Why Being a Parent Sucks

The real reason most people make lousy parents and why most people never grow up. 

Forty-some years ago, my two daughters were in their early teens and two of the people, a pair of brothers, who ran the company that employed me were about to become parents for the first time.  At the time, we were all middle management of a small manufacturing company, but they’d been there ten years longer than me and that made them “senior management.” But we were all the same age and we were peers and had a fairly close relationship.  During a meeting with the more adult of the two brothers, John, he asked me “What’s the secret to being a good father?”

From the outside, I suspect it appeared that Ms.  Day and I were actually competent parents.  Our daughters were smart, well-mannered, well-spoken, beautiful little people, but from my perspective we were making a mess of the job.  Our oldest was veering off into a bad crowd of Southern California punk rockers and skateboard punks and our youngest was trying to become a 1980’s Valley Girl with the associated shallow, fashion-oriented, pop culture values and neither were doing well in school and it was in no way the school’s fault.  In the 80’s—before Reagan’s anti-education, no social responsibility attitude, and “greed is good” damage to the California education system took root and started the social decay the whole country would soon follow—the California K-12 and college system was the model the rest of the civilized world would begin to follow as the US began its decent into the current brainless, uneducated, low-brow hellscape.  So, the only answer I could give at the time was, “Keep them alive until they are 18, when that becomes their problem.” It wasn’t bad advice, but it was way incomplete. 

Humans overthink almost everything, which is a real problem for the below-average half of every human population who don’t have a primate’s capacity for thinking under any condition and any subject.  Animals, especially birds capable of flight, know the parenting job is to keep the kids alive until they can fend for themselves and, then, make them leave the nest and discover how their wings work, or not.  That’s the whole job.  Obviously, some parents do a spectacular job of equipping their offspring with an ability to fly, fend for themselves, find a suitable mate and procreate the next generation, and live lives of meaning and value.  But most of us have no idea how to manage any of that for ourselves, let alone teach our kids those skills, and most of us do a pitiful job of the most basic task of parenting (see the bold print earlier in this paragraph). 

Contrary to popular myth, historically the absolute worst parents in human history are rural parents; particularly farmers.  Most modern people have totally forgotten how critical it was for a farmer’s wife to bear children, particularly sons.  That wasn’t because those men wanted to raise strong, independent, well-educated sons to make the world a better place.  It was because farmers wanted the free labor that sons represented and, typically, only the most independent, intelligent, and courageous of those litters of dumb farm boys managed to leave home and make a life for themselves.  The majority of farm boys stayed home until technology, competition from other farm boys, or a bank repossession made their unskilled labor necessary.  That is why, in the 21^st Century, the rural states and rural areas of urban states are overwhelmingly Republican voters, living in poverty, uneducated by several grade levels in comparison with urban citizens, illiterate, and spectacularly dependent on urban welfare while imagining themselves to be “simple farmers .  .  .  people of the land.  The common clay of the new West.  You know...  morons.” (When I saw “Blazing Saddles” the first time, I finished Wilder’s last sentence in perfect time with the film dialog.  I grew up surrounded by Kansas “morons” and from about age 15 on no stupid, evil thing they ever did surprised me.)

So, the reason being a parent sucks is because as much as we desperately love, cherish, and crave the company of our kids as they approach adulthood and become the people we hoped they might be, the job is to make them uncomfortable enough to leave the nest and get on with their independent lives.  That is the final, painful task of every parent and the part where most fail.  And the biggest reason for that failure is that most of us have no idea how to prepare our kids to make that leap and we have every incentive to avoid doing that work until it is too late.   Most of us, at least in the Midwest, come from several generations of parents who follow the model of the worst farm families.  Although I met several people, highly successful people, in California who came from at least a couple generations of urban life and whose parents, especially fathers, were the worst possible parents.  An incredible number of fathers are not only pissed off that their sons didn’t become unpaid employees for life but are jealous of their sons’ successes to the point of often engaging in sabotage.  It’s tough to beat that for a model of failed parent: someone who intentionally tries to keep their kid down to their own level of personal failure and dissatisfaction.  I suspect a lot of the people reading this will be squirming because either their parents followed this example or they have been doing it themselves.  It is not even a little bit unusual. 

If I could tell my uncomfortable, self-doubting 1980’s-self anything today, it would be, “You did suck as a father, but you did manage to help raise two competent and independent, brilliant, generous, literate women who are living enviable lives and who parented children with far more insight and skill than you ever demonstrated.” That does not mean that I did something, anything, right, but it does prove that, if you get the fuck out of the way and provide a little safe harbor when those early attempts at flight fail, your kids have a half-decent attempt at parenting themselves and turning out to improvements on their parents in every way.

But why would anyone want to take on a job like that?  Someone recently tried to convince me that our purpose, as human animals, is to procreate and reproduce our special genes.  With more than 8 billion of us polluting, over-populating the planet and fighting each other for every half-habitable square inch of the place, I think that job is done.  There is zero evidence that people with kids live any sort of happier life and lots of evidence to the contrary.

[The current head cheerleader for overpopulation is the world’s most deplorable man, Elon “Space Nazi” Musk and it’s hard to imagine a human being with more reason to be happy who clearly is insecure, miserable and miserly, desperate for positive attention, and for whom nothing will ever be enough. And he’s spewing out offspring (12 with 3 women, at the current count) like an alley tomcat, with almost exactly the same parental skill and attention. I won’t be surprised if he eats one of his several mate’s children from a different male, in some kind of primal competitive frenzy. Seriously, that wouldn’t surprise me even a little.]

Evolution and endorphins certainly make humans “feel happier” when their kids are small, but when the kids turn into teenagers, that all goes to hell faster than a fat man can stuff Big Macs into his gullet.  For some parents, mostly fathers, that initial rush dies a lot faster.  From that moment on, parenting is not much more than a matter of hanging on, keeping them alive, and trying to make “home” less home-like so their little monsters will be encouraged to get the fuck out and start living their own lives.  Often part of that process results in the parents also becoming less comfortable with their own home and splitting up (especially true for parents of daughters).  The funniest reaction to the discomfort of living with teenagers is that late parenting period when, suddenly, a more-than-adequate home starts to feel cramped and the family moves from a reasonable house to a 5,000 square foot mausoleum where there still isn’t enough distance from the pimply monsters, but now the little bastards are practically living in their own homes and have zero motivation to leave.  When and if they do finally leave, the parents are stuck with a gigantic house full of expensive crap, an outrageous mortgage and utility bills that would bankrupt a small business.  

By far, the best approach at this point in life is to start downsizing the day the last kid leaves high school.  Start looking at apartments in really boring senior housing, even if you aren’t over-55.  Put the house up for sale at a higher-than-market price and make a point of showing the kids’ rooms to prospective buyers before letting them see the rest of the house.  That way, if the buyers aren’t interested, you will have made the point to your failure-to-launch offspring and made them uncomfortable as a side benefit.  Start remodeling the kids’ rooms first, in preparation for the sale. If you have spare bedrooms, this might be the time to invite your own parents to move in while your own children can serve as grandpa’s caretaker and diaper-changer. Some adult birds stop cleaning up after the chicks, letting the nest fill with bird crap and even making contributions of their own, to make the nest less inviting.  I would not consider that to be extreme behavior as opposed to being stuck at home with a spoiled man-child like Jacob Chansley (QANON-sense “Buffalo-head boy”) who needed special food in prison after trying to overthrow the US government on January 6, 2021. I’d crap in that scumbag’s bed to get him out of my house.

When I was breeding age, the biggest reason many of my Midwestern peers gave for having kids was “My mother desperately wants to be a grandparent.”  No, she desperately wants you to be as miserable as she was when you were a teenager and she wants to live long enough to see that happen to you.  The later you wait to have kids, the less likely she is to see you miserable. That is your mother’s entire motivation for nagging you to reproduce.