You Rent Your Kids (Much Downstream Of This)

"It all goes by so fast..."

I have one friend who is perpetually on the verge of another baby announcement, and you can always tell when it’s coming because about six to ten weeks before, he will say something like, “(name of wife) is getting sad about the kids getting older.” And then, bam, here we go. I am not sure this is the soundest economic strategy, but I am also not in their bank accounts and investment portfolio, so I know nothing. Aside from that friend, I have met about 20 couples like that in my life. I am sure you know a few too.

Perhaps the grandest clarion call of middle age is “it goes so fast” and/or “they grow up so fast,” as evidenced in the chart above (you can see more charts about how we spend time in adulthood here). Most rational people understand that while their kids will (ideally) always be in their lives in some way, and hopefully they will die before their children do (natural order of things), the real chunk of spending time with your kids and active parenting and imparting lessons is basically 0–12, if not less than that. After that, there’s more mobility, more friendships, new relationships emerging, and “leaving the nest.” I’d honestly argue the most important parenting work you do is probably 0–6, but I’ve heard different theories on that.

In a way, you “rent” your kids. You have them for a while at full bore, but eventually that fades. It’s obviously not quite “renting” in that “renting” implies a completely transactional nature, but it’s closer to that than we think.

Two vacation lessons

Small sample size, but I went on two vacations in the past year (because I am a DINK, not by choice but by lack of fertility success), and each time I met multiple couples with late-20something offspring. One couple from Allen, Texas had three kids, from 25 to 32. I would regularly hear from them on this cruise: “We honestly don’t even know if they’re dating anyone.” I met a couple who moved from Illinois to Iowa on a different trip. Three sons. One of the sons had “given” (weird term) them grandkids, but the other two were still romantically and professionally adrift. The mom, floating in the ocean near me: “I really don’t know much about what’s going on with them.”

Beyond those two examples, I’ve seen it dozens of other times. On that same Illinois/Iowa ocean trip, there were 10 couples from Knoxville who vacationed together. Most of them had adult children. Very few seemed to know much about their existences beyond the obvious baselines of marriage, kids yes/no, and job.

The Fix-It Baby’s cousin