Okay, but before that post I said it is fine to leave a 16 year old home alone and that shared custody would give at least one parent time for dating, and in the same post I said I didn’t think I’d have time for dating (ie signing up with an app and going on dates with a bunch of strangers) with a very young kid, but I still wouldn’t rule out forming a new relationship, because it’s possible to meet and get close to someone through work or ordinary socialising. I was hardly endorsing the idea that a single parent ought the stay single until their kids are grown.
Your post seemed to me to represent the opposite extreme. Dating would be a “vital part of taking care of yourself”, while staying single inevitably leads to you obsessing over your kids and becoming interdependent in unhealthy ways. I don’t think it’s necessarily bad to form a new relationship when you have a toddler, but I don’t believe it’s wrong or harmful to wait a few years, either.
And since you talked about the benefits of a “secure romantic relationship”, ie something long term, it’s not a huge jump to consider the effects of having a step parent.
I don’t want to give personal details here in this thread, but my experience on this has not been positive. I feel like the justifications you and some other posters are giving can easily encourage parents who are already inclined to act selfishly to do so, and that’s what I wanted to push back against, not the idea of parents dating in itself.
It’s okay. Just frustrating when it seems like if you disagree with the consensus in any way then people assume you must support the opposite.
Eh, I’m in the middle on this. I think it matters who cares more about their graduation, and how it’s presented to the child. And i think some people will be better able to parent with a romantic relationship and others don’t need that.
Despite pushing back against the gender stereotype, I am an example of @LSLGuy 's
and i have below-average sex drive. I would certainly need close adult friends to be a successful parent, but probably not a romantic partner. (Of course, I’ve been to a lot of thesis defenses of adult friends… But they probably wouldn’t feel abandoned if i skipped it for my kid’s thing.)
I also think a lot of people jumped onto “it’s fake to ‘graduate’ from preschool”, reading that as a bogus ceremony of accomplishment rather than a legit rite of passage. I mean, it’s not a rite of passage I ever celebrated, as it wasn’t done when i was a kid. But we all take our rituals largely from the society we live in, and share them with the people we spend time with. Rituals aren’t magic spells that matter in some abstract way, they are just ways of sharing with other people.
Again we are missing all sorts of context that a real world circumstance would have. And yes. Dating someone with a preschooler you may not understand why a preschool ceremony means something to a specific parent but if it did you would minimally pretend that it didn’t matter to you that he was missing your event. But I can also imagine a scenario that the adult graduation was known about first and shared as something she is excited to have him be there for. Then the preschool ceremony is announced. She says oh don’t worry about my thing but he knows she cares and the kid is more excited about a a weekend event with dad later than this …
The only way the question is even remotely interesting is if we assume a good faith effort by all the parties. The father is just trying to decide on the path of causing the least disappointment, the girlfriend wants him at this meaningful event she worked hard for but isn’t going to give the kid any poison apples or anything, the kid doesn’t only see their father for pre-K ceremonies, etc.
Once it turns into “I’m hiding my child from this woman” or “Girlfriend will freak out if I choose to spend time with my young child” or “Should I ditch the kid I abandoned three weeks ago for this hot side-piece of sex”, it changes from the relative merits of the events to just vanilla “Some person somewhere is a jerk” and who cares.
Step parent experiences are as varied as parenting experiences.
For some kids, the step parent is a source of stability whereas their biological parent may be toxic or unreliable, or totally absent. They may represent a safe sounding board, and they may develop a genuinely connection as close as any biological one.
I mean, this commercial is schlock, but it pings people’s emotions precisely because it has realistic underpinnings.
We can, but it’s an assumption like most of the additional hypotheticals in this thread. Plenty of people agonize about decisions that affect other people without actually adking what the other people would like.
Shortly before graduating from high school I was speaking with the principal and mentioned to him I didn’t really care about the ceremony. Just mail me my diploma. He told me the graduation ceremony is not for the students, it is for the parents.
Yeah, but it’s one that’s sort of required for the question to be valid. Otherwise, the question isn’t “Which of these events should I attend?” but rather “Should I bother communicating with my partner?” The first question invites some debate but I doubt there’s a bunch of people advocating for not talking to your partner. Maybe a lot of people who don’t DO it, but not because that’s their actual philosophy.
I disagree. Nor did I say anyone was advicating for not taklking with your partner. Yet I’ve seen very little to no suggestion of asking the partner what she wants. Speculation such as ‘she may not care’ is not the same as asking her. A lot of people never ask. /retired psychotherapist
Never suggested you were. Pretty much the opposite: “Find out if your partner cares” is such an obvious step that there’s no need for a debate or “What would you do?” style question.
Again, this isn’t to say that people DO correctly talk to their partner but there’s no debate to be had around whether or not you should.
These sorts of questions can be debated on the assumption of good faith and a modicum of common sense among not only the dramatis personae but among us here doing the debating.
Or the question can become a Rorschach test upon which each of us impress our biases, battle scars, and cynicisms.
50 people have weighed in here so far, with at least 25 doing so 3+ times. I see we have pretty good split of each kind so far, but it’s left up to the reader to segregate them into the appropriate group.
Neither is true of me; I just don’t see that I could have had time to dedicate to looking for a new relationship when my daughter was younger. Now that she’s school age, I have a lot more time for hobbies etc, and it would be easier to find a suitable babysitter.
Yes. My daughter’s ‘graduation’ from nursery wasn’t presented as an accomplishment; it was their leaving day where they gathered together, sang songs to their parents, and were each given a book as a leaving present. Then we all ate picnic food. The kids were going to a variety of schools, so they were also saying goodbye to many of their friends. It wasn’t a big deal, but still would have been a shame to miss it. And it would be a shame to miss the adult graduation ceremony too, if your SO wants you to be there. That’s why it’s a dilemma worth discussing.
And sorry if I sounded like I was snapping at you yesterday. I’m feeling sensitive about being misunderstood right now.
And I said it would not be impossible that I’d start a new relationship if I was the single parent of a young child, yet here we are.
I held back from replying to this thread until I asked my 42-year old daughter how much she remembered from the three years she spent in pre-school. She rattled off an impressive list of events, activities, school pets, former classmates, former teachers, story times, and how to make stone soup.
She did not specifically remember graduating, but I’m willing to bet at least one of her classmates does.
Kids remember who shows up for them, and who doesn’t.
Sure. But I doubt they will care if someone misses a thing here and there. Life happens…part of growing up is learning that sometimes there are conflicts of time. If the important people show to most things the kid will know they care and it is enough. If they freak over one missed thing then I’d say that is a problem.
The version of this "hypothetical " argument I saw on Youtube was a woman ranting, no…actively bitching, hardcore, because her live-in partner was choosing between her graduating from Nursing school and the kids “kindergarten” (to a 1st grade promotion) and he was choosing his kid.
Apparently she took the “high” road and moved out while he was gone to that instead of attending her own Nursing school graduation.
His grandmother and aunt came, too.