I average 8.5 hours an night, have 3 and 5 year old kids, get up with them half the mornings, eat with them 6 nights a week, gym 3 times a week, run a popular open source project, cofounded a startup (and a staff+ IC until recently) and do my share of chores at home. I’m sure that’s not possible for everyone/everywhere but a non-trivial number of privileged middle-class parents in tech (like me) have convinced themselves it is impossible when it is not.
Admirable. I have similar age kids, average about 6-7 hours of interrupted sleep a night. They wake up between 5 and 6 am, asleep between 7-8 and I often don't go to bed myself until 11pm. I'm writing this comment while sitting next to my 3 year old who has woken up at 11:14pm and called out for comfort to get back to sleep.
I do 50% of the cooking, chores, school/daycare drop offs, work an 8.5 hour day 5 days a week, and have effectively zero time for any personal or extracurricular pursuits. I barely get any time alone with my wife as it is and if I gave up any of the moments we can snatch in between kids awake and asleep I don't think there'd be much of a relationship left. Once a fortnight I get a night to myself but often end up socialising. How do you do it? What's different about your life?
My guesses for things different about my life (not suggesting anyone should do any of these):
- my kids have been sleep trained to not wake up so early. They used to and now they don’t.
- if my kids wake up in the night: I put them back to bed (repeatedly if necessary) and don’t stay with them unless they are literally vomiting or need other medical attention
- I don’t work 8.5 hours a day 5 days a week. I didn’t when I was employed and don’t now
- my wife and I alternate week nights when we’re out the house. One of us can feed/bath/bed both kids by ourselves.
