Life Gets Complicated and Parenting Adds to It

I couldn't stomach reading the entire New York magazine article about hating parenting and how unhappy parents are compared to non-parents. I'm a subscriber to the magazine and learned of the article's existance when I read through my mail and saw the cover last week. I read the first half immediately upon opening my mail then tossed it aside in disgust.

All Joy and No Fun: Why Parents Hate Parenting by Jennifer Senior
cover headline "I love my children. I hate my life."

The bottom line is I think the issue is that as we get older life gets more complicated. The older we get the more bad stuff starts to happen. (Good stuff happens too but it's the more difficult things that seem to stick in our memory or we feel it changes us for the negative in some way.) People we love, like our parents get sick, may suffer, then die. Our childhood friends or college roommates may die in their 30s, shocking us because no one OUR age is supposed to die so young.

If we marry life becomes also about our spouse and their extended family too, which adds more complications.

Adding a child to one's life means life is not just all about us anymore. Life doesn't revolve around our personal happiness and our own personal growth on a trajectory of our choosing.

Today we are told to strive for the best in everything we do. We are told what to eat that is good for us and what to avoid. We are told what common things we perhaps should not partake in (cigarettes, alcohol and so forth). We are told to exercise. It is no longer good enough to just work to make money to survive we are supposed to be on a quest for the ultimate in personal self-growth. Always moving up and expanding our horizons! That's our work life, I'm not even talking about spiritual growth there.

Trying to do it all is nearly impossible even for a child-less adult. Trying to do it all and all at the same time is impossible and causes feelings of defeat and failure.

Those of us who are parents have our hands full. It's not like what my parents had to deal with in the 1970s. Now we are told by lots of experts what to do and what not to do. We are counseled in the media about feeding our kids, not letting them go outside too much lest they get kidnapped, molested, sunburned or bitten by mosquitoes (West Nile Virus!).

Since my first child was born thirteen years ago the media and marketers have been pushing to help our children develop properly and ideally with things like crib mobiles that provide brain stimulation with black and white patterns, or cartoon faces since some study said that babies respond to human faces. We were told to play classical music all night long so our kids developed to be a genius. (I have no clue what people were advised to do pre-1997 as I was too busy living my child-less life to notice. But compared to my childhood what kids live today and what my middle class parents did or did not do, it is night and day.)

Upper middle class and upper class stay at home mothers (even those with two college degrees fully capable of being with two, three and four year old children all day and providing an enriching life experience) are pushed to enroll children into for-profit private preschools so they are Kindergarten-ready. Elementary school has changed into more formal academics pushed down younger and younger.

We are told to always be watching for signs of this and that. Does the child have speech delay? Signs of autism? Signs of ADD or ADHD? Signs of a learning disability? We are supposed to notice then do something about it to fix it and make it go away. If we do not do this we are negligent parents, failures who should maybe not have the priviledge of raising children, and maybe even the state will take the kids away from us and put them in a very-flawed foster care system.

While juggling everything a typical American adult has to deal with then adding in the pressures to be a perfect parent it is no wonder that parents feel stressed out. The constant pressure to perform at a high level can get to a person. It is easy to point to the children as the cause or a large contributing factor at least. "If only I was childless I could deal with helping my mother with her chronic illness and juggle arranging in-home Hospice care for my grandmother and really if I wasn't at home with the kids, ever, I might have really been raking in the bucks at my career (having not ever quit it) and thus my husband's current unemployment would not be such a financial strain and we'd not have the pressure of contributing to our kid's college savings fund".

Yada, yada, yada.

Another thing that happens is even when we're feeling great about our parenting we have someone telling us what we're doing wrong. We have "let ourselves go". We are so busy with our kids we are 25 pounds overweight. We have gray hairs coming in and don't get our hair dyed as we must not care about our personal appearance since we are so focused on raising our kids. We may get our kids to all their sports events but we don't invest a much smaller amount of money toward our own exercise endeavors let alone the time to exercise.

And if we try too hard to be good parents it must be an "unhealthy level" of dedication. Maybe we are labeled a helicopter parent or someone living vicariously through our children. I disagree. Some of us are just trying to give our kids a good life, maybe better than we had, maybe offering them more choices than we feel we ever had. These are ageless ideas that have persisted for generations and generations and they are not bad or unhealthy.

Yeah, without kids a person really has themselves to blame or to pat on the back if their lives suck or are wonderful. If stress comes from a cheating spouse we could blame them. A parent with Cancer that we help out, we can blame them, or blame Cancer, or blame the doctors, or blame (fill in the blank). If our main focus in life was climbing the corporate ladder and we lost our job we could blame any number of things. Seldom does a person blame themselves for what goes wrong especially if they are so self-centered anyway. When the focus is "all about you" the last thing a person usually does is blame themselves (even when it truly is the cause of the problem).

I argue that as we get older life gets more complicated, for all of us. However how we assign blame or credit for what happens in our life is up to us. I think that being a parent is just a scapegoat, so blame the fact that a person is a parent for them being less happy.

I have serious doubts about the studies that show that parents are less happy. I would like to read the test questions and see where the bias lies. Is it skewed to blame being a parent for everything? I doubt it.

Many parents are busy living. We have our hands full. Our lives are not perfect, usually for a number of reasons. Stuff happens, period, and the more time goes by, the more challenges life can bring: challenges with us, our spouse, our kids, our parents, our careers, money, our extended family and many other things.

Add to that fact that the work never ends when parenting, we have responsibility for our kids 24/7 (unless we put them in charge of other adults for childcare). Even then the kids are a consideration for everything. When to go on vacation: check the kid's school schedule. Is going to that place worth it with kids or is that more of an adult-only vacation? Can we afford the airfare for a family of four? Well if we were just a couple we could afford it but not now (blame the kid's existance for our lack of financial ability to take an exotic vacation).

Parenting has made me grow up and mature more than any one other thing in my life. Parenting has made me less selfish and self-centered. Parenting has changed who I am as a person, for the good, I believe. The worst that it did was made me more serious, due to various challenges I've had. No, I'm not as silly and carefree as I was in LBK but that was also because then I had little responsibilities. I was in my 20s and my focus was on my career and being in love or looking for love. I was healthy and young and it felt like I'd live forever. Life was good. Many things that were simple back then are now more complicated. Some happy good things in my life became problem-filled or are now gone (an old friend is now an enemy, multiple loved ones have passed away, so forth and so on). These things are all about me and not about parenting but they have made my life less happy or more challenging.

The hardest things I had to deal with as a parent were the ones when something was physically wrong with a child and I was in charge of getting them correct treatment in a timely manner lest there not be permanent damage or death. That can really affect a person, and age them, I contend. Also difficult is dealing with signs of a learning disability and getting that addressed lest the kid's future be impaired in some negative way. The push to educate children well less you screw up their entire adult life is present in America today also.

I really have no desire to spend my time reading writings of people whining about how hard parenting is and how it has made their lives so miserable. (The worst is those who intentionally got pregnant then seem tortured at all the work it is. The ones I have the least patience for are those who whined about infertility and went through great effort and monetary expense and medical procedures to get pregnant then seemed eternally miserable.)

I guess the unhappy parents have not yet learned that once you have a child life is not all about you anymore, you are responsible for someone who is dependent on you to do the right thing and raise them well. Yes, that's a hard job.

I honestly feel most adults are capable and if they so choose, they can step up to the plate and do the right thing to be good parents. As Nike says, Just Do It.

I wish some people would just shut up and stop complaining, grow up, accept responsibility and do the right thing: parent your kids well (as that's a major responsibility), besides that, attend to all the other stuff in your life as best you can, and accept imperfection.

Now to combine parenting with dealing with everything else in life is a real challenge, and therein, I believe, lies the real issue. Life gets complicated the older we get, in many areas (money, health, relatives). That's life. We can't control everything, we have to learn to roll with it and deal with the issues as best we can in each moment.

No one ever said life was a cakewalk or fun all the time. Perhaps the real issue is when people refuse to see they are looking at life with wrong perspectives or that they expected too much to come from little effort. Attitude shifts and perception changes must come from within and I bet with a little change of perspective the same life can be viewed as wonderful, worthwhile, good, and successful. I also bet that the biggest complainers live a life that many in our world would label priviledged and ideal, it's just a shame that those living really what is a great life view it as living a tortured existance. That's crazy, in fact.