Greg Bruce: How much time do you have for your kids?

When they leave the nest, will you regret not spending more time with your kids?

Greg Bruce, in search of the truth, performs a close reading on a popular tweet

Here's a tweet you might find touching: A friend said something crazy to me the other day: "You have 18 summers to enjoy with your kids. That's it."

By the time your kids turn 18, you have spent 70+ per cent of the total time you will spend with them. After that, it's a wild card (they are busy, you are old).

The tweet (10,000 likes, 2000 retweets, 237 replies) was written by Andrew Wilkinson (56,000 followers) who, according to his Twitter bio, is co-founder of Tiny, owner of Dribbble and MetaLab and has been "buying, starting and investing in wonderful internet businesses since 2007".

To summarise: that's a bio mentioning three specific businesses and an unspecified quantity of others but not a single family member. Wilkinson's tweet urges us to spend time with our children but his bio uses the adjective "wonderful" to describe businesses, which are - 98 per cent of entrepreneurs agree - things that exist primarily to deprive us of time with our children (a word that doesn't appear in his Twitter bio). And now he's coming at us with "you have 18 summers"? Tech Dad, please.

Let's also consider the claim that 70 per cent (plus) of the time we're going to spend with our kids is gone by the time they're 18. This is the sort of completely unprovable bulls*** beloved of our tech overlords - but let's assume for the moment it's not. If Wilkinson wants to get serious with numbers, let's get serious with numbers. Here's a statistical breakdown of the time we spend with our kids before they're 18:

22 per cent dealing with tears (includes yours)
16 per cent dealing with whining (includes screaming - includes yours)
15 per cent making food they won't eat while they yell at you that they won't eat it
14 per cent not sleeping
12 per cent listening to the Frozen soundtrack
12 per cent driving them places
12 per cent driving them places while listening to the Frozen soundtrack
11 per cent doing laundry
4 per cent watching bad TV/movies
4 per cent watching Frozen
28 per cent asking them to do something you know they won't do, then doing it yourself while telling them they're old enough to do it for themselves.

Do you know how much quality time this leaves for playing games and building sandcastles? Three per cent. That's right, 3per cent - and 80 per cent of that is being told you're doing it wrong.

(Cuddles and other manifestations of familial love come in below the statistical margin of error.)

The mathematically inclined may have noticed all this adds up to much, much more than 100 per cent. Hi nerds! Welcome to parenthood!

NB: These numbers apply only to primary caregivers. If you are, say, an entrepreneur with multiple start-ups under your belt, the percentage of your life spent making food no one wants is way down. The percentage of your time spent telling people the way things are, however, way up.

This morning, a Friday, my wife texted me the following, regarding her trip to the mall with our 4-year-old daughter Clara and 2-year-old son Casper:

"Casper just had an unprecedented meltdown leaving Kmart. Unbelievable. It's still going in the car. He just wanted to buy everything. I had to wrestle him for a helicopter and put it back. Then at the checkout he kept getting things off the impulse rack and when I said no he would lose it. Then he scanned some lollies at a checkout and insisted he'd bought them. I finally managed to put them back, then he grabbed another bag of lollies and tried to walk out with them. I told him he had to give them to the security woman. He wouldn't so I did and that was the end. Threw himself on the floor wailing. We were there for several minutes. He screamed all the way to the car."

Less than a minute later, she sent me a follow-up text: "He also tried to strangle me."

I replied: "Enjoy these halcyon days that are gone too soon."

It's so easy to forget how painful parenting can be and how hard it is, when the bulk of your daily interpersonal experience is the inane, low-stakes power babble of a workplace dedicated to creating things we don't need. Actually, "easy" isn't exactly right; I think what I mean is "wonderful".

When you're not at home for most of the day, it's an unmitigated delight to sit next to your life partner on the couch at night, looking at beautiful photos of your family - photos which, crucially, are silent - and to feel sad about your kids' growing independence rather than elated.

The philosophy of "you've only got 18 summers" fits snugly into the utility-maximisation culture beloved of economists and of Big Tech, in which armies of numbers are gathered and deployed in the fight against the human inclination to imperfection.

In a follow up to his original tweet, Wilkinson links to a post by prominent blogger Tim Urban, in which Urban has drawn a series of charts demonstrating the brevity of a human life. On each chart, Urban has crossed off the bits of his life that are already gone. The idea is that we should be surprised by how little he - and, by extension, us - have left.

Okay, we get it dude: we're going to die. Big whoop. I already think about death pretty much every day. I assume it's what keeps me alive. Nice pictures though!

On and on go the charts. One series shows how few opportunities Urban will have to experience the things he loves before he dies: winters, super bowls, ocean swims, books, his local sports stadium, dumplings, days with his parents. Not one chart illustrates the time remaining for making charts.

Let's turn briefly to the final words of Wilkinson's 18 summers post: his explanation for why we won't spend much time with our kids after they turn 18: "They are busy," he writes, "you are old."

Ummm, sorry Wilko, but it's not just in the middle of life that we might be considered busy. There are a surprising number of things that keep us busy outside the obvious one (leveraging computing code in the quest to create shareholder value). Also, in which rhetorical direction is he deploying: "You are old"? Does he mean, "Once you are old you're no longer of interest to your kids"? Or, "Once you are old your kids are no longer of interest to you?"

Also, isn't it equally reasonable and meaningful to reformulate his argument thus: "We are busy; they are young"?

A few years ago, I went through an embarrassing period of wanting to be a tech entrepreneur, during which I listened to all their podcasts and read all their blogs. I'm past it now - at least until my next existential crisis - and all that's left is the memory of the energy expended on pretending it's not about money.

Among the 237 comments below Wilkinson's tweet was one mentioning that it reminded them of a blog post from business tech god Paul Graham, which reads in part: "One great thing about having small children is that they make you spend time on things that matter: them. They grab your sleeve as you're staring at your phone and say, 'Will you play with me?' And odds are that is, in fact, the bulls***-minimising option."

Just a second there, Graham, world-leading entrepreneur and godfather-type figure at Y Combinator, the world's most famous incubator for tech businesses: let's more closely examine your claim by taking your hypothetical paragon of tiny cuteness who just wants to play a game with the dad she adores and comparing it with an example based on my own life.

In this scenario, my 4-year-old arrives in my bed at 1am. During her brief subsequent periods of sleep, she turns horizontal across the top of the bed and intermittently kicks me in the head. On waking, I turn her vertical again but, due to some internal orientation malfunction or hatred of me, she turns straight back. She wakes at 2am, 3am, then half-hourly until finally rising for good at 5.30am.

On getting up, we read stories in the living room while she complains about the voice I'm using, which is my voice. She complains I'm not holding her correctly on my lap. She uses a whiny voice to tell me she wants a blanket but she won't get it for herself and, after I get it - to avoid a meltdown, she tells me it's the wrong blanket, then has a meltdown. When I get the right blanket and put it over her, she yells at me because she "didn't want it folded".

I'm hungry, so at 6am I try to stand up. She won't let me. I say I'm going to make breakfast. She yells: "I don't want breakfast!"
I say: "What about rice bubbles?" She doesn't reply. I ask again. She sits there quietly, sucking her thumb. I ask a third time; again no reply. I say, "Darling, I've got to get breakfast, then I've got to get started on lunches, then I've got to get ready for work. I don't have time for this."

At this, she bursts into tears, and yells, "Stop it, Dadda!" then wails: "I… want…. a….. cuddddddddle!"

I give her a cuddle. It lasts 15 minutes I don't have. During this time, my two other children get up. When I say, "Okay, I've really got to start getting ready," she says, "Just a bit longer."
I say, "Okay, one more minute."
By this time, I know I'm going to be late for work. At the end of the minute, I say, "Okay, I'm getting up now."
She yells: "Stop, Dadda!" and starts crying again. While her tears pierce my heart, I put four pieces of toast in the toaster, get out three plates, three bowls, three different types of cereal and three spoons, all of which I will soon discover are unacceptable.

At any given time, over the ensuing infinity of preparing and eating breakfast, at least one of my children will be saying "Dadddaaaaaaa" in a whiny voice implying they are about to complain about something their siblings are doing/have done/may be about to do/have never done and will never do.

None of this is to suggest that Graham's hypothetical adorable kid at your sleeve is necessarily Satan incarnate but one thing we can say for sure about Satan is that he likes to play games with his creator.

Elsewhere in Graham's blog post he writes: "My oldest son will be 7 soon. And while I miss the 3-year-old version of him, I at least don't have any regrets over what might have been. We had the best time a daddy and a 3-year-old ever had."

Let me begin my response by hosing the vomit from the entirety of my body and - having completed that - also from the ceiling.

Every parent knows three is the age at which things get very, very bad. No serious parent thinks of 3 as a wonderful age, except on the eve of their child's 4th birthday, when the parent thinks (wrongly - 4 is a waking nightmare) the suffering is about to end.

This might all sound like hyperbole. Maybe it is. It's hard to say for sure because it's impossible, as a parent, to untangle the freaky mix of emotions your children foist upon you. Mine are 6, 4 and 2 and often just thinking about them during a boring work meeting is enough to make my eyes fill with tears. They bring me great joy and meaning and all that type of crap. The love is real and life-changing and stuff like that. Each night, when Clara comes to get into bed with me, a giant smile on her face because she's never met a snuggle she doesn't like, it's all I can do not to spontaneously combust.

But it's important to remember that I write these words in the sweet mid-morning, at my desk in the 5 green star-rated central city office where I spend the bulk of my children's waking hours, light flooding through the floor-to-ceiling window next to me, the life and excitement of the city visible below me any time I choose to appreciate it, which is often. When anyone wants my attention, which is not often, they typically either email politely or approach with a friendly greeting. If they scream my name at full volume and throw Duplo at my head while s***ting on the carpet next to me, I report them to HR, with a high degree of confidence it won't happen again.