Chapter 7

Space Not to Kill Each Other

The hardest part about having multiple kids is figuring out where to put them. You can’t leave them out in the garden, and nobody makes an aquarium big enough. It’s just as well. You don’t want to spend all your free time blowing up armbands.

Inconveniently, kids think their natural habitat is inside your house. In fact, they expect to have the run of the place. Sure, you can confine them to just part of the house when they’re young, but that won’t last. Things get awkward if you try to stop a teenager with a baby gate.

Despite being small—at least at the start—kids take up a lot of space. The amount of room you need to accommodate their clothes, toys, plates, and other associated gear is inversely proportional to your child’s age. A baby needs the most room. Despite their being immobile, you’ll need acres of indoor habitat to raise one. A bottle doesn’t take up much room by itself, but then you need a bottle sanitizer. And a sanitizer that sanitizes the bottle sanitizer. And the incinerator that destroys all the sanitizers because it’s the only way to kill every single germ. A bare minimum parent would never buy those appliances, but you’ll probably get them as baby shower gifts anyway. You can’t stop capitalism.

As your kid gets older, their stuff will cost more, but it will take up less space. Their flat-panel TV can be mounted on the wall, and their laptop can be closed and tucked away, especially when you walk into the room. I’m sure they were just embarrassed by all the learning they were doing.

As a bare minimum parent, you should give your child the space they need to grow up, but not much more than that. Don’t be like overachieving parents, who think a nursery should be big enough to hold a regulation-size tennis court. Square footage isn’t cheap, and all that athletic grunting would wake up the baby. Besides, it’s dangerous to give children too much room because they grow to fill the size of their container. At least their egos do. Just ask the kid with the six-bedroom house. They’re dying to tell you about their weekend in Windsor.

Child Personalities by House Size

Basic Amenities

What’s the best kind of home for raising a kid? Wrong question. It’s like you didn’t read the title of this book. The right question is, “What’s the bare minimum amount of shelter you can get away with?” As with everything else in parenting, the answer is disappointing.

It takes a fair amount of house to raise a kid who won’t hate you. And that house must have all the amenities normally expected in Western civilization. If you have twelve bedrooms but your kid has to poo somewhere other than a toilet, that’ll definitely be part of their tragic backstory. Pray their memoir doesn’t include a chapter titled “The Bucket.”

Internet service is also a must. It doesn’t matter if you have a picturesque country estate with the perfect tree for a tire swing. If you can’t get high-speed internet, you’re basically Amish. And no, the dicey country alternatives like satellite internet don’t count. Slow internet is the same as no internet. If you have to wait more than two seconds for a website to load, you might as well ask someone to print it out and mail it.

Also keep in mind how any potential home looks, not so much for your kid’s sake as for yours. Documentaries about notorious figures always show their childhood home to figure out how things went so wrong. Make sure that home has curb appeal. Your kid might blame you, but the audience won’t. Those well-trimmed hedges prove you’re not at fault.

Lastly, a safe neighborhood is also a must. Ideally, playing outside shouldn’t come with an imminent risk of death. In some areas, that might mean gunshots. In others, it could mean giant eagles. Ever since the war ended, housing prices have been out of control in Middle-earth.

It shouldn’t be hard to find a home that meets those criteria. The vast majority of nice-looking houses feature indoor plumbing, internet access, and minimal risk of giant eagle attacks. How, then, should you decide between them? Since you bought this book, I’ll help you pick the right place on your first try. The cover price is way cheaper than hiring movers a second time.

Houseboat

If you’ve ever had neighbors, you recognize the value of a good moat. Other people can’t judge you if they drown. Unfortunately, most municipalities frown upon digging a water barrier inside city limits, and besides, moats aren’t cheap. They were only economical when they were dug by serfs, whose only payment was the vague promise you’d protect them from Vikings. And if you didn’t, they couldn’t complain because they’d be carried off as plunder.

So if you can’t bring the water to your home, what should you do? The easy thing: Bring your home to the water. All aboard the houseboat.

Houseboats can float up a river or be cemented in place at a permanent mooring. I recommend the latter. A permanent mooring both stops the house from drifting away and deters sea monster attacks. Keep a broom on the porch to shoo away the kraken.

Houseboats can have internet and plumbing, so they’re functional for bare minimum families. Just stay inside. Some older houseboats still flush their toilets directly into the surrounding water, which can put a damper on Marco Polo. Parties are more fun without dysentery.

The downside of houseboats is they cause as many problems as they solve. While you won’t be bothered by your fellow parents, you’ll have other, more nautical challenges to deal with, and those can be even worse. Everyone has a kid who’s dumped out the silverware drawer, but few have a kid who sank their house. Just remember the captain shouldn’t go down with the ship. No one else wants to raise your kid.

Nautical Terms That Apply to Houseboats

Nautical Term	How It Applies to Houseboats
Poop Deck	The bathroom.
Helm	The remote control.
Brig	The time-out corner.
Captain’s Quarters	Your kid’s bedroom. What, you thought you were in charge?
Enemy Fleet	Other houseboats.
Pirate Booty	Torrented adult films.
Anchor	The poor life choices that hold you in place.
Plank	The window you jump out when it all becomes too much.

Flats

For bare minimum parents who are landlocked, flats seem like a passable fit. They’re cheaper than stand-alone houses of the same size, and they come with fewer responsibilities. While you’re dealing with problems inside—namely, your kid—someone else can deal with problems outside—namely, garden work. Too bad that isn’t as great as it sounds. The cost of all that outdoor work is built into your rent or association fees. You could just as easily buy a house and pay someone else to do everything outside. It’s almost like you end up footing the bill no matter what because nothing in life is free. Go figure.

These types of homes are also the opposite of houseboats when it comes to proximity to other people. Your home will be physically attached to your neighbor’s, so they’ll hear everything your kid says and does. EVERYTHING. Only move into a flat if you want to permanently share a wall with people who hate you.

Bungalow

If you’re looking for the smallest practical house in which to raise a kid, a bungalow is a passable choice. It’s literally the fewest number of stories you can have. Any less and you’d be homeless.

Bungalows are safer than two-story homes. If there’s an emergency, you can jump out any window without injuring yourself. Of course, your kid can use those same windows to sneak away. It’s up to you if you want to lock the window after they go out.

Bungalows are great for elderly people because they don’t have stairs. You might not think you’re old yet, but your child will age you prematurely. Besides, stairs take effort, so a second story isn’t something you want in your life anyway. Unless you can replace those stairs with a lift or a fireman’s pole. In that case, can I live with you?

House

A two-story house has approximately twice as many stories as a bungalow, give or take a story. In theory, that’s twice as much space to spread out your belongings and feel less cramped. In practice, it’s an excuse to get twice as much stuff. If that doubling includes the number of kids you have, you’ll need a four-story house. Adjust your budget accordingly.

Houses offer some options not available in other types of shelter. You can put your master bedroom on the same floor as your kid’s bedroom so you can keep an eye on them, or you could put your bedroom on a different floor, giving you more privacy. Warning: Quiet time away from your kid can lead to more kids. There’s nothing wrong with that. Just know what you’re getting into. And start shopping for that four-story house.

Shared Space

One determining factor in which type of house you buy will likely be whether or not you want your kid to have their own bedroom. If you only have one kid, that’s not a huge issue. You should have more than one bedroom as long as you don’t live in an igloo. Although if you do, your walls will melt in the spring, and then your kid will have plenty of space to spread out.

The bedroom debate gets more complicated when you have multiple kids. The crucial factor is age. Babies usually get their own rooms. It’s not feasible to fit six metric tons of baby gear and another child in the same ten-foot-by-ten-foot area. And if you do somehow jam two kids in there, one noise from the older kid will wake up the baby. Then one kid will be sleeping in the room and the other will be sleeping in the garden. Serves them right.

When your kids are older, the debate over giving them their own room versus making them share becomes more nuanced. If your kid has to share a room with a sibling, that’s fine. If they have to share a room with you, that’s less than ideal. If they have to share a room with the car, that’s a problem. Trust me, you don’t want your kid to sleep in the garage. That’s probably where you keep your power tools. Avoid putting your child out there unless you think your car needs more drill holes.

Personally, I’m a fan of stacking children. Bunk beds let you cram more kids into a small area, which means you can get by in a smaller house with fewer bedrooms. By sleeping in bunk beds, your kids will learn to share a space, and if the one in the top bunk falls out of bed, they’ll learn a lesson about gravity they’ll always remember—unless they land on their head. Then they’ll immediately forget.

If your kid has their own room like overachieving parents suggest, they’ll learn a different set of lessons. They’ll discover that you’re willing to bend over backward to accommodate their needs, at least spatially. Surely they won’t abuse that knowledge. They’ll also learn how great it is to live alone before they lose that privilege, first by being crammed into a dorm room and later by moving in with a romantic partner. If you don’t inoculate your kid against the annoyances of other people by making them share a room, they’ll gain antisocial tendencies at an early age. That’s fair, though. People are the worst.

Location, Location, Location

Even if you decide each of your children should have their own bedroom, it might not be possible. Your house size is dictated by your budget, and how far that stretches depends on where you live. Money goes further in some places than in others, although it always travels in the same direction: away from you.

Don’t live somewhere where the price of a house is on par with a lottery win. From a kid’s perspective, a house is a house. It doesn’t matter if the windows look out over a landfill or a golf course where even the balls have valet parking. At some point, your kid will put on headphones and ignore the world anyway. You don’t need a million-dollar view if all your kid will ever see is a four-inch screen.

The truth is you don’t need to live somewhere expensive for your kid to turn out okay. Not that overachieving parents will ever believe that. Super mums and dads think they need a major metropolitan center—and the expenses that come with it—to raise their kid. That’s where all the jobs are, right?

Sure. There are no jobs anywhere else. If London fell into the Thames, the UK’s unemployment rate would be 100 percent. Well, that’s not quite true. There would be a few jobs for scuba tours of the sunken ruins. Natural disasters aren’t so bad as long as you can turn a profit.

I’m going out on a limb here, but maybe—just maybe—there are literally millions of jobs outside the five most expensive metropolitan areas in your country. Yes, the jobs in other places pay less, but it also costs less to live there, so your standard of living will be higher. If you want to live in Silicon Valley or London, you’ll need a thirty-year mortgage just to sleep in a skip. And those aren’t exactly forgiving jobs. On the bright side, after you work yourself to death, your kid can use your life insurance money to move somewhere more reasonable.

Unlike overachieving parents, your aim as a bare minimum mum or dad shouldn’t be to land the job that pays the most. It should be to find the job with the greatest asymmetry between how much you get paid and how much it costs to live in the area. You’d be better off with a slightly above-average job in a cheap area than you would be with a high-paying job in an expensive area. Happiness comes from having more than the people around you. Not so much that you start gloating, and definitely not so much that your neighbors rob you. But enough that you don’t have to be jealous of anybody else. Then you won’t be tempted to work harder to get more. You can just keep doing what you’re doing now and float through life. Parenting will never be easy, but at least your job can be. Cut your corners before they cut you.