Does Having Two Kids Ruin Your Life? A Father of Two Weighs In.

Family A father of two weighs in. These people are fine. kazoka30/iStock/Getty Images Plus Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. This week, an article by Zach Baron that ran in GQ took over the discussion in Slate’s human interest Slack channel. Titled “My Second Child Is Perfect. He Ruined My Life,” the piece chronicles the trials and tribulations of parenting two small kids. Baron had found having just one child to be easy, at least in hindsight, writing: “A parent with one child has more in common with a childless person than they have with a parent of two.” Two kids? Well, I just hope his younger child will be able to appreciate the explanation that “writers don’t typically get to choose their headlines!” when he’s old enough to find the piece on the internet. Baron is blunt about the incredible amount of work that is involved in raising two kids—not just work, but boredom, and also hysteria. “Why did we do this? It’s a funny question,” he asks at one point. He does not have a good answer. His wife, wisely, has an agreement with him that she will not really be discussed in articles such as this. There is a lot to argue about here. If you have just one kid, you might quibble with the idea that your life hasn’t changed that much (I mean, comparatively, it has not). If you have zero, you might be excited about keeping it that way, and a little bit confused as to why anyone in their right mind would have two kids, if it’s really so soul-destroying. So I am here to offer my perspective as a father of two: The key to understanding Baron’s account is to understand that his kids are very, very young, ages 2 and 4. My wife and I have two kids, ages 13 and 11. Yes: Those first two years with just one weren’t as big of a change. Most of our other friends hadn’t had kids yet, so we would take our daughter with us and do the things that we had done before. And, yes: Having a second child meant things were harder on a geometric scale. A trip to the pool with one kid and one parent is fairly easy (and meanwhile, the other parent can take a break). But with one parent and two toddlers, it’s downright harrowing. Perhaps this stage is most exhausting because both children are aging so rapidly that they are always in extremely different stages of adventure and danger. One will be capable of drawing a picture, and the other would injure themselves if they were handed a pencil. You might be able to leave one child briefly unsupervised, but once there are two you can leave neither unsupervised. I’ll give Baron this: Having two young kids is tough. But they aren’t life-ruining. For us, things got truly easy again when our kids were 8 and 6. You’d think it might happen earlier, but it only takes that one younger irrational and emotionally undeveloped child to sow chaos in everyday life. Still, there should come a day when you realize that no one in your little unit is going to suddenly throw a tantrum or urgently need a new pair of clean pants. The everyday things you remember will open up again. The kids can hang out together independently, but you also actually want to hang out with them because they are interesting people. Don’t delay! Take advantage of it. So, two kids with a close-ish age gap are hard for, what, five years? Yes, that’s a while. Yes, there are sacrifices. But I’m here to tell anyone who is thinking about having two kids that it is manageable, and that the full-force takeover is temporary. While it’s nostalgic to read a well-written first-hand account from “the trenches” of multi-toddler parenting (most people are probably too tired to do it), writing during those early years is surely akin to an astronaut trying to scribble down a description of space travel before the boosters have separated. With two small kids, everything is still vibrating in the cockpit and three Earths’ worth of gravity are mushing your body into the seat. You haven’t even gotten to the metaphorical parenting version of floating around and seeing Earth from space yet. It doesn’t just get better, it gets great. The view is like nothing you’ve ever seen. And for those of us who went through it and are on the other side, whining about toddlerhood feels almost quaint, and a little naive. A lot of parenting drudgery is the drudgery you make of it. With one kid, you don’t have to try very hard not to be a family. You and your spouse can take turns going out to dinner every other night, if that’s what you want! With two, that kind of freedom is almost impossible. Fighting the tide will wear you out more than just letting yourself be taken out to sea (a sea where you don’t have any free time at all). And being too nostalgic for the days before you were a family unit will only make you miserable. Two kids doesn’t mean you can’t move to Paris (as Baron laments is possible if you have just one kid). Two kids means moving to Paris is harder. But people have been having far more than two kids and crossing oceans for a long time, and before there were even planes. I think it’s notable that Baron is writing about parenting from a man’s perspective. Women go into motherhood, often, having been pregnant, with a loss of freedom that is more gradual. Given that women on balance do more childcare, women also tend to have a little more warning from other women about what they’ll be facing. For men, the change is extremely sudden and can be unmooring. Man to man, though: Your kids will get a little older. You’ll get your life back—not all of it, of course, but a lot—soon enough. Family Kids Parenting Parenthood