Posted on 06/16/2013 5:34:09 AM PDT by NotYourAverageDhimmi
It’s easy to be arrogant about parenting before you become a parent. Here are some insane beliefs I had about parenting before I tried it.
1. I’LL NEVER WEAR A BABY BACKPACK
I was so sure I would never wear one of those ridiculous baby holders that go on your chest, I bet another dad $100 that those straps would never touch my shoulders. “A baby only weighs 15 pounds,” I’d say to the beta males strapped to the BabyBjorns. “You can’t carry 15 pounds?”
No, you can’t. Not when the 15 pounds has a wobbly head with no neck muscles and you need both arms to keep him from flopping over. Not when this 15 pounds wants you to hold him all day. After trying the Bjorn, I felt like a war vet who magically got his arms back, and I happily paid that guy the $100 I owed him.
2. THEY’RE TAKING PIANO LESSONS AND IF THEY DON’T LIKE IT, TOO BAD
We tried piano lessons. They were really expensive and the kids hated them and sucked at them. The same thing happened with ballet and gymnastics. Trying to force them to do things they don’t like is as implausible as that gay Mormon dude who married a woman because he said his sexual preference is like smoking and you’re able to quit.
“It’s easy to be arrogant about parenting before you become a parent.”
3. I WILL MAKE THEM FINISH EVERY MEAL
You think you can make a kid eat something he doesn’t want to eat? Go feed a cheeseburger to a salamander. He doesn’t even want to crawl on it. It’s too dry. The first time I forced my kid to eat something, she barfed and I haven’t done it since. If making your kids throw up is good parenting, I’m a bad parent.
4. I’M GOING TO BE VERY ATTENTIVE
I was very attentive at first. Time-outs were doled out after every fight and if they didn’t say sorry to each other, they went back in the corner. But after 347 fights you start to think, “You know what? You’re on your own.” Sometimes you might even catch yourself thinking, “Go ahead and beat the shit out of each other for all I care. You might learn something.”
5. WE’RE GOING TO HOME-SCHOOL THEM
Kids in public school spend something like 30 minutes a day actually learning. At private school it’s probably three times that. I have an hour and a half of spare time a day to spend talking about history, so why not pull the kids out of school? Well, for one, they’re already in my house way more often than I can handle. By contrast, sometimes I feel like going to work where I deal with getting sued, licking clients’ asses, and where firing people is some kind of party. What kind of maniac thinks 100% of their waking moments are about the right amount of time to spend with your kids? When I told a home-schooling parent that my kids go to public school, she said, “The only thing they’ll learn there is how to fight.”
Good.
6. WE WON’T LET THEM WATCH TV
Pushing the “on” button on the TV is like pushing the “off” button on your kids. They just sit there like zombies. If you worked in a zoo and the howler monkeys had a magic button that shut them off, how could you resist pushing it? You love the monkeys and you think they’re cute, but when they’re really going bananas and you have to make an important phone call, that button becomes as irresistible as the “Get me a drink” button they have on airplanes.
7. NO LOGOS ON THE TABLE
Eating dinner with the family is a very important ritual that should not be sullied by corny logos on milk cartons and juice containers. So all beverages will be served from jugs and the butter will be unwrapped and placed in a small glass dish. The problem is that getting children to sit at a table and eat anything takes up more than all of your energy, so defining the design aesthetic for what’s actually on the table is about as high on your priority list as what underwear you’re going to wear.
8. I’M STILL GOING TO PARTY
After my first child was born, I continued to have parties at the house. My wife and I would wake up at 6AM the next day wondering what the hell we were thinking and then forget about it six months later and throw another party. One night during a break-dancing competition, a beer smashed on the kitchen floor. I thought I cleaned up all the shards, but my crawling infant daughter found one with her hand the next day. Since then, the only parties we have here involve piñatas and cake and “Happy Birthday” sung by very short people who don’t know the words.
9. I’M STILL GOING TO SMOKE POT
We stopped having people over, but what’s the matter with a small joint after the kids go to bed? It might make all these terrible TV shows kind of interesting. This seems like a fairly safe idea until you try it. You’re on call 24 hours a day when you have kids, and that means it’s fairly negligent to get yourself into a state of mind where you were worried about satellites but then you forgot and now you keep saying, “Wait, what was I talking about?”
10. NO PRINCESS OR SUPERHERO S##T
I’m Canadian and I grew up with old French cartoons such as Barbapapa, so my kids should do the same. They don’t need all the corporate crap and merchandising that Disney shoves down their throats. Then I took the kids to see Toy Story and my son’s head blew off. Soon after, I got him Woody and the guy who was on that giant screen was now his best friend. To deny him this fun would make me feel like the guy who made Beethoven deaf.
Same goes for my daughter. I avoided all the princess stuff until she went to her friend Cassidy’s house and saw a huge trunk full of princess dresses. She convinced me to buy her a pile of princess costumes of her own, and I haven’t seen her since. I think she’s in her room.
How do we explain the parenting that went on with the arrogant children running the show these days?
Well, I guess parenting is especially challenging ... if you’re a Liberal.
What a potty mouth parent.
great article!!!!!
I was the same, nothing but the best for my kids and that included no mighty Morphin Power Rangers. But that was not realistic and we got Power Ranger costumes eventually. In fact, we would get the costumes for Halloween months early and they would wear them a lot.
Kids are great, what life is all about, they are a challenge too, I never spent so much time in the emergency room getting stitches and xrays...............I wouldn’t trade it for anything.
What an immature clown. Poor kids. But at least their father is around, puerile as he is. A lib, of course (note drunken partying, pot-smoking, reluctance to homeschool). He certainly isn’t taking them to church, either. I’m glad my father isn’t like that and my adult son won’t be like that either.
2. My kids took piano lessons. Minimum sentence: 2 years. Turns out, once they took the lessons for a while, they began to actually play music, and actually liked it. Older one took lessons for 6 years, younger one for 5 years.
3. If they were full before finishing what was on their plate, I never forced them. But they were obligated to eat at least a little bit of whatever was served. Today, they are ravenous omnivores who eat anything and everything that isn't nailed down. But both have a grace given to them that when they've eaten enough, they push away. They are not gluttons.
4. They are 18 and 15 years old and I'm still very attentive. I don't have to break up many arguments because they learned a long time ago that they are each others’ natural best friends, and apart from their parents, their best allies, each one having the “back” of the other.
5. We homeschooled. Turned out great. Nothing I have ever done at work has been as worthwhile or as important as working with my wife to educate my sons. Enough said.
6. TV - 30 minutes a day until they were pre-teens. Didn't have to enforce the rule after that, as by then, TV bored them, they'd rather work on the computer, play outside, play the piano, or read a book. No video games either. We never restricted them from playing with this stuff when at friends or neighbors, but we never owned any ourselves. They seemed to have survived.
7. Not exactly sure of the issue. I suppose we have logos on the table. I mean, would you really take ketchup out of the bottle and put it in a small serving dish?? Yikes, I'm not THAT nuts.
8. We were never much of partiers before our kids were born; didn't take it up afterwards. We still did the things we liked before they were born once they were born - fine dining, museums, window shopping, visiting historical sites, etc. They enjoy eating good meals at good restaurants, have proper table manners, enjoy museums, tolerate trips to the mall, and they know in which half-century the Civil War was fought.
9. Never smoked pot in the first place. Saw no reason to take it up upon their entry on the scene.
10. No Disney stuff in our house. But plenty of heroes and the like. Some of my fondest memories were reading The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings to my four year-old and then seeing him teach himself how to read because I was going too slowly through The Chronicles of Narnia. Later, his heroes were Odysseus, Xenophon and the like. In the original Greek.
My younger guy just never got much into fiction when he was little. Much rather read the Feynman Lectures. He has taken an interest, however, in writing fiction.
I’m 64 & still childfree. From time to time I need an article like this to erase any incipient regrets.
Furniture looks like new, come & go as we please, surrounded by children only in church, blessed silence at the point of a remote, money in the bank, you get the idea.
Only.....in church today the Rev will ask all fathers to please stand for a round of applause. A few uncomfortable seconds, big deal.
[flameproof suit donned]
McInnes makes appearances on Fox's "Red Eye" with Greg Gutfeld, and he pens articles that appear on the Paleoconservative/Libertarian website Taki's Magazine.
Here's an article where Libs attack him for being decideley non-Liberal..
You sound like a fantastic father. Happy Father’s Day!
Thank goodness you made sure to post in this thread on fathers day. RGRDS.
So much wrong with this, the fact that he’s a lawyer who nonchalantly talks about continuing to smoke dope doesn’t even make my top 3 dislikes. But he’s pretty humorous.
As a first-year father, let me offer some of my own:
1. Biological instinct is amazingly strong.
2. Getting three hours of sleep at once makes you feel human again.
3. Babies change more in the first few weeks than they change over the next several months. Focus your entire life at soaking up those first weeks.
4. I had no idea what to do with him. Didn’t really matter.
5. The internet is wonderful for us parents with no experience.
6. If you’re really lucky as I was in finding someone great, day care isn’t necessarily a necessary evil. Being with other babies in someone else’s home about six hours per work day is great for his personality development and makes his time with his parents more precious. I can tell on the weekends that he misses having other babies around.
7. Churching the kid immediately allows for miracles; even if he has no idea what is going on, he’s in the presence of God.
8. The lack of sex isn’t so bad, when you feel completely fulfilled on so many other levels.
9. Babies’ overriding desire is to know how everything tastes. The more you struggle to keep it out of their mouths, the more urgent the need becomes.
10. The gross-out mechanism simply fails.
3. I mean: for those few weeks, focus your whole life on soaking them up.
Misconceptions
1. I’ll have X number of kids this far apart.
Surprises do happen.
2. I’ll stay home full time.
Budget and kids’ medical bills didn’t allow that, had to shift to part time.
3. We won’t have the over loaded schedule with tons of activities. We’ll focus on family and academics.
It’s hard to do when your kids want to do everything their friends are. Though my daughter is thrilled because I’m almost the only mother who comes to meetings and STAYS, though I ended up sucked in as a volunteer.
My son as a baby caught a caterpillar. I immediately started telling him, “No, put that down, don’t NOT eat that!”
He smiled and deliberately put it in his mouth. I run over to take it out, and he purposefully swallowed.
And he had no correlation to the digestive upset he had a few hours later.
This guy still has a great deal of growing up to do.
Wow. This writer needs a half dozen punches in the head.
You’re right. My apologies to the happy parents posting here & a happy Father’s Day to those who have been so blessed.
Parenting is not for everyone, one only has to look around.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.