I’ve had an anxiety disorder as long as I can remember. So when I became a parent, whenever Sr. Weasel told me to calm down, I told him “Back off, man! I’ve been training my whole life for this!”
I don’t think it’s so much a matter of being “better” than childless people. It’s more like once you have children, much of the things that childless people are into seem frivolous and unimportant. Childless people can do that stuff because they have nothing but time on their hands. But when you have kids, your free time after taking care of the kids becomes very limited. So you tend to be very particular in how you spend it.
A lot has been covered, but there are littler things that only parents really get. Once I was sitting chatting with some moms-of-toddlers friends around a coffee table and one of our kids started to teeter a little toward the table. Every one of us made an instant dive toward the corner he was going to hit if he fell, although no one had in fact been watching him at the time.
With small children, when you get a chance to do a mundane thing like grocery shopping without them, it feels like being on drugs.
I also have never experienced in other parts of my life the pure murderous rage that poured into me when someone mistreated, insulted, or neglected my child.
As a parent, I just want to chime in with “Bullshit”. A comment like “You won’t understand until you have kids yourself.” is so inconsiderate, I assume it’s made by a parent who wants a medal for all the extra work they’re doing.
And they want to put their single friend down (Oh, I meant their soon-to-be-ex-friend).
I mean, would you tell a woman “Oh, you’ll never understand _____ , 'cause you’ve never been a man.”? It sounds a little like that.
That’s really the key point. Non-parents seem to assume that parents can always control unruly children, or that parents’ #1 priority should be to shut them up or take them outside. It doesn’t always work like that- be patient!
Don’t worry- that’ll calm down with time. I remember when our second child was born and I changed his diaper for the first time, and I was struck by the contrast of how relatively rough I was with the second kid versus the timid, extra cautious first diapering of our first child a couple of years prior.
They’re tough, and they’ll let you know when they’re ready for stuff. Just be aware of what’s normal and what’s not, and don’t be embarrassed to discuss it with your pediatrician. At preschool ages, they’re sort of the guiding authority for stuff like that- they’ll make that initial pass/consultation, and make suggestions, referrals, or even diagnoses.
It doesn’t stop, and at some point when they get a little older, they themselves become unrelenting with questions, demands, etc… beyond the normal needs that kids and people have (and that you are mostly responsible for fulfilling)
Very much this. A lot of stuff that I used to do seriously when I was single and/or before my wife and I seem like fun things now, but hardly important. We don’t have to eat out, go to bars, see movies first-run in theaters, or anything like that.
But I’m also a whole lot less inclined to go do some of those things if I happen to have a few free hours. Nor am I inclined to play video games with a steep learning curve and/or a lot of grinding. I don’t have the free time to do that.
Thanks so much for quoting this. This moment is one of the high points of a fabulous movie.
Carry on.
I have good news, and I have bad news.
The good news is, pretty soon, you’ll realize you don’t really need to consciously work at teaching them most of the millions of things you want them to learn. They’re constantly watching and absorbing, so you just have to be, and they’ll pick it up from your behavior without any effort on your part.
The bad news is exactly the same.
Thread winner! 
Well, that and, “We deal in lead, friend,” but that would creep people out in this thread.
It has nothing to do with deciding to have kids. Any idiot can do that, and many do. It is all about going through raising kids. Which is always going to be a leap of faith for your first, at least.
Kind of like my wife’s best friend, who got married late. Before she got married she liked to give my wife advice about our marriage. Unrequested. After she got married she shut up.
It is also like how you become a better parents to your kids after they have children. Then they get it.
But this a thread inviting parents to talk about what parts of the experience seem impossible to understand from the outside. Answering a question that’s been asked is a fair cop.
And the internet is full of “What do outsiders really never understand about X”, where X is "living in a particular country " or “having a particular condition.” Asking questions like this is how we come to understand the human experience.
I had the exact same thought. I remember the long tense lead-up, the birth announcement, and the early days.
You mean it’s parentsplainin’. Or ‘rentsplainin’ 
Don’t matter whatcha callit, _____splainin’ ain’t nice and ain’t right.
Agreed, if I may.
And this:
…It is also like how you become a better parents to your kids after they have children. Then they get it…
Boy howdy. Or in my case: ‘daughter, howdy.’ I just have to remember to not smirk as my son-in-law looks at me and smiles knowingly.
So Bipp … How is it this son-in-law is so much wiser than his wife, your daughter, about this stuff? 
I truly do not feel this way. I’m the exact same person I was before I had a kid. I have the same interests. The initial newborn phase was admittedly like a bomb exploding our lives, but… You adjust. After about six months I resumed writing, I still meet with my writers group every other Tuesday, and our vaccinated friends are coming over tonight to watch Fargo. Yes it complicates things logistically but life outside of parenthood is doable if you have support from your partner or someone else. We’ve been really clear about carving out time for ourselves and each other. (And I admit I’m in a priveleged position here… My husband and I both have some control over our schedules.) My life has changed, certainly, but I haven’t.
And of course I still waste a ton of time. It’s hilarious to me how much I haven’t improved as a person. But I think I still am adjusting, as I’m just now getting started with thinking about life in the long - term rather than just getting by day to day. Plus you can’t underestimate the impact of COVID on everything, and I had my kid two days before our state shutdown, so these things are inextricable to me and how our lives have changed. People are looking forward to getting back to normal and that ship sailed for us the day he was born. Nothing will ever be the same again.
Also, when they tell you it takes 4-6 weeks to recover from childbirth, they are full of shit. You really can’t conceive of how physically traumatic childbirth is until you experience it.
He’s been in love with the person who gave my granddaughter half of those temperament chromosomes for more than a decade, he knows them well. It’s all about the apple not falling far from the tree.
Plus, he’s 5 years older and served in the military which I think gave him a fair bit of perspective on human behavior, including just what you could change about another person and what you couldn’t. And he grew up in Canada-he does gentle smiles about a lot of things.
He understands (and mostly enjoys) the reasons why, literally from the moment of her birth, we called my daughter “tiny, but mighty”. Now she has her own “tiny, but mighty” of her own making to deal with.
Canadians … Smiling knowingly at the antics of their southern Yayhoo neighbors for nigh onto 250 years.
And looking on now with ever-increasing consternation bordering on fear and loathing.
But that’s true, isn’t it? I can cognitively understand the social pressures men face but I have no experiential reference, and I’m aware of the limitations of my knowledge. I know I can do better by those men by listening to their experiences and gaining insight into what I can’t understand.
I used to think “you’ll never understand” was an excuse parents made for bad parenting choices, now that I’m a parent it’s more like understanding you can make all the “right” choices and the outcome is a total crap shoot. Or if you look at the way the public blames mothers when their innatentiveness leads to disaster. You have no way of knowing if innatentiveness is a frequent thing or whether it was just that one freak moment because nobody can be perfect all the time. The other day my kid pulled the baby gate down on top of himself and it was 100% me not paying attention and that shit puts the fear of Og in you. I’ve been trying to get treatment for my ADHD and that was kind of a moment that could have been so much worse than it was. What other dangers am I not even aware of?
And while we’re on this subject, the pressure that society puts on mothers to perform perfectly at the expense of their own mental health is enormous. There’s this huge movement within our society, usually driven by the white upper middle class, to give birth without pain medication, to breastfeed at all costs and to spend every waking moment attached to your child no matter how much your mental or physical health suffers. These ideas have been perpetuated by groups with a vested interest in keeping women tied to the domestic sphere. It establishes ideals difficult for even the most privileged to uphold and impossible for many who don’t have a co-parent, or who don’t have the option to take time off work, or anyone with a serious illness, etc. It’s reinforced by other mothers and many health care professionals. And it’s totally FINE if some women get satisfaction from those approaches, but we don’t all, and this is not a one size fits all endeavor.
After the eleventh social media post by some woman sobbing about how she “failed her child” because she ended up having an emergency C-section instead of the medication - free vaginal delivery she dreamed about, you just get cranky about these things.
I opted out of that game because my sorry depressed formula-feeding ass had no chance of winning. But I don’t think many mothers know that they can opt out.
I respectfully disagree. Well, I don’t disagree with the idea that a non-parent can have some “insight” into what it’s like to be a parent. Sure they can!
But any non-parent who thinks they can completely understand what the feeling of parenting is like is simply wrong. There is no substitute for being a parent to comprehend precisely how it feels.
Imagine a deaf-from-birth individual and a hearing person. Sure, the hearing person can understand, on some level, that the deaf person will be far more exquisitely sensitive to visual input. But it’s a purely intellectual observation without the visceral knowledge of what it’s like to be deaf.
Similarly, a deaf person can appreciate music on some level - they can sense rhythms and can dance along. But they cannot have that same aesthetic joy of discovering a new piece of music that is profoundly beautiful.
What I object to in many of these “parent v non-parent” discussions (which frequently degenerate into mutual hostility; nice to see that this thread remains fairly civil) is smugness on either side:
Non-parents, you don’t know what it is like to be a parent. If you remain childless you will never know, period. So don’t tell me you understand what parenting is like.
I was childfree by choice until nearly 40, so I can speak for the other side too: Parents, you are not in possession of some life experience that is so essential that anyone who doesn’t participate in it is less than fully human. It’s possible to have a wonderful and utterly fulfilling life without children, just in a different way.
While nothing analogizes to parenthood very well, I think of it like going through any difficult, amazing experience - say, sailing around the world by yourself. Anyone who has not managed that feat will never really understand what it’s like, but that’s okay. They can be curious about it, or not, and can learn as much as they want. For the sailor, it was probably a life-altering experience. For the observer, it’s just a story - one they can understand well, but imperfectly.
And yet - both the sailor and the non-sailor can have rich lives in their own way. It shouldn’t be a competition as to whose choices are better.
No kids. So I could zoom through this thread pretty damn quick. Other people’s kids are for the most part boring. Your own kids are fascinating to you, of course.
SpiceWeasel? My grandnephew wasn’t really speaking much when he was almost two. My niece and nephew-in-law took him to speech therapy, and, man, he talked weird for a little while. It was like they were training him to speak syllable by syllable, and that’s how he spoke. He sounded like a kid robot. But after only a relatively short time, he began speaking normally for his age.
And my younger sister went to a speech therapist when she was 3 or 4. She just wouldn’t talk. She’d point. Now? She never shuts up. Must be something in our DNA.
So, tl;dr, he’ll probably be fine, but therapy will probably help.