Before & After

I'm on the organizing committee for a conference (Young Investigator's Conference) in Aachen in a few weeks, and one of the things we are doing is a Science Slam.  A Science Slam is where you give a 5-15 minute presentation about your research (or loosely related to your research) in a way that can be understood by the public.  It has also developed into quite a stand-up comedy bit.  I've been "volunteered" to present because I make too many jokes at our meetings.  I just can't help it, especially when I'm not the one in charge of the meeting.

Pretty much everything in my life that is funny right now either shouldn't be mentioned in public or has to do with my kids.  So I'm going to talk about having kids during grad school and some of the pros/cons.  Then I'll be making a transition into some of my research, which has to do with making simplified computational models for structural components that are very fast and give a general idea of the stresses.  Here is the comparison with kids (in cartoon form):

When you have your first kid, you may check up on him/her and see the following scene.  You scan the room, and assess the situation.  You draw the blinds so that the light isn't too bright on your son/daughter's developing eyes, you turn on some classical music to induce brain activity, you fix his/her out-of-place hair (singular), and you maybe replace the blocks with a calculus book to give him/her a head start in life:

Ahhhh, better.  This is like component engineers, who have the job of analysing a single part in a plane like a door frame or the joint between the wing and fuselage.  They make a detailed analysis of the situation with very detailed models, and make excellent predictions for strength/stiffness.

On the other side, there is a design engineer.  He is in charge of looking at the whole plane in the initial design phase.  He has to worry about cost, weight, aerodynamics, structural failure, and sizing.  He makes very coarse models and decisions based on imprecise, but "good enough" information.  He is like the mom with more kids.  She has something cooking in the kitchen, has to leave in 10 minutes to drop someone off somewhere, has a baby in the arms, and suddenly thinks: "The kids are awefully quiet; I better check and see what they are up to."  She might see the following scene:

She scans the room: No blood, no fire, no knives..... no problem!  She goes back to her work.

As the complexity of the situation increases, the ability to do a perfect job decreases.  
Although there are extremely detailed and accurate models out there to predict if your airplane is going to fall out of the sky, designers need access to very simple, coarse models with as much accuracy as possible to get a ball-park idea of what is going on and make initial design decisions.

So here is the question: does this make sense?   Is it even funny?  Is it just insulting to families with one child (which I think is just as hard as 3 kids because expectations are much higher)?

All those who had kids during grad school or key times in your or your spouse's career, do you have any funny thoughts about pros/cons?  Give me any suggestions/ideas you have in the comments below!