[username90]

Making meals for the kids can be done at the same time as making meals for yourself, no extra time spent there unless you make exceptions for them. No need to activate the kid, kids can entertain themselves if you let them. Helping them with homework is not important, no, you can tell them to do their homework but that doesn't take a lot of time to do.

The thing is that you as a parent has extremely small influence on your kid. Your goal should be to provide a stress free environment they can feel safe in, you do that by not stressing about all of these things, everything else you do for your kid is for your own sake. Every hour you force feed them information and activities is an hour they don't get to discover and experience things on their own. Both are valuable, so picking one over the other doesn't really change much.

[pavel_lishin]

Do you have kids? This all sounds like it's written by someone who's read articles about how to parent and nodded along, without any practical experience. Specifically, by someone who envisions the "happy path" of parenting, without considering that sometimes kids throw tantrums, sometimes they're not content to entertain themselves, that sometimes you cannot make them the same meal you make for yourself.

> Your goal should be to provide a stress free environment they can feel safe in, you do that by not stressing about all of these things, everything else you do for your kid is for your own sake.

This is a huge load of baloney. This zen "let the kids discover things on their own!" maybe works fine for high school students, but my toddler is fascinated by many things about the world, and my wife and I are a vast source of information about it, and rightfully so. Kids are chock full of questions because they're trying to learn about the world, and many of their questions cannot be answered sufficiently with a "go find out".