[marcuschong]

Me too. I'm an active father, love my daughter and don't regret our choice. But damn I would never opt to go through this again and can't wait until she's a little older. I see parents having orderly lunches in restaurants with their older children and it just seems like the most beautiful and civilized thing in the world.

The whole experience is too much noise and not enough signal to me.

[strix_varius]

This is a trend, perhaps with most parents, but definitely with fathers and especially with the sorts of hyper focused, contemplative, creativity/engineering-minded fathers who might hang out on hacker news. At least in my anecdotal experience.

What I've found is that as my 2.5 year old gets older it gets easier and easier for me. The ratio of cool shared experiences to frustrating noise gets higher and higher.

We've just had another child, still very much a newborn, and now that I have something for contrast I see how much harder that was. To some degree the frustration and grind of very young kids had faded into the background of my memory.

The older kid helps though as a concrete vision of what we're moving towards.

[et-al]

Yeah, this is highly dependent on the child and parent. Some kids just require attention, are more stubborn, or are just terrible sleepers and that's definitely gonna take a greater toil on the parents.

Sure there's Bringing up Bébé, sleep training, etc. but sometimes you just get difficult kids at no fault of the parents. And some people are just okay with the chaos of children.