my best friend had kids before me and told me something before I had kids that changed my life forever - “I was here first and I have my life, the kids need to adapt to my life just as much as I have to adapt to theirs.” I have followed this mantra for the past 12 years and I think both my life and my kids life is much better for it. I see too many parents turning their lives upside down after they became parents, I have not much at all. I am definitely more risk averse which is probably the biggest personal change I made but otherwise I do everything I’ve done before I became a parent and my kid has experienced extreme levels of boredom while waiting for me to finish what I am doing
In the US, unless you have a few million saved up, children will probably make most people more conservative.
Wake up, drop kid off at school, go to job allowing one to afford health insurance for kids, come home, take kids to after school activity, eat, sleep, repeat.
A child is from the parents perspective a lot of repetitive motion over a very long time, and, I think, a main contributor to speeding up your relative passage of time.
Which you might find super rewarding! But I am fairly confused by the claim that children are interesting and wonder how people spent their pre-children time to arrive at that conclusion – or how much they actually are involved in all the parts of taking care of their kid.