I do notice, and often will comment to a parent on how well-behaved their child/children are.
As others have said, there is a difference in loving your child and spoiling them. An acquaintence of mine just had her second child. Her first son is a spoiled rotten little shit, and it’s totally her fault. Now that she has the baby she is trying to rein the older one in, and he’s having none of it. If he weren’t so loud, it would almost be entertaining.
Yes.
Septimus G. Stevens VII may be the worst father I’ve ever met (with the possible exception of Septimus VI, the nasty unloving s-o-b who gave me this awful name). I never wanted kids, nor dreamed of having them. Knowing what kind of father I’d be, I felt the most loving act I could do for my children was not to have them in the first place.
But Mrs. Septimus wanted children so much; and she is so good with kids I thought there was a chance her love would make up for them having the world’s worst father. I didn’t actually agree to have kid(s), but gave her a lottery shot: one month off the birth control pills.
That was 18 years ago and … (drumroll, please) Miss Septima came home from school just now with a crown and sash. She just won a contest and is Miss Christmas 2011 at her high school! 
We have a son too (I think Mrs. Septimus gave herself another lottery chance without my knowledge :dubious:). I did not name him Septimus VIII. 
I’m still not much good at fathering, but am probably better at it than Septimus VI was, and these two kids are by a long measure the most important people in my life.
Ugh, so true. Also sad are the parents who completely ignore their kids, as if they are embarrassed to talk to the little guy -
I feel uncomfortable, yes. But not for the OP’s reasons. For me, it’s a combo-feeling. One part jealousy + one part irritation at emotionality/sentimentality. The last is a constant feeling, so I’ll talk about the former.
My parents in fact do love me. They say so every time I talk to them. So I’m lucky because many people do not have this.
But they were not the type of parents to actually talk to their kids like they were individuals with real “insides”. We were things to boss around, to scoot out of the way, to yell at, to tease, to see but not hear. There were tender times–I still remember my father doing a little trick where he would pretend to hold something in his hand for me to take and when I would get closer, he would pull me into his lap and tickle me. And he would talk to me about crazy, funny things during those times and make me laugh so hard. But once I reached a certain age and stopped being cute, those times stopped.
The only kid in the family that got serious one-on-one attention was one of my sisters, and it was because she was a hellion. And a lot of her one-on-one was in the form of yelling and beatings. However, being the oldest, she did get to experience life as the center of attention for a spell. For that reason alone, I think she had a different kind of relationship with our parents.
I don’t mean to paint such an awful picture of them. My childhood was not bad, and I’m about to drive down to visit home for the holidays. But yes, I admit when I see parents hugging their kids lovingly in public, or when they talk about them as individuals (“Johnny loves dinosaurs! That’s all he ever plays with!”), or when I see parents rushing to provide comfort to their crying kid, or even when I see them disciplining them in a way that doesn’t rip your heart out, I feel uncomfortable. Like I’m seeing something I missed out on. And I wonder if maybe I would be a different person if I had had just a little bit of that.
Ya’ll may flame me all you want. But feelings aren’t good or bad, right or wrong. They just are. I’m not choosing to feel any particular way, and I know intellectually that my parents–like all parents–were doing their best.
I had this, what I found out was it was me, not the parents or the situation. That is the love that all children need, but I didn’t get it to that level and it bothered me to the point that I was critical and fault finding similar to how you expressed in the OP when I saw others getting it.
Realizing that and healing that, basically some very loving people taking over where my parents could not, now it is one of the most beautiful things I notice.
More often than not, if I’m annoyed it’s by parents who are ignoring their kids in public to do their own thing, while the little [del]hellions[/del] dears go crazy in order to get attention.
There is a species of parent that does its parenting in an extremely ostentatious manner, seemingly designed to garner public praise for how very dedicated and self-sacrificing it is. Still, that’s preferable to no parenting at all.
Does the OP realize that for some adults, that 5…10…or maybe 15 minutes a day outside (when they actually get to spend time with their kids away from the soul-crushing nightmare of work necessary to pay the bills) is the single best part of their day?
The one thing that makes me roll my eyes a bit is when people turn into “internet tough guys” on the subject of their kids.
E.g. “If a stranger ever offered my daughter some candy, my incandescent rage would make me turn into the Incredible Hulk and then I’d peel off his fingernails and burn his eyeballs out with a hot poker and drink his blood and no jury on Earth would dare to convict me!!!1!!”
I do.
Becoming an uncle is one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.
It doesn’t bother me to see parents go all goo-goo over their kids, but I think I have an inkling of what might be bothering you.
I have kids and I love them, and I always have loved children. There is an extremely biological component to all this oh-you-little-adorable-cutesy-pie stuff…I think this had been more apparent to me because with me it has been so dramatically hormonal.
For me having a baby (each time) has been the most astoundingly euphoric thing I have ever experienced (not the labor and delivery part, the part right after that, where you get the baby). You know how some people get post-partum depression? I get the opposite of that. And it is so obviously hormonal. And it lasts, in modified form, for about a year. It’s so great it’s almost worth summoning a whole new human being into existence just to get that feeling again (almost. They do an astounding number of annoying things too).
So my point is…it’s not exactly personal, dear children, the way I fawned all over you like kittens, my biology made me do it.
Now that you’re 12, 10, and 5 it’s more about you…but it’s a lot less kitchy-kitchy-koo now too.
Dammit, I just got to work 30 minutes ago and now I want to go home and see my kids again 
It seems entirely possible that you are simply picking up, or sensing something, in the individual cases you are witnessing. As in, perhaps those parents, you witnessed, were being inauthentic and are really shitty unloving parents in reality. Maybe they were pouring it on thick, in public, and what you were really sensing was that ‘masking’.
Maybe. And maybe it’s parents that brag about their kids as a way of self-validation. That can be annoying.
People acting lovingly toward their children doesn’t bother me. I think it’s nice to see parents who treat their kids like valued people in their life. It balances out the people at the who treat their kids like annoying burdens that got dropped in their laps.
I came in to talk about a situation like this. The person I knew who made the biggest display of loving his kids, going on and on about it nonstop, turned out to be treating them poorly behind closed doors.The whole thing was an act for everyone’s benefit and most likely for his guilty conscience. It was an “are you trying to convince us or yourself?” sort of thing.
Sounds like some people didn’t get hugged enough as children…or maybe too much.
Overpraising is also pretty rare, in my experience, unless one is of the rather recent (and in my opinion, imbecilic) opinion that kids shouldn’t be praised at all. Yes, I’ve heard that theory.
I still see a lot of parents - and I’m not talking about losers, but educated, well off people - for whom 85% of their public interaction with their kids is yelling, scolding, snapping or snarking at them. If kids are being overly praised or loved, I ain’t seein’ it.
If I may digress, a little.
I had great parents but to be honest my recollection of childhood was that it really wasn’t an especially happy time. People tend to look at kids at the fact that (a) they will complain about things adults do not and (b) they have no adult responsibilities, and think that kids have it great. But, you know, that just wasn’t the way it was for me, and it’s not the way it is for most kids. Kids have disappointments and stress and pain and uncertainty every day. They have few responsibilities but that is countered by the fact that they are powerless to control their lives, and shit hits them from all sides. They worry about bullies, they worry about a mean teacher, they worry about what their parents will do when they fail, they worry about not fitting in. They aren’t listened to seriously, even when something is deathly serious to them. If a beloved toy breaks that’s a heartbreaking event; if a pet dies it’s a tragedy. They deal with family conflicts and stuff without really knowing how to deal with it; my parents would have awful screaming arguments and all I could do was hide in my room. My daughter is dealing with her parents divorcing and I think she’s doing okay but I know it hurts her.
For kids, life sucks jut as much as it does for adults. And it’s not going to get any better. They’re going to become teenagers and that will suck, and then they’ll go to college and that will suck, and then they’ll get jobs and that will suck, and along the line there will be broken hearts, bad friends, school disappointments, lost games and embarassing moments. Life blows.
So you know what? I’m going to go home tonight and I’m going to kiss my little girl all over her little cheeks and tell her what a smart and funny and beautiful little girl she is, and tickle her and watch Ren and Stimpy with her and just generally treat her like a princess, because at six years old she really doesn’t need any more shit. She needs some time where someone is unconditionally, purely loving her, a few moments where she knows that to one person in the world she’s the best thing there ever was. The world’s going to kick her in the ass again and again and again for the next eighty or ninety years, so frankly, she could use a little boost from her Daddy now and then. If you can’t get joy from your parents loving you then what the hell can you get joy from?
Wow. Well I certainly don’t put my kids on a pedestal, but I’m affectionate with them (hugs/kisses/snuggling/rubbing their backs, etc), but hardly inappropriate. My parents were not remotely affectionate with me, so I’m not sure how I grew up with such an affectionate personality. Touch and showing love and acceptance do wonders for a child (physiologically, it releases hormones that provide then with a sense of safety, security, and self-acceptance). Touch is magical (not the nasty kind, mind you). My showing of love and affection is most certainly not out of any insecurity on my part. I love them and I like it that they know it. The discomfort some people feel is an insecurity on their part. Even my parents, at times, will seem tense or uncomfortable when the kids give them hugs/kisses. They tend to coil at physical affection.
This may be it, I don’t know. The thing is, I like affection; my father still hugs me, my mom still kisses me. But I also come from a fairly large family…I remember childhood as a time spent with all my siblings playing. Of course parents should love and be affectionate with their kids, but sometimes the love appears smothering when witnessing others do it.
Obviously I haven’t fully worked out my feelings or been able to pinpoint what it is-so apologies if I am painting things with too broad a brush. I guess it really depends on the specific interactions. Obviously a parent berating or yelling at their kid is truly horrible to witness, I don’t want anyone to get the impression that I would condone nasty parental behavior. But in some instances, I think parents fear their kids being exposed to things (or to others), so the attention or focus on the child is a strategy to build intimacy and dependency at the cost of exploration with the greater environment.
I think this may be it. Don’t you?
It’s the one thing about having multiple siblings, particularly those close to you in age, that sucks. Not getting individual time. I didn’t have a real big family, but I have a twin and two other siblings. When I call up my mother, there’s no instant recognition of my voice. Sometimes I’ll be talking to her for several minutes before she realizes I’m not my sister. She gets components of our lives mixed up. She buys my sister and I similar–sometimes the exact same thing–for our birthday and/or Christmas.
My sister and I have both felt that neither our parents really know us. They know our older sister (the wild one), my brother (the only male child), but not really us–the “twins”.
So when I hear people with parents talking about what their individual kids like or don’t like–you know, talking about them as if they are real people–it comes across as bullshit. Not because it is bullshit, but because I can’t imagine my parents ever doing such a thing. It’s only recently when I’ve been able to imagine my parents even talking about me–and just me–to other people.
So it’s me. I know it’s me that has the problem–not other people.
I mean, not always, mind you. Sometimes I feel correct in rolling my eyes. Like at people who won’t let their kids do age-appropriate things, or at parents who seem overly-committed to giving their kids a perfect, responsibility-free, pain-free childhood (“I’ve got to spend $400 that I don’t have on Christmas presents, so that my kids will continue to think Santa Claus is real!”)