And there’s no sense in trying to be one. Just be as good as you can, and know you’ll screw up from time to time, and forgive yourself when you do.
Sadly it doesn’t work so well for modern well fed women. My birth month group is full of women who are pregnant again and wondering when/how to wean.
Non-parents don’t understand that gray hair is inherited from your kids.
Almost all new parents make the same mistake, they forget to get a receipt from the hopital and don’t realize you can’t return the kid without one.
For me the phrase “if you’re not a parent, you just can’t understand” refers more to an emotional understanding than an intellectual understanding. Not unlike saying “the drill instructors in boot camp are gonna be screaming at you 24/7 and you’ll be running as fast you can the whole time”. Sure one can picture in one’s mind scenes from movies of DI’s screaming and recruits engaged in physical training running 10 miles in formation, but that’s quite different from the emotional understanding that can really only come from experiencing it oneself and actually living it moment to moment. So too with parenting; it’s one thing to say 'god help you if your baby is colicky" when the idea of sleep deprivation is in one sense accessible, but it’s quite another level of understanding to go for weeks or months on little or no sleep dealing with a screaming infant knowing there’s no escape from it and no one to deal with it except you.
At least we know we’re just lucky. Incredible, that a one in several hundred million spin of the genetic wheel resulted in this great kid. I’ve often said of my husband that he is the best of both his parents, and I think it’s always been my hope that our son would be the best of both of us I don’t, for example, want my son to suffer my crippling depression. I hope he inherits his father’s baseline mood. But if he wants to be a creative introvert like me, awesome!
One of the many reasons we are one and done is that we know we would never get that lucky again. The idea of perpetual sleep loss does not appeal. Frankly it’s bad for my mental health. We are lucky, lucky, lucky.
And yesterday I had my first “I would do anything in the world for you” moment with my son. That’s a whole thing. Very intense.
Indeed. The most influential thing parents give to their kids are genes. The two biggest factors in how most people’s lives turn out are genetics and luck (non-shared environment), with their upbringing (shared environment) being a distant third.
In the press this often gets spun as “new study claims parents don’t matter” which is exactly wrong. Parents do matter tremendously. Every day that they provide a safe and loving home environment is another day that the child is loved and cared for. It’s just that some homes that rate 90 (out of 100) on some quality parenting scale aren’t going to produce more “successful” children (on average) than homes that only rate a 60. All of those homes are “good enough”.
Unfortunately it doesn’t work that way in the bad direction. A home can be so bad, that no matter how many genetic advantages a kid may have, the outcome is poor. I think about it as “always easier to break something than to make it better.”
Some people, for example the press writing the “stupid scientists say parents don’t matter” headlines, get a bit offended by this. As a parent, I find it quite reassuring. It doesn’t matter if we never got bath time right, learned baby sign, 100% breast fed, started solid food at just the right time, or whatever other thing. What matters is that we’re providing a (hopefully much better than just) good enough home for our child to perform to the best of her abilities.
Parenting does matter. What goes wrong is the idea parents have that they can mold their child into any form they like as if their offspring were made of Play-Doh. If you get exactly what you wanted you are probably just lucky. If you don’t then the result is no different than for the rest of us who got a mystery box.
Working in juvenile dependency court, I see a ton of kids whose parents did something bad enough, or failed to do something important enough, that the government felt the need to intervene. Unsurprisingly, a lot of these kids do poorly in school and suffer from depression, anxiety, or other issues. But a surprising number of them turn out to be pretty resilient. Seeing how well some of these badly-parented kids still manage to do for themselves has made me extremely skeptical of parents who take credit for having awesome kids.
I’d say just about any parent with more than one kid understands this. My kids personalities were very different from birth. They still are.
You can’t turn a bad seed into a good one, but you can cultivate a good seed to grow strong and leafy. That’s the job of a parent.
And part of this is not trying to get your squash plant to produce tomatoes.
I wonder if this is to some extent an artefact of the modern self-contained nuclear family system. ISTM that a lot of premodern societies didn’t keep childcare responsibilities so hermetically isolated within the parent-child unit.
As a non-parent, I’ve had difficulty understanding how parents can allow kids to run wild in public spaces i.e. restaurants, either without making more effort to control them or to take misbehavers home rather than inflict prolonged insane noise and running around without taking the family and leaving.
But now, a wise mom has opened my eyes.
“If you are flying with young children this summer and they become noisy, please take a minute to say to the other passengers around you, 'I am so sorry that this is not something that you are used to. You know, in a lot of cultures, the sound of fussing babies is seen as a sign of abundance and God’s blessing. Instead, our dumb, postmodern culture sees babies as a burden”
Obviously this pertains to more than just flying. Henceforth I will endeavor to view all uncontrolled wild child episodes not as indicative of bad/indifferent parenting, but as God’s blessing.
I’m reminded of a bumper sticker I saw now and again when I lived in the bible belt midwest:
Lord, save me from
Your followers.
As a parent, there is some level at which I completely agree with your first sentiment. But…it depends. When a kid is going nuts at a restaurant that is not kid friendly - that’s a problem. When the kid is leaving their table to run around the restaurant, that’s a problem. Those are examples of “parenting I don’t approve of” - pick up your kid, pay your bill, and leave.
But when you are in your local pizza place post pandemic (as my husband was) and there is a family where the kids are in the “echolocation” stage. (They seem to be discovering their world through a series of loud shrieks). Or when a baby is crying on a plane, or a toddler keeps kicking the back of my seat…I have some pity for the parents. I assume that - like me - they have made an attempt to control their kids. And that it hasn’t worked because it often doesn’t and there is only so much you can do.
And that as was said up thread, sometimes good parents end up with small fiends for children. And no matter what you do, there is a stage that you just hope they grow out of. And that sometimes good parents end up with kids who are neurodiverse and are really doing the best job they can with a kid who will always be challenged to behave.
(And sometimes parents are selfish idiots, but I find that my own life is much better when I ASSUME that they are trying, I just didn’t see it).
When our kids were babies, we lived in Tokyo and had no choice but to take babies an infants on busses and subways. Short of chloroform, there’s no way to keep this age of children perfectly quiet.
We quickly found that when my wife was holding our child, people would be giving her dirty looks. Often it was older women who would be staring daggers at her. However, if I, the father, was holding the kid then these same ladies would be looking quite sympathetically.
This is kind of what I was saying in my post near the top of this thread. Non-parents assume we have more control over our kids than we do.
So what do ordinary Japanese folks who live in e.g. Tokyo and have infants do? Just keep them at home for the first 3 years? Genuine question, not meant as snark,
As a non-parent. … I may not have a fully accurate understanding of how much direct control you have over the kid’s behavior. But I 99.9% know how much control you have over yourself and the total situation that happens to include you, your kid(s), wherever you are, and all the other people around you.
A crying or fidgety kid 3 hours into a 6-hour airplane flight is annoying. But I can recognize that short of tucking them in the overhead bin there may be little any of us can do but put up with it like the patient grownups we all are (or at least are supposed to be).
But kids dashing around in a non-kid-centric restaurant are doing that with the implicit (or worse yet explicit) indulgence of the parents who totally have the wherewithal to end the imposition on everyone else. Yet somehow elect not to.
IMO parents have an obligation insofar as practical (not insofar as selfishly convenient) to prevent feral kid behavior when in adult-centric public.
It’s the difference between those two parental attitudes that I (and perhaps other adults) find galling. Regardless of whether said adults are childless, have young children now, or had kids once who are now long since grown.
I got drug out of a lot of restaurants and such by the ear as a little one. As the eldest, I got to watch my younger sibs ruin our planned outing the same way in their turn. I’m sure my parents didn’t bat 1.000 on preventing or stopping feral behavior. But they weren’t happily batting 0.000 either. Civilization: pass it on.
At the same time, when I’m at the public park and a gaggle of kids are dashing about shrieking & being kids, it’s totally on me to adopt the attitude that “They’re having fun and I’m here to enjoy watching them having fun. Gleeful kid shrieks are music to my ears.”
To a much greater extent than in the Western world, possibly. One of my cousins is married to a Japanese woman. The kid only left their house to go to the doctor for the entire first year of his life and then VERY infrequently until preschool age. This was about 20 years ago.
Mom had 12 months maternity leave (dunno if that is normal) and the maternal grandparents were buzzing around pretty much 24X7 for the first three years. Not sure if that is normal either.
A lot of mothers choose to go during off peak hours as well as to stay around the neighborhood. (This is based on the mindset that stay-at-home-mothers are the ideal of course.) Some people have cars and others just go out and hope for the best.
I really hope this thread doesn’t sink down into yet another debate if kids should go to XYZ.
My kids are now past that age, but we were definitely part of the mindset that kids needed to behave in restaurants. My wife has one particular friend who wouldn’t control her kids in public and after the first outing, I simply refused to go to restaurants with them.
Except when the default response to benign situations is high-decibel shrieking. If a parent begins tuning that out as “normal”, what happens when the kid gets into real trouble?
Darn good question. Not one I have an answer to.
Almost 20 years ago childless-by-choice wife and I lived in a 'burb. Among the several neighbors with young kids, one immediate neighbor had 5 kids ranging from 4 to about 12 when they first moved in. These were largish lots with no fences separating the backyards. So while all the kids generally stayed nearer their house than other houses, it was normal to find balls, trikes, and various assemblages of kids in our yard. All good clean fun. Our WFH office had windows facing the backyard and we were happy to see them enjoying themselves. Except …
All the neighborhood lots were gently sloped up near the house then steeply sloped down to a lake. Steep and tall enough that each yard had some arrangement of 50 to 100 stairs to get down to their dock at the bottom. Breaking a bone in a tumble down the slope or ending up in the water and drowning were realistic concerns, not just overprotective parental paranoia.
The youngest of the set of 5 was a girl who had adopted an
I’M being DISMEMBERED!!!1!!1!
shriek as her normal call. It totally lacked that “gleeful” tone I mentioned above.
Her very indulgent parents, having had 4 kids through that stage already had long since learned to tune that noise out totally. It took us a lot longer to not go Red Alert whenever Elizabeth let our her scream. Which was every few minutes all afternoon many days. Sometimes in our yard, sometimes 2 yards over.
We moved away a couple years later before she outgrew the habit. She’d be about 23yo now unless one of those screams turned out to be for real some time later.
Prurient side thought: I wonder if she’s still a screamer? 