In Defense of the Marginal Baby

This Father’s Day, I took some notes on parenting and put them together here. The purpose of this post is to strongly advocate for people to increment their child number, ideally recursively. If you have two, go for three! Five? Six is barely 16% more. I currently have four children, and I think I’m just getting the hang of it. This post indexes on my own experience and is thus most likely to be helpful to younger men. It’s necessarily contingent and personal, but I think it may be useful to others. Your mileage may vary. Here are some of my observations around having children. Some of these I was quite surprised by. I may update this list from time to time. Children are surprisingly fun, even in the pre-verbal, highly dependent stage. The first one is a bit of a shock, but my working assumption was that family life would involve two kids, five years of frustration and pain, then some enjoyable family life, then them leaving for college as I move into late middle age. Instead, I’m in…