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I started writing this article in 2022, three months after our first daughter was born.
A few paragraphs in, I decided I was jumping the gun. Maybe the first months were easy but those naysayers who kept telling me “just you wait!” were going to be correct in the end.
So I put it in the metaphorical drawer and decided to come back to it later.
Then our second daughter was born, and a few months into being parents of two the itch to write this article returned. But I’d only been a parent for two years, and while two kids is above average these days, it’s still not very many “reps” to claim to know something from.
So back in the drawer it went.
Three months ago our third daughter was born. Our oldest is nearly four, our middle daughter is two, and here I am, once again itching to write this piece.
Along the way, I’ve realized I’m not alone in thinking this. Quiet whispers and text messages from friends have trickled in: “Why did everyone tell me this was so hard?” Revealing a kind of guilt over the joyous reality of life on the other side of having kids I and others did not expect.
So I think it’s time. Three kids under four is enough experience to confidently say this is far easier and more wonderful than I could have possibly imagined.
If you’re on the fence about having kids, or have been putting it off, I strongly urge you to ignore the whiners and complainers. Ignore the fear-mongering. It might be better than you’re expecting.
If you haven’t grabbed a copy of my sci-fi thriller Husk, pick one up before you keep reading. The Kindle, Print, and Audiobook are all now available.
Known Challenges, Unknowable Joys
A few years ago I wrote “Known Costs, Unknowable Benefits” about how the best parts of life are hidden.
Many of the best changes you can make in life are on the other side of some cost you’re painfully familiar with, but where the payoff is a kind of joy you can’t yet comprehend.
You cannot understand the high of running if you’ve never built a running habit. But you can imagine the pain of straining yourself and the anxiety around fitting something else into your schedule. Before you start running or any kind of exercise, it seems like a bad tradeoff. Then you start doing it and realize how much better you feel and go “ohhh I get it now.”
Nowhere is this more true than having children.
Before you have kids it’s easy to imagine getting woken up repeatedly in the middle of the night. Having to cut back on your social plans. Not being able to travel as easily. Spending more money. The costs are visible and painful to imagine.
But what you can’t imagine is the first time your baby smiles at you. When they say Mama or Dada. When they start crawling and want to chase your dog around the living room. Or the pride of coming back from the gym at 7am and finding your toddler sitting at the counter in the dark with a play knife cutting a peach for themselves.
Even the challenges you can imagine have a secret side to them you can’t anticipate. Bouncing your baby who’s been crying for an hour is exhausting, there’s no denying that. But then you look across the room at your wife and your eyes meet and you both have the “lol what the fuck” expression on and you start laughing and suddenly the tension isn’t gone, but it’s a strangely happy tension, where sure it sucks but you’re in the suck together and you know at some point it will stop and you’ll collapse in bed together.
As scary as it is, you have to take on faith that it’s going to be amazing, because the kind of joy kids bring is impossible to imagine before you have them.
But that said, there are plenty of vocal people who will loudly shout about how miserable and hard having kids is. Thankfully except for the most extreme situations, this is not a factor of kids as much as the parents’ attitudes.
Attitude
Some subset of people are going to be miserable regardless of whatever situation they’re in.
Because look, the reality is that losing sleep sucks. Getting poop on your clothes sucks. Your toddler screaming at you because they wanted a DIFFERENT blue dress sucks.
But come on. It doesn’t suck that much. You’re not in a ditch breaking rocks. You’re in an air conditioned house with unlimited entertainment and a magic piece of glass that can conjure Thai food.
If your newborn is screaming they’re either hungry, gassy, overtired, or soiled. You keep trying to solve one of those problems until they stop.
If your kid isn’t sleeping and you’re getting woken up in the middle of the night constantly, you drink some coffee and figure out how to help them sleep better.
Unless your kid has serious health issues, there is just nothing that challenging that warrants constant complaining, unless you’re the kind of person who is going to constantly complain about things anyway.
I should mention too that there’s a type of socializing parents do which can sound like complaining from the outside, but is in reality closer to a kind of shared humor.
When I tell a story like how this morning my older girls got up at 6:20 and tried to rush downstairs, then started crying when I told them they had to stay in their room until their light turns on, to someone without kids you only hear the bad parts like getting woken up, the crying, etc.
But the reality is that it wasn’t a bad experience. They were sad because they heard me downstairs and were excited to play with me, which itself was very sweet. And even though they whined as I walked them back to their room, we cuddled in bed for a minute, they calmed down, and then they happily stayed in their room either snoozing or playing until 7:00.
If you adopt the right attitude, most of the challenges of having kids are a sort of “amusing struggle” where they’re psychologically taxing in the moment but also funny, like trying to get a drunk person to drink water before bed.
So even though the challenges are real, most parents will see them as a kind of Type 2 fun and roll with it. Some don’t, and will thirst for attention online whining about their kids, but they should be ignored, just as you’d ignore someone whining about how unfair it is to have to work.
And, yes, all the obvious caveats here. Having a good partner (with the right attitude) helps. More money helps. Having family around helps. But none of the imagined deficiencies in your situation are more limiting than your attitude.
You can either be the kind of person who accepts the challenges and figures it out, or the kind of person who complains. And it’s a lot easier to accept the challenges when the kid train is pulling you through them.
The Kid Train Keeps Moving
Having kids is far from the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I’m not entirely sure what the hardest thing is, but two possibilities come to mind.
The first is running my marketing agency, Growth Machine, through 2020. When COVID lockdowns started, over half of our clients canceled their contracts, leaving us cash-flow negative and at risk of not making payroll. We survived, barely, but pushing through that period knowing everyone’s salaries and healthcare depended on me was grueling.
The second is when I did a half-ironman two years ago. The moment I jumped in the water for the 1.2 mile swim, the person in front of me kicked me in the face, knocking my goggles off and filling my mouth with the oily water of Galveston. The second half of the 56 mile bike ride was into a brutal headwind. My legs cramped up halfway through the half marathon run, and I had to walk the last six miles, wondering with each step if they would lock up for good and I’d collapse in the street.
The acute and chronic challenges of having kids have never felt close to either of these. And a core part of why it’s felt so much easier is that even in its hardest moments, you are being pulled through the challenges of raising kids. You aren’t having to push.
I could have shut Growth Machine down any time in 2020, but I woke up every day choosing to keep working on it instead. I could have quit the race at any point in the 70.3 miles, but I chose to keep going. I had to push myself to stick with these challenges, knowing full well they were optional.
And thankfully with kids the challenges are never optional. You can’t not feed them. You can’t not soothe them. Maybe you can procrastinate those interventions for a minute, letting them cry as you take a deep breath in the other room to calm your nerves, but there’s no option to quit.
Alex Elliot described this as “The kid train” and it’s the perfect metaphor: