I’ve noticed that parenting tends to make some people extremely practical or tangible-minded, in that they start to think of everything in terms of tangible factors like “food; sleep, water, heat, cold” but begin to have less sense of less-tangible things and how they can also play a role. For instance, my mother tends to heavily assume that fatigue is due to physical factors (“must be lack of sleep”) but has less of a sense that mental factors can also generate fatigue - such as a demanding boss, too much schoolwork, or dealing with bullies.
Not having children of my own, when I run into someone with kids who is a denier, my thoughts alternate between, “Whistling past the graveyard,” and, “What is wrong with you?”
As the 2 year old at the next table pierces eardrums and throws stuff, and my childless date becomes increasingly unable to function properly, I can smile and laugh and eat, with exactly no inclination to move or leave. I will also laugh at the people who make shitty faces and comments.
I might then pick up the parents tab, and if you can understand why I’d do that then you’ve got it.
I can answer any question asked by a random small child in public. If you don’t know what your third favorite dinosaur is, or why you have a weird looking face, you wouldn’t understand.
This is definitely YMMV because I don’t see it as common. I know people like that who aren’t parents so I assume it’s just a personality thing.
IMHO, part of being a good parent is paying attention to those sort of things, being aware of the things that are going on in the child’s life and understanding how that affects them.
I just don’t know how to interact with them, but then, I’m not very sociable anyway. Babies I’m fine with, even the (bottle) feeding, burping and diapers. In generaI have no idea about children’s likes and dislikes, and I’m not around children enough to know what the popular toys are, besides the playground equipment.
We’re next to one of the children’s play area for our development, so we here them playing anytime of the day, especially since we started working from home.
If I hear a child screaming (the typical frustrated screaming), I’ll mention to my husband that there’s an unhappy camper. If I have a headache, and I have the possibility, I’ll move away from the screaming child, but normally I’ll stay put. We knew the play area was there when we moved here, and we’re not going to complain about children making noise.
It’s only recently, seeing my friend from kindergarden worry about her daughter who was away at college when this pandemic started, that I started to realize how much some parents worry ALL THE TIME. Even if the worrying is not active, it’s there in the background.
The bottom line to me is that being a parent is one of the most irreversible things that can happen to someone. Once you become a parent, you remain a parent for pretty much the rest of your life (baring a tragedy), there are few other things in life that are like that. You can switch jobs, become a citizen of another country, etc, but once you become a parent, then you will continue to be one. That change, and what it entails for the rest of your life, may be something non-parents cannot understand.
I think that’s got more to do with the person than with being a parent. My mother is currently being kept up at night by her worrying about where her great-grandchildren will go to school. The children in question are two and their grandparents and parents aren’t worried about where they will go to school, at least not yet.
I got real hung up on this during my postpartum depression. Of course I knew children are permanent, cognitively - that’s one reason you have to think it through ahead of time - but after my son was born, there was this part of my brain that short-circuited, not just I’m going to be a parent forever but I’m going to be the parent of a newborn forever. It’s like my brain couldn’t make that logical leap that things would eventually change.
In reality, things change all the time. It’s a wonderful exercise in impermanence.
This would be me! When my two 20-something daughters are doing well, I breathe a sigh of relief and relax a bit, but more often, their struggles become my worries, and I get stressed out about things I can’t do a whole lot about. It never goes away.
As a person with a longstanding anxiety disorder, I frequently joke when Sr. Weasel tells me to relax about my son. “Back off, man. I’ve trained my whole life for this!”
I do all right, though. I’ve worried significantly less than I had ever imagined I would.
My younger brother was just walking around in church at the age of four, tripped and broke his leg. My mom said she decided then that she wasn’t going to worry about other things so much if someone could get hurt like that.
You are making sense, but TBH, in reality many of the people I know who make the most effort to save the planet for future generations are those who don’t have their own children. And it’s not necessarily that they’ve decided not to have kids for environmental reasons, either.
Maybe it’s because those of us who have our own children can drill it down to what is best for those specific children, which isn’t necessarily the best for all future generations, whereas people without kids can be more abstract.
Or maybe it’s just because it’s easier to think in the abstract if your own kid isn’t going to be affected by it. The next generation after that might be better off if your kid doesn’t get given all the latest stuff, but that will require sacrifices from our kids’ generations, and that’s much harder to deal with in person than in abstract. This comes up more if your child is NNT, but also comes up a lot when they’re just going through the normal stages of childhood and adolescence, and you’re not helping them because you’re helping their future great-grandchildren.
So that’s one thing that’s pretty much impossible for non-parents to fully understand - the everlasting juggling of principles and parenting.
My daughter is 19yo, financially independent, out of the house, living in the city she has dreamed of since the age of 12, has a signed 1yr lease on an apartment with 3 other 20-somethings, and makes $45-50k/year working alongside the CEO in the flagship location of one of NYC’s premiere cafe’s.
I don’t know if non-parents will understand the satisfaction I felt in typing the above sentence, much less the satisfaction in watching my little girl actively pursue her best life.
Are there things that you vowed you’d never do as a parent (when you were a teen, or in your unmarried 20s, etc.) that you’ve promptly now done as a parent? i.e., vowed you’d never crack down on your son playing video games, but now you crack down on him playing video games
Well, I mean there’s tons of stuff right? For starters there’s the ‘TV rule’ which usually gets broken. Most new parents say ‘well we’re not gonna watch TV’, or ‘we’re going to watch very little TV’, or ‘just educational’, and then within 6 months they’re watching Dora the Explorer, telling themselves that Susie is learning Spanish.
As far as punishments, no. I knew I would suck at monitoring her media consumption, and guess what? I completely sucked at monitoring her media consumption. Remember the kid in your neighborhood who had HBO and the Playboy channel and Showtime, and their parents were never home, so everyone went there to watch the forbidden shows? Metaphorically, Sophia was that kid, even when I was at home. Making sure she only watched ‘the right’ shows just seemed like a lot of effort for almost no reward, so I didn’t even bother.
No, not that I can remember. Mostly because the only thing I thought about being a parent was I didn’t want to get a girl pregnant. As a kid I’d dislike or ignore my parents rules but put zero thought into how they could do their jobs better.
As a parent I’ve never made those types of parenting plans (only organic food or no TV, etc) because it just seems to make a hard job tougher. I mainly worry about making the next decision to the best of my abilities and not look too far down the road.
As a mother of two, I think some of that may play out when kids are babies and all you have time to think about is food, clean diapers and sleep, but once they get older, their problems don’t go away, they get more complicated and harder to solve because they involve those intangibles, which leads to less sleep for you and for your kids. And also because there is often very little you can do about them for your kids.
I also work full time and am painfully familiar with burnout, especially after this pandemic, so I think it makes me recognize more when my kids are drained mentally.
