[ip26]

Good luck “looking on the bright side” when you’ve had less than four hours sleep every night for the past week.

Some kids are just angels and sleep like champs, others fight every inch of the way and wake up constantly. As a result, different parents come up with wildly different “truths of parenting”.

[tharkun__]

This is true but also dependent on your "other circumstances". The US is decidedly a bad place to be a parent from what I can tell. Parental leave, even when graciously granted by the company is short and frowned upon nevertheless (generalizing here of course but this seems to be the overall majority of cases).

Taking a few months of parental leave right at the beginning was such a big help. All of the above becomes so much easier when you simply do not have to worry about work. Baby is not sleeping from 2a.m. to 5a.m. every night? Or only sleeps when having body contact, such as sleeping on your chest? So what! Stay up, do some chores, play some computer games or watch a movie w/ baby on your chest (yes there's ways where you do not have to worry about baby falling off and you have both hands available, so you definitely can get lots of computer gaming done in that time ;)). Go to bed at 5a.m. knowing you don't have to get up to get to work and be expected to have a fresh mind. You just fall asleep, exhausted and wake up for lunch time and it's fine! It just totally takes the extra stress out of that time (of course you're still gonna be tired from having your sleep rhythms effed up and such and sometimes baby just doesn't want to sleep at all, no matter what you do etc.) and I believe that can make for better parenting overall. Back in the day some of that would've been taken care of by living w/ your parents or in-laws.

[ip26]

Go to bed at 5a.m. knowing you don't have to get up to get to work and be expected to have a fresh mind. You just fall asleep, exhausted and wake up for lunch time and it's fine!

Baby wakes up at 6:30am like clockwork. Your move, parent.

Not to be a stick in the mud. You’re of course right that having additional responsibilities further increases the stress & difficulty.

[tharkun__]

Which in the case I described is not a big issue and basically entirely my point. 1.5 hours of sleep. Usually a killer. In the above mentioned situation it will still not be great, you'll be tired, groggy, irritable. But you won't snap at your PM for the 10th time in a row during standup and be cited to the boss' office or a formal warning or something.

As in I'm talking proper parental leave, meaning both parents can take 3-6 months off at the beginning, no questions asked, everyone is OK with it and it's totally normal. And you still get a reasonable amount of salary - in our case here in Canada from the parental leave part of E.I. meaning government guaranteed. Of course if I look at SV salaries, the maximums you can get under that program are laughable but here where we are it was totally workable at the time in our lives when we had kids.

Contrast that to what I hear about SV companies (I won't cite company names as that will draw the ire of the down voters here on HN, but I have inside knowledge i.e. new dads in such companies) where even if officially it's possible, nobody really does it. Sort of like "unlimited vacation", which sounds like it's better than the 30 days you get as a dev in most European countries but that in reality just ensures that nobody wants to be "the guy" that takes the most vacation and you still don't get more than you used to. If you were one of the "lucky ones" that had more than the minimum, you're now probably taking less time off than before.

[emj]

> living w/ your parents or in-laws.

This does not help if your parents are working, which they usually are.

[tharkun__]

I am fully aware of that and that is why I wrote it the way I did. As in, you are quoting just one part, leaving out the most important part of that sentence:

     Back in the day some of that

This implies a time at which at least the mother (in-law) was probably a stay at home mom. Please take note of the word probably. Yes there are and always were exceptions. It's about likelihoods and how societal norms and such have shifted over time. In fact we should probably add "and/or grand parents". And while at it also making extra sure this isn't mis-understood as an absolute or a "current situation" statement: "or living very close by" vs. today where you're more likely to live further apart.