Being a Better Parent
Three Things #109: March 3, 2024
Since becoming a parent I noticed a strange phenomenon. All parents obviously intend to be good parents, but very few people are actually good parents. If you ask most people how their parents were, most people will tell you that their parents weren’t very good parents. Why is this? Is there something about parenting that’s especially difficult? If so, what is it?
What’s more, in a strange version of the Lake Wobegon effect (with quite high stakes), most people think they’re good parents even when they’re not. I’m totally committed to actually being a great father to my son—not in just thinking I’m a good father—and a big part of my motivation is that my parents weren’t very good parents. My son deserves better, as does every child. So why are we collectively failing to be good parents?
Thing #1: Parenting is Hard 🤦
Let’s face it, everything about being a parent is hard. It’s not supposed to be easy, and it isn’t in practice. For the mother pregnancy, labor and delivery, and recovery aren’t easy. Trying to take care of a newborn while recovering makes it even harder. In the beginning the baby has no schedule at all: they eat, sleep, and poop around the clock which makes it impossible to sleep through the night or have any sort of normal schedule. If you’re lucky, over time the baby settles down into a routine, which helps a little, but it constantly gets harder in new ways. Once the baby starts moving around you have to childproof your home, and it isn’t easy or obvious how to do this. The baby is always penetration testing your childproofing and finding things you missed, and missing something dangerous will literally keep you awake at night. The first few times your baby gets sick it’s really, really tough: they may stop eating, drinking water, pooping, and sleeping, they may cry all the time and just make life miserable for you.
This is all still just the tip of the iceberg. Some of these things get easier as the baby grows but other challenges don’t get easier. No matter how you feel, no matter what you need to do, the baby’s needs always come first. If you try to have a job and raise a child at the same time then this necessarily means regularly losing sleep since the only time you can get anything done is when the baby is in bed. Your social life suffers. It becomes difficult to impossible to make plans with friends who don’t have small children because the things they do and the places they go tend not to be baby friendly. You end up spending time only with other parents with small children as a result. Things that used to be trivially easy, like going out to get coffee or buy groceries, become a logistical nightmare as you need to juggle childcare duties with your partner (assuming you even have a partner) and coordinate schedules. As a result you start putting even the most basic task on each others’ calendar to make sure someone’s free to watch the baby.
You lose all of your alone time. You’re lucky to get a quiet ten minutes to yourself in the morning before the baby wakes up or in the evening after the baby goes to bed. Meditation becomes impossible. Even finding time to workout becomes very difficult. Your health suffers: you’re not sleeping, you’re not exercising, you’re constantly stressed out, you’re losing friends, and you have no time to reflect.
Balancing personal needs and work needs against the baby’s needs is a full time job and also an impossible task. Every hour you spend working is an hour you can’t spend taking care of the child or just playing with the child, but by the same token every hour you spend taking care of the child is an hour you can’t invest in work and putting food on the table. God forbid you have to travel for work: this is the hardest thing of all! You put a great deal of stress on your partner while you’re away. You miss your child all day, every day, which makes enjoying yourself or focusing on work or travel very difficult.
The hardest thing of all is the stress that raising a child puts on your relationship with your partner just at the time when you need each other the most. Given everything else that’s going on, given lack of sleep and how stressed you are constantly, you have little to no time to actually communicate with one another, spend quality time together, or to be intimate together. When things are quiet, you pretty much just want to sleep. As a result your relationship naturally suffers. Small things start to bother you more. You disagree about how to raise the child—such as whether to protect the child or whether to let them explore and make their own mistakes—and these differences manifest in cracks that appear in your relationship. You try to keep things together for the sake of the child and as a result you paper over these problems rather than discussing them or tackling them head on, which only causes them to get worse over time.
You try not to make the same mistakes your parents made. You try to give your child better because they deserve better. But in the process, in spite of everything you find yourself making the same mistakes your parents made, and you hate yourself for this but you can’t figure out how to fix it.
Thing #2: Parenting is Easy 🎯
I’ve experienced some of the challenges above, but more of them are based on things I’ve heard from friends. In general my experience of parenting has been quite different—it’s felt quite natural and easy despite being a new, first-time parent.
Every new parent will tell you the same thing—they’re amazed when you’re sent home from the hospital with a tiny, swaddled, brand new human being and without an instruction manual. But parenting really is quite intuitive and natural, at least for most people. Sure, there are lots of little details to figure out and advice is helpful—how best to heat a milk bottle, how to burp the baby, how to know when you actually need to call a doctor, how to baby proof the house, etc.—but in my experience 99% of parenting is intuitive and natural even as a first-timer.
From the time my son was only a few months old I felt a very strong communicative bond with him. I’m not sure exactly how to describe it but from the moment he started being able to communicate, even only partially through things like body language and facial expressions, I could almost always tell what’s on his mind and how he’s feeling. It’s a strange phenomenon to describe to someone who hasn’t experienced it before. You really can easily distinguish your child’s cry even among a room full of crying babies, and, at least in my case, I really could communicate with him through a form of almost extrasensory perception from a very young age. Mothers have a hormonal bond with their infants in the beginning; I’m not sure what the basis for a father’s bond is!
This bond helped because knowing his mood helped me know how to respond and how to take care of him. Babies cry for all sorts of reasons: because they’re hungry or thirsty, because they’re sleepy, because they’re bored, or because they just want to mess with you. But each of these cries is subtly, slightly different and you learn to differentiate these pretty quickly too. I can tell when my son is sleepy, when he needs a nap and when he’s ready for bed. I can tell when he’s really angry or frustrated, and when he’s just acting cute.
Most importantly I can tell when he needs love and attention. That’s the single most important thing about parenting in my opinion, especially in the early stages: making sure your child feels loved, protected, and safe and secure. My parents got many things wrong but at least they got this part right. They were always extremely loving so this behavior at least was well modeled.
In fact it’s not hard to make a child feel loved and secure. The most important thing is to spend quality time with them every day. It doesn’t matter so much what you actually do: reading, playing with toys, running around, taking them to the park or playground, or just rolling around on the floor. But it’s critical to be really present and to be an active listener when you’re doing this, which means no phone, no taking work calls at the same time, etc. It can be hard to carve out an hour or two each day from a busy schedule to spend quality time with a child but it’s essential.
It’s also common sense. Nothing I’ve said or described here is rocket science and none of it took too long to figure out. It certainly didn’t require reading fancy books. There are many books on parenting and yes, I did read one or two in the beginning, but I don’t think one needs a PhD in child psychology to figure out how to keep your infant happy and safe and secure. I suppose things get more complicated later. As they say, “little kids little problems, big kids big problems”—but, so far at least, intuition and common sense have been enough and I kind of suspect this will continue to be the case for a while.
Have other parents had a similar experience? Or is it something about the fact that, parenting aside, I’m good at forming emotional connections with other people?
Thing #3: Being a Good Person 😇
One of the key things to understand about children is that they learn through imitation and mimicry. This means that you have to be extremely careful what you do and say around your child because good or bad they’ll copy your behavior. A parent or caregiver to a young child is quite literally modeling behavior for them and it’s only natural that they seek to copy what you say and do. In the beginning, in the life of a child, a parent is like a god or a superhero. (Of course this changes later but enjoy it while it lasts.) If your kids are anything like my son, they’ll want to eat and drink the things you eat and drink, they’ll copy your behavior down to the smallest nuance, they’ll try (and fail, and try again) to say the things you say, copying your pitch and intonation, and they’ll even mimic your facial expressions and gestures.
This makes it sound sort of easy—just model the behavior that you want your kids to adopt!—but it’s harder than it sounds for a bunch of reasons. The challenge is that being a good parent means modeling good behavior for your kids, and modeling good behavior generally means being a good person. Kids definitely are not stupid (they’re actually, amazingly socially very smart from a very young age) and they can see through false behavior and false pretenses! The best way to model good behavior is to become the sort of person that you want your child to be, and then just be yourself.
But it’s difficult to say what sort of person you want your child to be. Obviously I want my son to have positive traits like patience, compassion, thoughtfulness, curiosity, etc., but this is also sort of a random grab-bag of generally positive things and says very little about specific behaviors on his part or specific desires on my part. I also don’t want to push him too hard in any particular direction or try to change his personality or, worst of all, try to make him more like me. I want him to find his own path.
The second and more difficult challenge is that it’s not easy to be a good person. It’s definitely easier said than done. Of course I also want to be patient, thoughtful, to have more compassion and empathy, etc., but how do I do those things? And how do I model them for my son? These aren’t easy questions to answer and there are no easy solutions. Changing behaviors is certainly possible but it takes a lot of effort and a long time. It’s hard enough on your own, and even harder when you have your hands full with a kid or two.
I do believe that you need to be a good person to model good behavior for your kids, and that the biggest reason we fail to be good parents is that we fail to be good people to begin with. But I also believe that having a child is the perfect impetus to change and become a better person. Having negative personality traits—being overly anxious, annoying, impatient, etc.—is bad enough when it just impacts you and the adults around you. When it also negatively impacts your child, likely for their entire life, that’s far worse and it’s the best possible reason to change.