and is also an all-star parent. And you have to figure out that it's a lie. One little clue - start to notice: of your professional idols who are good parents and seem to have it all, how many have a spouse working a demanding full time job as well? I realized for me it was zero.
- CalRobert 29d ago
  “Lol dude can’t their mom do that?” -Random manager ca. 2018 when I explained I couldn’t join an 8 AM meeting because I had to take my kid to daycare.
- tibbar 29d ago
  Unfortunately, I think that this is possible, but it requires a superhuman well of energy, sleep deficit tolerance, and benevolence that very very few people possess. :/
  - wrecked_em 29d ago
    Yeah I think that word is spelled i-m-p-o-s-s-i-b-l-e.
  - ip26 29d ago
    Seriously, aside from the folks with the “2hrs of sleep is enough” gene, it’s not. It’s an actively harmful myth that is sold hard. Start gathering your own evidence, with a critical fact-finding eye. Don’t just accept the narrative. It’s one of those legitimizing stories that serves the teller. Try watching The Dawn Wall or Free Solo, keep notes, and fill in the blanks on how long they were gone from family. It’s a canned example of how it gets glossed over. The same attitude as towards gear in weightlifting is appropriate. They tell you it’s natty all day long, but you know delts don’t get that round without gear.
brainzap 29d ago
parents dont do shit to change the world for their children

by mholt 29d ago

handedness 29d ago

I 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.

ignoramous 29d ago
> 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.
- alansaber 29d ago
  Yes, for most I would guess it's hard to get criticism in the right dose/frequency
senkora 29d ago
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 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.
- quadrifoliate 29d ago
  > The online discourse around this book can be kinda vitriolic (lots of examples of it starting arguments) Yeah, no wonder given that it starts with an unrealistic view that the average man is a lazy slob that sits around playing video games while his wife has to handle everything with children and the household. You keep waiting for her to mention that anything else might be possible throughout the book, but that never happens. I think gay couples were mentioned maybe once.
  - senkora 29d ago
    Yeah... I do have some issues with the book. I think that the cards tend to be weighted towards things that women care more about, which naturally means that women end up being responsible for more of them. And different cards require different amounts of time to handle. The way that I’ve tried to handle this is to focus on equalizing “total time per week spent on managing cards”, which requires time-tracking but is more fair, and also negotiating a modified set of cards. The book kinda suggests both of those but I think that in practice most people don’t implement them. And, as you said, the tone of the book can be off-putting at times. I still feel like it’s the best available resource for this problem.
    - quadrifoliate 29d ago
      I had no problem with the cards or the system, I like and have tried them with my partner.
mandevil 29d ago
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-growing-share-of-u-s-marriages-husbands-and-wives-earn-about-the-same/ 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.
ColdStream 29d ago
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.
socalgal2 29d ago
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.
- stephbook 28d ago
  Those boarding schools make for some quality upbringing! "Winston Churchill would recall the floggings, done until pupils “bled freely” and screamed loudly. In “Such, Such Were The Joys”, George Orwell writes of being beaten so violently that his headmaster broke his riding crop and “reduced me to tears”." Sad little boys: the backlash against Britain’s boarding schools https://economist.com/britain/2023/05/28/sad-little-boys-the-backlash-against-britains-boarding-schools https://economist.com/britain/2023/05/28/sad-little-boys-the... from The Economist
  - socalgal2 28d ago
    Love your anecdata. Would you like me to list abusive parents as counter examples?
    - stephbook 28d ago

luqtas 29d ago

> The real heroes are the ones ambitiously raising the next generation while changing the world right now. so pedagogy and psychology researchers? giving that having biological children is the worst ecological offense someone can do in an ever increasing worldwide population? [0] how about adopting and getting into voluntary programs or even do pro-social things with your money? giving birth on the current societal status-quo not only screws with the future of our own specie but also a bunch of others which may go extinct because of our greed [0] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541/meta https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541/...

entech 29d ago
Things are considered important in the context of humanity. Environmental concerns only exist because of its impacts on humanity. The planet does not care. Calling having children an ecological offence is like saying that best way to reduce emissions is for all people to die.
- leoedin 29d ago
  Yeah, sometimes I think people lose track of why they support environmental movements. I've had people question my choice to have kids along these lines before. I just don't understand it - surely we only care about all this stuff because it is observed by humans? For humanity to continue, someone has to have children. I can sympathise more with the idea that humans are destroying everything and life won't be worth living for my descendants. But that feels like giving up on the possibility of humans. I don't want to do that. In any case, it turns out that global fertility rates are in freefall and we're facing population decline faster than anyone predicted.
scns 29d ago
giving that having biological children is the worst ecological offense someone can do in an ever increasing worldwide population? Have you ever heard of fracking? Or mining Gold using mercury?
- 29d ago

richardlblair 29d ago

"People telling you" That's the real problem. People need to stay in their damn lane.

ip26 29d ago

I've started peering behind the curtains when I get the chance, and I've not yet found someone wildly successful who is also a model parent. Time after time, their spouse is quietly shouldering an enormous load, or their children spin their wheels and wind up rudderless, etc. You can certainly be successful and be a good parent, but one of the first steps is recognizing and picking out the false prophets. You can't hold yourself to a superhuman standard, which is what a parent maximizing career while letting family malinger will present. They will say, Look at me, a captain of industry with vaults of gold, who has the physique of a twenty-five year old and is also an all-star parent. And you have to figure out that it's a lie. One little clue - start to notice: of your professional idols who are good parents and seem to have it all, how many have a spouse working a demanding full time job as well? I realized for me it was zero.

CalRobert 29d ago
“Lol dude can’t their mom do that?” -Random manager ca. 2018 when I explained I couldn’t join an 8 AM meeting because I had to take my kid to daycare.
tibbar 29d ago
Unfortunately, I think that this is possible, but it requires a superhuman well of energy, sleep deficit tolerance, and benevolence that very very few people possess. :/
- wrecked_em 29d ago
  Yeah I think that word is spelled i-m-p-o-s-s-i-b-l-e.
- ip26 29d ago
  Seriously, aside from the folks with the “2hrs of sleep is enough” gene, it’s not. It’s an actively harmful myth that is sold hard. Start gathering your own evidence, with a critical fact-finding eye. Don’t just accept the narrative. It’s one of those legitimizing stories that serves the teller. Try watching The Dawn Wall or Free Solo, keep notes, and fill in the blanks on how long they were gone from family. It’s a canned example of how it gets glossed over. The same attitude as towards gear in weightlifting is appropriate. They tell you it’s natty all day long, but you know delts don’t get that round without gear.

brainzap 29d ago

parents dont do shit to change the world for their children