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Posted by Arwen Mosher in Family on Tuesday, July 31, 2012 12:00 PM
Have you ever seen the hilarious post at Conversion Diary with the formula for parents to calculate their “sleep index” - how much sleep it feels like they’ve gotten in a night?
See it here. It takes into account all sorts of factors, and comes up with a surprisingly accurate number. After a particularly bad night I like to plug in all my own variables, and I’m always like, “Huh. Yup, feels about right.”
So my engineer husband, who loves all things math-y and geeky, recently came up with a similar formula of his own. It’s not as complicated as Jen’s, but I think it holds up just as well, so I’m sharing it here to see what you think.
He calls it Chaos Theory of Parenthood, and the idea is that there’s a state when you have a number of kids of a certain age, where things are chaotic. You’re swimming upstream during this time, just surviving, because having all these young children is physically overwhelming. And eventually things even out again, and you’re out of Chaos Mode.
(That’s the point when a lot of families have another baby.)
Bryan came up with formula with his theory, and it goes like this: A family is in Chaos Mode when the average age of their children is lower than the number of their children.
You can use simple year-number ages, or you can get more accurate and calculate months (dividing by twelve at the end, of course).
So right now our family has a 69-month-old, a 42-month-old, and two 14-month-olds. 69 + 42 + 14 + 14 = 139. 139 ÷ 4 = an average age of 34.75 months. 34.75 ÷ 12 = 2.9 years. 2.9 is considerably less than 4, the number of children we have, so we are still in Chaos Mode.
(I could’ve predicted that!)
The simpler version of our math is 5 + 3 + 1 + 1 = 10, 10 ÷ 4 = 2.5. 2.5 is close enough to 2.9, so it’s still pretty accurate.
After further consideration, Bryan also came up with a corollary to his theory, which is: The greater the difference between the average age of children and the number of children, the more intense the Chaos Mode.
So when our twins were newborns and the average age of our four children was 1.5 years, our state of chaos was more intense than it is now. (True.)
With a little algebra, you can also figure out when your family will be released from Chaos Mode. My math* tells me that for us, it will be when Linus and Ambrose are about 2 years, 3 months old. That sounds about right. Only a year to go! Woo hoo!
Okay, if this is the kind of thing you like to do for fun, how does the math work for your family? In Chaos Mode? Out of it? Do the results seem right to you?
*55 + n + 28 + n + n + n = (4 x 4 x 12) = 192, 4n = 192 - 55 - 28, n = 27.25 months, or about 2.25 years, where n = the number of months that have passed since the twins’ birth, 55 and 28 are the extra ages Camilla and Blaise were when Linus and Ambrose were born, and 4 is the number of our children and the average age they’ll need to be to move out of Chaos Mode (times 12 because I’m calculating in months).
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This formula didn’t hold up for me. There are just too many variables in a family. I only have two kids but I was in chaos mode for years (even now with older kids I go in and out of chaos mode depending on how many health issues I am currently dealing with). If you have kids with special needs or health issues combined with parents with health issues and other obligations (such as helping aging parents or other relatives), you can be in chaos mode with only one or two kids into the grade school years. Similarly, if you have a lot of outside help, either extended family or hired help, you may never be in chaos mode.
Even though I have a newborn, this formula tells me I’m not in chaos mode (giving me a 7.8 for my 7 children). Things certainly are easier in many ways, but still - life with a newborn is rough, no matter how you look at it!
Arwen, I don’t know when the rough teen years are. My 14 yo son is occasionally grouchy and touchy but he loves to hold the baby and he is a great babysitter for the others. I really do have it easier than I did when he was 3 and I had 2 others! My guess is that a chaos formula either cant be linear or needs to have more variables, like Conversion Diaries’ sleep one. Now that was a fabulous equation!
Well, rough teen years can be 16 year old boys driving, or two teenage daughters with PMS at the same time ....I agree that chaos is not necessarily confined to the younger end of the spectrum. But I wish I had a newborn!!!!! I could use a little of that kind of chaos. It is the emotional chaos of the teen years that can be especially trying ....
This is pretty close! Since our kids are almost exactly 2 years apart, our number became 2 around Paul’s first birthday (when we had a 3-year-old and a one-year-old). Things have definitely improved over the last month or two. (Although, we still have a nearly unbearable level of chaos going on. Not TWIN 13-month-old chaos, but the one is doing a pretty good job of it.)
I think the only thing I’d add is the caveat “as long as everyone is older than 1 year of age.” Because even if you have, say, a 5-year-old and an under-one, my guess is things are going to be chaotic.
OK - so who is going to come up with a calculation for “deer in the headlights” mode? You know, when your kids are 20-somethings and throw all that Catholic education and upbringing to the wind and are sucked in by the world despite your best efforts? Never mind, it’s too scary a thought. I really don’t want to know that calculation. I think I’ll just keep praying…
We have a 4.5 year old and 2.5 year old, so we are not in chaos mode. And I believe it. My life is infinitely easier than it was a year ago. But, we are having another baby in November. I think a simple add-on to this method is if you have a child under the age of 18 months, you are automatically in chaos mode. 
I love this post. Bryan’s “chaos theory” seems to me like a perfect example of something lighthearted and funny that parents should be able to appreciate as humorous and fun even if the math doesn’t work out perfectly in every case. Let’s take a deep breath and relax, everyone! :-D
I totally agree—we will have 7 (as of Thursday if the induction goes well!) and our average age is 4.0 (although it is 4.6 for the next day or so!!)—we are definitely in chaos mode. I read this to my husband and he agreed with the chaos theory as being on par with his Job Completion Formula: take the amount of time you think it should take you to complete a task and multiply it by the number of children in the family and that is how long it will REALLY take to complete the task. (This only works if there is more then one child in the family!)
Love this! I’m a math major, so it’s right up my alley (and obviously my husband’s since he left this page up on the computer, interesting fact, that). So with a 5 year old, a 3 year old, and a 16 month old, our average age is 129 months and our chaos average is 3.58. That seems about right. I feel like we just exited chaos mode not that long ago. And already I’m longing for another baby.
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