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> 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 ... was much better than any of the others. Why wasn’t anyone remarking on this?
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.
Really appreciate your post! I'm a dad who also takes an active role in raising and nurturing his kids. I agree with your point at the end about responsibility, but another way of looking at the author's reframing of "parenting" as "childing" is that the parent is also on the receiving end of the experience. As a parent I've found I've learned a tremendous amount of patience, humility, perspective, perseverance, and self-awareness from the role, so I found a lot of truth in that idea.
"as a father I was clearly not welcome"
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.
> 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
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.
Baby goggles. Your own kid is clearly the most talented/intelligent/cute of the bunch. It's probably an adaptive response, because any kid whose parents thought other kids were more talented/intelligent/cute probably didn't survive long in our ancestral environment.
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.
Re school play: the phenomenon also neatly explains why Gene Hackman's line as Royal in The Tenenbaum's - "just a bunch of kids in animal costumes" - is so funny.
We’ve never given our baby formula (made it almost 11 months so far) and the thing that really frustrates me, as a new father, is to watch my wife struggle to feed our kid and work full time because she’s been told she needs to breast feed. I’m not arguing the health benefits, but if I were, here’s one for you:
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?
This woman agrees with you.
>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...
We gave our son both. My wife breastfed him in the mornings and in the evenings when she worked, and in between he got formula. He’s as healthy and strong as anyone.
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.
It's truly insane. My wife is panicked over it. She's _only_ producing about 1500mL per day. Which is an insane amount of milk. But, we have 5 month old twins. She can no longer keep pace with their needs. We have a freezer stash of her own milk plus some donor milk from a friend, but we will run out in ~2 months by my estimate. She's slowly coming around to the idea of doing their last feeding of the day with formula. I hope we're now on a path to start weening back the scale and magnitude of pumping operations in our home. It's been... quite a ride.
The pendulum really has swung too far on breast feeding.
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.
So true! The bias towards breastfeeding is out of control. It's nutrition / calories, not magic fairy dust.
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.
Always remember that your kid will eat a fair amount of hamburgers, ramen and pizza ten years later. And beer, twenty years later.
Obviously breastfeeding is better if you can, but no need to lose sleep over it.
I usually stay the heck away from parenting articles but there was a genuine honesty to this one.
> "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 a newish dad this is relatable but not as much as for my wife. There is so much pressure and she is constantly telling me she feels like a bad mom. I say listen , who cares about the media or twitter. There is always some person posting on instagram about how they make a gourmet vegan meal for their baby. As a male, an alternative dude, and a bit of a stoner with open mind I can pretty easy filter out all the crap and focus in on what matters. Not as easy for the females, i have mad respect for all the moms out there grinding.
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
I wondered when our first one came out and looked pretty damn good from, literally, minute one, just how powerful those my-own-kid-is-cute hormones must be. I mean even cute kids are a bit ugly for the first week or two, right? Certainly the first hour. Figured strangers were just being kind when they said (several times) that we should try to get her in commercials or something ("the pictures", one old guy said, hahaha) when she was still under 90 days old.
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.
"As a newish dad this is relatable but not as much as for my wife. There is so much pressure and she is constantly telling me she feels like a bad mom. I say listen , who cares about the media or twitter. There is always some person posting on instagram about how they make a gourmet vegan meal for their baby. As a male, an alternative dude, and a bit of a stoner with open mind I can pretty easy filter out all the crap and focus in on what matters. Not as easy for the females, i have mad respect for all the moms out there grinding."
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.
I often read about moms feeling bad because of other moms' perfectly curated instagram feeds. As someone who doesn't remember ever feeling instagram envy - and btw all photos of my adorable children that I post are adorable :) - I must admit I'm envious of people whose feelings of sadness and inadequacy are cased by things farther removed from day to day life. For me the most disheartening feelings are usually the result of interactions with people close to me, mother and mother in law particularly so. Nine years after becoming a parent I still am unable to not let it phase me when my mother says "oh, they never act in this [terrible] way when you're not around" or when my mother in law asks "oh, did you want to brush her hair before the family photo?" "did you want me to get some cute plates for her birthday party so she feels special?". I'm sure much it can be helped by me just growing thicker skin - but I do feel lonelier sometimes when I think, people worry about instagram, they don't often talk about family making them feel like they are not good enough, I guess it is me.
I haven't got a lot to add apart from saying that my experience parallels your own. We have an eight-month-old, our first, and my wife feels inadequate all the time because she can't ignore the carefully cultivated facades from 'influencer' parents. Rationally she knows that these standards are impossible and unnecessary, but we humans don't get to select our anxieties.
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.
I can't scroll this at all with Chrome on Android?
If anybody else has the same problem: https://outline.com/PrPGFc
I'm on desktop firefox 70 and I can't scroll either.
When are web devs going to stop this nonsense? Don't override basic behavior.
Same problem for me in Firefox on Windows. Scrolling using cursor keys doesn't work. Using the scroll wheel on the mouse doesn't work. Scrolling by clicking and dragging the scroll widget also doesn't work, because the page puts a transparent header at the top of the page, that somehow extends over into the scrollbar, blocking the widget!
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
Ooh, I don't know Outline. Does it have a browser extension? I can't find one.
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
Can't scroll on firefox 60 on Debian either. Works fine by blocking all scripts with umatrix or in reader mode.
I'm on Chrome on MacOS and could scroll with magic mouse, but no keyboard scrolling via arrows or spacebar.
Horribly broken as it doesn't even scroll in netsurf.
It works fine if you don't run scripts on the page.
One great excerpt:
"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" :-)
> "you're THE car, but your child is the one driving it"
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.
This kind of attitude towards children baffles me. It was always very clear where the authority lay in my family, and it certainly was not in my childish hands. You did what you were told, and with not too much grumbling. It's a much more effective system, by all indications.
The author is lamenting how much the whims of the child control her parenting. I don't want to make this about wealth but it kind of has to be. Wealth buys the freedom to cater to these whims and make the cost seem justified. This is normal to her because the author lives somewhere and associates with people in similar situations, it's the local status quo. The kind of stuff the author describes does not fly in families of lesser means. Good for her for having those means but her experience is not universal.
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 were down voted because this is HN and someone felt offended.
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!
The wealthy are building a generation of softies. Every kid has some kind of 'issue' now and they need special coddling.
Of course it's from a wealthy perspective. The author was raising her kid in Silicon Valley in the the 2000s. Even before the startup/VC explosion, it was expensive to live there. It's a good piece of writing, but also very sheltered and privileged. Not everyone has the luxury to romanticize parenting as a "hostage situation" where the child is always in control.
Cosleeping is actually substantially more common in low-income households.
Just more evidence that everyone parents differently. My friends hardly hear about the good stuff that my kids do. I want to talk about the grime and the shit and the speech delays and the temper tantrums. That's the stuff I feel like I need to get off my chest, when I'm afraid for their future.
We and most of the parents we know probably spend more time talking about the crappy bits of parenting than how awesome our kids are. The single best part of doing anti-natal classes was meeting a small group of people who were all going through the same kinds of stuff we were. Knowing "It's not just me" is a really big help coping with some of the tougher stuff.
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.
From the unscrollable article:
" 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 couldn't tell if the site itself was screwed up or if it was something on my end.
I converted the article via Outline and read it that way. https://outline.com/PrPGFc
Parents don't make adults out of children, children make adults out parents.
I don't have children.
I am an adult.
> 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 ... was much better than any of the others. Why wasn’t anyone remarking on this?
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 read the author as being fully self-aware and assuming we understand that that is the case.
This was just an incredibly thoughtful essay and really captured some of the deeper movements of raising children better than most “OMG, raising children is NUTZ!” essays.
Beautiful piece of writing, thanks for posting this.
I made this meme to express what the first year of parenting is like: https://youtu.be/-br6dC69vdk
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!