Kid routines
Routines are critical for a successful life. They are the foundation upon which the house of your life is built. With a solid foundation, the house can endure tougher challenges than were it built on clay. When we got our first son in 2019, we had to build new routines. It took about two years to iron out everything. Then, son number two arrived in 2021 and all routines were blasted into smithereens, and we had to restart the routine building process for another two years. In about a week, it is time to destroy the routines once again.
Or is it? A colleague once told me that the challenge increases with kid 1 and 2, but from 3 and onwards there is no difficulty increase regardless of how many of them you’ll have. That is an interesting theory that will soon be put to the test. There are several reasons why this might be correct. The first thing that crosses my mind is that they entertain each other. If we only had one kid, I would have to spend way more time playing with him. (Which is not a bad thing or chore in any way of course.) But now, they play a lot with each other, figuring out the social codes together. And they burn a lot of energy doing so, which is perfect. I am an old father >40 yo, and I sometimes look at their intense play sessions and just sigh to myself how grateful I am that I can just sit back and observe them, with a cup of coffee in my hand. I would have to spend some serious energy to tire them out anything resembling their play sessions.
This reminds me a lot of dogs. As a dual Labrador owner since many years, I can confirm that Cesar Milan’s theory that many or most dog problems can be solved with exercise is true. And it seems to work at least as good on small boys too. Tire them out properly, and they will behave and sleep perfectly. And on the contrary, of they spend too much time in the sofa with a screen, they become rather unpleasant company, likely because they have too much excess energy and it has to go somewhere. If you boil water in a kettle on the stove, you can try to contain it with a lid when it boils over and see how well that program will work out for you. So yes, more kids will indeed simplify with regards to distributing the rough and tumble playtime across more persons.
The second and obvious reason why the third kid is supposed to be perceived as “easier” than the first two, is that the parents have had more practice. Everything usually gets easier when you have collected a couple of battle scars. Even though every kid’s personality is widely different, on a meta-level you will still learn how to establish new routines even though more micro-managing is involved. That reminds me of my experience with musical instruments. The first one is the hardest. The second instrument you learn takes a lot less time and by the time you are learning your fifth or sixth instrument, you probably have such a good knowledge of the underlying system that you can get pretty good in under a year. Polyglots seem to work the same way. The more languages you learn, the fast you can acquire new ones. Because you are understanding more and more about the underlying patterns and rules that are the same for all languages.
Anyway, it was fun to get this in print. A couple of weeks from now, I will probably know how right or wrong I was. And it will also be interesting to pick this post up in a decade or two, and check whether it still holds.