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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I went to stay with my sister for a week to help out as she just had her second child. I don’t have any kids yet, but honestly it seemed like her life is hellish. As is a lot of my friends in the same phase of life. They have high friction relationships with their partners, are trying to juggle too much on their own, and are squeezed financially.

It made me wonder if there’s something wrong with how we do the family thing America. Is there a better way? Or is this just life for a lot people with kids?[/quote]

A few thoughts here:

(1) Because there are only 24 hours in a day, there will always be tradeoffs. If both parents work then the kids have to be in daycare or aftercare. Dinner is probably later because it's hard to start it until you get home from work (unless you want to eat reheated food or slow-cooker meals or pasta all the time). Bedtimes probably end up being later because you want to have at least some time with your kids. If your kids are in activities that require supervised practice every day (e.g., music) then you may be getting up early or going to bed late in order to do those things. You may frequently have to work at night to make up for time taken off of work to take care of the kids (e.g., doctors appointments, sick child, etc.). It can be harder to exercise unless you find creative ways to do it at your office. You can outsource cleaning the house, but that takes money, or you can live with the stress of cleaning the house at 9pm every night (which is what my wife and I do). You may have less time for your spouse because a lot of your time outside of work is spent on cleaning/laundry/etc. that couldn't be done during the day. Mandatory "volunteering" at school or daycare can be a huge imposition on parents' already stretched schedules. But if you do the stay-at-home parent thing, then you've got one parent who may feel unfulfilled because they see a lot of their peers with jobs that give them a lot of purpose in their lives and because they feel their education is going to waste. And of course you have less in income, retirement contributions, and potentially college savings. In our case, we made the calculation that it's best for us both to work, and we pay for it in having very little time for each other, a house that isn't as clean as we'd like, and kids going to bed later than we'd like.
(2) Daycare/aftercare is only a partial solution. It takes care of the kids during working hours, but kids get sick sometimes and are excluded from daycare and it throws everything into chaos. You still have transportation to and from the daycare, and once you add all of that in you may be looking at a late dinner and having to tackle homework/music/bath/etc. in a very limited time in the evening.
(3) As stressful as I find the two-career family thing, I remind myself that there are people who live in countries without proper sanitation, high levels of disease, active military conflicts, etc. Compared to much of the world (and almost all of human history) we have it pretty good. Not saying it's perfect, but my family is unlikely to die of a common bacterial infection or in a war. [/quote]

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