Standard Parent Question

[entertainme]

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New mothers can be amazingly smug and think that they have somehow been granted maturity and centrality to the universe's goings-on by popping out a larva.

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Do you ever have anything good to say about women, besides in regards to their looks? Every time women and specifically children come up you seem to have a huge chip on your shoulder.

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Are you ever not defensive and generalizing?

I'll say this about women -- they all too often think their sex and any members of it are off limits to criticism. Retaliatory accusations, even when you're not being attacked, such as the one you just made, are strangely enough not that uncommon.

If you said men can be jerks, do you think many men would disagree with you or paint you with the huge clumsy brush of misanthropy just for noting something so clearly true?

If not, why do you think it is okay for you to do that to me?

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I apologize if I was out of line here. In my defense, I have noticed repeated posts on your part, most in OOT probably, that seem negative on parenthood. However, I did generalize and that's not fair.

I acknowledge that you and I come from completely different life experiences and it probably makes it hard for us to relate on this topic specifically.

FWIW I don't think my sex is off limits to criticism. Far from it. One thing you and I do seem to agree on is the realities of human nature.

[Blarg]

Apology accepted.

We do come from different backgrounds. I think mine is very different than most, so my perspectives may seem unusual to a lot of people. Our family was a foster family that took in kids after their parents had truly messed up. I learned through daily living with their kids the results of poor parenting, and it took a lot of the magic out of idyllic notions of motherhood and parenthood. I came to see them as what they really are, which is not a bad thing, but an ordinary thing and a difficult thing that can easily be messed up, and one with pretty huge repercussions when it is messed up.

So I'm not negative on parenthood, but I realize that it can be and very often is bungled. Sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. It's just like any other part of life that way. But as a society, we tend to mythologize parenthood and childhood a lot, so talking frankly about it can seem very negative and unnerving, like a buzzkill, when really it's just bringing things back down to earth.

To be clear, I don't blame all the potential problems in parenting on women, too. Parenting takes two. Dads can, and do, mess up all the time. Lots of the kids we got were raped and/or beaten and/or tortured by their dads. (But believe it or not, women do messed up sexual stuff to their kids too.) And of course there are plenty of ways to mess up badly without anything that catastrophic.

One of the things I took from dealing with all those kids myself at such a young age was that parenthood is a really serious undertaking with profound consequences for both parent and child, and that it should not be undertaken lightly or with the idea that things will just work themselves out. Things basically don't. Generally speaking, YOU work them out. Or not. We got other people's "or nots." False pride and idiot optimism can leave quite a trail of carnage.

So many of those kids seemed so traumatized, almost ruined even at, say, four years old, that it made me worry a great deal for their future. How easy is it to pull yourself up by your bootstraps if what you understand about the universe is that it's basically hell? If these kids grew up even halfway normal, it would be a small miracle.

Yet they were going to have to go out there and compete. Among other things, that experience made me promise myself that I would never have kids unless I was truly ready to give them a truly good life, and one with the full scope of opportunities needed to remain competitive with their peers. I don't want them struggling to catch up from behind. In my mind, the kid and his needs come first, always, not the needs of the parents for fulfillment, conformity, to be optimistic, to please their church, anything like that. I really don't care about adult dreams in comparison to the dreams of the kid. And when people talk about their dreams, and insist everything will work out fine and that there's never anything to worry about or really prepare for, I think they are vain and still children themselves.

Unfortunately, I have seen a good number of people, including some real clods, credit themselves with wisdom just because they have proved their fertility. I am not first in line to praise people's fertility, nor even their hopes and dreams, much less their wisdom regarding parenthood or anything else if yet unearned. My first thought is always, "Enough about you. What about the kid?"

[daveT]

It takes no talent to make a child.

[Blarg]

Absolutely. Any dog can do it. It has nothing to do with being a good parent.

[wheelflush]

conspire,
keep doing what you're doing. mom knows she isn't going to change your mind. you just caught her in an honest moment.
i have a picture of my son with my dad, grandpa, great-grandma, and me. that right there is worth more than my house. there's nothing wrong with a kid living in an apartment.

[Klompy]

Conspire,

I've felt pressure to reproduce and be married from both my parents, and my grandparents. I get it WAY worse from my grandparents though. They're really sad every time I see them and I'm not married even though I'm 23. I'm sure this all comes down to them wanting to see their line continue, but it certainly gets on my nerves.

My parents don't usually give me to much grief about it, as I'm the youngest son out of 3 and the oldest is married with no children and the other and I are still single. Most of the pressure is on the married one.

Blarg,

What age were you in relation to these children when you started finding out really messed up stuff about them, IE they were molested? Were you still young enough that you didn't understand everything yet?

edit: I understand this is personal, and I understand if you don't want to share.

[Blarg]

We started being a foster family when I was about 9. I understood everything. My parents told me some of why some of the kids were there, partially to not keep secrets from me and partially because it would help explain some of their bizarre behavior. Sometimes they had sexual problems and behavior, sometimes they were violent or unreasoning, sometimes they were fearful seemingly for no reason, or bizarrely clingy, or more angry or scared toward one sex than another, and it didn't make sense until you found out about the back story. Then it made more sense and it was easier to deal with on a daily basis. If you learned that a kid was scared to death of bags or taking a bath, and why, you wouldn't try to press those ordinary things on him and would find a work-around and give him extra room. If you found out about his sexual background it was easier to be compassionate and calm rather than freaked out when he acted out, etc. We also occasionally saw something out in the community about it, like the dad went to jail, or the mom left her infant and two toddlers naked at the bus stop all weekend while she went and partied and they were finally turned in to the police by some passerby, etc. The biological parents were always a presence in their kids' lives, too, and that meant they were also part of ours one way or another. I'm sure I wasn't told every story's every detail, but I was told or picked up on most of it.

[MiloMinderbinder]

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I wish they would tell you to not die of AIDS in the next week.

Or in other words: If you are still so childish to have this attitude, then you probably shouldn't be breeding anytime soon anyway.

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Not a mod of this forum, but I think you took a wrong turn somewhere. OOT is one line up on the sidebar.

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Thank you VR. You are right about the tone of this post. This is inappropriate for the Lounge. Nothing wrong with disagreement and vigorous debate in this forum however, Milo, let's not be so rude as to wish AIDS on other loungers please. Thank you.

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I didn't wish AIDS on anyone. I wished for parents warning of AIDS. Which is sensible advice. How OP uses that parental advice is up to him.

[bogey1]

Blarg,

No offense meant, but you're pretty strident about only bringing in children under, what to me sounds like, near idealic circumstances.

However, given your experiences, I can certainly understand it! I'd probably have that view too if I'd seen what you've seen. I'd have an almost gut level fear of exposing a child to those kinds of traumas.

Reminds me a little of the "Truman Show" where Truman was exposed to horror stories about travel so often he'd never want to travel. Similarly, I have to wonder if your over exposure to the extreme of potential child issues has given you an overly cautious mindset about people having children.

[Blarg]

That's one way to look at it. But there seems to me at least as much going for taking my outlook as rock solid reasonable, which is that when having kids, thinking about what you're going to be able to do for the kid comes first, not what the kid is going to be able to do for you. It bothers me a great deal that when people talk about having kids, it very often comes across as though they are talking about accessories to their own lives, as if sprucing up an outfit, rather than taking the kid's point of view and putting much thought into the ramifications for the child of creating a life.

It seems backwards and selfish to me to just have kids and only then think about your responsibilities to them. To me, the least a parent owes a kid is an excellent chance at the same living standard as his parents. That doesn't doesn't seem in the least overly cautious to me; more like, "Hey, fair is fair." It seems to me a minimal standard to strive for, not an outlandish one.

I think that very clearly reflects the "kid first" outlook, and that's the one that I think is healthy and responsible. The "me first" outlook seems fine when you're a kid yourself and being self-centered is fine, or at least minimally damaging for getting through life. But when you become a parent, I think you have to step up your game dramatically, and if you're not prepared to do that, you are not ready for parenthood, no matter how much you want children.

It even seems to me kind of sad and odd that our standards may have slipped so badly that being able to give your kid a better life, that progressing through the generations, has become just another option and not a compelling one. That the moral flabbiness of our society may have extended so deeply even into such matters so dear to us as raising our children strikes me as an enormous moral and ego failure of society and individuals.

It certainly would indicate that downward mobility will only increase and that the unsuccessful family could be moving much closer to the norm.