echidna

I note that this theme remains loud and strong. Now those parents who remember being childless, must also appreciate the irritatingly patronising tone of this statement. I understand that irritation is in the ear of the irritated, so I’d like to understand what this statement means.

I have telemarked on fresh snow on deserted mountains under blue skies.

I have walked alone into Indochinese hilltribe villages where no language communication is possible.

I have loved a French girl.

My parents underwent a bitter 10 year divorce.

My father died suddenly.

Is my lack of understanding of the nature of parenthood, akin to someone’s lack of understanding of these experiences, unless they have experienced them ? No, of course it’s different to being there, but I believe that some understanding is possible.

Each of these experiences I can explain in vivid detail, how they felt, what they meant to me, how they changed me. I would never dare to presume that the only way someone can understand these things is solely by experience. To me this would be insulting.

Otherwise, that I simply can’t know what it’s like, just seems like a cheap brushoff. How is parenthood so different that one can never convey understanding ?

[ March 04, 2002: Message edited by: echidna ]</p>

Hobbs

That's my thinking on the matter. I have to wonder what parents who say this were thinking or expecting before they had kids. When our muffin was in the oven, and even before we started baking (12 years after getting married, so we had plenty of time to hear it), I heard that from people: "You can't know what it's like until you have kids yourself; it'll be completely different from anything you expect; blah blah blah."

I wanted to ask, "Well, just what in the world were you expecting?" I didn't, because of course the answer would have been, "Oh, you just wait, you'll see," accompanied by a smug smile. But I'd heard the same things about leaving home for college and about getting married, yet I had paid attention to other people in those situations, listened to them talk about it, and noticed that they tended to have generally similar experiences along with many differences based on their own personal differences. So I tried to imagine what someone like me would be like in such a situation. And I did a pretty good job imagining.

So now I can ask all those parents: "Just what were you expecting parenthood would be like?"

If you're bright enough to think this now, I doubt that would change if you become a parent (at least I hope it wouldn't; having kids doesn't have to make you lose sense).

Well, hey, if it seems to work for me, it must be absolutely right for everyone, since of course I am the measure of all things. That, I think, is the primary sentiment underlying religious dogmatism.

And this, of course is precisely where those with an experience like ours, but without realizing that they are not the measure of all things, will respond: "Oh, yes, we felt like that, too, we were sure we didn't want kids, but, hey, when that biological clock goes off, you'll see..." Well, we didn't want kids at first, then we wanted one, so we had one. Others want kids right away, still others never do. (But of course we realize that there is just something wrong with people who don't feel exactly as we do.)

Oh, you mean maybe people sometimes have very good reasons for their different preferences? That thought never occurred to me.

Were there that many people who were that miserable before they had kids? Well, if that's what it took to make them happy, I guess I'm glad they had kids (as long as they aren't screwing up their kids' lives). I was happy enough without kids, and I'm happy now that I have one.

There is a difference, though, in what can make me happy now, and it's one reason I was so hesitant to have a child. I used to be able to be happy without a child. But I knew that, once I had one, I'd never again be able to be happy without one. I can't think of anything worse than outliving my son. So now, despite all the joy he brings me (well, actually, precisely because of all the joy he brings me) I'll always have to be aware of the possibility that I could lose him. I certainly hope that never happens, and odds are it probably won't, but, unfortunately, I've never been able to be one of those people who thinks of bad things that "it can't/won't happen to me."

So, to get back to the original post, maybe you could bring that point up if another buffoon asks how you can be happy without kids. It's a big gamble. The payoff can be great if it works out, but you have to take enormous risks, and for a large number of reasons there are no guarantees that you'll get that great reward. I can certainly understand people not wanting to take that risk. I suspect that, on average (with many exceptions, of course), people who have chosen not to have children have put a lot more thought into their decision than people who have chosen to have kids.

[ March 04, 2002: Message edited by: Hobbs ]</p>

DRFseven

Hi, Echidna; I've missed talking to you!

To say that you can't know what it's like may seem like a cheap brushoff, but there it is. I promise you that even child development experts find that having their own children is different from anything they ever imagined, as they will be happy to tell you. This all has to do with previously unexperienced feelings, which is why they can't be explained, feelings that have evolutionary underpinnings. People experience these feelings to different degrees, but the vast majority experience them profoundly.

Try to imagine describing what it is like to fall in love and to intimately touch your lover for the first time to someone who has never experienced falling in love. What is that like? Can it be compared to being squeezed shoulder-to-shoulder in a crowded elevator next to friends and acquaintances? No, just because both situations involve people being close together, you still can't experience one from doing the other. Having a child is even harder to describe than having a lover because of the dawning sense of long-term responsibility that is realized. People intellectually know they will be responsible for their future children, but until that responsibility arrives, they don't get the emotional impact, which, of course, is the feeling. It's not the financial responsibility or the caretaking, but the growing realization that this is a permanent, full-time, emotional bond that has been established and there's no backing away from this; this is it. From now on the parent's emotions are heavily invested in how this new person fares in life - every hurt, from playground falls to the child's inevitable social disappointments, hurts the parent. But the same is true for the joys; the successes and triumphs of the child/teen/adult will color the parent's life forever. Most parents learn to experience their children's lives with some degree of equanimity as the children grow up, but, for most people, those heavy emotional ties will exist to some extent until death puts an end to them.

tronvillain

There is a difference between attempting to imagine describing something and attempting to imagine something. I see no apparent obstacle to imagining being a parent, especially not the emotional impact.

echidna

See, now that’s where I think that’s a loaded experiment. To me, anyone who calls themselves a "child development expert", almost automatically doesn’t understand child development. The parents I know who have been most surprised at the child-bearing experience are generally those who have been most opinionated about it prior, those who thought the first 6 weeks would be easy, those who thought they could still enjoy all the things they liked beforehand, those who bought a puppy dog to practise on.

But there are also those like Hobbs (thanks very very much for your post, I find the subject quite demoralising at times), who have found the experience less of a surprise, those who can take it in their stride without such a quantum transformation. They knew it would be hard work, they knew it would be rewarding, they knew they would have little time for themselves, they knew the burden and challenge of such responsibility, they knew the risks and joys of guiding a new life and the roller-coaster of adolescence.

Just because some parents weren’t ready for it, to me doesn’t mean that it automatically applies to everyone. It’s the blanket absolutism which I object to, that I am being rudely shut out of the discussion, that my opinion is meaningless and invalid.

My Saturday daytrip was quite a tricky one in the end. With 12 kid and families mingling around, the bus wouldn’t start & an impromptu car shuffle left 5 leaders getting lost for an hour, we temporarily lost a cochlear implant receiver, there were 4 behaviourally tricky children who don’t respond to verbal instructions, the weather was abysmal, and yet we had a great time on the steam train.

Now I won’t ever say that no one can ever understand the fun and the challenges of the day, in fact I could bore you for hours with stories about the kids. And if you didn’t agree that my experience was fun, it doesn’t mean that if you were there, you would definitely have had fun, it just means that maybe you are different. To me it’s wrong to expect that everyone should have the same experience of something as myself.

And yet I find a common conversation pattern, is to discuss toddler topics, and then to be shut out with "well you wouldn’t understand of course." I think there’s a remote possibility that I do, and that my life experiences and memories can be quite relevant to another person’s childhood. I sometimes suspect a degree of possessiveness and new-found elitism.

(likewise DRF7 )

DRFseven

I'm not arguing anything but that people without children really can't know what it's like to have children, that most who say they won't have children will, and that it's a good thing that new parents are highly focused on their children. On those other things, I agree with you. It's unfair (and not nice!) for parents to exclude non-parents, and it's ridiculous to decide that someone else needs to have children. In fact, I think if those kinds of needling conversations take place in the workplace, it constitutes harrassment of a sort.

I still don't think you're getting what I'm saying about not knowing what it's like to have children. Doesn't mean you don't understand lots of things about children or that you are unable to anticipate interaction between you and possible future children. It simply means you won't know how it feels until you have them.

Do you agree that someone who has never been in love can't know what it's like to be in love? This person might know all kinds of technical information about physiological aspects of falling in love and may have observed many people who are in love, but he or she won't know how it feels to be in love. It's the old problem of the senses; what is it like to be a bat, what is the color red like? Only the bat knows what it is like to be a bat and the only thing like the color red is the color red.

DRFseven

double post

[ March 05, 2002: Message edited by: DRFseven ]</p>

tronvillain

DRFseven:
I agree that someone who has never been in love can't know what it's like to be in love, but then someone who has never bowled can't know what it's like to bowl. However, that did not prevent me from accurately imagining what it was like to experience them before I actually did, and I don't see why the experience of having children should be any different.

It's not clear that it's "the old problem of the senses" at all. Is it asking someone who's never seen red to imagine the colour red, or is it asking someone who's seen red and knows what a vase is to imagine a red vase?

DRFseven

It's different because the elements of bowling can be broken down into separate elements of which you were familiar. Unless you were taken to a bowling alley as an infant or toddler, you probably had aimed at things and tried to knock them over before and you probably had played games and experienced the same sort of competitive feelings (or lack of them) as you did when you bowled. There are no emotions involved in bowling that single it out from all other activities. But the feelings a parent develops for his/her child are unlike the feelings a person has for others, even though the interactions with the parent's own children and with others may be very similar. It is the emotions that make the difference; they are what determine the vested interest, just as the emotions of falling in love are very different from "falling into" a friendship.

It is asking someone who has only seen green to imagine seeing red. After all, red is only another color, right? They've seen green, so they should be able to imagine its opposite, right? They know that green is a "cool" color, shouldn't they be able to imagine red by being told that it is a "hot" color? By pointing out the difference in wave lengths? No amount of technical information will help generate that perception of red; to be imagined, the color red must be seen. Same with maternal and paternal feelings; the evolutionary forces that drive them forth are different from what drives friendship, tribal loyalty, sexual passion.

echidna

Which is OK, assuming there is such a thing as an objective perception of redness.

That I don’t know how it feels, begs the question, so what ? Re-stating the exceedingly-obvious serves no purpose save to put down the other person. There is no information in the statement which objectively describes the validity of my viewpoint. There is an implicit message in the statement that "the only reason you don’t agree with me, is that you don’t have children." I find this a quite irritating response, because it ignores that maybe we actually just think differently.

The parents I know have many different feelings for their children, which will vary further as their children grow older. "You don’t understand because you don’t have children" assumes that there is a universal feeling of parenthood to which I am automatically excluded. I don’t see evidence for this amongst the parents I know. Each set of feelings differs, as would my feelings differ if I were to be a parent.

I know there is a high chance that my opinions may change if I were to become a parent, but also they may not, I don’t think anyone knows for sure, but your statement is absolutist and assumes that they will, and also implies that they will follow yours. Maybe, but not for certain at all.