Why I Go Home: A Developer Dad's Manifesto
Sorry, but this is getting a little unctuous.<p>I don't think the trend in our time of parents organizing their lives around their children is very good for anybody, especially the children. I'm thinking, for example, of fathers who call their kids "buddy" and think it's the meaning of life to play with them. This is pandemic where I live. People have convinced themselves that the good life consists of being child-centered parents in child-centered families. Everybody [†] is busy confirming to everybody else that this is true (consider the platitudinous tone of most of the comments in this thread), but I doubt that it is true. It has much to do with parents' emotional needs (edit: specifically the need to Be A Good Parent, which if you think about it is actually a selfish concern) and little to do with kids'. Children ought to be running around outside playing with <i>other children</i> and depending on nice-but-otherly (not pseudo-peer) adults to keep their world secure and stable and fix things when they cry. Children raised by child-centered parents seem at a loss when they aren't at the center of attention. This bodes ill for inner strength. Most such parents fail even to teach their kids basic manners. They're so identified with their child, or rather with the mini-me they imagine their child to be, that they don't notice if the child is routinely disrespectful to others. When they do occasionally notice something egregious and limply intervene, it's always with the same whiney "Honey..." followed by a feeble plea which the child ignores with no consequences. What they ought to do, of course, is what any ordinary mammal does when their offspring goes too far - smack them. Figuratively if you prefer.<p>The problem is that we're immature and infantilized ourselves, so we've forgotten all of this. Perhaps it's an outgrowth of postwar youth culture.<p>One tell-tale symptom is that children have fewer friends than they used to, and adults consequently have fewer friends and less time for the ones they do have. (Nowadays when a friend has a kid I tell them "See you in 20 years." Not my choice.) Adults' time is taken up with the sacred family-ness we all must bow before. Children's time is taken up by their parents. I remember how hard it used to be to arrange for my son to play with a classmate after school. (Arrange!  When such a thing need to be <i>arranged</i> in the first place, we're already losers. This whole subject really needs a Louis CK to do it justice.)  Parents would look up  times for "play dates" in a calendar. I swear they were jealous of their kids seeing other "buddies".<p>In short, a little neglect never hurt anybody.<p>p.s. Maybe it seems like the above hasn't much to do with "work-life balance" (blessed be its name), but it totally does. However, I'm over quota.<p>[†] Well, everybody in my lily-white liberal world.