Thank you so much for this post! It’s one of these posts that gives the community a more community like feel which is nice.
To share my experience:
I have two kids, they are 10 and 3.5. What I would tell my younger self before my first kid mostly revolves around “slack”, everything else went very well! I think my predictions around what having a kid would be like were mostly pretty decent and mentally preparing for a lot of challenges paid off.
But one thing I did not fully account for is how having slack for my future plans matters and how having a child would reduce the amount of slack I had a lot. Slack would have been most relevant in case I wanted to change my future plans which I did not expect to change much (this is more of a young person error). I did not properly budget for opportunities opening up/maybe changing my mind. E.g. it had not occurred to me that going to university abroad might be a better option than in my home country, but that would have been very difficult with a child.
I think my predictions and mindset were actually more off before my second child. I think I was much less mentally prepared for challenges and did not budget for them in the same way as I had before my first child. Some of that was due to underestimating how different children can be and how much your experience can differ between different children. I had heard this from other parents, but did not really want it to be true, surely I knew what was up after one child already? As it turned out, my experiences were pretty different with both my children—with my first, sleep had never been that big of a deal, my second still does not quite properly sleep through the night at the age of 3.5 years. However, taking care of my second during daylight hours has been a lot easier than with my first, I didn’t realise babies could be so easy!
Not mentally (and practically) preparing for challenges the same way for my second as I had before my first was partially the same mistake, but deserves its own mention. I find it a bit tricky to say how ‘wrong’ that was however, would I actually want to let my younger self before my second child know about the challenges I had? I was more engaged with wishful thinking, but babies are hard work, and maybe parents need a bit of wishful thinking to actually be willing to have another one. Otherwise hyperbolic discounting would stop them.
This is also the way I feel now—I’m hoping to have a third child soon-ish, but pretend to myself that everything will be easy peasy, because my tendency to hyperbolically discount might deter me. Deluding myself might just be correct.
I don’t think I changed much as a person due to having children.
Thank you so much for this post! It’s one of these posts that gives the community a more community like feel which is nice.
To share my experience: I have two kids, they are 10 and 3.5. What I would tell my younger self before my first kid mostly revolves around “slack”, everything else went very well! I think my predictions around what having a kid would be like were mostly pretty decent and mentally preparing for a lot of challenges paid off.
But one thing I did not fully account for is how having slack for my future plans matters and how having a child would reduce the amount of slack I had a lot. Slack would have been most relevant in case I wanted to change my future plans which I did not expect to change much (this is more of a young person error). I did not properly budget for opportunities opening up/maybe changing my mind. E.g. it had not occurred to me that going to university abroad might be a better option than in my home country, but that would have been very difficult with a child.
I think my predictions and mindset were actually more off before my second child. I think I was much less mentally prepared for challenges and did not budget for them in the same way as I had before my first child. Some of that was due to underestimating how different children can be and how much your experience can differ between different children. I had heard this from other parents, but did not really want it to be true, surely I knew what was up after one child already? As it turned out, my experiences were pretty different with both my children—with my first, sleep had never been that big of a deal, my second still does not quite properly sleep through the night at the age of 3.5 years. However, taking care of my second during daylight hours has been a lot easier than with my first, I didn’t realise babies could be so easy!
Not mentally (and practically) preparing for challenges the same way for my second as I had before my first was partially the same mistake, but deserves its own mention. I find it a bit tricky to say how ‘wrong’ that was however, would I actually want to let my younger self before my second child know about the challenges I had? I was more engaged with wishful thinking, but babies are hard work, and maybe parents need a bit of wishful thinking to actually be willing to have another one. Otherwise hyperbolic discounting would stop them.
This is also the way I feel now—I’m hoping to have a third child soon-ish, but pretend to myself that everything will be easy peasy, because my tendency to hyperbolically discount might deter me. Deluding myself might just be correct.
I don’t think I changed much as a person due to having children.