Parenting and Panic
thepointmag.com
thepointmag.com
I am fascinated by this phenomenon. I remember my kid being in a school play when he was young: everybody who wanted could be in it and they clearly added trivial non-speaking spots for kids who might not have passed an audition but still wanted to be on stage. He had one of those! Yet whenever he was on the stage he just dominated -- expanded to fill the whole field of view. At least for me. I really recognized this phenomenon years later when I watched another play which had two kids in its cast who were really good. Probably the first time I really noticed that there were even other kids on the stage.
As for new parents groups: they really are for mothers and aren't about the babies. So I understand what she felt ("It was around the time I abandoned my third or fourth new moms group that I began to consider the possibility that I might be the problem."). And I mean mothers: as a father I was clearly not welcome (this was back in the late 1990s). At the park I was definitely viewed with suspicion by the other mothers even though I was a regular, and none would really talk to me (that's OK, I had EE times and the NYRB). Back then I was the only father pushing a pram around downtown Palo Alto in the middle of the day, and certain segments of the population clearly treated me with scorn. After the 2000 crash I saw more fathers doing this and I hope this has changed to some extent.
Interestingly at a party this phenomenon didn't appear, which I feel was due to context: if I was carrying a baby I believe the presumption was this was a dad being cute and "helping out" and that the rest of the child rearing was done by the mother (in fact she did a lot but had no patience for the American baby rituals). I saw this play out in other countries when I had the baby (and later child).
I don't agree that the child controls the process, but rather the child is a big responsibility, and that controls the process. Frankly owning a home is a lot of responsibility too, but the home is not in control.
Interesting. My experience as the only dad at the parks with my young child was that all the moms wanted to come tell me what a great thing it was that I was there, and how they were really proud of me for doing it. It felt very condescending and awkward.
Mom's groups are still for moms (I think this is because they often discuss mom-things where they don't want men around), but the park and downtown have become a shared spaces. I don't get strange looks for taking my kid to the playground, about half the parents there are dads (more on Sunday morning), sometimes moms or other dads will even talk to me. I do remember my dad (a househusband back in the 80s) complaining about how he'd get lots of strange glances taking my sister and me to the playground.
I've experienced this. I tried to volunteer with the summer band camp my daughter was in. The volunteers were all mothers. I got lots of vaguely accusatory questions, and then got turned away. The implication was that I was some sort of threat.
Things can go a different way too. I've heard of other fathers getting lots of unwelcome romantic attention from the mothers.
It’s better for the long term health of the baby if the mom doesn’t jump off the fucking roof because you put too much pressure on fucking breast feeding!
It’s probably fine to supplement once in a while to ensure the mother has a lower stress level. All things in moderation I think...
Do I sound panicked?
>I beg to differ [that there is no reason for a healthy well-fed mother not to breast feed her baby]. There are a lot of healthy well-fed mothers who have found what they think are valid reasons not to breastfeed. I chose not to breastfeed my babies because it was inconvenient, time-consuming, interfered with my sleep, and was incompatible with my job as a doctor working 24 hour shifts in the emergency room and as a flight surgeon on call. I suppose I could have pumped milk and planned ahead and found a way to do it, but it would have required heroic measures. I can imagine leaking breast milk all over my flight suit when I was on an emergency helicopter mission and simply couldn’t stop to pump. Moreover, I tried breastfeeding briefly with my first baby and frankly, I didn’t like it. All in all, I thought my babies were better off with a happy mother and a bottle.
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/breastfeeding-is-good-but-m...
Everyone has an opinion about how to raise a kid. As long as you use some common sense and treat your kid with as much respect as you would any other human, he or she will most likely turn out fine. Considering that much more stupid people have managed to raise kids, it actually seem hard to fail if you succeed reasonably well with other endeavours in your life.
Research shows they will get slightly less of your antibodies, which if I understand correctly translates to one or two less cold viruses in the first year.
Yes, if you can do it, it’s better than formula.
But if you can’t, you’re not a bad parent. If you can only sustain it for 6 months because it’s too much work, that’s ok.
Only 50 years ago we had a couple generations of kids where breast feeding was almost never done. Those adults don’t seem to have been handicapped by it.
Obviously breastfeeding is better if you can, but no need to lose sleep over it.
> "The women in these groups had bent over backwards to be welcoming"."
People love to believe that mom's groups are full of snotty judgments and anti-vaxx sentimens which is rarely, if ever true
> "My baby alone had the brilliant promise of profound intelligence shining out of his eyes."
Shhh - we're not supposed to admit that!
> "Every story about parenting has to do double duty as a story about how I am such a good parent."
I am pretty impervious to guilt trips, but 90% of parenting articles are just flat out boring. I don't know why it can't be addressed with any sort of intelligence and introspection.
As for the whole 'my kid is so amazing', yeah i have that feeling as well with my kid. seems like it's just a paternal thing. but damn man kid is fucking cute and EVERYONE says hi to her. This doesnt happen with all little ones right? Our kid is smiley as shit, waving, laughing and basically a smile generator. IF you dont smile as this kid you have no soul
Then we had two more and no, it wasn't the hormones. They both had the usual newborn uglies and even we could see that. Our first one actually was remarkably cute. No one ever told us we should contact acting agents about either of the later ones.
Having more kids makes it easier to tell where your kids truly fall, absent parental bias, on the cuteness or cleverness scale or whatever. Sometimes they actually are unusually cute or unusually smart or unusually well-coordinated, and that's not just parent-insanity talking.
Also my daughter is super cute and smiley and we secretly suspect she really is unusually adorable, even though we rationally realize that it's mostly hormones. Mostly.
Might I suggest one of the aspects that you may be missing is that mothers are judged as mothers first and humans second in society (at least in America where I live). Often times a woman who doesn't mother as vigorously as another woman is considered less worthy as a human being and less deserving of respect, care, comfort, etc.
I would compare this to ask if men are judged the same way as fathers. For example, if a male CEO doesn't take the day off to nurse his sick infant, is he considered a bad human being and judged as morally a less worthy person?
Or, in my experience, if my male friends are letting their spouses handle taking care of the child for the evening, they are not casually discussed as allowing malnutrition and unkemptness the way women are discussed when they let their husbands take care of the kids while they have a night or a week out for a business trip or just to have some fun.
An interesting thing to note is that women on average were studied to have an additional 2 hours of work per day upon becoming new parents, while men on average have an additional 40 minutes.
The example I would use is a father who looses his job. Is he considered as morally a less worthy person compared to a mother who lost her job?
Cultural we still have gender role leftovers from the perception that mothers are judged based on how they are able to raise children, fathers on how they are able to provide for their children and spouse. A man who can't provide is cultural viewed as an unfit father. A woman who can't raise her children a unfit mother.
In such culture it is of no surprise that the father can take a much more relax attitude to question such as nutrition.
> women on average were studied to have an additional 2 hours of work per day upon becoming new parents, while men on average have an additional 40 minutes.
And how many work hours at the office? Should anyone given our current culture be surprised if fathers spend more time in the office than mothers?
This response is entirely out of scope. This isn't a competition on who works harder, and framing it like this completely ignored my point.
Without understanding gender roles the different in anxiety in fathers and mothers is unexplained, but there is no reason to do so as gender roles is a fairly well documented and understood concept. Even in households that do not perceive the father as the provider and the mother as the caregiver the gender roles in society still imposes expectations that results in anxiety and stress that align identically to those gender roles.
I am not sure where you got the concept of a competition, as the key insight from identify the problems of gender roles is that both women and men suffer from it. A simple decision such as taking a day off to nurse a sick infant should have same outcome for both women and men, but with gender roles pushing the mother to prioritize the child over work and the father to prioritize work over the child the outcome becomes stereotypical.
Yes, that's... kind of what I was pointing at, because the original guy said he was baffled at the anxiety of his wife. That's literally all I'm saying. I'm so confused at your responses.
If anybody else has the same problem: https://outline.com/PrPGFc
When are web devs going to stop this nonsense? Don't override basic behavior.
Annoying++ right there. I guess scroll bars were ugly or too complicated, so they had to go.
https://github.com/gblazex/smoothscroll-for-websites
Actually, I get no scrolling experience.
Solution: Open up devtools and run this in console,
> SmoothScroll.destroy()
I found three ways to scroll the page:
- Click in the scrollbar below the scroll widget; this moves the widget out from under the invisible header, allowing it to be clicked
- Use the Kill Sticky Headers[0] extension to remove the header
- Use reader mode
I've been using Mercury Reader, and the old Readability extension before that, but I like the idea of being able to share readable urls, like you just did.
Edit: Oh, though I guess you actually weren't supposed to do that: https://www.outline.com/dmca.html
"Parenting is a hostage situation: you're in the car, but your child is the one driving it"
I would have said "you're THE car, but your child is the one driving it" :-)
When you've got a baby, or a toddler, you can't just leverage your authority and expect them to comply. It's a slow voyage. And, even when they comply, it may not be a victory; would the author feel better if his child actually used the bear costume?
I suspect from the fact that you said "not my childish hands" that you're referring to your own childhood, and you're not a parent (yet). Maybe you should ask your parents about their feelings.
Sometimes you expect parenthood to be hard, complex, tedious, but oddly satisfying. But it can be totally unsatisfying. Because it's about children, not about parents.
Although getting a hug from time to time is a nice bonus. :)
... so long as you keep pushing when things get tough for you. They'll cave. After a few times, it'll stick and the struggle will get easier. Unless you start caving too fast. Unless you can't handle frustration and deferring goals or altering plans. Then you're so very, very screwed.
Even when they are little (perhaps especially) you can insist on things without being some monster. You can say no, and mean it, without being an awful person.
One of your jobs as a parent is to teach them how to get on with other people, and part of that is realising that no, the world does not revolve entirely around them, and sometimes they can't get their own way.
The author here wasn’t talking about authority, she’s saying that the goal of parenting is ultimately to raise another human being. You can try to be the best parent you can be, but in the end, it’s not about you.
There's a different perspective to that from the standpoint of a middle/upper or a working class family.
In most working class families, time and money are scarce resources and it is the responsibility of parents to allocate them by prioritising the essentials. It is not an option for a father for example to spend more time with his child, when working on a weekend means being able to repair the car which is used for going to work, which guarantees the financial safety of the family.
Affluent families buy time in many ways - by hiring ladies to do their cleaning, by letting their children attend various cultural, educational and sports activities, by having more automated homes, etc.
It may work for the wealthy, but it can be detrimental to the integrity of paycheck-to-paycheck families.
You can bet that when daddy is waking up at 5am so he can be sitting in the cab of an excavator at 6am mommy would be making the whiny 6yo sleep in his own bed. The parenting experience would be very, very different with less emphasis on the needs and whims of the individual child and more emphasis on what's best for the family unit, parents have to work, kids have to go to school. There is little room for compromising the routines around that.
Edit: I'd be interested to know why people disagree with me so much.
You're spot on with what you said and I appreciate your perspective. We cave to the whims of our kids eventually but that's because we earn a large dual income so it's no big deal if the eldest girl wants some new expensive art supplies. She told us that one of her friends has second hand / used clothes for school and doesn't even get her own bedroom. Sometimes I think it's better to grow up with some sort of struggle, our kids will never really know struggles so they'll assume things just come when you want them.
I'm still figuring out the best way to handle this as I'd like to build up resilient kids rather than entitled ones that are confused when they don't get given that $100 block of clay.
The eldest is a straight A student and we told her that straight A's get us off your back. This was a mistake as grades are only one aspect of what is important in raising children. I know try to teach her patience and persistence, how to be confident with people, how to handle angry people and how to negotiate, I feel like some of this is coming too late though however the last 18 months have seen her go from being shy to be being more confident with approaching adults.
It's hard to be a parent, you never know if you're doing the right thing and you don't find out until it's too late!
We do still talk about the good stuff, but we all know they are awesome.
Thankfully most of my FB friends are pretty light on the performative parent posting. The ones who go in for that also tend to be the one who overdo the posting generally.
probably just a typo but I thought this was a great malapropism... assuming you meant ante (as in 'before') and not anti
Although some of the stuff they covered in the classes would have been enough to put many off having kids if they were not already very pregnant :)
" While they were comparing and affirming baby-care choices, my eye was on the babies, and I couldn’t help but notice that one of them was chubbier, calmer and more beautiful than the others. My baby alone had the brilliant promise of profound intelligence shining out of his eyes. He was much better than any of the others. Why wasn’t anyone remarking on this?"
"More good mail days. Join our newsletter."
I think some kind of paywall was squelched by tracker blocking. But it's not worth figuring it out to read more of that.
I converted the article via Outline and read it that way. https://outline.com/PrPGFc
I am an adult.
Probably because every other mother in that room was thinking the same thing about their kid.
* have a 11 month old who’s objectively more cute than every other kid in the room.
I can only say this so emphatically over the internet, but if you have not yet had kids, and you even remotely enjoy your life, DO NOT HAVE KIDS. Source: I am a dad.
They are in incredible burden that you cannot imagine or conceptualize prior. The company you founded, the marathons you ran, your PhD thesis, etc., these are all peanuts. Having a kid is like running a marathon every day for a year. If that sounds like fun to you, then go right ahead.
There are 8 billion people on the planet. You don't need them to run the farm, if you want to mentor someone there are lots of opportunities already. It's also a shit job. Kiss your weekends and evenings and any other free time goodbye. Like exercising? Good luck squeezing that in. Where this idea came from that having kids should be the default in life I have no idea, but it has got to stop.
The test I give my childless friends is to ask them what percent certain they are that they want kids. If it's less than 100% (and it usually is) I tell them not to have kids.
GET A DOG!
And still if I had the choice, I’d do it again.
Why is that?
Haha .... I agree.
The first kid is the hardest. For the second one, you think you've wised up, and it is still difficult for different reasons.
It is like every time you think you have solved the parenting issues and leveled up, the kids evolve too and present you with entirely new issues you were not prepared for.
And yet, like the other poster said, I'll still do it and go through it again.
[EDIT] Children are a joy, if you understand and respect them. Sometimes they need to be treated like adults, sometimes like the kids they are. The trick is to figure out which to apply when. To paraphrase Antoine de Saint-Exupéry [1].
"Children exist to remind adults, what it is to be a child again."
[1] All grown-ups were children first. (But few of them remember it.)
Of course I'm also single and never been married so this may be a "me" issue...
> If it's less than 100% (and it usually is) I tell them not to have kids.
I need to disagree with your first point, I loved my life before kids and I love my life with kids.
I think the key is your second point, make sure you're ready.
I do not agree with the "don't have kids" advice. I have two grown-up kids; no regrets whatsoever. Neither child was planned (yeah, two accidents!) You have to be quite unlucky, I think, to have kids that don't make you happy.
Having said that, there's a good argument that the world is already full-up, that the world is getting worse, and that bringing kids into the world is not a kindness. I'm OK with not having kids for those reasons; and I'm also OK with not having kids because you have better things to do with your time. No judgements, be happy your own way.
Nobody is a good parent; we're all beginners, none of us has ever done it before. It works out; kids can deal with crap parents, otherwise our race would have died out.
BTW, I used to spank my kids when they were naughty. Word of advice: do not do that. Even if it's legal where you live, it is just a way of expressing your anger, it solves no problems. Grown-ups should never beat-up children, not even gently.
Um, dawgs, no thanks. I'm not enthusiastic about hoovering. I'd sooner change nappies (or become a school governor).
Child-rearing only takes about 15 years. It really isn't a river of tears; a lot of it is fun. Children can be a total gas. When it's over, they leave, and chances are you'll be on your own again, with nothing left but photos and memories.
You have to take care of a set of daily tasks to keep them happy and healthy. If you work, you'll have to send the child to daycare, which you don't have to do with a dog, but for me personally, there's some mental stress associated with leaving a dog home alone all day. Other than that, you can't just up and leave your house for longer than a work day without making arrangements for either kids or dogs. Naturally, there are certain kinds of vacations that you can't take with children, but in my experience, most people vastly overestimate how much time they'll actually spend travelling the world over the next decade or two.
Dogs have to be walked regularly enough that I don't think it's unreasonable to say that a lot of people will spend more time actively caring for their dog than they would caring for a child once the child is older than 5 or 6, at least when the child doesn't have a ridiculous amount of extracurriculars, though that's far from universal. Some kids are quite self-sufficient, though.
In my mind, the major thing that makes dogs less of a responsbility is that they don't live as long, but then no one ever just has one dog, they tend to string together 30 or 40 years of dogs, whereas kids are theoretically out of the house after 18 years.
Lest it be said that I must not have much experience with kids, I have 4 and have been a stay at home dad. It must also be said that I derive much more joy from interacting with my kids than I do from interacting with my pets so my whole perspective is certainly biased.
All in all, I think culture has instilled in us this fear that we'll ruin our children's lives if we just let them be children and that has made having children so much more daunting and intense and exhausting than I think it needs to be(though babies, I fear, will always be intense and exhausting).
I occasionally leave my two dogs at home, outside, alone, over night.
Their water is on a timer.
Dogs can go days without food.
You can leave a dog at home alone.
Dogs can eat rotting food, including meat.
Dogs can be trained to sit and wait in silence.
You can put dogs in a cage for hours and they just take it and wait.
If I can’t be arsed running with them I get in the car and they run on the footpath beside me for 10k.
If a dog gets to ill or too physically incapable you can take it round to a mates place and shoot it in the head.
Of course I don’t train as much as I used too. And most of my old hobbies are on hold for a couple of years. But I haven’t regretted a second that we got a child.
It does change you, and it is a lot of work. But it's been the most contextualizing experience of my life. I don't want my old life back, even though I was very happy with it. A lot of things that I was happy with were relatively meaningless in a big-picture sort of way. I'm not partying on the weekend? Oh, well, thank god, I should have had kids earlier!
Nothing I've ever experienced can match the pure joy of coming home and having my kid run up to give me a giant hug. Everything else pales next to it. I went though a lot of job angst a couple of years ago but none of it could overshadow the happiness I felt just being able to read my kid to sleep at night. It's incompatible.
I mean, if you feel you don't want to bring kids into this turbulent, uncertain world, by all means don't, but please also recognize that one of life's biggest purposes is to beget life and we will do nothing (and have never done anything) if we didn't reproduce
I find this argument extremely offensive. Do you think the life of a child born in a +3C USA is going to be worse than the life of an adult currently in say Bangladesh? If not, the implication is that it wasn’t “ethical” for the parents of living Bangladeshis to have had kids given how “hard” their lives are. That currently living Bangladeshis would’ve been better off never being born than suffer such a low standard of living.
Presumably, there is a standard of living where it becomes “ethical” to have children. Show me where in the happiness scale (from Norway at the top to Central African Republic at the bottom) that transition happens: https://news.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/206468/happiest-unhap.... Italy has a happiness rating a full point lower than the US. Was it “unethical” for the previous generation of Italians to birth the current generation of Italians into such a hard life? Or do we need to go further down the scale? About a point below Italy is Nigeria. Is that the transition point? Once you can expect your kids to have a quality of life better than that of Nigerians currently, it’s ethical to have kids?
Arthur! I love you buddy! And I am also allowed to not like being a parent, it's a weird thing, but trust me it has nothing to do with you, you are the best! The best analogy I can give is that it's like how even though you have teachers you really like, you might not like that you have to go to school every day.
I hope that my own honesty about this will help you make your own choice when the time comes. The bottom line is, having kids is not the only acceptable path in life, though it is usually presented that way.
Fortunately I'm not a disinterested farm investor. The kids bring meaning to life.
One time, my grandmother asked her father to look after his three young grandsons so she could get some work done in peace.
He sat them all in a row on the counter and gave them candy to keep them busy as he started to tell them a story.
A customer observing this scene said: "Look at you, you must be so proud to have three such beautiful grandsons!"
To which he replied: "Yeah, you couldn't pay me millions of dollars to part with a single one of them...but I wouldn't give a dollar for another one though..."
Sure, things in my life peeled away after having children, but I also gained a tremendous amount as well.
It’s all perspective. Enjoy the ride, don’t regret your children.
Nowadays it's rare to have more than 2-3 siblings. In the old days, everyone pretty much had older and younger siblings, and lots of them. So the "dealing with children" skill was well practised and common.
I juxtapose that situation with myself. Although I had neices and nephews, I didn't spend any significant time with children until I had my own (late 30's). And wow what a shock! I had lived mostly for myself, for decades prior. All the work and responsibility for dealing with babies and toddlers was a real surprise. If I knew anything about kids, I'd long forgotten it.
It's been one hell of a learning curve. My kids are really creative and clever. They can be kind and generous, they can be little fiends. They can be sweet as honey or ornery as can be. But they're PEOPLE. When you make kids you make PEOPLE. Miraculous and banal all at the same time.
But when people say kids are terrible because they take up too much time, stress you out, cause you to loose sleep, yes, all of that is true.
But it would be the same as saying “Dogs are terrible because you have to pick up their food, you have to find someone to watch them when you travel, their vet bills are so expensive.” Again, all true, but those statements completely ignore the positives.
Sure, the world doesn't need more people, you certainly don't NEED kids but come on.
The key reasons boil down to "you'll have more responsibilities, it's hard work, and will need to share your life with other people and not make it all about you". You even somehow managed to utter "the company you founded" in that same sentence.
Having done both, I'd say raising children is actually lot like starting a company, just requires a lot more discipline and is more stressful. It would happen that I tried to do both at the same time, and both are hard work, you pile on responsibilities, reduce hobbies and "me time" and become responsible for other people's lives in the process and in both you're essentially fucked without strong willpower and discipline. I wasn't good enough to do both at the same time so I sold off and left the company and got a well paying 9-5.
Btw the ticket out of the "children situation" for man-children (and sorry but you managed to paint yourself as one) also exists, it's not impossibly hard and, assuming you'd do your fair share of obligations, could possibly even benefit your wife and kid(s).
I too hated the lack of "me time", don't get me wrong. I had a hobby I was deeply passionate about and really got back to it (and still fairly infrequently) only when my kids were well into school age. I also gained about 12 kg (some 25 pounds) that it took me years of gym, running and mountaineering more-less just to halve and I don't really go down from there (tho my "build quality" did improve :) ). I've also halved my learning rate in things, had to rearrange my priorities and generally "streamline" my career in many ways.
But here's the other side of it. Had I not become a parent I'd probably have fucked up my business. Neither of the issues were me not having enough time -- most were not knowing enough, not being man enough and not being mature enough. The children might have hindered my speed of improving in the first thing but have made me surmount a Mont Everest in the latter two -- which I don't feel that I would be able to (short of some traumatic experience). I'm much more confident as a man than I would ever be without having them and knowing them.
Also children return on that investment of time, nerves and forgoing with (at least in that age between two/three and puberty) unreserved love you'll never witness (and I've had dogs and kitties so, no, sorry, no contest there really), and later, with slowly becoming men (well, people, It's just that I have two boys) and although much of their accomplishment has fuckall to do with you, you can't help but be filled with pride.
I regret a thing or two in my life, but having them was the best damn thing that ever happened to me.