For me, some things are luck. I live 25 minutes from my workplace by bike. The kids get themselves to school. I never worked more than 8 hour days, and have a job where nobody really understands what I do (a unique skill area within the company), so I actually spend work time on maintaining my skills. There may be reasons why communities like mine, and less intense employers, are magnets for people with kids.
A huge matter of luck has been my kids not needing things like exceptional medical or behavioral care. That's just not predictable.
Having kids does sharpen your time management, and may cause you to set aside some activities that no longer matter. I think that the mental stimulation -- or perhaps sheer terror -- made me more creative and energetic, even if I was physically fatigued. In the weeks after my daughter was born, while she was asleep, I actually developed and launched a new product for my side business.
Don't rule out changing jobs. I've read that something like 50% of workers change jobs right after the birth of their first child. A repeated pattern I've seen, over and over, is that new parents suddenly express an interest in becoming managers.
It wasn't profound -- an improvement for an existing product. The idea came from suggestions made by users on a web forum. Since it's an electronic gadget that means a new design. It's a fairly specialized audio related device. What I needed to do was a circuit board design spin and prototyping stage, then a bunch of testing.
One good thing was that the effort could be broken into chunks, and interrupted. I didn't need the kind of "flow" that programmers often talk about.
A huge matter of luck has been my kids not needing things like exceptional medical or behavioral care. That's just not predictable.
Having kids does sharpen your time management, and may cause you to set aside some activities that no longer matter. I think that the mental stimulation -- or perhaps sheer terror -- made me more creative and energetic, even if I was physically fatigued. In the weeks after my daughter was born, while she was asleep, I actually developed and launched a new product for my side business.
Don't rule out changing jobs. I've read that something like 50% of workers change jobs right after the birth of their first child. A repeated pattern I've seen, over and over, is that new parents suddenly express an interest in becoming managers.