# What are things that non-parents cannot understand? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [May 23, 2021, 8:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-things-that-non-parents-cannot-understand/942756 "2021-05-23T20:29:57Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 209
**Author:** ![JohnT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johnt/32/15048_2.png) [@JohnT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JohnT)\ **Post date:** [June 11, 2021, 4:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-things-that-non-parents-cannot-understand/942756/209 "2021-06-11T04:18:29Z")
Oh, shit, just gonna answer the OP with a link or two. No, I want a few words as well. Sorry for being a liar two sentences ago: It’s the 24/7/365/18+ years non-stop nature of parenting that non-parents don’t _really_ get. For 18 years and 10 months, until this past August, I knew where my daughter was every second of every day, at the very least in _general_ terms (Sophia is with Katie’s family) but mostly specific (Sophia is with her mother/@ school). And I do not know of any other person in my life to whom I could make the same claim for in a random 72 hour stretch, much less 18 years. I guess my then-wife, at those rare times when we had just one car? ¯\_(ツ)\_/¯ Then there’s this: When Sophia went to St Johns she was faced with 2 weeks of quarantine, coming in from Texas as she was. So I compiled a list of my more important posts and threads about her, wrote her an open letter, and posted it here, sending it to her so she’d have something to read during qtine. > [@An Open Letter to my daughter, Sophia](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/an-open-letter-to-my-daughter-sophia/918949): > > Dear Sophia, Yeah… this is weird. I’m writing to you on some message board rather than sending you an email (though I can do that too!), where a bunch of people you don’t know can read it, but it will… I hope… all make sense in the end. I’ve been a member of this online community since before you were born, before it became a web presence, way back in the 1990s. The Straight Dope itself is a weekly newspaper column series written for an underground newspaper in Chicago starting in 1972. 20 yea… In the above thread you will find links to, IIRC, over 50 threads and posts about her, about being her father, and about some of the issues I wanted help from this community on (usually regarding education). More to the question posed by the OP, I offer this thread, [Thoughts Upon My Daughter’s First Month](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/thoughts-upon-my-daughters-first-month/93435), specifically this quote: > [@](#): > > … I really love my daughter. I mean, those of you without children have no idea how this feels but a rough equivalent is the emotion you felt at 8 years of age the day before you went to Disney World - you are that excited, that joyful, that full of hope. She is so pretty and smart and right now she is the most interesting person on Earth. This is a special time in our lives and every minute needs to be cherished as much as possible. … and the minutes were, and are still, being cherished. And she still is the most interesting person on Earth. And I _still_ feel that excited about Sophia, that full of hope about the promise she brings, but even more so now that I know her gifts and strengths. And she has a _lot_. Having been both a non-parent and a parent (and Sophia wasn’t born until I was 34, so I had plenty of adulthood being a non-parent), I can safely attest to the truth of the statement that there are aspects to being a parent that a non-parent cannot understand. I do hope the above words and links help in understanding this. JT --- _[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-things-that-non-parents-cannot-understand/942756)._