Rule of law in the house<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\nSometimes I feel like half of my cognitive energy as a parent is spent deciding sophisticated legal questions that would \u201ccross a rabbi\u2019s eyes\u201d as Tevia sings in Fiddler on the Roof. Child A made an agreement with child B, child B reneged on it according to A\u2019s interpretation, etc. For example, asking multiple children to clean an area \u201cuntil it\u2019s done\u201d is a sure recipe for freeriding, retaliations against freeriding, etc. Children are very sensitive to fairness, and an open-ended request like that is opening you up for more time spent in judicial proceedings than cleaning. Instead, with cleaning we quickly learned to assign each child their own area over which they have 100% responsibility. Having the rules decided on and affirmed in advance helps prevent having to spend energy on a thousand different subjective judgment calls.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n\n- Automate learning\u00a0<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
Growing up I had fantasies of reading my children lengthy tomes of children\u2019s literature every night and lecturing them from a whiteboard for hours about the mysteries of the universe.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nWhile I still sometimes harbor these fantasies, the automated learning resources we\u2019ve been blessed with make it difficult to justify spending the time. Audiobooks, educational YouTube playlists (my kids particularly enjoy Ted x Ed and Crash Course movies), and Kahn Academy videos have some of the world\u2019s best produced content and teachers across all subjects. It would be arrogant to think I could compete with that. Of course that\u2019s not to say that I don\u2019t spend time with my children, but when I have deep learning\/talking time with my kids it\u2019s about higher issues; somebody else can teach them about mitochondria or read Harry Potter to them. I used to be needed when they ran into a wall with a particular issue, but with ChatGPT even that process is becoming automated.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n\n- Make your hobby their hobby<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
It provides you with more one-on-one time, developes your and their breadth of interest, and helps you understand their world better.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n\n- Expensive but cheap baby products<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
Because of the US\u2019 fertility patterns the secondhand baby product market is a clear buyer\u2019 market. Dual earner brain surgeons with their one child will buy a nice baby carrier that they\u2019ll only use for a year or two then sell; any high income area of the US has a Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace that is filled with this stuff for bargain prices.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n\n- Home gym<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
Even if your local gym is cheap and close, getting ready to go the gym and driving over is often not feasible or affordable in terms of time or money. Also, the transition time when you\u2019re waiting for that guy to get off your machine is not negligible, and with a large family wasted time comes out of your flesh. A more efficient alternative is to build up a basic, cheap home gym with one inch plates, a basic pull pulley system, a pull-up bar (outside, not one of those door frame ones that destroy your house), and a really heavy kettlebell or two. Stationary bikes are nice for winter months and multitasking while working out, but you can get the same effect simply by doing wind sprints in front of your house. Unless you\u2019re training for bodybuilding or powerlifting competitions this should be more than enough for your purposes. By having your own stuff you can fit in sets in the cracks in your schedules when you can, and don\u2019t have to block off an hour for travel and working out. This has helped me increase my total volume dramatically. I\u2019m somewhat overweight but I can still do 9 pull-ups from a dead hang because I try to do a couple pull-ups every time I go into my\u00a0 backyard. It doesn\u2019t have to be expensive either, for years I used a bucket that I had filled up with cheap concrete and it did wonders.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nA sidebar to the above, more and more the literature is showing that high intensity interval training\u2014where you train for less time but more intensely\u2014provides the same benefits as steady state cardio.\u00a0 HIIT is incredibly painful, but also very rewarding when you get a complete workout in ten minutes.<\/span><\/p>\n\n- Take advantage of bathroom time.\u00a0<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
It\u2019s been a while since I just sat in a bed and read alone. Also, you can get a surprising amount of work done on a phone.<\/span><\/p>\n\n- Geolocation apps<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
Losing keys or a wallet is always a high-stress event, but especially so with a large family where the time margin for error is so much slimmer and the amount of stuff it can get lost in is so much higher. Thankfully now there are location app devices that you can attach to your keys and wallet, and an app on your phone can tell you where they are to within a half inch. These have saved us an untold amount of stress.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n
Reading between the lines of the above gives you a sense of how much chaos is involved in managing a big family. Obviously I don\u2019t want to discourage anybody from pursuing a big family ideal. In a society of ennui I have as much excitement and meaning as I need; my cup runneth over and I wouldn\u2019t have it any other way. I just need more sleep.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nPS Additions from the Mrs:<\/em><\/p>\n-Meet friends at parks and wilderness areas instead of trying to make home guest ready or worry about kids overrunning someone else\u2019s house.<\/em>
\n-Libraries are magical, but secondhand for books that young kids will destroy.<\/em>
\n-Screentime makes kids less fun.<\/em>
\n-If it\u2019s not fun (most of the time) you\u2019re not doing it right.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Responsible Woman,\u00a0by James C. Christensen I\u2019m on the record as being very pro-big families. As we become more and more of a minority you have to be clever about how to pull it off logistically since society is increasingly built around the 1.6 kid family. Given Latter-day Saints\u2019 (albeit increasingly fading) penchant for large families I thought it was appropriate to post the little hacks and tricks we\u2019ve come up with on the way for others. Anything we haven\u2019t thought of is welcome in the comments.\u00a0 Keep all clothes in the same area by the laundry room. This one is more doable for us since our kids are all the same sex, but keeping all dressers by the laundry room saves the time cost of carting clothes back and forth, which becomes significant at scale.\u00a0 White noise for naps It\u2019s frustrating being awaken from a much-needed slumber because your parental authority is absolutely required to referee an argument. With enough kids (in a small enough house) these sorts of interruptions become consistent enough that without white noise an uninterrupted nap is just not in the cards.\u00a0 Lock the door and put on a white noise app high enough to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10403,"featured_media":45177,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-45176","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-mormon-life"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/07\/s-l500.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45176","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10403"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45176"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45176\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50210,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45176\/revisions\/50210"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/45177"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45176"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45176"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45176"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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