Care and Feeding is Slate’s parenting advice column. Have a question for Care and Feeding? Submit it here.
Dear Care and Feeding,
My wife and I have four kids (all under 10) and two dogs. My wife is a physician with a very demanding practice. I am a consultant with a very demanding schedule, including travel every week. We have two nannies that help us make it work.
We both love our kids but are also both professionally ambitious and work a lot. Our kids want us to spend more time with them. School is getting more demanding. Activities are getting more serious. Our youngest kids just don’t get the same attention that our oldest kids received because we simply had more time when we had fewer kids. We are tired and distracted most of the time. Neither of us really wants to stop working, as we receive great satisfaction from our work (though we both find our jobs to be overwhelming at times). I’ve offered to stop working, but I make three times more than my wife. My wife doesn’t want to give up our current lifestyle. Are we bad parents for not pulling the trigger? Are we missing anything?
—Guilty Dad
Dear Guilty,
You aren’t bad parents for having careers you love and prioritizing them. I suppose the question you have to ask yourselves is whether your careers have become your top priorities at the expense of time with your kids. I can’t answer that from a single letter, and I’m not interested in passing judgment on you either way. But here are some questions I would consider:
How much are you and your wife home each day or week? Not just total hours, but waking hours with your kids. During those hours, are you catching up on chores, pursuing your own interests, or engaging with your children? When you think about the time you spend with your kids, how much of it is quality time?
How often are you able to make it to your kids’ activities? Even if you can’t go to every game or practice, are you able to make it to a few, some, or most? Do you see enough that you can observe their progress, encourage their hard work, and express pride in the effort they put in (not just the end result)? Are you present at events other parents are at?
Are you and your wife absent and present at the same times, or are your schedules offset from each other? If there are days when the kids don’t have time with either parent, is that what is making them miss you guys? If you and your wife’s schedules were offset so at least one parent was there most times, would that feel different to the kids?
Would scaling back now (for either of you) hurt your long-term career goals? Would an income reduction create an outsized challenge for your family, or could you weather it fairly comfortably?
And finally, would scaling back demonstrably impact your kids and your relationship with them?
Like I said, I can’t answer these questions for you. I’m not asking with any kind of bias. In fact, I see myself in your letter—and as I crafted these questions, I realized I was making a list as much for myself as for you. I am a single parent with a full-time job (and long commute) and write this column on the side. I also go to the gym and maintain my own hobbies. And I consistently ask myself if I am making the right choices for myself and my kids. Most days, I wish I was more present, whether physically and/or mentally/emotionally.
It’s natural to feel like you’re not enough as a parent and not enough as an employee. It’s also natural that kids would want their parents around as much as possible. You have to decide whether you’re comfortable with the answers to the questions above, and whether your kids miss you the “typical” amount or if they’re sending up a flare that you need to listen to. Presumably, you had kids so that you could nurture them, enjoy their company, and watch them grow up. Are you able to do that? Work will always be there, but 1st grade, for example, will not. You have to evaluate whether the balance you’re striking is right for you, enough for your family, and then from there, trust yourself.
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Dear Care and Feeding,
My partner and I (she/her) have an incredible 8-month-old. We both work full time—me in an academic career I’m passionate about, and him in a tech job that pays our bills—so our baby is in daycare. Our daycare is idyllic, our daughter thrives there, and we love everything about it except for the illnesses. We’ve missed weeks of work in the past four months because of nasty colds, stomach bugs, and the flu—all contracted from daycare. The cherry on top was a case of hand, foot, and mouth disease that kept us from attending the wedding of close friends this weekend, and this is the third wedding of loved ones that we’ve missed in the past few months. Though fortunately, our daughter hasn’t gotten too sick, my partner and I have felt truly terrible, and it just seems to keep coming. Our work is suffering. We have a great community around us, but no one wants to see us when we’re sick (and I don’t blame them!). We feel demoralized, isolated from our loved ones, and unable to plan for the future because we keep having to cancel things.
Next year, I will start an intense job that I’ve worked incredibly hard for, and I’m terrified that I won’t be able to manage it with this level of sickness. We have felt strongly for personal and financial reasons that we don’t want to hire a nanny and that daycare is best aligned with our values. But this feels so untenable, and I’m having trouble looking forward to anything when it feels like it will just be taken away by a bug from daycare, especially going into flu season! Does becoming a parent mean that you can’t plan anything ever again? Will this ever get better, or should we try to scrape enough for a nanny? Do other parents just go to events sick (I hate this but we’re feeling so desperate)?
—Collecting Colds in California
Dear Collecting Colds,
Here’s the rapid-fire answer round: No, being a parent doesn’t mean you can’t plan anything ever again. Yes, this will get better. No, don’t scrape for a nanny if it’s not what you want for your child (or your finances). Yes, parents sometimes go to events sick.
I appreciate that you’re really in the thick of it right now, in terms of the baby stage of parenthood. Daycare babies are sick a ton, and you will be sick a ton…until you’re not. I know it feels never-ending right now, but there has never been a better time to remember that “this, too, shall pass.” Consider, also, that you and your partner are probably not sleeping well; you may be breastfeeding, which is physically taxing; your baby is getting their first exposures to everything; and so on. Your baby isn’t fortified against illness, but neither are you, honestly. And that is OK.
You don’t need to change your childcare situation; you just have to adjust your mindset. Being a parent means that your life must now make space for unpredictability. Today, your baby has hand, foot, and mouth. Tomorrow, they’ll be throwing up on their third grade desk an hour before your big meeting. The next day, they’ll tell you about a poster presentation that is due tomorrow. I would hate for you to make a decision that you’re unhappy with, and that strains your finances, because you’re upset at your short-term situation. A nanny is no guarantee against sickness, anyway—especially if they have kids of their own, watch other kids, are in college or other close-knit environments, etc.
But you can take some steps to mitigate the effects of daycare germs. Wash your hands often, wipe down doorknobs at home. Take vitamins and naps. Stock up on masks for when you have a cold but you still want to go to the housewarming party. (Stay home for severe illnesses, of course.) Be willing to have one of you go to the party while the other stays home with the baby. Get comfortable calling your friends and saying, “The baby has a cold, do you mind if we still come? It’s OK if not.” And make friends at daycare and with other parents of young kids. They’re usually very sympathetic about this phenomenon, and if you find folks like mine, they’ll likely reply to you, “Does she have a fever? No? Then who cares, still come, kids are all sick all the time anyway. We’ll play outside.” Hang in there, it will get easier to manage.
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Dear Care and Feeding,
My husband and I have four kids. Three are 17 and older, while our youngest is 8. He was a happy surprise, but my husband got a vasectomy shortly after the birth. His birth was traumatic and I’m not able to safely carry another child to term if I wanted to, plus my husband and I agreed we’re finished having more babies.
Our son has been obsessed with being a big brother for more than two years. He loves other people’s babies and talks about wanting a younger sibling all the time. We were very direct with him: He’s our last baby, we physically can’t have more kids, and our family isn’t going to grow. But he’s nonstop. One of the neighbors adopted a child and he brought this to my husband as a “solution.” I have taken to shutting this topic down with “because I said so,” which I know isn’t great but I’m out of patience. He’s got lots of friends and activities. We took up fostering puppies so he could have something to nurture. He loves that, even the hard and gross parts. I’ve talked to him about babysitting other people’s babies when he’s older. We don’t have any little kids in the extended family he can be a big brother to. What else can we do here? I’m over this topic.
—Youngest Doesn’t Want to Be
Dear Youngest,
This is really hard, but you have to be firm and kind with him. Find a time when you, your husband, and your youngest can have a conversation without the other kids around or a time crunch. Since you and your husband’s physical limitations clearly aren’t convincing him, I’d suggest you talk about how demanding it is to parent a child, and how you and your husband have goals and energy levels that simply aren’t compatible with a fifth kid. Express that you understand how badly he wants a little sibling, and you wish you had the same goals so you could give that to him, but you don’t.
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I think you should then move into a conversation about respecting others’ needs and wants. You might try something like this (without being too heavy-handed, and tailoring it to your kid, of course): “When you keep asking for a sibling after I have said no and explained why, it makes me feel like you don’t think my opinion matters. I don’t think that’s how you feel, is it? I know you care about what I think. But it can feel like you want me to make a choice that is not right for me, just because it’s what you want. And relationships can’t be like that. We have to respect each other’s needs. Sometimes we can find compromises, but not always, and I know that can be hard.”
If he’s able in that moment, you might consider asking him if he can explain why he wants a little sibling so badly. If, for example, he says (and I suspect this could be the case) that he feels lonely and set apart from his siblings, maybe he has ideas for other ways that feeling can be mitigated, like special sibling hangouts. If you know more about what he feels is missing, you might be able to help fill that gap more effectively. Good luck.
—Allison
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