Hey Lemmy!
I’m a dad to a two year old boy. He’s very energetic and needs quite a bit of supervision. Other than that I couldn’t wish for a better son. I’d like to preface my actual question with saying I want to be a parent and I wouldn’t change that given the possibility.
The question is, does it get any easier? I have been stuck in a loop of wake up, take care of breakfast and other preparations, go to work, go back to parenting and maybe two hours of rest after the kid falls asleep. It feels like I don’t rest enough. I will however add that I’ve struggled with depression for the better part of a decade, I’m still pretty heavily medicated and in therapy. I’m much better than I was a few years ago, but the feeling of tiredness and lack of strength to be the best parent I can is at times getting the better of me.
I’m fully aware I put myself in this situation and I’m not sure I’d be happier with no kids. I guess I’m just looking for other people’s stories of when they were in similar situations or simply some words of encouragement.
Thanks.
It gets … different. With 3-5 you get to sleep again. But instead you get fits of rage that can last for hours. 6-… you get a know it all that can’t accept when they are not right.
This is how far along I am now. And technically it is easier to handle the Kids. But the problems they make for themselves are also biger and harder to solve.
Yes. Do your best. Take care of yourself. Keep going. It gets better.
Yes. So much, easier.
The big improvements in your future:
- reliably sleeping through the night ~3 YO for my boys (biggest improvement by far)
- reliable day time toileting, so not having to carry “the bag” everywhere
- better appetite/impulse control, ~4 YO, not always having to have a “kid snack” on hand. So you don’t have to constantly think, when they last ate.
Those are just a few big ones in your immediate future. There are bunch more smaller things.
One word of advice, don’t accept “I don’t like it”, before they taste any food. The rule in our house is “is OK to not like something, but not OK to not try something”. Fussiness is learned not innate. Too many parents give in way too quickly, and I see kids who don’t eat anything but stuff they are already comfortable with.
Another commenter said to encourage age appropriate independence. 100% agree. Example, a few weeks back on Sunday morning my 10YO comes into my room and asks to make pancakes for breakfast, answer “sure, but you have to make enough for everyone (5 of us) and any mess is your responsibly to clean up”. He got his brothers to help, 4YO getting utensils and setting the table, 7YO mixing and measuring, whilst he cooked.
It is an adventure, that’s for sure, three are super frustrating moments (daily) but there rewards are immense.
I’m childless by choice, so I don’t have any lived advice. I just wanted to say that you sound like a great dad and your boy sounds like a healthy little duracell bunny! All the best to you and your little family!
From what I have observed around me, you’re currently in the hardest stretch of parenthood in terms of the physical and mental toll from not having any time to yourself, but it comes back to you gradually as the little one grows and starts to explore the world. By the time where you get most of your freedom back, you will do anything to have those early years back. The paradox of parental love <3
Yes. For one, the older they get the more independent they get. When they’re little its like you gotta lug around like 2 large bags and a playpen if you wanna just like go to someone’s house. Eventually you don’t need the playpen, then two bags becomes one bag, then the large bag becomes a small bag and then they can just carry their own little backpack if they need any personal items.
In a couple years, prob when he’s between 4 and 5, if you need to go anywhere, you can just be like “let’s go!” And he will put on his shoes, put on his coat, run out to the car, open the door, jump in his carseat, buckle his seatbelt, and be ready. This is very fun.
If he is a 2 year old boy, there’s a good chance he will still be in diapers, so not changing diapers is a big QOL improvement.
2 yo can be very challenging. Take him to the park where he can run off all that energy. He will chill out. My oldest son was extremely challenging when he was that age. He was impulsive, destructive, unpredictable. If he wasn’t in the room with you he was painting the carpet with nail polish. If we invited people over for dinner, he would grab whatever was laying out on the dinner table and break it. He quick grabbed cellphones and immediately dropped them in classes of water, he would grab your glasses off your face and just break them in half. He destroyed multiple baby gates within seconds. But I just took him to the park in the morning, let him run, tried not to be too hard on him despite being sometimes incredibly frustrated. Told him I loved him every day, sang him to sleep. He chilled out, and now he’s a hard working, committed young man. He’s still a pain in the ass, but he’s a good guy, I love him and trust him.
It gets easier but it gets more complicated. Some of the issues that can come up around age 11-13 are not easy. But its also my favorite age, because they become like self aware in a way that they weren’t before. They develop little identities, but they’re still kids. But this process, esp around other kids going through it can be really difficult. Teenage years can be difficult, even if they’re not rebellious and chaotic, they become very self absorbed and it feels like they’re slipping away. This also changes with time, and it has its own rewards watching them mature into young adults.
Parenting never gets easy, but those young years when they are so dependent on us are the most like labor intensive, and the labor is very like “make sure you have all of the 500 things you need for them in order to leave the house.” Make time for your self and your partnership if there is still a partner in the picture. Ask for help if possible from relatives. Don’t lose yourself and don’t let your partner (if there is one) lose themselves either. Strive for balance over happiness. The happiness will come if there’s balance, and it gets easier to find balance as they become more independent. But ironically, with independence comes strong ambivalence, not necessarily like happiness.
Hang in there dad, you got this
Thank you!
Yes.
Teach as much independence as their age allows.
Talk to them as an equal human, just smaller and less experience with things.
Calmly narrate everything you do.
Kids pickup on all this and the more they learn about how the world fits together, the more capable and confident they will be.
Try to encourage solo investigations of things, or quiet individual tasks like painting.
At 2 there is heaps of assistance you need to give. As the independence grows, your tasks may not get less, they just morph into something else.
Aye.
They say it doesnt get easier, the difficulties just change.
My son is 13 now, and Id say its true. That said, the toddler years wiped me out. I much prefer these teen years.
It does get easier, but never is it easy.
I also have depression I struggle through all these years, keep swimming, I quite literally live for my son. I was taught in those early days, you cant pour from an empty cup as a parent, so take care of yourself
Thanks, hope you get better with depression too, hell of an affliction.
for sure, I can appreciate your username :)
It doesn’t get easier. The challenges change, but the level of effort remains. As insane as it sounds I found the teenager years to be more challenging than the younger years.
Early on it is feed them, clean them and monitor them. When they get into the teenage years they start working against themselves. That is when it gets insane.
When they can hold their own food in fork it will be easier. When they can use the restroom and clean themselves it will be easier. When they can help you clean the house it will be easier.
They’re going to introduce all new emotional strain to your life eventually, but they get remarkably easier as they become more competent. Part of your job is to make them competent at things.
I’m a dad to an 11-year-old, a 9-year-old, a 6-year-old, and a 4-year-old. I wouldn’t call myself an expert, but I have felt all the ways you’re feeling now and so I do have some thoughts.
First of all, yes, it does get easier. You’re at or near the absolute hardest part of having a young child. For my kids, I won’t sugarcoat it, the hardest part was when they were three (we called it “threenagers”), so you may have another year or two yet to go (though if you look at our age span, you’ll see that we always had another baby right around that time, too, right up until the last one who was the easiest, so take that as you will). But after that phase, I will honestly say that my kids have become four of my best friends. It’s a weird friendship, but it is a very rewarding one.
Second, there are different kinds of hard. You mentioned the rut, the exhaustion, the amplification of existing depression and anxiety, and the feeling like you aren’t strong enough to do a good job; that’s a great summary of the four different ways it gets hard. Not all of them get easier all at once, but they do all get easier. Kids grow up. That’s both a blessing and a curse.
Third, part of the way it gets easier is that you just learn better ways to deal with the stuff that’s hard. I needed a routine so that my days didn’t become a rut, and I needed to journal (my form of journaling is heavy on photography right now) so that I could see all the ways I was actually doing a good job. It sounds like you’re already medicated and in therapy (it took me four times as long in parenting to get to that point, good on you). I will be honest, I still haven’t really found a good way to get enough sleep. But I have it on pretty good authority that teenagers sleep a lot, so I’m hopeful that it’ll sort itself out soon.
Overall…well, I’ll put it like this: Last year, my oldest beat me at chess, 100% legit, for the first time. My 9-year-old is maybe the most thoughtful and empathetic person I’ve ever known. My 6-year-old just learned how to read (a bit late), I think mostly so he can play Pokemon for the first time. My 4-year-old is just so excited about everything and anything. They’re making friends and having a life outside of me, they’re helping out around the house, and they’re coming together as siblings.
Being able to write a paragraph like that is what makes it worth it, and what really makes it easier in the long run. Sometimes the greatest accomplishment is just keeping them alive for twenty-four hours (and I don’t just mean right at the beginning), but eventually you get new and different problems and they start helping with the solutions.
At the end of the day, you obviously care a lot, and that’s the #1 clearest characteristic of a successful parent. So it sounds to me like you’re on the right track.
Thanks for that write up! If you don’t mind me asking: why did you decide to have another child while being in the hardest phase every time?
I have a 1-year old, and to be honest, if I had to decide today, I wouldn’t know if a second child would be a good idea for us
That’s a good question, and I absolutely don’t mind you asking. Honestly, I didn’t even make the connection between the “threenager” phenomenon and the fact that all three of ours happened when they were new siblings until I was writing up that earlier post, so take my half-decade old memories here with that particular grain of salt; the real reason may well be “oh we never really thought about the connection.”
When we decided to go for our second, I think it was the fact that our first was a really easy one-year-old at the time, so we were feeling the hubris of new parents with an easy kid. He had been a slightly tricky newborn (medically), but then he turned into the sweetest kid, so we figured we were over the hump; he didn’t become difficult behaviorally until right around the time our second child was born. We also knew we wanted to have more than one, and had seen some research (and had some personal experience) that suggested a two-year age gap was best for sibling bonding and closeness, though I think I’ve heard that data has been questioned more recently.
And then our second was born, and life was kind of hell for a little while because she wasn’t sleeping and he was a threenager (and so you’ll note that the gap between the second and third is definitely bigger than between the other two gaps), but just like it got bad at the same moment, they both straightened up at more or less the same moment, too; he was potty trained, she started sleeping better, and they were suddenly really good friends, so we knew (or thought we knew) that the hard times would end and that we could make it through more or less unscathed.
At that point, we switched from the hubris of new parents to the hubris of parents of a big family, so after the third’s infancy was more or less fine and we made it through the second’s threenager phase, we went for a fourth, assuming we knew the drill. We didn’t; our second child’s absolutely horrible year from 2½-3½ was like nothing we’d experienced before or since. But it also ended, eventually. We had already decided even before the last one was born that we were done at four anyway, so we knew that it could only last for so much longer.
So I guess the tl;dr answer would be, ignorance at first, and after that confidence (hubris?) that we could handle it. In hindsight now, I don’t regret it. I honestly don’t even know if I’d warn new parents not to do it the way we did it if they wanted to, though I would give them the heads up that it’ll be tough for a while, and strongly recommend that they get a good community around them.
I don’t know you or your family at all, of course, so I wouldn’t counsel you either way; but I will say that the people who are unsure about whether they’re up to the task are, in my experience, the people who are most up to it. The people who are confident about it all are probably going to crash and burn, and the people who are sure they aren’t up to it are probably right. But if that worry about the first year overlapping the third is the only thing holding you back, maybe the assurance that it ends eventually will help.
(Sorry about the novel! Hope that helps.)
Thank you, it means a lot!
You should edit your post title; I almost came here to give advice on the paperwork for establishing a temporary monopoly on your intellectual property ;)
For parenting, YES it gets much easier physically really just about now (2-3) as they start to be able to play more independently, (esp imagination games – encourage it, play along a few times and they will continue on their own).
It gets a lot easier physically when they go to school even that half-day a few times a week gives them a lot to process.
Beware, it gets much more challenging emotionally right around 3-5. This is where they will try to find what the boundaries are. Set clear boundaries and stick to them. Be a hard immovable rock just a few times and you both will really appreciate it for years after.
EDIT: oh yeah and be prepared to go into another room, yell obscenities at the little brat into your pillow where they cannot hear, and come back into the room as the Patron Saint of Calm Parenting. DO what you can to avoid losing it right in front of them or worse at them. They will test you.
Fixed the title, thanks! Hopefully the emotional support will be easier thanks to years of psychotherapy, but I’ll take your suggestions to heart. Glad to know there’s some easier times ahead.
psychotherapy
Incredibly important during this time
This is about the most “your-mileage-may-vary” topic possible, but almost certainly, yes, especially when it comes to the stuff you talk about. Kids at 2yo just need way more helicoptering than they do a year or two later. Our son developed a heck of a talent for entertaining himself roundabout that age, so yeah, you’ll get to have your own leisure time back. That’s just kinda the sacrifice you sign up for, the first few years you get very very little.
Father of an ADHD 9-yr old who I love dearly. To quote a song from Hot Mulligan:
“Things don’t get better just different”
Yeah, I just hope I can cope with different better, it’s mostly the rut I’m stuck in that’s doing me in.
One thing you can take comfort in then is that nothing ever really stays still and whatever you are used to will change before you really realise it.
There will be some different you can cope with better, and some maybe not. Just keep doing your best and showing as much love as you can, to both your kid and yourself.
It’s a full time job for 18+ years, on top of the things already in your life. It isn’t easy, but god damn it’s fulfilling to see them grow. They do get very funny when they hit 3 or so and are grappling with language. They become proper little people.
Slightly related: One thing I’d suggest is opening an email account for them, and any time they say or do something funny or memorable, send an email about it. I love reading through the hilarious things they’ve said across the years that you forget about, and I’ll give them the account when they’re older.
Personal faves are my 3 year old calling a compass a clock of the world and my other one at 4 years old telling my retired boss, who had just told him he’s grown since she last saw him, that she’s also grown, into an old lady. Or saying, when he lost his favourite hat, ‘that hat was a piece of my heart.’
Beautiful, thank you. Glad to know there’s so much to look forward to.
My daughter is 20 and in college now but I was a single dad and spent many days like you where parenting took every minute I had.
It absolutely gets easier. You’re In the phase where they’re mobile, can’t do anything for themselves, yet somehow, if you look away for 3 seconds they will burn the house down.
They start taking care of themselves more and rmore, requiring less constant watching until one day you wake up and they’re 20 and in college
