On Having Kids
The excellent luminary and essayist, Paul Graham, articulates what it’s like to have kids and why we shouldn’t be afraid -- a younger me may have been cynical enough to dismiss it but now I whole heartedly agree as a parent.
We project our current selves out 10 years and think we’ll be the same person just older and armed with the same perfected knowledge we have now. However we definitely think we are much smarter and wiser than our younger self. We never quite reconcile those conflicting thoughts and I’m guilty of that as well especially when it came to parenthood. I was so wrong years ago about parenthood and that peak adulthood experience would be before having a kid.
A lot of that has to do with the “selection bias” Paul refers to where pre-parenthood we only notice kids and how it makes us think of the parent experience:
when things were going wrong. I only noticed them when they made noise. And where was I when I noticed them? Ordinarily I never went to places with kids, so the only times I encountered them were in shared bottlenecks like airplanes. Which is not exactly a representative sample.
Now as a parent, I see kids everywhere I look. Most of the time they are quietly observing the world, they are sharing a touching moment with their kin and friends, or they are just eating something (kids eat and drink a lot!) -- very much the definition of living. Having a kid reminds me of what it means to be living and being human. It has taught me empathy!
I think the word Paul chooses to describe moments with your own kids as a “kind of peace” is closest to articulating how I feel.
And while having kids may be warping my present judgement, it hasn't overwritten my memory. I remember perfectly well what life was like before. Well enough to miss some things a lot, like the ability to take off for some other country at a moment's notice. That was so great. Why did I never do that?
I too can recall life before partnership and before kids. Before finding a partner, it was filled with constantly finding distraction and luxuriating in freedom I never truly exercised except in a few narrow realms. After having a partner, any loneliness was lost and we had plenty of happy moments. But as Paul says,
there are more after kids than before. Now I practically have it on tap, almost any bedtime.















