>>21649087
I’ll be the first to say that having kids isn’t for everyone. It’s expensive, it’s time consuming, and it requires a change in lifestyle. However, it’s an investment in the purest sense. You sacrifice in the short term and you reap incredible rewards in the long term if you’ve done a good job. Your child’s first steps will vindicate every sleepless night, and their first words will repay every diaper change. It’s not about legacy in the shallow modern sense of “people will remember me,” it’s about recognizing that you created someone, raised someone, and prepared someone to be a net positive to society.
As far as the parental dynamic goes, I think there are plenty of factors at play for why things don’t work out optimally, but I’ll list a few:
1. People change over time, hopefully for the better but sometimes for the worse.
2. Incentive structure. If you stay at home, you are your own boss. Few people have the discipline needed to be optimally and consistently productive without oversight, because the incentive is to do the bare minimum and laze about with the rest of the day.
3. Actual skill issue. People used to learn how to keep house from their mothers. This has largely disappeared due to dual income households and feminism (inb4 we’re losing recipes). Housekeeping also used to be taught in home economics, and that has disappeared. Wives and mothers are not being taught the skills they need to be effective stay at home wives and mothers.
4. Lack of drive. Even factoring in the lack of training, you would think that someone who is going to spend 20+ years raising kids and tending to a house would want to do it well. This is simply not the case. Plenty of people live an unexamined life, and never ask themselves “can I do this better?”
