Man’s search for meaning Part 2: Plant your garden

The Penny-Arcade guys are awesome.  They started out as a couple of dudes with a web-comic.  They’ve taken that web-comic and their fame and channeled it for something much bigger.  Yes, they run conventions, but more impressively, they started an awesome charity called Childs Play.

This charity, aimed at showing that video games are not evil incarnate, and that gamers can do good, connects children’s hospitals with games, books, toys, and other resources to help sick children keep their minds off their illnesses.  Donations started small– one hospital and the PA guys’ garages as storage facilities, and they made deliveries themselves.  Now they’ve ratcheted up into a large non-profit that connects with and ships directly to hospitals.

You can donate here.

And now for some negative griping.

Compare the PA guys to the onanistic navel-gazing you see from other movements.  The minimalists.  The travel the world folks.  The motivationalists.  [Note:  we are not saying that all minimalists, world-travelers, self-helpers etc. are onanistic con-artists, but you know they exist.]

The Penny Arcade dudes are real.  They have authenticity.

So much of that motivational crap seems so hollow and insincere, aimed just at making money off other people.

For the most part, they’re not actually doing anything.

The P-A guys, OTOH, are teh awesome.

And that, perhaps, is why I don’t expect them to get mid-life crises.  When you’re busy doing things that are real, you don’t have time to feel like life is meaningless.

also:  I like the word onanistic

Man’s search for meaning: Part 1, in which we do not understand

I was recently talking with someone wealthy and somewhat famous (on the internet).  He mentioned that since he’s become wealthy he’s been searching for meaning.  I was all, dude, I’ve noticed.  Not really into that.

We are from the midwest.  That means we are pragmatists.  We generally keep our navels covered so we don’t spend much time looking at them.  I thought that, but didn’t say it.  We do things because they’re The Right Thing to Do.  Not because of some grand purpose or passion or destiny or whatever.

Back when I had a ton of free time (see:  K-8), I would sit around in the back yard and analytically ponder the meaning of life.  I decided that the only true meaning of life was that of reproduction.  We were put on earth to reproduce.  I thought as a species that we had done (more than) a fine job of doing that, and we were at a point at which the human race would be fine and people could make their own decisions about reproduction using their rational minds.  (This was before I figured out what made boys so interesting and got the urge to go through the motions of reproduction without actually, you know, reproducing.  Er hem.)

Given that our main duty in life was being taken care of by the race as a whole, that allowed us to pursue other purposes.  I decided that I liked hedonism as a guiding philosophy and I would do the things I liked.  Being from the midwest, of course, I also had a large lump of responsibility.  So to quote the Wicca, “An it hurts no one, do what you will.”

I’m pretty sure I haven’t really thought about my purpose since.  Maybe at 3am in a college dorm hallway, but I probably just related the story above.  I have generally had better things to do and think about (like how sexy my partner is!).

I do, however, sometimes wonder why some people spend so much time on the question.  I sort of understand the self-help gurus– they like to separate desperately unhappy people with money from some of that money.  It’s the unhappy people who have no real reason to be unhappy that I just don’t get.  If it’s chemical, then why aren’t they searching for solutions in a doctor’s office?  If it isn’t chemical, then why are they allowing themselves to be unhappy just because they can’t find their “purpose” in life.  Whatever that means.  It seems like pondering the question just creates more angst.  So why not stop worrying about finding meaning in life and, you know, live life instead?

But, as I said earlier, we’re from the midwest.  We are incapable of understanding this coastal melancholia.  Perhaps that means we’re somehow incomplete or there’s something wrong with us.  But you know, pondering that question might make us sad for no purpose at all, so why ponder it?  If a person has that kind of free-time, that’s why God invented the modern novel.  (Or Cervantes invented it, depending on your view.)

*Some women search for meaning too, but we’re mostly too busy.  Second shift and mental load, dontcha know.

Do you spend a lot of time searching for meaning?  Do you think doing so affects people’s happiness levels?  Do you think this is something mainly done on the coasts (particularly the West Coast), and if so, why are there regional differences?

Unnatural Mother

The title is what a famous single academic called another famous academic after hearing that the latter spent her post-delivery hours in the hospital (no doubt while her newborn napped) working on a revise and resubmit.

I, too, am an unnatural mother.  (Though with my first, I did catch up on the Harry Potter series in the hospital– there was a 3 day regression running at home, so giving birth came at a good time.)

I don’t identify with the standard tropes.  And I think I only introspect on motherhood when I read one of these tropes and find I don’t identify with it.  Since I no longer read the NYTimes and am off forums, that happens a lot less frequently these days, and I suspect I’m happier for it.

Grad school changed my entire sense of self in the way that bootcamp tears someone down before building them up again.  Cognitive Behavioral Therapy changed me to become closer to the person I wanted to be.  Motherhood, not so much.

I don’t feel that motherhood has changed my life in ways I never would have dreamed.  It’s been pretty much what I expected.

I did think I would still love my cats as much as my babies, but it turns out that they actually did become second-class citizens.  Loved and cosseted, but no longer the most important creatures in the house.

DH says that he never would have noticed how many curse words and how many panty-shots there were in Goonies before having kids.  He also still feels just as much himself before and after kids… and he is pretty much just as I’d imagined he’d be.  (Wonderful, of course.)

Loss of autonomy… no, that’s what work is for.  Also, as my grandmother always said, hire good help.

Overwhelmed… well, sometimes, but not usually.  DH is really great with children and once we got DC1′s food issues figured out (green peppers) it wasn’t so bad.  There was a semester of awfulness in which the three of us were constantly sick, but that’s not entirely DC1′s fault– it was a bad flu year for everybody.  We did wait to have a second child until the first was able to entertain hirself and could help us out, which helps.

It is true that my kids are amazing.  (And I hope all parents think their kids are amazing.)  They get more amazing every day.  I don’t want them to stay babies– I love seeing them grow into responsible small adults.  (And with that evidence, how can I feel guilt?)

Would I be different without children?  Well, yes.  All my life I’ve been tackling difficult goals and usually I figure out what it takes to get where I want to go and decide whether or not the effort is worth it.  That year-and-some of infertility with the miscarriage was the first time that I ever thought that maybe no matter how hard I tried, no matter how much I wanted something, no matter what I put myself through, I might not be able to get what I wanted more than anything.  Because my body was failing me.  But then I unexpectedly got pregnant in the end and that lesson remained unlearned.  So DC1 brought me back to the me who tackles challenges, and that lesson will have to wait another day.

So I may be an unnatural mother, following in a long line of pragmatic career women with perfect children, but I am a happy self-confident mother.

Are you an unnatural mother?  What tropes do you or do you not identify with?  Whether or not you have children, what has changed your life (if anything)?

Authoritarian vs. Authoritative parenting

We recently left DC1 with my sister for hir first overnight away from home without parents.  My sister asked, “Do you have any rules?”  And really we didn’t have any.  I came up with, “Don’t rob any banks” (Actually, I came up with, “When we’re gone, your aunt is in charge,” turning to Auntie, “Don’t abuse that privilege.  No robbing banks,” back to DC, “If Auntie tells you to rob a bank, tell her no.”) and DH came up with, “Ze is too short to cross the street by hirself.”  Apparently my sister’s friends have a lot more rules for their kids.

DH and I don’t have a whole lot of rules for our DCs.  We don’t say that they must ask to be excused at the dinner table.  We don’t make them clean their plates. We do have a set bedtime, although we didn’t used to.  But practice has told us that if DC1 isn’t asleep by 8:30 ze is difficult to get up to go to school at 7 the next morning.

We do try to guide DC1 (and someday DC2) into the rules for polite society.  Grown-ups don’t have to ask to be excused at the dinner table.  But when they leave, they must leave politely.  We try to model that.  Adults also can’t hit people, but that hasn’t been a problem with DC1 since ze was 2 or 3.  And if DC1 does anything odd, we address that at the time and explain what appropriate alternative behaviors look like.  So DC1 says please and thank-you and is reminded if ze doesn’t.

Our goal is not to have total and unthinking obedience.  The rules we do have (see:  street-crossing) we have for a reason.  DC1 is free to argue with us about said rules, so long as ze does it in an appropriate fashion that could be termed, “discussion” and not the heated kind.  Our primary goal is to guide, and we have authority because we’ve lived longer and know more about the world than DC1 does.

Another form of parenting is authoritarian parenting.  With this form, there’s a belief that the child needs to respect and obey hir elders because they are hir elders.  Blanket training is an extreme and awful example of this.

The ironic thing is that Authoritarian and Authoritative parenting seem to lead to exactly the opposite types of behavior that the parents are trying to instill.

For example, DC1 is a natural rules follower.   Ze trusts us.  If it were our goal to raise someone who questions authority, we’d be doing a pretty poor job of it.  (Fortunately for us, our goal, as always, is just to make things easier for ourselves.)

We haven’t noticed that kids under authoritarian parenting are any better behaved.  In fact, with more rules, there seem to be more rules to complain about.   And that leads to lots more arguing.  The arguments don’t seem particularly valuable either because there’s a lot more, “Because I’m the adult and I said so.”  Authoritarian parenting seems to create rebels in a way that authoritative parenting does not, despite rebellion being exactly the thing that authoritarian parenting is trying to squash (and questioning authority being encouraged by authoritative parents).

How were you parented growing up?  Do you think how your parents disciplined mattered to you as an adult?  If you have children, how do you try to instill lessons today?

More on jealousy

#1 : I think imma have to stop reading Suzie’s blog for a bit. Her son is finishing his PhD and getting tons of offers from great schools in gorgeous locations. Must…. quench…. jealousy… of petroleum engineers….

#2:  you wouldn’t want to be a petroleum engineer

#1: no

#2:  and they have to work, with like, oil companies.

#1 : he was like, Oh mom, what should I do, I have so many places wanting to hire me… I was like, I smash you.

#1: he has an offer at [school in Awesome Wet City]

#2 : don’t be jealous

 #1: why not?

#2: you don’t want to be a petroleum engineer

#1: it’s like, I know exactly why it’s bad to be jealous, and how unfounded it is, and how everyone has problems, yadda yadda, but thinking I shouldn’t be jealous doesn’t stop it.

#2: yeah, but in this specific case

  you don’t actually want to be a petroleum engineer

  you wouldn’t actually trade with this person

 #1: I don’t. But I might want a job offer at [Awesome School].

#2: but not a petroleum engineering job.

I’m afraid you probably wouldn’t get tenure at [Awesome School] in petroleum engineering.  You’d have to do petroleum engineering theory or something (does that exist?)  You would have to be really good at faking it.

  “This theory is so brilliant no one can understand it!”

#1: hahaha

 no, not in petroleum engineering. No petroleum engineering for me.

#2: You have my permission to be jealous of the profs [in your field] at Stanford. That at least makes sense.  While you’re at it, stick to being jealous of the tenured ones

#1: arrrrghgghghghghhhhh

  stanford won’t hire meeeeeeeeeee

#2: no, but at least you want that job more than one in a petroleum engineering dept…

 #1: true

#2: or maybe it’s easier thinking about being jealous of the petroleum engineering department in [Awesome Wet City] because deep down you don’t really want to be a petroleum engineer in [Awesome Wet City]

 #1: true

#2: because if that’s been your goal all along, you’ve made a few really odd choices

 #1: hahaha

Grumpeteers, do you indulge in jealousy?  Do you prefer more realistic targets or less?  Do you feel like you’re being jealous of the right people?  (Or should you aim higher or lower?)  Is there anything that stops it???

Ponderings on perfection

One of DC1′s classmates is a doctor married to another doctor.  (Her youngest is best friends with my oldest– they skipped first grade together.)  Dr. Bestfriendsmom is also gifted with organizational and artistic abilities.  Her kids seem similarly endowed and often win the school-wide art contests.

Dr. Bestfriendsmom also throws amazing parties.  She knows interesting people, both with kids and without, even though they’ve only been living here a couple of years.  She and her husband are both total extroverts.  Their parties are honestly the only ones we’ve really enjoyed (including the ones we throw) since our odd assortment of non-work friends graduated, getting their PhDs, and moved to other states.

The children’s parties that Dr. Bestfriendsmom throws are generally themed.  She does the decorations.  (She makes pinatas in her hotel room on conference trips.)  She does the baking.  (The baking can include 30+ gingerbread houses made from scratch.)  She’s totally amazing.  A non-anal Martha Stewart.

At the last party, other mothers tried to engage me and did engage each other with catty comments about Dr. Bestfriendsmom and her over-the-top baking.  I responded with earnest, “It’s totally amazing,” and “DC1 is loving this” kinds of comments.  Mentally narrowing the eyes in my mind while doing so (the eyes on my face got wider and more innocent looking).

I don’t get the vitriol.  The jealousy.  Why are people so hostile when presented with someone who is awesome?  Why do they feel like they have to tear someone down who is just trying to do things well?

I don’t particularly want to be her… crafts are not my thing even if I had artistic ability.  (Also:  it is my understanding that MDs have to deal with blood.  Urp!)  So much extroversion would tire me out.  But I appreciate that there’s someone in our life who puts in that kind of effort to throw a big party and to make sure her guests are having a great time.

It could be that I don’t feel jealous precisely because I don’t particularly want to be a crafty person who throws awesome parties (though I appreciate being invited to them!).  But I also look up to the awesome women in my field who are at better schools and more published than I am, even though I do want to be them!  I strive for their accomplishments and I appreciate the way they’re opening doors for all women.  (Come to think of it, the ex-friend whose therapist told her to stop talking to me often took instant dislikes to some of these shooting stars, and also accused me of being jealous of her own success.)

Maybe it’s a fixed mind-set vs. growth mind-set thing.  I assume that with enough concentrated effort I could do things, or at least do more things, so there’s no need to tear anybody down to my level.  But really I have no idea.

Related:
Sylvia:  The woman who does everything so much better than you do.
Also Historiann’s recent series on Hillary Clinton.  (Another awesome woman.)

Why do you think some people hate perfection?  Do you?

Mr. Money Moustache vs. Laura Vanderkam

Ignoring academic blogs for the nonce, the blogs we read generally fit into two categories:  super-frugal people and high-powered career women.

Sometimes this causes a bit of schizophrenia when it comes to the money-time trade-off.  Half the blogs tell us to keep our expenses low, do everything ourselves, earn less money to buy ourselves time.  The other half tell us to work hard, invest in our careers, live that upper-middle class lifestyle (saving responsibly on the big and/or important stuff, of course), and outsource anything that takes time away from what we want to be doing.

After reading the former I always feel a little guilty.  Surely there’s someplace more we can cut.  Maybe I could force myself to eat greens instead of just not taking them at the CSA.  After reading the latter I worry, am I not doing enough to make more money?  Am I not outsourcing enough?  Am I spending too much mental power worrying about those former blogs when I should just relax, or am I spending too much mental power worrying that I shouldn’t be worrying?

But, of course, after some soul-searching I always realize that no, I’ve been optimizing my utility subject to my budget constraints and my time constraints all along.  It’s only when there’s a change coming ahead (like DH quitting his job…) that I need to think about re-optimizing.  Mr. Money Moustache is very persuasive, but in the end I don’t really want his life.  I want *my* career.  And my career means that’s where the bulk of my time goes, so some outsourcing makes sense.  I don’t want to do it part-time (though after tenure some people do).  But I also haven’t taken my career or money making to extremes and doing so might stress me out.

I think most of us are probably somewhere in between the two extremes of minimizing spending and maximizing earning.  And that’s probably healthy, and given diminishing rates of marginal utility, that’s probably utility maximizing.  If we’re off the equilibrium, we can cut some spending to get more time or use more time to get more money and we’ll be happier.

However, it’s really intriguing to read blogs from people who are extreme on one end or the other.  They show what’s possible.  And it’s compelling to read authors who are 100% sure of themselves and tell other folks what they should do.  Martha Stewart didn’t build an empire with doubts, but with her way being a good thing.*  Mr. Money Moustache has his dictatorial Moustachian way, many parts of which I completely disagree with (despite being in his target demo in terms of income).  Laura Vanderkam has hers with making the most of every one of those 168 hours.

Funnily, Mr. Money Moustache makes this comparison on his own blog but with the I will teach you to be rich guy and the 4 hour work-week guy.  But for me, Laura Vanderkam is a more realistic proponent of outsourcing and careerism/money making.  (Just like Mr. Money Moustache is a more realistic version of financial independence than Early Retirement Extreme was.)

*Hilarious interview with Martha Stewart on Wait Wait Don’t tell me the other weekend– she admits that there are multiple correct ways to get seeds out of a pomegranate, but there are also very wrong ways.  My sister left us a pomegranate at Thanksgiving that I am too scared to open for fear of doing it wrong.  The instructions she gave were complicated!

Where do you fall on the early retirement vs. work hard/play hard spectrum?  Who are your favorite extreme bloggers and other personalities?

Going early and slow

Back when I started this article, people were talking about Race to Nowhere… one of those movies about pressure cooker parents messing up their kids.  (Note:  neither of us, despite our elite circles, has ever actually met someone whose parents pressured them thusly.  We believe they exist, otherwise Amy Chua wouldn’t be, but are by far the minority… or at least don’t actually end up at the elite institutions with which we are familiar… maybe they go to Princeton.  No wait… one of us met a first gen Chinese girl with one of those moms, but she didn’t go to an Ivy for college… just grad school.  The other one of us remembers a couple of pre-meds on her hall in college, also of Asian descent.  But they seemed perfectly fine, except for the not really wanting to be doctors part.)

Of course, on the mommy forums, folks were taking this documentary to mean that kids should not be allowed near a written letter until they are 5 years old at the absolute earliest, and that’s only if you don’t get into the local Waldorf school, in which case age 8 or 9 is better.

The argument seems to be around whether you’re providing your kids with an advantage by “hothousing” them (or as some like to put it, “enabling them to reach their potential”) or by letting them “enjoy their childhoods” (or as I like to say, “be Rosseau dream-children”).  Proponents of the anti-learning model argue that we’re stressing out our kids with all the pressure.   Arguments in the other direction (that I haven’t actually heard made by a real person, just by articles against hot-housing) seem to focus on children getting into ivy schools later in life and becoming successes, whatever that means.

What the arguments seem to ignore is that when you start something early instead of late, the learning can be more leisurely and more fun.  There can be LESS pressure instead of more pressure.  Deadlines are far away and nobody expects a child to show genius at such a young age for task X, Y or Z.  The time can be spent focusing on the learning and the joy, and when it stops being fun, you can take a break and come back to it later, no harm, no foul.  Plus there’s the meta lesson that even if you don’t get something right away, with practice and time you will get it eventually.

We’ve seen the positive aspects of starting early and going slow across several aspects of DC1′s life.

Potty training

Unlike most parents, we found potty training to be pretty fun.  Unlike most parents, we started pretty early.  15 months.  We would have started earlier but before reading the research I thought you had to go all or nothing.  Ze wasn’t completely trained for many years (went a week without accidents right before age 2, was mostly dry before 3, was dry at night before 5).  The joy of starting at 15 months is you feel a bit naughty doing it– people who find out will be more than happy to provide their opinion of why you’re torturing the child or you’re the one being trained, etc.  (To which I would say, “Did you know that before disposable diapers the average age of potty training was 18 months, and in cultures with infant training, the average age of being completely trained is 12 months?  It’s really interesting, the potty readiness signals were created by Barry T Brazelton who was working for Pampers at the time.  They seem to coincide with the worst time to start training.”  You can see I have the speech memorized– as a professor I use people not minding their own business as an opportunity to educate.)

Potty training for us went much like all the other skills.  It was fun watching DC1 get better and better at this new skill.  Very relaxed.  Whenever it wasn’t relaxed we’d just stop.  And that would feel fine too, because the feeling of naughtiness would go away while on break.  Then we’d go back later.

Reading

Reading isn’t quite as good an example, because we didn’t deliberately start training DC1 to read (I did read  a couple of books on how to teach infants to read via flashcards, but decided that wasn’t fun and only taught sight reading which isn’t phonics.)  We did, however, read a lot to DC1, and I tend to run my finger along the words as I read children’s books because that’s what my mother did (possibly from her Headstart training).  And we have literally hundreds of children’s books to flip through and chew on, many at baby height.  We also introduced the Leapfrog CDs long before DC1 could decode because DC1 was really into frogs at that age.  The side effect of that was that ze knew all the phonics rules (in verse form, “The A says ah, the A says ah, every letter makes a sound the A says ah”) so that as soon as hir brain was ready for phonics, the inputs were already there.  On top of that, we have some great simple puzzles that attach words to pictures or letters to words and pictures.  These worked so well that we hope to do the same for DC2 even if ze isn’t as into frogs as hir older sibling.

Math

I love math and I love teaching math, so math is something we start right away, counting baby lifts and baby fingers and toes and ears and eyes and noses.  Numbers are everywhere and we point them out.  Following that, any kind of manipulable can teach simple addition (two raisins plus two raisins is one two three four raisins).  Skip counting is also a lot of fun.  We practice these kinds of games when we’re waiting for things, even if it means I occasionally get dirty looks.  Better dirty looks for “hothousing” than for my kid getting stuck in the slats of a chair yet again.  Later on we added workbooks and money games from Scholastic books.

We’re totally Boicing our kids.

Disadvantages

There are some disadvantages besides the occasional dirty look and accusation of doing horrible things to your children in order to win at life or something.  Sometimes the whole point of learning something new is learning to overcome a new challenge.  When learning is easy and happens over a long period of time, and doesn’t have those frustrations that a deadline will bring, the child may be missing that important lesson.  Additionally, when a child knows something that hasn’t yet been taught in school, that can lead to boredom when it is finally covered.  Though perhaps the boredom is a societal problem, not because of us.

[Disclaimer:  We do not recommend trying CIO-style sleep training or solid feeding earlier than what doctors recommend-- baby brains and baby tummies aren't ready for those until about the date the AAP recommends or they show signs of readiness.  Of course, anyone knows that trying to feed a baby who doesn't want to be fed is not fun for mom and dad, and CIO generally isn't ever fun.  So if you keep to the rule of only doing things early if they're fun for all, you should be ok.]

Anyway, my point is that introducing something early doesn’t necessarily lead to pressuring.   In fact, sometimes it keeps you from ever having to pressure.

How do you make choices about when to introduce new concepts?  What did your parents do?

Is GDP how we should be measuring success: A deliberately controversial post

Chacha and Linda commented on an earlier post that they didn’t like the way that success of a country is measured by GNP (gross national product) or GDP (gross domestic product), basically how many goods and services are sold in an economy.  Having more goods and services doesn’t mean a country is doing better and focuses on materialism as a sign of success.  [They also talk about the lump of labor fallacy, but that's the subject of someone else's post.]

Believe it or not, in economics we don’t assume that GDP is directly a measure of success.  We really care about happiness, or, as economists like to jargon it up, “utility.”  GDP does measure stuff, and stuff is something that we put into our utility functions.  Assuming free-disposal (which, admittedly, is a pretty big assumption), that is, that if you don’t want something you can get rid of it at no cost to yourself, then more stuff is better (or at least not worse).  We’re all about maximizing happiness, and stuff is just one thing that goes into that equation.

We would love to measure actual happiness.  But… it’s hard to measure happiness.  Even if we ask people, we’re not really sure if they’re telling us about relative happiness or absolute happiness, or if there are cultural differences in how to answer the happiness question that make differences in happiness not comparable across countries.

But we can measure stuff, so that’s what we measure.

We do also use other measures besides GDP: things like poverty rate, infant mortality rate, income inequality, literacy, etc.  These tend to give a measure of how a nation’s poorest citizens are doing.  Each of these captures a measure of a country’s success, but alone each cannot give a full picture.

What do you think?  How should we be measuring success of a country?  Is GDP a valid measurement?  Is happiness our end goal?  What would you measure instead?  (And should we even be comparing countries?  Why or why not?)

Helpless husbands and the fixed mindset excuse

Just read this on a mommy blog:  “Dh said that he leaves me to do all those things because I’m better at it than he is.”

I’ve seen the sentiment before.  Heck, my in-laws recently revoked laundry privileges from both my BIL and my FIL… something about a shrunken sweater.

That doesn’t fly in our household.  If you suck at something that is a basic ability, if that’s your excuse, well, then you need more practice.

My partner wore a lot of pink underpants and socks when he started doing laundry.  That’s not an excuse to stop doing laundry, just a reason to not buy red clothing to begin with.  (Or really any clothing that’s not color-safe.  Who has time to separate laundry these days?  Not us!)

My husband didn’t know how to cook when we got married.  He made some memorably spectacular mistakes (pretzel bread, fish cookies, etc.), and now he’s a better cook than I am.  That means I need more practice!  We even sent him to cooking school to speed up his knife skills and it worked.

If you’re bad at something, that’s not an excuse not to do it.  That’s a reason that you need to do more of it.

Now, if you don’t like doing something, then perhaps you should consider outsourcing, because your partner may not like doing it either, or even if your partner likes doing it, you may dislike far too many household chores to be able to split them evenly.

Of course, something like baby-care becomes more enjoyable when the baby has bonded with you both, and that takes an upfront start-up cost of time spent taking care of the baby.

What do you think?  Do you or does someone you know use the “but I suck at it excuse” to shift work onto other people?