Trying to Explain Parenthood
Notes after a long Zoom call with our daughter
Marsha and I spent almost three hours on Zoom last week with our older daughter. It was one of our regular weekly calls, which wander across a familiar mix of topics. Wedding logistics. Travel plans for New Jersey. Updates on where everyone is living and working.
Because they will start married life living in different places, the conversation drifted into longer‑term planning. How careers might unfold. How long it might take before they are in the same city again. Once the conversation stretched far enough into the future, certain questions surfaced, including kids.
I am writing this to document the conversations Marsha and I are having right now, not to arrive at conclusions. I suspect many peers our age are having similar conversations with adult children who are thinking carefully about what kind of lives they want to build.
What our daughter is working through
Our daughter approached the topic thoughtfully and analytically. She is not dismissive of parenting. She is trying to reason carefully through constraints.
A big part of her professional world is academia, where early‑career faculty work extremely long hours and most days, if not every day of the week. Some have kids and appear stretched thin. Some do not. She acknowledged the sampling bias in what she sees day to day, noting that at her new job most faculty do have children. Still, the environment she is immersed in shapes how she thinks about what is possible.
Her questions were practical. How parenting intersects with time, energy, and career momentum. How finances get stretched. How freedom changes. She also raised uncertainties around timing, including how old they might be when they are finally living in the same place and what that might mean for biological kids versus adoption.
There was also a broader concern that comes up often for her generation. Whether this is a good moment in history to bring kids into the world. I made the case that history has rarely offered “good” moments, depending on who someone was and where they lived, and she seemed to accept that logic, at least provisionally.
Mostly, though, she was trying to model parenting as a set of tradeoffs.
That framing is what Marsha kept circling back to.
The tradeoff model
At some point, it became clear to me why the conversation felt subtle but difficult.
Our daughter is framing parenthood in abstract tradeoffs.
freedom versus constraint
career versus caregiving
money spent versus money saved
All of these are real. They are also the only terms available without lived experience.
This was Marsha’s central point throughout the call. She was not challenging the facts. She was saying that our daughter is using the only framework she has access to right now, and that framework is incomplete by nature.
Marsha said, repeatedly and very plainly, that there is no way to understand the rewards of parenting in advance, not fully and not through stories, observation, or careful analysis. She said she never could have understood them herself before we had kids, and she has never expected our daughter to understand them now.
That absence is not a failure of reasoning. It is a limit on what can be reasoned about from the outside.
The rewards of parenting do not sit on the same axes as the costs. The rewards do not appear in any spreadsheet but arrive relationally and over time. They show up unevenly and often without warning.
There is no category for what it feels like to notice a quiet kindness in a child. There is no clean variable for the way watching a child struggle reshapes how someone understands responsibility, patience, or fear.
Marsha felt this point of the intangibles needed to be highlighted. The problem is not that the tradeoffs are wrong per se. The problem is that they are not the whole picture, and the missing pieces cannot be supplied ahead of time.
Why the costs felt different than expected
We did not deny those tradeoffs. Time and energy get reprioritized. Careers bend around logistics. Money gets spent differently.
But we both tried to explain that those costs did not feel like losses while we were living inside them.
I joked that I dressed much better before having kids, which is true. I also did not mind spending less on clothes later on. Travel changed. Money went toward lessons and camps and activities. None of this registered as a sacrifice. It felt like alignment with what mattered to us then.
Even in genuinely hard financial moments, that framing held. During the dot‑com crash our investment portfolio dropped about eighty percent, and we still carried a large mortgage. Financially, that period was tighter than our daughter’s situation today. And still, I never regretted having kids. Not once.
That is not a claim about virtue. It is simply a description of how it felt.
An imperfect analogy
I reached for an analogy during the call because the logic alone was not landing.
Our daughter was a serious classical guitarist as a teenager. She even placed fourth in the Sierra Nevada Guitar Competition. So I tried to explain parenting as analogous to learning an instrument from a manual.
Facts and techniques can be learned in the abstract. Actually playing notes cannot be learned that way. There is a difference between knowing something conceptually and having it reshape instincts and responses over time.
That analogy helped a little. Marsha was quick to point out its limits. With guitar, there is always the option to stop playing. Parenting does not offer an off switch.
More importantly, the part that cannot be explained in advance is not just mechanics. It is the emotional reward itself. That is the piece that resists translation.
What was actually hard
When I look back, the hardest parts of parenting were not financial or logistical.
The hardest part was watching the kids move through their own struggles without knowing exactly how to help. Deciding when to step in and when to hold back. Learning how to support growth without smoothing away everything uncomfortable. Figuring out what was ours to fix and what belonged to them.
There was no manual for that. We learned by doing. Sometimes we got it wrong. We adjusted.
Those challenges do not map cleanly onto tradeoff language, but they were very real, and they were the parts that stayed with us.
Marsha’s clarity
One thing I appreciated about this conversation was how aligned Marsha and I were. She was explicit that she would not change anything, even knowing she carried more of the day‑to‑day parenting labor because I worked a lot. More importantly, without hesitation Marsha would still do it all over again, understanding the argument of lifestyle benefits before children and lifestyle changes with children.
She said it without nostalgia or bitterness. Just clarity.
She also articulated the core issue more cleanly than I had.
Our daughter is not wrong. She is reasoning carefully within the terms she has. What is missing is not effort or intelligence but access to a set of experiences that cannot be previewed.
That was what Marsha kept trying to say. She was not arguing that parenting should be chosen or that careers matter less. She was saying that the model our daughter is using does not capture everything. Marsha likened this situation to conversations people have with AI when they give it unbalanced inputs. If an AI user precedes a question about children with financial data to have it analyze budgets, AI will weigh the financial considerations of having children more heavily into its response!
Why I wanted to write this down
This piece is not meant to resolve anything. Our daughter and her partner are still early in their shared life. They are navigating geography, careers, and timing. None of this is settled.
I am writing because conversations like this can be surprisingly hard. Everyone is acting in good faith. The analysis is sound. And still, something important fails to translate.
Marsha and I were trying to convey that raising our daughters did not feel like a sequence of tradeoffs endured. It felt like a life chosen and lived with meaning that only became visible along the way.
That is where the conversation landed tonight. Not with answers, but with a little more mutual understanding.
And for now, that feels like enough.
AI disclosure: I used AI tools during the drafting and editing process to help clarify structure and language. All ideas, judgments, and final wording are my own.
Tough conversations, well done! So much nuance, and a great analogy. I love hearing Marsha’s perspective too! I think about this subject a lot - what I would say to myself given a Time Machine and my own kids someday. I very much agree with you both about the incalculable depth and joy the kids bring and I deeply appreciate my life with them. But also, the woman I was before kids - her goals, health, life trajectory - is fully unreachable to me now. I have zero regrets but there is also grief in that. I flatly did not understand that could happen (I bought into the “you can have it all!” dream at their age, though it sounds like that’s not so much a thing these days?). I’d describe having kids as a journey you can choose to embark on or not. It’s not a milestone or even a mapped out route, and it’s impossible to anticipate where it will take you or more than just a rough idea or how you’d like to get there. It is important I think, especially for women (who still bear the brunt of supporting children and home in our society), to understand just how much distance you can be called to cover from the life you’ve already worked so hard to create for yourself. Especially if you have a partner who is also deeply invested in their goals and must go on that journey with you.
Bravo Marsha and Steve, for beautifully and practically capturing joy and suffering that touch our humanity, in a dimension that is unique to parenthood.