Sure they do, just not at 2:00am then 3:36am then 4:27 am…
WTF are you talking about? Parents are 24/7 whether they are chained to their children, or a non-custodial parent. The point is that there is no break nor is there a beginning or an end of the shift where they are not a parent.
Also, all a person has to do is turn on the news or open a newspaper and they will see many instances of parents who obviously (through their actions) hate their children very much and wish they’d never been born. Oh, what I wouldn’t give to sit down with these people and get into their heads. But we rarely hear anyone speak of this point-of-view.
So while I totally believe everyone who gushes over the wonders of parenting, I always keep in the back of my mind that there is another contigent who is silently lurking and afraid to really speak their mind lest they get the treatment this woman got.
This is not particularly true, and I wish people would stop repeating it puts a lot of needless pressure on young women who take it at face value.
While fertility does drop as you get into your 30s, that is more likely to translate to “It’ll probably take a few extra cycles to get pregnant” than “You’ll die alone a shriveled husk of a woman.” When you look at the chances of a normal weight women getting pregnant in a year, the rate between women in their early 30s is not notably lower than women in their late 20s. Even as you get into your mid to late 30s, the rate is lower but not dramatically so-- a risk, for sure, but something like 78% of normal weight women age 38-40 are able to get pregnant within a year. It’s really after 40 that fertility “drops like a rock.”
So a healthy weight woman with normal mensteral cycles (often a pretty good indicator of fertility) really doesn’t need to be freaking out about their fertility just because they hit 30. If you are one of those “Having kids is the absolute purpose of my life” people, it might make sense to get an early start to mitigate any risk, but if you like most young women and interested in having kids if the situation is right, you most likely have a good chunk of time to work with.
Well, you can be good at parenting. We’re raising a daughter that is a model child - high energy, bright as hell, funny, engaging, is about 3 years ahead of her grade in most skills (reading, math), does a lot of volunteering at the food bank, church, etc… I mean, I could go on. Really… all you have to do is ask. 
Problem is, some of that is sheer luck. Sophia is healthy and always has been. She hasn’t suffered any debilitating injuries. She’s good looking, with perfect dimples. Her brain works, and her heart is always in the right place. And none of this was our conscious doing. She could have been sickly, injured… hell, even a bad seed, and there’s not a thing that we can do about it.
So it’s kind of unseemly to be positive in threads like this, because one understands (I hope) that people who are just as “good” at parenting as my wife and I have been (so far) have had misfortune due to the sheer randomness of life, misfortune that is of no fault of their own.
It’s really a lot of I’ve been trying, inarticulately, to say. I am proud for my kids but really not of them. “Of them” implies to me that I’ve had more to do with their good outcomes than I likely deserve. Of course that same attitude absolves myself of some responsibility if one had turned out to be a meth head too!
We do our best, like almost all parents do, and the dice they roll. Mixing my gambling metaphors, as a parent I play the cards I am dealt and am grateful that the deck has given me good cards. It’s easy to look good with good cards but really very little tribute to your skill at the game.
My advice to non-parents is to get over themselves that they think they have much right to judge how we are doing. We know we aren’t perfect.
Well… I wouldn’t go that far. 
We are good parents and a lot of what Sophia is, is because we are who we are - on a simple level, she wouldn’t be a Doctor Who fan if her mother wasn’t one as well and on a more complex level, she wouldn’t be as smart as she is if we* didn’t push her as hard as we have. Sophia is a child who really doesn’t like to read**, yet this sixth-grader tested at an 8.8 grade-equivalency largely because we expect that she reads 2-3 hours per Sunday and 15 minutes per day during the week.
So, parenting matters. It’s just difficult to determine the nature v. nurture mix at times.
*Really, “we”=“Mom”.
**Maybe a bit harsh, but picking up a book is something that rarely, if ever, occurs to Sophia on her own.
Oh, I wasn’t meaning that other patrons should have to put up with parents ignoring their children- far from it!
I was just trying to say that sometimes young children can literally go from calm, happy and placid to FULL ON HOLY TERROR SCREAMING FIT!!! in a matter of a second about things that you as a parent either don’t understand, or don’t think would be a big deal. Stupid stuff like whether or not their tortilla chip got guacamole on it, or that when they pull the straw partially out of a half-full milk cup, they may not actually be able to suck milk out of the straw.
Other patrons may have to suffer a minute or two of screaming when the (good) parents try to defuse the situation, and if that doesn’t work, they have to unbuckle the kid and de-food them in order to take them outside, all with the toddlers screaming bloody murder in their face.
Some people get torqued about this because they can’t handle a screaming child for a half-second and consider it a parenting fail if even that happens, but that’s not reasonable for the reasons I detailed above. Now if the parents ignored it, then they are total jerks and I see why people would be pissed.
(If I’m ever on an airliner that’s crashing, I want the pilots to be fathers because those guys will have learned how to concentrate with a lot of noise and distraction going on right in their faces.)
Oh I am not saying we are immaterial! Just that we, assuming we are doing the basics and not neglecting, let alone abusing our kids, that we love them and provide the structure that they need, have an overamped sense of our impact in both directions. And IMHO perhaps paroxically the anxiety that we sometimes bring with that overamped sense of responsibility gets in the way of our relaxing and enjoying them more which sometimes gets in the way of playing the hand that is dealt as well as we otherwise could. I am perhaps biased by being a fifth of five and having experienced myself what I like to think of as the benefits of benign neglect. And being balanced off in my parenting by a wife (firstborn herself) who is bit (he says looking to make sure she is not reading over his shoulder) more anxious about things!
I have three bio kids and one child who is adopted. To beat my analogy to death, I am fascinated by how the hands dealt from the same deck differ so much and yet share certain things in common, and thrilled to see the completely different features in the hand dealt from a completely different deck. All with intrinsic strengths and weakness, and fortunately more of the former than the latter for all. Yes to some degree my adopted daughter likes Doctor Who because we’ve sat and watched it together, but probably moreso because her best friend likes it too. My wife and I can influence values and model behaviors. We can provide her with an environment that will more likely expose her to peers who reinforce the values we try to encourage (knowing that those peers will have more impact than we do). We can afford to have her tutored for areas that she could use it. We can give the resources to let her gifts shine and the space and structure for her to discover those gifts. But the fact is that she came wired, for example, to have the social smarts she has. I wish we could take credit for the fact that she is the kid who is the social glue, reaching out to the kids who are outside the social circles and bringing them in, able to defuse conflicts between her friends and more casual peers. But I know better. I know I have to thank her bio mother and father (who I will never know) for those skills.
Your daughter sounds great! You do indeed sound like wonderful parents! I am sure you’ve done much very right. I do not mean to say it isn’t important or impactful … just (again assuming love structure and basic needs) not as hugely impactful as many of us imagine.
Yeah, well said. I’ve only got one kid and she’s great. That’s her personality - people will ask me for tips, but their kid might be totally different.
Parent or no parent - take time and be kind.
Also because I only had one kid, I really have no idea what parents of several kids go through, although I have two siblings so I know it from that end.
I agree with this with a caveat. If you, Random Stranger, start interacting with my kids and either they or I are immediately responsive and friendly, that is your signal to continue. If we are NOT receptive, it’s because we’re overwhelmed as moejoe describes above… or we’re not feeling well, or we’re overtired, or we’re scared of strangers, or many other reasons. If you say hello and get a cursory nod, don’t make it your business to force my kids to talk to you, because I don’t owe you friendliness or an explanation of whatever is going on in my day. I want my children to be polite. I do not require them to interact with every nosy person they meet wherever we go.
It isn’t advice exactly but I often find myself wanting to remind non-parents (and many parents) that children are actually people, small ones but nonetheless individuals. Parents may sometimes wish they could control the child’s every move, sound and word (and lots of parents whose kids are grown claim that they could and always did) but short of out and out child abuse this is not possible.
As I get older (and I still have a young child though my older three are young adults) it seems that the readiness to critique parents’ performance has increased a great deal. And for each person who thinks I am too lenient, there’s another who thinks I am too strict. I am also baffled at how many people will complain openly about a an action on the part of a child (speaking loudly, rudeness) when they would ignore the same behavior exhibited by an adult.
Your child? You just have the one?
My mum only had me. I was, according to her, also an easygoing, non-tantrum having child. She too attributed this to her awesome parenting skills.
Fast-forward some 30-odd years and I had my daughter. She is not an easygoing child, she’s a wilful, quick-tempered little bugger. The night she was born the darling midwife who spent hours pacing the floor with her screaming self so that I could get a little sleep tactfully described her as a “difficult” baby.
Now, having spent time with my daughter, my mum doesn’t think of herself as a naturally awesome parent, she thinks of herself as a damn lucky one. Because she got one of the easy ones, and I - who parents in a very similar way, with firmness and authority and a determination to civilise the little animal, because that was how I was raised - didn’t.
Or, as a friend of mine put it: “I feel quite sorry for people who get an easy one for their first. They get all smug and assume it’s down to them. Then they have their second…”
To answer the OP, what I quite often want to point out to judgemental non-parents is this: You may not have children. You may not want children. That’s fine. But at some point, you yourself were a child, and I can absolutely guaranteed that no matter what you or your rose-tinted parents think, you will not have always been perfectly behaved - in fact, I’d hazard a guess that there were times you were horrid. So for the sake of the child you used to be - please, cut my kid (and me - I’m doing my best, as no doubt your parents did) some slack. Please.
I’m always late to threads, but whatever.
I am a little baffled by all these people who say “You have no idea what it is like to be a parent! No idea!” What planet are you from?
Ever spend a day with your sister that has small kids? What was her day like? Constant multitasking, constant problem solving, sometimes up in the middle of the night, and little things like going to the store are turned into an expedition and could benefit from a mission control center. Ok, now imagine that every day. Its not that hard to figure out!
Yes, I have child now (and another on the way). I had pretty good idea what I was getting myself into.
Did you think that it was going to be all coos and giggles?
I suspect the difference is between those who are willing to, as it were, cease to be the star of the movie and move over to the supporting role (at least a little bit), and those who are not.
Kids can vary between wonders and horrors - sometimes in alternate minutes - and when you have them, your life “becomes” about them, at least in part, not so much about you.
Some find that life-affirming. Others, a terrible imposition.
My own opinion is that a life lived only for oneself isn’t as rich or complete as one that is lived, at least in part, for others; but that’s something everyone has to determine for themselves. Others I know feel differently, and I do not judge.
Now that I think about it it might have been Mrs. Whatsit. I confuse you two.
My opinion is that one should live life appreciating the richness and completeness they already have, rather than assessing their life against a changing ideal they may or may not be well-suited for.
There is always something out there that would make one’s life “richer” and more “complete”. The self-actualizing challenge isn’t acquiring these things like you’re some character in a video game, scooping up tokens so you can get on to the next level. Nope, the thing that makes you truly rich and complete is finding satisfaction in what you already have. Looking at what your “richer” neighbor has before deciding how you feel about your lot in life is a guaranteed way of feeling disappointment.
This is only my opinion, of course. It is what I tell myself whenever well-intentioned people get to “shoulding” and “musting” around me.
But us childless people don’t live only for ourselves.
When me and my SO were growing up, we both had unmarried aunts with no children who gave us extra love and spoiled us rotten and whom we both adored. I was determined to be that aunt for my nephew and niece, and he wasn’t as sure, but as he got older, he too decided he didn’t want children and would rather spoil these two.
These two kids now have two extra people looking after them, giving them gifts, etc. We are putting aside a little extra money for when they turn 18.
If I had my own kids I would have to give a little less to these kids. So instead of adding extra bodies to this world, I am making the lives of two little ones marginally better.
I am living my life, in part, for others. I am also living my life for myself. I’ve never wanted to have children, and never will…but I can lavish love and affection on these two.
My kids are grown now (got grandkiddies who are another species altogether) but my memories of motherhood are still strong.
I’m talking about ‘normal’ kids here too…not children with serious behavioural issues or physical/mental disabilities, just your average sprog.
App 50% of the time you either want to kill them or at least inflict bodily harm upon them. The other 50% you love them so much and just want to hug them, snuggle, god you’d EAT them up with all their childish goodness. Somedays these percentages differ of course.
I know it’s a bit of a theme on this board, but I very rarely see kids going absolutely mental when out in public. Shopping can be a challenging time, but I NEVER see parents allowing their kids to run amok: I see parents embarrassed and at their wits end trying to figure out how to cut the kid whingeing about not getting a treat, but full on ballistic? Nope.
Having said that, I had a kid (second kid, first was a dream and I thought I had this parenthood gig all sewn up) who would start screaming the minute we walked into a shopping centre. I mean SCREAM. I had no choice but to get the shopping done as quickly as possible, and as soon as we’d exit the mall, he’d go back to being all cute and sweet and gorgeous. WTF??
Looking back at those times, I now realise that he was probably suffering some sort of overwhelming sensory overload…crazy fucking lighting, music, people everywhere…fuck, I HATE them too, and haven’t been to a major shopping complex in maybe 20 yrs. Had I had more experience I would have limited my weekly shopping to small local supermarkets (he had NO problem with those).
So one rule I learned is that kids are weird, and you have no idea what sort of weird they’re going to be at any given time.
Do NOT expect your child to fit in to your previous childless lifestyle. Kids like to eat and sleep at pretty regular times…going out for dinner at 8pm and sleeping in are not gonna work with a little child. Get a babysitter, or start adjusting your life accordingly.
Don’t give your kid a super-weird name or one with creative spelling. First you, then your child will spend your whole lives having to explain why mummy and daddy thought it was cute. It’s not.
A messy house is OK. I’m not talking about a week’s worth of dishes piled in the sink, or stinky nappies piled up reeking the house, but a house with toys and stuff hanging around always makes me smile: an immaculate house with kids gives me secret horrors.
GET OUT OF THE HOUSE. I don’t care if it’s just a walk to the park, or catching up with some other mums/dads for a latte and babychino, but get out of the house every day otherwise you and the kids will go mental.
At the end of the day, you do what you have to do. Sometimes bribery works, lollies will NOT kill your child nor create ADHD, and if the kid just wants plain pasta for dinner, don’t make it a fight. Pick your battles wisely.
Oh, and touch your child lots. Touching can turn a child having an attack of the ferals into a veritable pussy cat. Case in point: yesterday my four yr old grandson fell against a glass-topped table and thwacked his ear a bewdy. He howled, kept howling, and as the pain was (obviously) easing, howled even LOUDER. Ordinary cuddles weren’t working, so I offered him a ‘backrub’. Lying over my lap with his sweatshirt pulled up, I ‘wrote’ letters on his back with my finger telling him how much I loved him. Within 20 seconds the cries had turned into giggles, and demands for more letters. Five minutes later, he was up, happy as larry and no memory of his sore ear (which was indeed red and bruised).
I know it’s a bit hard to do this in the middle of a supermarket, but improvise! Stroke their hair, play 'round and 'round the garden, do whatever it takes to distract if necessary.
And just love 'em. All sorts of parental shortcomings (and we’re ALL guilty of many, no matter how perfect we think we are) will be forgiven and forgotten if you just love your kid/s. At least 50% of the time anyway. 
So here are my positives:
-My kids crack me up. When my four-year-old daughter mimics our speech patterns (“Daddy, I think I prefer this butterscotch pudding, because it’s quite delightful!”) it’s hilarious. When she screams to me from the bathtub, and I go running upstairs, only to be told, “I think that whales have the biggest farts, and blue whale farts are the biggest whale farts,” I’m irritated at the false alarm but also pretty amused. And when I wake up to see her hovering over me softly singing, “When the moon goes up, you go to bed/When the moon goes down, you wake up dead,” I’m thoroughly creeped out, but you better believe that’s going on Facebook.
-A child’s snuggles are among the best things in the world.
-Absolute abject love of your child confers an obvious advantage to your genes, and we’re pretty hardwired to feel that love in a way that we feel few other emotions. The love I feel for those kids is unlike any other love, and it’s pretty amazing and rewarding.
Yes, being a parent is a total time sink. But it’s also probably the most rewarding thing I’ve ever done.
Heh–this is actually something I use for discipline, but not the way you’d think. If my daughter loses a privilege (worst thing in the world!) she starts to wail inconsolable.
So I console her. Immediately on this reaction, instead of saying, “Oh, quit it, you just lost dessert, it’s not the end of the world,” I say, “Do you need a hug?”
And she does, so I snuggle her, and when she’s able, I talk with her about what she can do next time to keep all her privileges.
She needs that touch, she needs that sign of love. She still gets the punishment, and we still do that interminable middle-class-college-educated parent thing of talking through misbehavior, but I try to make it clear that it happens in a loving context.