My kids are now almost 6 and 8, we live in Canada. Our kids are hilarious and add a lot of joy to our lives.
Thankfully, we have grandparent support, though we still have had years where we paid 50K CAD for childcare and housekeeping, in order for us to both work big jobs.
At this stage of life, we want to spend lots of time with our kids as they really get more out of time with us than time in public school. We often speak about if we should optimize their schooling situation, our daughter is gifted and our son (likely like many other children of EAs) has high functioning autism and ADHD. Our son now has expensive therapy/tutoring 4 times a week. Our kids have lovely lives and will likely have significant impact, but I caution that their lives are valuable even if they can’t produce impact.
If someone starts an EA school accepting neuro atypical kids, please let me know.
I’m a 39 year old physician, so not in a high impact career (rather doing targeted donations), and I have found my motivation to work big hours/make more has waned in the last few years, as I increasingly value my time and energy. I do travel less as we have to trade off. I don’t know that my working less is directly because of my kids, but having kids provides a ‘good reason’ (read:socially acceptable especially for a woman) to say no to things I don’t want to do. There is a certain mental energy drained by family/household management.
Given that we have awesome kids and the infrastructure they require, we need my consistent income to sustain this, so that my husband can take a risk (he left his executive job) to have a greater impact.
I think many of the above issues would also extend to other caregiver roles, e.g. caring for a parent after a stroke.
I wonder if that’s just the nature of earning-to-give careers? That if you do the same thing for a while just to make money that you will eventually get bored and not want to work that hard at it? Versus direct work which seems to me to be easier to feel personal fulfillment around.
I’m sure this varies a lot by person: I was earning to give for ~16y and probably more motivated at the end than when I started. The longer I worked in my field the better I understood it, the more I got to be deciding what I (and later my team) worked on, and the more (non-altruistic) impact I could have.
My kids are now almost 6 and 8, we live in Canada. Our kids are hilarious and add a lot of joy to our lives.
Thankfully, we have grandparent support, though we still have had years where we paid 50K CAD for childcare and housekeeping, in order for us to both work big jobs.
At this stage of life, we want to spend lots of time with our kids as they really get more out of time with us than time in public school. We often speak about if we should optimize their schooling situation, our daughter is gifted and our son (likely like many other children of EAs) has high functioning autism and ADHD. Our son now has expensive therapy/tutoring 4 times a week. Our kids have lovely lives and will likely have significant impact, but I caution that their lives are valuable even if they can’t produce impact.
If someone starts an EA school accepting neuro atypical kids, please let me know.
I’m a 39 year old physician, so not in a high impact career (rather doing targeted donations), and I have found my motivation to work big hours/make more has waned in the last few years, as I increasingly value my time and energy. I do travel less as we have to trade off. I don’t know that my working less is directly because of my kids, but having kids provides a ‘good reason’ (read:socially acceptable especially for a woman) to say no to things I don’t want to do. There is a certain mental energy drained by family/household management.
Given that we have awesome kids and the infrastructure they require, we need my consistent income to sustain this, so that my husband can take a risk (he left his executive job) to have a greater impact.
I think many of the above issues would also extend to other caregiver roles, e.g. caring for a parent after a stroke.
I wonder if that’s just the nature of earning-to-give careers? That if you do the same thing for a while just to make money that you will eventually get bored and not want to work that hard at it? Versus direct work which seems to me to be easier to feel personal fulfillment around.
I’m sure this varies a lot by person: I was earning to give for ~16y and probably more motivated at the end than when I started. The longer I worked in my field the better I understood it, the more I got to be deciding what I (and later my team) worked on, and the more (non-altruistic) impact I could have.