Parent Propaganda

Recently, a young woman on LinkedIn.com wrote about the pleasure she is deriving from her childless life and how other friends and family don't believe her. Her problem isn't that she is delusional. Her problem is that misery loves company and is intolerant of happiness. Many people have been coerced into parenthood through guilt and social pressure and have discovered it isn't a fraction as positive an experience as advertised. Once the little darlings become teenagers, the last of what pleasure existed vanishes; leaving only the desperate hope that some sort of adult compromise will end the wars.

Some people are naturally smart enough to see through the breeder marketing, but that won't save them from guilt trips and myths and propaganda. A few of us realize that having a family is a choice that eliminates a host of other possibilities. People who are successful in business or who become expert in a field of study or who master an art form are not multitaskers. Parents are primarily multitasking amateurs for at least 18 years; mastering nothing except, ideally, their own tempers and lowered expectations. If having kids makes us so “happy,” it must be really hard to explain the repeated results of marital satisfaction surveys that demonstrate just how unhappy kids make their parents (see the survey chart attached to this paragraph).

In one of his many excellent routines on the human condition and delusions, Jim Jefferies asked his audience to “put up your hand if you truly believe you have a stupid child.” Seeing no response, he yelled, “None of you? Well guess what? It is statistically higher than that!” He chased that down with, “You child isn’t stupid. Your child has a ‘learning disability.’ That’s the definition of stupid. If you have difficulty learning, that’s what stupid is.” Humans desperately want to imagine that their offspring don’t fall into the 50-something-percent of below-average nitwits (and “average” isn’t an improving characteristic in our dumbed-down society). The only way to cling to that delusion is to keep the little nitwits in constant motion through sports and other activities so that the school system will value them mostly because of your participation in functions that would otherwise require teachers of school administrators to manage alone. As someone who spent a dozen years teaching at a for-profit college that, eventually, dumbed-itself-down to catering to momma’s little rejects, I can tell you that many of your children couldn’t outsmart a pet rock. And if that is not an unfulfilling way to spend your life, I don’t know what is.

But your mileage very definitely may vary.

Recently, I have decided there are a couple of categories that people fall into: 1) people who have something to do with their lives that obliterates all other options and 2) people who have unfocused and scattered interests and who just need stuff to burn up their time and years. If you are the first, having a family will slow you down or defeat you in your life’s purpose and you will burn up your years searching for that mythical “balance” bullshit that is no more real than fiction’s “true love.” If you are the second, you will fill your life with kids, pets, trivial activities, and lots of friends who share these likeable non-passions.

In saying this, I am not making a value judgment. If everyone were the focused and driven type, the species either wouldn’t reproduce or reproduction would always result in either the single-parent or the distracted parent model (No, they aren’t substantially different.) People who are not driven to accomplish some specific thing in their lives make good parents, committed pet owners, family member caretakers, and community contributors. Those are among their best qualities and activities. At the other end, the undriven are often called “slackers,” but the driven are just as likely (or more) to end up burned out young and useless thereafter.

The thing most humans don’t comprehend is that we can’t have it all. Type 1 driven folks are unlikely to have anything resembling a happy or healthy home=life. The choices are either follow that passion all the way to the logical conclusion or flail away unsuccessfully at having a “balanced life” and fail at both hitting your goals and succeding at your chosen field while you raise unhappy and dysfunctional children and do that ridiculous serial monogamy thing every few months or years at a time. Type 2 undriven folks often want to have the money, power, and recognition that only Type 1’s ever achieve and their jealousy turns into a dysfunctional society that attempts to drag everyone down to the lowest common denominator. Very much like what is happening right now with the Trumpanzees and their Tangerine Misleader.