I just talked to a friend who said “I just have remarkably less ego now” after getting two kids up to school age and it made some things click. All the hardest parts of raising a kid are, in some sense, ego problems:

• ego: I want to sleep enough. kid: you can’t
• ego: this is boring. kid: I don’t care, you have to keep watching me
• ego: I wish I was doing ___ with my time. kid: sorry, you have to give up so much of it to watch me
• ego: I want some time to myself. kid: no
• ego: I want to Accomplish More Important Things. kid: no, you have to accomplish “playing with dinosaurs with me.”

So what should we do? Parents seem happier the more they’re able to just shed their ego like a snake skin. if you’re a High Powered Career Person who used to work 80 hours a week, that’ll be hard to adapt; if your career is kinda flexible that’s easier. If you don’t care about how you sleep or eat, that’s easier than if you do. If you keep thinking “I want to be playing chess with my chess club”, you’ll be sad; if you keep thinking “rolling a ball around with my kid is the most fun thing ever”, you’ll be fine. It seems like a good argument for “minimize yourself” or “your needs become subordinate to your kids'.”

But that has two problems: 1. it’s hard, 2. it sets you up to be a depressed empty-nester. I don’t know how valid #2 is; it’s solving something 20 years in the future, and maybe the answer is more like, “learn to adapt”. Maybe the parents who navigate this the best are those who pivot from “chess club alone” to “rolling a ball” when their kids are 1, and then to “reading books with them” when they’re 6, “rock climbing with them” when they’re 13, and back to “chess club” when they go off to college.

There may be a problem 3, too, which is that “minimize yourself” isn’t actually good? Thinking of this post by David MacIver and this one by Scott Alexander. I’m sure that everyone reading this is going to rush in to say “noooo, you’re doing If-By-Whiskey; Minimize Yourself (to be a good parent) doesn’t mean the same thing as Minimize Yourself (in a bad way)”, I don’t know, maybe you’re right, in that case strike Problem 3.

But problem 1 (“Sloughing Off Your Ego Is Hard”) is a problem no matter how you slice it.