Why parenting makes you human

This article, like most breathless endorsements of parenting, fails to detach personal experience from the actual experience.

Sometimes a mother doesn't immediately feel love for the child and instead feels an intense guilt for being so unmotherly in a world that talks so highly about the immediate connection between mother and child.

Sometimes a father won't feel the weight of responsibility and will rely on the mother completely to take care of the child.

Please excuse the genders, it also happens the other way around. Your mileage may vary with parenting. Don't have kids simply because you expect to feel this way... or do it, I am not your keeper.

I have always thought it helpful to think of the first 3 years as a parent as an emotional and mental low point. Kind of like how buying a house is often a financial/savings low point (those down payments are brutal) having kids hits you really hard right at the beginning. And it hits you in the mind, something I was used to relying on that suddenly is actually struggling. I’d say much of the challenge is sleep deprivation, and there's also new responsibilities and not going out, etc, but it is actually even harder than that.

That said, I absolutely love being a parent. So if you ever are considering it, just know that 3 year old is _much_ easier than a 1 year old. And then before you know it your 7 year old will out-build you in Minecraft and it’s even more fun :)

> parenting starts almost as a selfish act. It all starts the moment we say: I want kids.

As a parent of a planned 2 year old I can most assuredly say I never thought "I want kids", it's difficult to even say any decision was made at all, beyond an unexpected awareness the environment for it was perfect and there was no friction. Everything else naturally flows from this and it really didn't require much discussion beyond that.

Parenting foced close a cycle and imparted me with a better understanding my own parents and hence on myself. Im aware that parenting isn’t for everyone and am not advocating or forcing it on all. But for me, it did indeed feel like it humbled me and gave a deeper meaning to my own life.

I'm probably not the target audience for this blog post, but if parenting humbles you this much you probably started a little too early.

> It’s not that I want to help a new human being for the rest of their life by sacrificing myself; no, I want something for myself, someone in this case. I want kids.

This part is the smoking gun.

> However, that selfish aspect of the planning phase goes away very soon.

There's nothing selfish about planning. If your plans don't hold up, that's a sign.

Guess being a wizard makes me less than human, huh? (I know this isn't about us/me, but these posts aimed at "normal" people can be so...)

I expect it’s less offensive in full form than it is in its clickbait title, but this line of thinking is beyond disturbing to me.

As someone who doesn’t have children and likely never will, I can think of few things more upsetting than reckoning with the judgmental attitudes of the “I made a baby” crowd. If making a baby is what it took for you to become a human being, that says way more about you than it does about birthing a child.

Yet it’s people who think like this who will be coming with pitchforks for those of us who wouldn’t — or, imagine it, couldn’t - feed the meat grinder. De-humanizing language is a requirement for such a movement.

> “Will they be ok?”, “All I want is a healthy baby,” most say.

And why is your baby's health so much more important than that of the other hundred million babies in the world? Because it's (half) yours. Your selfish genes made you for this moment; all the bloodlines that didn't sacrifice for their babies died off. You can claim to be less solipsistic; but not a whit less selfish.

thank you for writing this. it was very tender and heartfelt

> when you die, you’ll probably remember

Is this vacuous clickbait written by AI?