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Aug. 17, 2024 - The Matt Walsh Show
14:57
"Regretful Parents" Are Going VIRAL. Here's What I Think
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You know, sometimes on this show, I like to read questions and quandaries from the clueless souls on the internet, especially Reddit, and try my best to provide them with a little bit of guidance.
And that was a plan, the plan that I had for this segment, but then my producer, McKenna, suggested that I go to the subreddit called Regretful Parents to find some fodder.
I did as she recommended, and I can report that it is one of the most depressing places I've ever encountered on the internet, which is obviously saying a lot.
Just post after post after post of parents who view their children as nothing but a burden.
And I thought, well, I'm not going to attempt to talk about this on the show.
It's just it's so bleak and so horrific.
But then I decided that maybe I might have a useful thing or two to say to these people.
Sadly, a sizable number of parents feel this way.
We like to think that, well, no one ever regrets having kids.
Actually, they do.
And when that happens, it is a terrible thing.
Terrible for the kids, most importantly.
So I'm going to Start by reading a few of the posts or snippets of posts.
I hate mothering.
I enjoy maybe 1% of it.
It's given me misery on top of misery on top of pain every single day since she was born.
Giving birth was medieval torture.
I don't like playing with her.
I don't like talking to her.
I don't like taking her to the park.
I can barely think about anything I enjoy with her.
Maybe cooking for her, I don't even know.
Another says, my kids are 1 in 3 and they took away everything I enjoyed.
I'm going through the wildest mental and physical challenges of my life.
I had goals and dreams that are not realistic anymore.
All my favorite activities are replaced by draining micro-tasks and it's grinding me to my knees every day.
Someone else says, if I only knew this subreddit existed, I probably could have avoided the biggest regret of my life, which is becoming a mother.
I feel so tied up.
I want to get education.
I want to work and travel.
I want to live again and fall in love with life again.
I used to travel a lot back in my early 20s.
I always took part in some exchange programs in Europe and got to see a lot.
I met amazing people.
My son's about to be three and I'm just not having it.
I've been contemplating just leaving them and starting my life somewhere else.
Feather Post says, "I hate my children, both of them.
They're two and one and I hate every single second they're awake.
I can't sleep peacefully.
I can't eat.
I can't even take a (beep) peacefully.
I'm tired of this life.
I'm the only one with them 24/7.
I'm so sick of it.
My partner is useless."
All he says is they're babies and something's wrong with me.
How could I dislike my own children?
In a similar vein, someone says, my daughter just turned five and I was already regretful about having her and having no love for her.
We treat her well and I say I love her and all that jazz to not mess up her childhood.
But she has now been diagnosed with selective mutism, which is a type of anxiety disorder where she can't speak in public or to anyone outside her immediate family.
Her teacher says she doesn't speak a word at school and her peers keep asking her why she doesn't talk.
I already hated life as a parent and now I have to deal with psychologist appointments.
What a joke of a life I've gotten myself into.
These have mostly been mothers so far with these posts, but there are also some dads are on the forum.
I'll read one of those just, you know, to be gallantarian about it.
Just day after day after day and it never ends and it never changes.
Incessant bickering, screaming, slapping, kicking, biting, fighting over every possible tiny goddamn little thing.
When all my attempts for diplomacy fail and I finally snap and yell at them to stop, they act absolutely shocked and hurt by how mean Dad is.
And it works!
I end up feeling terrible and apologizing to them and on and on and on it goes.
My brain and nerves are completely shot.
I don't understand how they seem to thrive in that level of dysfunction.
I know kids are dramatic and all, but I know I was never like that as a kid.
It's bonkers.
A lot of frustration there, to put it mildly.
I understand parenting frustration.
I don't understand hating your kid, or most of what we just read there.
But, you know, frustration, sure.
When you have, as we did, two sets of twins, six kids total.
Uh, you experience frustration.
Our last set of twins were both colicky as infants.
And if you know anything about colic in an infant, you know that we dealt with about six months of constant crying, morning, noon, and night, from two babies, while also having four other kids to take care of.
Now, I'm not saying that that's the hardest parenting experience anyone's ever had, but it's definitely not entry-level stuff that we were dealing with.
So, uh, I've been in the trenches.
And therefore I think I have some credibility to say the things that I'm going to say to all of these people and anyone who might find themselves relating to what I just read.
You know, a lot of parents who feel this level of anger and despair to the point of actually regretting having kids, it's at least partly because their kids are out of control and totally unruly.
The kids are running the house, bouncing off the walls, ruling the roost, and you're at wit's end.
Here's the good news about that, and it'll sound like bad news, but it's actually good news, is that it's your fault.
It's totally your fault.
You are 100% to blame.
Your kids are out of control because you are out of control.
And I don't mean that you're yelling and screaming and losing your temper, though you might be.
But even when you have your temper in check, you're still being ruled by your emotions.
You are, I'm going to assume, angry, sullen, visibly overwhelmed, overcome by frustration.
Well, the problem is that your kids pick up on that.
They see it.
And it's not just that they're imitating your lack of emotional regulation, though they are.
More importantly, they see that you are projecting a lack of control, a loss of command, and they lose respect for you and your rules as a result.
And that's natural.
When a leader seems flustered, his followers become disturbed.
And if this state of being flustered continues or happens over and over again, eventually they lose faith in his ability to lead.
People who listen to my show know that I'm kind of a nerd about reading stories of explorers.
Sometimes in these stories, something that happens are mutinies.
And very often, a mutiny happens because you've got a ship full of men in some uncharted part of the world.
And if the men on the ship, whose lives depend on the captain, if they perceive that the captain doesn't know what he's doing, is afraid, is frustrated, indecisive, Overwhelmed by the responsibility that he has taken on.
If the men on the ship notice that, if they perceive it, they lose faith in his leadership.
And then there's a mutiny.
So, what's happening in some of these households is your kids are—it's a mutiny.
They're staging a mutiny, although their reasons behind it are mostly unconscious.
For the kids, anyway.
Now, what makes this good news is that it's very fixable.
All you have to do is put on a convincing front.
Fake it till you make it.
As some very wise philosopher once said, project the appearance of being in control, of being in command, of being unbothered, of being unflustered, happy, good humored.
You don't have to feel that way.
Just pretend that you feel that way.
And yes, it is a virtue to fake it in those cases.
This idea that we should never, you know, we need to be true to ourselves and be honest about our emotions.
No, you shouldn't be.
In fact, you should be, you should not be honest about your emotions most of the time.
Like, most of what you're feeling, Should not be known to the people around you, and especially when you're a parent.
And you combine that attitude, or the appearance of that attitude, with consistent guidelines, clear rules, and clear consequences for breaking the rules, and you'll no longer have this level of dysfunction in your home.
Your children will not be in a constant state of war with each other and you.
And you may be able to enjoy their company and your own life as a consequence.
Like many of you this summer, I intend to spend more time with my family, getting outside, traveling, letting go of some of my routine.
But one routine I won't be letting go of is my prayer routine.
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Second, happiness is a matter of focus.
Happy people focus on the aspects of things that make them happy.
Unhappy people focus on the aspects that make them unhappy.
That seems so basic that it doesn't even need to be said, but it's a basic thing that we often lose sight of.
And this especially applies to parenting.
If you're an unhappy parent, It's because you're choosing to focus on all of the things that you want to do but can't because you have kids, and the things that you have to do but don't want to do.
For the people who wrote these laments that I just read, this focus for them has become obsessive.
All they can think about.
Is the stuff they don't want to have to do, but they have to do.
And the stuff that they would prefer to do, but they can't do.
And so they're just whining.
All the time.
In their heads and now on Reddit.
You don't want to do this.
I don't want to do it anymore.
This is hard.
I don't want to have to do these things.
I want to travel.
Look, it's a choice that you have made to focus your attention on those things.
There are so many things in life you could focus on, and you decided to focus on the fact that you can't travel to Europe or whatever.
So, your unhappiness is a choice.
You've decided to be miserable and wallow in your misery.
And you could stay there forever, wallowing in it, if you want.
And then you'll be unhappy and miserable your whole life.
In the process, you'll alienate everybody around you.
Your kids will grow to resent you and want nothing to do with you.
And then they'll get older and they'll be adults.
They won't be as difficult anymore, and you're going to want to have a relationship with them at that point, because it's easy now, because they're out of the house.
And they're going to have grandkids, and you're going to want to see the grandkids, because grandkids are easy, but your kids are not going to want to have that relationship.
And you're going to spend the rest of your life feeling victimized.
Oh, my kids ignore me.
They don't come over.
They don't bring the grandkids over.
Why should they?
You were awful to them.
You did the bare minimum their whole childhood.
You put no effort in.
Like, you fed them and clothed them.
You have to do that.
But you had a bad attitude about it the entire time.
You made the home just an excruciating environment for them to live in.
You spent the whole time whining.
Why the hell would they want a relationship with you?
A relationship with who?
There's no relationship here.
So, that's how it can go, if you choose that.
The only person who can choose otherwise is you.
The only person who can fix the problem is you.
Nobody else can.
Your kids certainly can't.
Now, I've never felt like I regretted being a parent, nor have I ever had feelings of hatred towards my children, for God's sake.
But I have experienced anger, frustration, sadness as a parent.
I have thrown plenty of pity parties for myself, like any parent does, because my parenting duties require me to do stuff I don't want to do, and don't allow me to do the stuff that I do want to do.
So I get that.
Like, I've been there.
And I've found that the way out of it is pretty simple.
It's just about redirecting my attention.
I can choose to redirect it or not.
It really is up to me.
So here's a relatable example, one that is, you know, millions of parents encounter something like this every day.
So I get home from work most days around 5.30 or 6.
Contrary to popular opinion, I actually work long days.
And I work hard, believe it or not.
Media is a stressful gig.
And then I sit in traffic for 45 minutes.
You know, it's not that bad.
A lot of people sit in traffic for longer, but still, 45 minutes in traffic.
And then I come home to a house full of kids who are talkative and needy and wanting my attention.
So every time I walk in the door, every day, I have a choice to make.
And it's a very distinct choice.
It's so distinct that it may as well be two different doors I'm walking.
There's the happy door, Or the annoyed, overwhelmed, sad door.
I'm either a stressed-out, sad sack forced to come home to a noisy house with a bunch of needy kids who won't give me a chance to decompress, dammit, or...
I'm an incredibly blessed man, privileged to come home each night to a lively home full of fun, rambunctious children and a wife who loves me.
I could be either one of those.
It's completely up to me.
And the thing is, when I walk in the door, the environment what I'm walking into is the same.
It is entirely up to me how I choose to perceive it.
And if I choose the sad, miserable door, I have no one to blame but myself.
My third point, and this goes to really, this is advice, universal advice for everybody.
Stop venting, okay?
You've done enough venting.
And I know everybody says that we have to vent.
We have to release our tension in the form of these self-pitying, overly dramatic b****** sessions.
And if we don't, we'll explode or something.
But that's bullshit.
Forums like this Reddit forum, they should not exist.
These are awful places.
Having a place to anonymously voice your darkest and most unspeakable emotions and thoughts in order to then be assured by other anonymous people that it's totally normal to feel that way and to be encouraged in your basest impulses and most dysfunctional modes of thought is bad.
The advice is terrible.
I mean, it's just awful.
There was one post, her young son is about to be his birthday, and she's not happy about his birthday and not excited about it.
Which, again, it's like, okay, so you're not excited about his birthday.
Deal with it!
Like, it's his birthday, it's not yours.
Pretend you're excited.
Dammit, stop being selfish.
But one of the pieces of advice was, well, on the day of his birthday party, just leave the house and have some time to yourself.
Don't tell anyone, just leave.
And come back at night.
This is your advice?
It's the worst possible thing!
Abandon your child on their birthday because you're sad?
This is what you get from these forums.
And the reason that you get it is because the people that are there leaving comments, they are not encouraging you We're trying to reassure you.
They're trying to reassure themselves.
They have these awful thoughts and feelings about their own family and their children, and they're trying to find a place where other people are saying the same things so that they can tell themselves it's not so terrible to feel this way.
You shouldn't hate your children.
It is wrong to have that emotion.
It's possible to have wrong emotions.
Like, it's bad to have—you shouldn't feel that way.
There's something wrong with you morally.
It is morally wrong to have that feeling.
The level of anger expressed by most of these people is wrong.
Having this kind of disdain for your family is wrong.
Venting this kind of stuff doesn't get it off your chest.
You know, it's not like opening a window in the bathroom to air out the sh** smell.
It's more like a gust of wind on a campfire.
All it does is make the flame grow and spread until it's completely out of control.
And next thing, your whole life is set on fire.
And that's what these Reddit forums do.
You should realize that this feeling is wrong.
It's not normal.
It's not okay to feel that way about your children.
The problem is you.
It's not your child.
It's you.
Your children didn't do anything wrong.
You are doing the wrong thing.
And you need to fix it.
So sure, go talk to a therapist if you can find a good one.
Big if there, but if you can find a good one.
Talk to a spiritual advisor, even better.
Talk to a priest, talk to a pastor.
But after all the talking, it comes back to you.
You owe it to your child to give him your love.
In fact, you owe it to your family to be happy.
Happiness is a responsibility.
And it is a choice.
And right now, you're making a choice that is destroying you and your family.
And it will continue to.
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