Having a baby changes you forever. It’s true.
For a woman, you will have stretch marks for the rest of your life.
For a man, you will become irrelevant; a useless appendage.
There are other changes, too. For both men and women, you will forever feel guilty that you messed up your kids. You let them eat too much sugar, and you shackled them with the same neurotic conditions you inherited from your own parents. You even bought them an iPhone. Shame on you.
Whoever came up with this system, where parents were expected to raise the children, had their head screwed on backwards.
Nevertheless, I’m starting to see information appear online about the benefits of becoming a parent. Supposedly — according to recent scientific studies — parenthood causes a person’s brain to undergo beneficial changes. Whether the beneficial changes are worth the cost, the scientists aren’t saying.
A couple of years ago, the internet featured plenty of stories about young people who’d decided not to have children. Who would want to bring a kid into the world where everyone had to wear face masks and worry about global warming? And where the Republicans are in charge? Or the Democrats, for that matter?
But just lately, the stories in the media seem to be shifting slightly — hinting that, while you’re still young enough, you ought to seriously consider parenthood if you want to become a scientifically self-actualized human being. Or if you want to obtain a valid prescription for anti-depressants.
I get it. The birth rate, worldwide, is falling like a bowl of overcooked vegetable tossed from a toddler’s high chair onto the kitchen floor. In the U.S., the people in charge of the birth rate — or rather, the people who imagine they’re in charge of the birth rate — are scrambling to make abortion illegal, knowing that 90% of babies born these days are the result of unintentional accidents during intimate contact.
They might even manage to make contraception illegal.
Many of these people, who desperately want more American babies to be born, are themselves well past childbearing age. Most of them became parents decades ago, when children were still fashionable.
Children were just barely fashionable when Darlene and I started having kids, in the late 1980s.
When our four-year-old daughter continued to wake us up in the middle of the night, it felt especially unfair because her younger brother, age two, was sleeping through the night, the way children should.
Darlene pleaded with our daughter not to wake us up, carefully explaining that it would leave us feeling tired in the morning.
She thought about this explanation for a moment.
“It’s OK if you are tired in the morning, because you can drink coffee.”
This story highlights the latest sociological research on parenting, which is finding that mom and dad have a lot less influence over their kid’s behavior than we thought, while the kid has a huge influence over parents’ behavior.
Kids who ‘act out’ thereby create parents who ‘act out’, and it’s not a pretty picture.
Specifically, your kids have a big influence over how much coffee you drink.
I feel sorry for new parents in 2024…
…what with the price of coffee.
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all.