>I think it is impossible to understand how much additional stress and anxiety being a parent of small children bring without being in that position.
I have to disagree and I'm a father. I think it's exactly like in the book "the happiness advantage", some people will see the positive and use it as possibility to grow and to get more productive.
On the other hand, People who focus on the negative and didn't learn to cope with stress will have problems in every high stress environment no matter the circumstances.
no matter the crap life throws at them some people simply march forward and this is the mindset you need - and not a break, which will only get you right back where you were.
Also a father, and I don't see it as a case of positives and negatives, rather how much energy you're putting into it.
There are many methods of minimizing the effort you're putting in and you can make it relatively easy, but like with everything it's a tradeoff.
Food is one major point. You can introduce a baby to solids early on and practice the BLW method, or you could just spoon feed them with ready-to-eat baby products - there's an order of magnitude difference in effort between those two approaches.
One thing I learned from this experience is that it's beyond the capabilities of a normal human couple to apply all the fancy, high-effort parenting methods - you'd need at least two grandparents cover just the more popular ones.
Absolutely this. You need to make sure they're clean, fed, safe (physically and emotionally), and are able to play (learn). Beyond that, choosing to parent on hard mode just gives you more stress for no benefit.
Looking back I see some benefit to doing extra - for example my toddler had no issue with weaning or adapting to daycare, which I heard is usually a problem.
We didn't implement independent sleeping and getting rid of the pacifier though(so far).
I believe that ultimately people usually try to do their best and there's no sense in beating yourself up about it or worse - someone else.
Some people have an easy time raising kids and some have a much harder time. There are a lot of reasons for this. Different kids, different parents, health issues.
The stress of a genuinely difficult parenting situation doesn't just go away with some superficial pop psych like focusing on the positive. That's such an astonishing claim, it's like telling a drowning person to use positive thinking to solve their problems.
Good luck “looking on the bright side” when you’ve had less than four hours sleep every night for the past week.
Some kids are just angels and sleep like champs, others fight every inch of the way and wake up constantly. As a result, different parents come up with wildly different “truths of parenting”.
This is true but also dependent on your "other circumstances". The US is decidedly a bad place to be a parent from what I can tell. Parental leave, even when graciously granted by the company is short and frowned upon nevertheless (generalizing here of course but this seems to be the overall majority of cases).
Taking a few months of parental leave right at the beginning was such a big help. All of the above becomes so much easier when you simply do not have to worry about work. Baby is not sleeping from 2a.m. to 5a.m. every night? Or only sleeps when having body contact, such as sleeping on your chest? So what! Stay up, do some chores, play some computer games or watch a movie w/ baby on your chest (yes there's ways where you do not have to worry about baby falling off and you have both hands available, so you definitely can get lots of computer gaming done in that time ;)). Go to bed at 5a.m. knowing you don't have to get up to get to work and be expected to have a fresh mind. You just fall asleep, exhausted and wake up for lunch time and it's fine! It just totally takes the extra stress out of that time (of course you're still gonna be tired from having your sleep rhythms effed up and such and sometimes baby just doesn't want to sleep at all, no matter what you do etc.) and I believe that can make for better parenting overall. Back in the day some of that would've been taken care of by living w/ your parents or in-laws.
Go to bed at 5a.m. knowing you don't have to get up to get to work and be expected to have a fresh mind. You just fall asleep, exhausted and wake up for lunch time and it's fine!
Baby wakes up at 6:30am like clockwork. Your move, parent.
Not to be a stick in the mud. You’re of course right that having additional responsibilities further increases the stress & difficulty.
Which in the case I described is not a big issue and basically entirely my point. 1.5 hours of sleep. Usually a killer. In the above mentioned situation it will still not be great, you'll be tired, groggy, irritable. But you won't snap at your PM for the 10th time in a row during standup and be cited to the boss' office or a formal warning or something.
As in I'm talking proper parental leave, meaning both parents can take 3-6 months off at the beginning, no questions asked, everyone is OK with it and it's totally normal. And you still get a reasonable amount of salary - in our case here in Canada from the parental leave part of E.I. meaning government guaranteed. Of course if I look at SV salaries, the maximums you can get under that program are laughable but here where we are it was totally workable at the time in our lives when we had kids.
Contrast that to what I hear about SV companies (I won't cite company names as that will draw the ire of the down voters here on HN, but I have inside knowledge i.e. new dads in such companies) where even if officially it's possible, nobody really does it. Sort of like "unlimited vacation", which sounds like it's better than the 30 days you get as a dev in most European countries but that in reality just ensures that nobody wants to be "the guy" that takes the most vacation and you still don't get more than you used to. If you were one of the "lucky ones" that had more than the minimum, you're now probably taking less time off than before.
I am fully aware of that and that is why I wrote it the way I did. As in, you are quoting just one part, leaving out the most important part of that sentence:
Back in the day some of that
This implies a time at which at least the mother (in-law) was probably a stay at home mom. Please take note of the word probably. Yes there are and always were exceptions. It's about likelihoods and how societal norms and such have shifted over time. In fact we should probably add "and/or grand parents". And while at it also making extra sure this isn't mis-understood as an absolute or a "current situation" statement: "or living very close by" vs. today where you're more likely to live further apart.
I refer to it as the best kept secret of parenthood. No one tells you this until you are in it.