Public complaint, private joy
There is social honour in following a prestigious career. Yet while the pleasures of parenting are profound, they are also private.
It’s hard to strike a balance between how hard it is to be a father versus the joy and wholesomeness of having children. The yin and yang to paternity always fall short: either you whinge too much, or you’re too much of a romanticist.
How do you avoid the binaries which are so definitive of this era - that you don’t have to be A or B, but rather A and B (and C, and all of the alphabet together). How to achieve stability and harmony between the opposing, different, complementary and interconnected forces that coexist in parenthood?
In the survey I put out recently (thanks to those who filled it out!!), a reader wrote that they felt sometimes I did indeed “protest too much”, as if I felt that “fatherhood was more of a duty than a pleasure”. I really thank the reader for their honesty — I really need it! — and I also completely agree with you.
An alarm that is going off as I write is indeed that I can sound pessimistic or too negative about my experiences of having children. My intention is for the individual to be an anecdotal bridge towards the collective: I am not the only father who can feel annoyed about parenting, nor the only man who questions and calibrates his role in this new landscape.
The data shows how challenging it can be to have kids today. On an international scale, fertility fell from 5 births per woman in 1950 to 2.3 in 2021, according to the State of the World Population Report of 2023 from the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). The organization writes about changing the narrative: for example, that “Young people want kids, but can't afford them. How can societies help?”
In the United States an increasing number of young adults see no way to manage their careers and the demands of parenthood. The trend, as this Bloomberg headline from February 2024 goes, is: “The New Work-Life Balance: Don’t Have Kids”.
Sarah Green Carmichael, opinion editor at Bloomberg, writes in the (paywalled) article about a survey of 20,000 people which reveals that young adults without children are worried about the medical and financial costs of raising children. There is also a large percentage (42%) who worry about raising children amidst the prospects of climate change.
Young adults are more likely than older adults to think that parents “very often” regret having children, according to the article. Nonetheless, the majority of people who become parents are happy to have done so. Less than 20 of the 20,000 people said they regretted having children.
“Sure, not all those he surveyed were parents. But even if parents accounted for half his sample, that would work out to a 0.2% chance of regret. It would be tough to find a safer bet”.
As I wrote in a previous newsletter, I don’t have a shred of regret nor doubt about being a father to my children. Knowing what we know, Irene and I know that we’d always have children in every life that we could (we’d probably try sooner, and have more than two). Having said that, of course we are in a tunnel right now — tired of being tired. It’s a rough transition (which we knew would happen).
Where do we stand?
Green Carmichael asks that if parents clearly don’t rue their decisions to grow their families, why isn’t it catching on for the younger generations? There is surely financial pressure in all parts of the world, beyond different contexts (and the importance that different cultures give to this question).
The columnist rightly says, to paraphrase her, that this is about more than dollars and cents. It’s about the social honor of having a prestigious career — and the private pleasures of being a parent.
When I read this I felt like it freed me from something which I was struggling to articulate. I feel like I want to start again explaining what I meant about what it means to have children.
It’s difficult to find the right words and be calm in the face of indescribable satisfaction and joy — incomparable to any other aspect of my life — and considering the great effort and level of physical, psychological and emotional demand — which is also incomparable, but easier to put into words.
It becomes all the more complex when you take into account the need for stability and growth in a relationship when children enter the picture — and that’s if you manage to strike the balance. Just look at the number of divorces which happen after a first child usually, but also after a second. And this happens when the children are still young.
In Spain, 32% of couples said the main reasons for divorce came down to exhaustion and a lack of communication over raising children, or because of work. In 2022, 43.1% of divorces happened between parents with young children.
There are many articles about why couples separate when children come along, and the roles men and women tend to hold. A relationship can break down in those first years of parenthood, making it fertile ground for disconnection or infidelity, even when separation can happen much later.
Many couples go their separate ways because they lack conversation and trust in speaking out and looking for solutions together, as a team, says Armando Bastida, a pediatric nurse practitioner from Spain, and father of three. In Spanish, he writes: “There are often reproaches where there should be commitment”.
A question of prestige
Mothers know their work is not valued as highly as it should be. A common joke is that mothers only go on about nappies, dummies and other such ‘details’ which those who criticize them don’t deem to be important — and it won’t often be other mothers who are doing the criticizing.
There’s this other cheap sport of making fun of ‘mummy’ groups too. Why don’t men take the piss out of themselves in this situation? Why don’t we question ourselves when we send all kinds of porn or homophobic jokes in our own private groups? At least, some of us share this kind of thing, and others stay mum (as it were) about it.
No one needs to tell me that there’s no prestige or anything comparable to being a man dedicated to childcare. Social prestige is ostensibly about the field of work, in what you manage to achieve or how you advance your professional career.
It couldn’t be more obvious to me, when you look at just how much more interest — and admiration — I used to get when I told stories of my life as a journalist — interviewing famous people or covering international news — compared to the tedium and lack of interest that happens in some instances when I talk about fatherhood. O, this guy again.
There seems to be a pattern of those who make fun of people who sometimes spend their time speaking about paternity and insisting on the importance of giving children attention: it turns out that they’re not involved in raising children, because they're absent when it comes to that role, or because they don’t have children.
It is a choice. I admire a person who actively takes part in raising children. I feel it more so for the rare times I meet a man who seems like he would know what he’d need to do if, one day, he ended up being a single parent.
I’ll always be surprised by the fact that some of those men only find out what raising a child involved when their partner is away (oh, I should have done the groceries in order to prepare something for the children to eat on time, so that they go to bed on time, and get to kindergarten or school on time in the morning, so that I can get to work on time?)
Don’t get me wrong. There are no winners or losers here because it’s not a competition. What there is here is an opportunity for us men to do what, so often, we were not raised to do. It’s about opening the door to discovering the bittersweet world of childrearing, which we often don’t realize can also be for us.
We need to change the social parameters which establish success at work as a standard of prestige — something that we should aim at as our utmost ambition. Why is being an involved father not on the same table?
For Green Carmichael, U.S. society doesn’t value children. She says that your work will never love you back, and your boss won’t be the one taking your hand on your deathbed. And while we know that parental license reduces child mortality, she says we still believe that corporate gains should come first.
Roll up your sleeves and learn
It’s not obligatory to have kids, nor does it have to be a mandate. While I don’t want to encourage the entire world to have kids, nor do I want to disencourage those who might have doubts.
I do want to encourage men to get more into the weeds of it all, especially in the things they don’t yet know how to do, never mind if it’s considered to be a boring task, or something you don’t think you’re supposed to be in charge of.
The more mindless, difficult, tedious or far off it seems, the more we should try to get involved. Mothers give birth and breastfeed — which in itself, is a lot — is there anything more that they’re consigned to do which men can’t do? The answer is no.
Whatever you think is a mother’s ‘natural’ job, it isn’t. And men should do those jobs too. Here are some basic examples:
Take your kid to get vaccinated (do you know where the vaccination card is?)
Organize an afternoon play date (do you know how to contact your children’s friends’ parents?)
Go to one of your child’s friend’s birthdays without your partner.
Organize your child’s birthday party (without asking for help constantly).
Travel for work and take one of your kids with you — without your partner.
Note: it is not just about doing any of these things on your own, but also about thinking about all of the elements which are needed to get these jobs done.
You don’t need to be told “take our child to be vaccinated on this day” — be ready to do what is necessary, with everything.
Collecting gems
I hear many mums and dads with more experience say that you’ll come to a moment where you start to miss your children’s first years.
In Recalculating it’s usually women who write to me and share how much they yearn for those years of childhood, which they treasure as relics.
I know it’ll be this way, that when certain things no longer happen they will become a memory that will begin to leaven and grow who knows how far. This newsletter too is a way of collecting such gems, such as the following.
Last week, as I was driving Lorenzo to school, he brought up the subject of death again. “I want to die with you,” he said, “but if I don’t die with you, I want to die after you. I’ll bury you in the garden at home, and I’ll put flowers there.”
Without transition, he moved on to a new subject. He told me that they had spoken about philosophical questions at school, such as the chicken and the egg, which he had found fascinating, just like he finds numbers. Then, he started obsessing about what the last number could be:
“There is no ‘last number’. You say ‘infinity’, which is impossible to get to.”
“There HAS TO BE a last number. Can we count to the last number?” insisted Lorenzo.
“OK, let’s give it a go.”
There we have it.
I hope to keep collecting gems and relics that my children offer. Speaking about the challenges of fatherhood is also a reminder to take care of yourself (what do I do to stay well for both myself and my family?), and also so that other men who might feel like they’re lost or in limbo, or trapped in the tunnel of those early years of fatherhood, know that they’re not alone.
One challenge is to interpret these difficulties as a storm, which we know will pass and can teach us. At the same time, not to miss the sunset, which happens every day, like the gems of parenting, and it can't be more hopeful, can it?
Thank you very much to those who keep sharing this newsletter, subscribing and writing to me (you can always do it by hitting reply to this mail, I answer everything!).
I really like it when you send me suggestions or criticize, complete or fix something I wrote in my text. I also love it when you tell me about your experiences. From the bottom of my heart, thank you for so much.
You can find the archive of all the past editions of Recalculating here.
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See you in two weeks!
With love,
Nacho
🙏 Many thanks to Worldcrunch for translating and editing this newsletter.
