This is an interesting essay because it identifies something important but, I think, stops one level too early.
I agree that children introduce friction. They expose our impatience, our need for control, our unresolved fears and our capacity for love. Parenthood undoubtedly changes adults.
But I don't think that is the deeper developmental story.
The article quotes Gibran's famous line that children are "living arrows" and parents are merely "bows." It is a beautiful metaphor, but it is doing an extraordinary amount of work while explaining very little.
Who shaped the bow?
Who made the arrow?
Who decided what counts as a good target?
An arrow is passive. Once released it simply follows its trajectory. Human beings are not arrows. They are developmental systems that continuously learn, adapt, revise and reshape themselves throughout life.
Nor are children simply launched into the world. They are born into societies that already define, implicitly or explicitly, what competence, responsibility, success and adulthood look like. Parents do not raise children in isolation. They are one part of a developmental ecology that includes family, teachers, peers, institutions, culture and the wider environment.
The article also speaks of epigenetics as though parents primarily transmit themselves to their children. I think that is only a small part of a much larger picture.
The more interesting question is not what parents transmit, but how developmental environments progressively canalise the child.
Every child arrives with a unique polygenic architecture. That architecture is neither destiny nor infinitely plastic. It develops through thousands of recursive interactions with the world. Manageable challenge followed by successful adaptation. Curiosity followed by competence. Stress followed by recovery. These repeated cycles progressively stabilise ways of perceiving, regulating, reflecting and acting.
In other words, the adult is not principally created by the friction of raising children.
The adult is largely created by the developmental landscape they survived as a child.
Perhaps that is why I see the direction differently. Give the child, and you largely give the adult. The real question, therefore, is not simply whether modern adults avoid friction. It is what kinds of developmental environments we are collectively constructing for children, because today's childhood becomes tomorrow's civilisation.
Friction alone is not the curriculum. War contains friction. Neglect contains friction. Poverty contains friction. Chronic stress contains friction.
What matters is developmentally appropriate challenge held within safety, relationship and recovery.
That is what builds adults capable of deciding for themselves what constitutes a good life.
This is a real and important question, how the developmental environment shapes the child into who they become. This article wasn't making a claim about that. It was about what raising a child does to the parent, the friction of losing sleep, losing control, confronting your own patterns in someone else's face, and what that friction develops in the adult going through it.
Both are true at once. What the environment does to the child, and what the child does to the parent, aren't competing explanations. They're two different people in the same relationship, each being shaped by it in a different way.
I don't think we're actually disagreeing that parenthood changes adults. I accepted that from the outset. My point is about explanatory priority.
If the claim is simply that raising children changes parents, then I agree. It almost certainly does. But the essay seemed to go further than that. It suggested that the friction of parenthood is itself a central route to adult development.
My argument is that this places the developmental emphasis too late in the process.
The parent who encounters that friction has already spent twenty or thirty years being shaped by their own developmental ecology. Their capacity to tolerate frustration, regulate emotion, delay gratification, form relationships and respond to challenge did not suddenly emerge through parenthood. Those capacities were themselves built through childhood.
So while the child undoubtedly continues to shape the parent, the more fundamental question remains: what produced the adult who became the parent in the first place?
That is why I place the developmental focus on childhood environments rather than on parenthood itself. If we understand how healthy developmental landscapes produce capable adults, we also understand why some parents are able to transform through friction while others are overwhelmed by it.
For me, the deeper causal chain runs from developmental environment to adult, and then from adult to child, rather than beginning with parenthood.
I don't think there's actual disagreement here. The environment that shapes a person doesn't stop at childhood. It keeps shaping them, including through parenting itself. That's already what the Foundations link was pointing at.
I completely agree that development never stops. That isn't really the point I'm making.
My question is whether all developmental influences are equivalent.
I don't think they are. Parenthood undoubtedly continues to shape adults, but the extent to which it does so depends on capacities that have already been constructed over decades of development.
Two parents can experience the same sleepless nights, the same frustration and the same challenges, yet emerge very differently. The difference is not the friction itself but the developmental architecture they bring to that friction.
So I see childhood development as establishing the conditions under which later experiences, including parenthood, become transformative.
In that sense, parenthood is not an independent developmental mechanism. It is one expression of a much longer developmental trajectory.
Childhood development matters, and it matters a great deal. This is real work, and it deserves to be said plainly, not as a formality before disagreeing.
But even a child who came out of the best possible environment will still face real challenges as an adult. What matters isn't only what environment built beforehand. It's how the person meets the challenge in front of them now, whether they take responsibility for it and learn what it's asking, or don't.
There is real research on this. Adults build real, new capacity from hard things that happen to them as adults, not just capacity childhood already gave them. Parenthood is not only showing what was already there. It can be where something new gets built, through how the challenge gets met.
Every life stage carries that possibility. Not only the early ones.
It's not the friction that prevents me from having a child. I think I would be a good mother. It's the why behind it all. I don't know why I would have a child. Especially in this society.
The difficulty of bringing a child into an uncertain world is not new. Every generation before us did it inside war, poverty, plague, collapse. The Middle Ages were not a gentle time to raise children.
What changed is not the difficulty. What changed is that you now have the choice.
Which means the question "why" is also new. It never had to be answered before. It was answered by duty, by continuity, by the absence of an alternative.
Now it has to be answered personally. That's harder in a different way than the difficulty itself.
This is an interesting essay because it identifies something important but, I think, stops one level too early.
I agree that children introduce friction. They expose our impatience, our need for control, our unresolved fears and our capacity for love. Parenthood undoubtedly changes adults.
But I don't think that is the deeper developmental story.
The article quotes Gibran's famous line that children are "living arrows" and parents are merely "bows." It is a beautiful metaphor, but it is doing an extraordinary amount of work while explaining very little.
Who shaped the bow?
Who made the arrow?
Who decided what counts as a good target?
An arrow is passive. Once released it simply follows its trajectory. Human beings are not arrows. They are developmental systems that continuously learn, adapt, revise and reshape themselves throughout life.
Nor are children simply launched into the world. They are born into societies that already define, implicitly or explicitly, what competence, responsibility, success and adulthood look like. Parents do not raise children in isolation. They are one part of a developmental ecology that includes family, teachers, peers, institutions, culture and the wider environment.
The article also speaks of epigenetics as though parents primarily transmit themselves to their children. I think that is only a small part of a much larger picture.
The more interesting question is not what parents transmit, but how developmental environments progressively canalise the child.
Every child arrives with a unique polygenic architecture. That architecture is neither destiny nor infinitely plastic. It develops through thousands of recursive interactions with the world. Manageable challenge followed by successful adaptation. Curiosity followed by competence. Stress followed by recovery. These repeated cycles progressively stabilise ways of perceiving, regulating, reflecting and acting.
In other words, the adult is not principally created by the friction of raising children.
The adult is largely created by the developmental landscape they survived as a child.
Perhaps that is why I see the direction differently. Give the child, and you largely give the adult. The real question, therefore, is not simply whether modern adults avoid friction. It is what kinds of developmental environments we are collectively constructing for children, because today's childhood becomes tomorrow's civilisation.
Friction alone is not the curriculum. War contains friction. Neglect contains friction. Poverty contains friction. Chronic stress contains friction.
What matters is developmentally appropriate challenge held within safety, relationship and recovery.
That is what builds adults capable of deciding for themselves what constitutes a good life.
This is a real and important question, how the developmental environment shapes the child into who they become. This article wasn't making a claim about that. It was about what raising a child does to the parent, the friction of losing sleep, losing control, confronting your own patterns in someone else's face, and what that friction develops in the adult going through it.
The environmental question you're raising, what kind of developmental landscape a child survives, is exactly what the Foundations series takes on directly, starting here: https://newsletter.awarelife.co.il/p/the-system-works-thats-the-problem
Both are true at once. What the environment does to the child, and what the child does to the parent, aren't competing explanations. They're two different people in the same relationship, each being shaped by it in a different way.
I don't think we're actually disagreeing that parenthood changes adults. I accepted that from the outset. My point is about explanatory priority.
If the claim is simply that raising children changes parents, then I agree. It almost certainly does. But the essay seemed to go further than that. It suggested that the friction of parenthood is itself a central route to adult development.
My argument is that this places the developmental emphasis too late in the process.
The parent who encounters that friction has already spent twenty or thirty years being shaped by their own developmental ecology. Their capacity to tolerate frustration, regulate emotion, delay gratification, form relationships and respond to challenge did not suddenly emerge through parenthood. Those capacities were themselves built through childhood.
So while the child undoubtedly continues to shape the parent, the more fundamental question remains: what produced the adult who became the parent in the first place?
That is why I place the developmental focus on childhood environments rather than on parenthood itself. If we understand how healthy developmental landscapes produce capable adults, we also understand why some parents are able to transform through friction while others are overwhelmed by it.
For me, the deeper causal chain runs from developmental environment to adult, and then from adult to child, rather than beginning with parenthood.
I don't think there's actual disagreement here. The environment that shapes a person doesn't stop at childhood. It keeps shaping them, including through parenting itself. That's already what the Foundations link was pointing at.
I completely agree that development never stops. That isn't really the point I'm making.
My question is whether all developmental influences are equivalent.
I don't think they are. Parenthood undoubtedly continues to shape adults, but the extent to which it does so depends on capacities that have already been constructed over decades of development.
Two parents can experience the same sleepless nights, the same frustration and the same challenges, yet emerge very differently. The difference is not the friction itself but the developmental architecture they bring to that friction.
So I see childhood development as establishing the conditions under which later experiences, including parenthood, become transformative.
In that sense, parenthood is not an independent developmental mechanism. It is one expression of a much longer developmental trajectory.
Childhood development matters, and it matters a great deal. This is real work, and it deserves to be said plainly, not as a formality before disagreeing.
But even a child who came out of the best possible environment will still face real challenges as an adult. What matters isn't only what environment built beforehand. It's how the person meets the challenge in front of them now, whether they take responsibility for it and learn what it's asking, or don't.
There is real research on this. Adults build real, new capacity from hard things that happen to them as adults, not just capacity childhood already gave them. Parenthood is not only showing what was already there. It can be where something new gets built, through how the challenge gets met.
Every life stage carries that possibility. Not only the early ones.
It's not the friction that prevents me from having a child. I think I would be a good mother. It's the why behind it all. I don't know why I would have a child. Especially in this society.
The difficulty of bringing a child into an uncertain world is not new. Every generation before us did it inside war, poverty, plague, collapse. The Middle Ages were not a gentle time to raise children.
What changed is not the difficulty. What changed is that you now have the choice.
Which means the question "why" is also new. It never had to be answered before. It was answered by duty, by continuity, by the absence of an alternative.
Now it has to be answered personally. That's harder in a different way than the difficulty itself.