On Parenthood

[Elok]

Been mulling it over since Lori expressed uncertainty about it. Since a surprising number of us have kids, I thought I'd ask:

In my experience, parenting is not hard in the sense of tough decision-making. Most of the time--thus far--it has been pretty obvious what I needed to do for my kid at any given moment. The chief difficulty lay in summoning up the willpower to do it right instead of taking the easy way out. The exact nature of the challenge varies. Right now, my job is basically to check, every fifteen seconds or so for as long as I have the conn, what my kid is doing. If he is doing something dangerous, destructive or aggravating to others, I redirect him to something more acceptable. If not, I wait another fifteen seconds, then reassess. This gets tedious, but it doesn't require an Einstein. Now for my question, for all you more experienced parents: is it like this the whole way through? Or is there a point when the challenges become more complex?

Also, today I had a girl tell me her parents had a special fund set up to bail her out in case she got arrested during Senior Week. After confirming that she was not screwing with me, I asked her, "Okay, did you run over a puppy on the way here too? Y'know, in case that wasn't depressing enough." Just throwing that out there.

[snoopy369]

I don't recall how old your little one is, but certainly at this point it's not always straightforward for me (2 year old). Dealing with temper tantrums, and figuring out how to solve the root problems rather than get angry or even fix the superficial problems, is very hard.

[Elok]

Maybe I'm just blessed with a really mellow kid; he's about twenty months old, and he's experimenting with fussing to get his way, but hasn't discovered the tantrum yet. He doesn't get sick all that often, either, and when he does it's minor. Well, we'll see.

[Elok]

My wife is breast-feeding a stuffed sheep right now, at the boy's insistence. One the one hand, it's kind of weird. On the other, hey, our boy knows how to share!

[Guynemer]

I don't recall how old your little one is, but certainly at this point it's not always straightforward for me (2 year old). Dealing with temper tantrums, and figuring out how to solve the root problems rather than get angry or even fix the superficial problems, is very hard.

The root problem is the kid is two years old. They don't have a conscience at that age, nor empathy. They are pure id. Two year olds are all sociopaths.

It will get better.

[SlowwHand]

You are certainly in the wrong field.

It's not the road they travel, it's each step of the road. You don't put them on a huge bicycle and shove them out into the street. Everything you do, whether you recognize it or not, is important.

[Lorizael]

I can't speak from any experience at all, but here's my take: Eventually, you're physically incapable of checking on your child every 15 seconds. Eventually, they go elsewhere, interact with others, go to school, make friends, etc. But more to the point, you lose control and information. As far as your child is concerned right now, you are both omniscient and omnipotent. When that's no longer the case, my guess is you have to get a little bit more creative with your decisions.

[regexcellent]

When the kids are smarter I expect it'll take a little bit more cleverness to keep him on the straight and narrow. When he's 14, you've gotta make sure he stays out of trouble, off drugs, and busy with productive work.

[snoopy369]

Largely, if you've done a reasonable job of parenting up to that point and are a bit lucky, the 14 year old keeps himself off of drugs and out of trouble. I certainly did as a kid.

Yes, the root problem (in part) is the two year oldness. But that doesn't mean when he's screaming at me about not going to bed that there isn't something there, sometimes; sometimes it's not. That's where I feel it's hard. Not impossible hard, or even Civ4-Deity level hard. More like Civ4-King level hard. But figuring out whether to let him cry or console him is hard - and both are the right answer for different times.

Also, difficult for me at least is managing the day. I really like doing things with my kids (2 and 6mo); we go to the park as often as possible, to the zoo, on trips to the store, whatever. The two year old really, really likes getting out of the house. That makes it easy to forget that he's 2, and has a lot of burst-energy but not very much staying power. A Saturday where we leave at 10 for the zoo, stay until 3, then go to Costco for an hour, then go home and eat dinner, then go to the park for an hour, then go to bed, sounds like a lot of fun - but he's fussy halfway through Costco because you've had him out six hours already and then he won't eat dinner and then he won't go to bed well, because I didn't pay enough attention to making sure he had some spacing in his day and plenty of relaxation.

20 months was a lot easier than 26, I will say; around 23-24 months is when he hit the wall in terms of "No" and becoming really possessive of us. Of course, around 20 months we had another one, and it seems likely that some of the stress from that just moved forward 4-6 months, because while he was really very well adapted to having the newborn here, now that the baby is starting to try to crawl and play with his toys and such, it's causing a bit of the jealousy we expected but didn't see when #2 was first born.

I do think that the rewards of having a child that is independent and has a strong personality are worth the downsides (more id/tantrums/etc.); it amazes me every day when he does things I can't imagine a two year old doing. It's hard in the sense that it's short-term and long-term stressful dealing with the tantrums and such (and remembering it's not exactly his fault); but it's also easy in the sense that you sometimes just relax and watch him blossom into something amazing.

[Sava]

If I ever have children, it's because I have an awesome wife who can deal with that stuff. Because I'm an idiot.

[Dinner]

They should have shock collars for kids. I mean, that works for dogs right?