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April 13, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
30:43
1639 The Downsides of Parenting

Some of the minuses among all the pluses - a fair and balanced view.

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Hey everybody, it's Seth.
Hope you're doing well. This is a, I guess, an update on the parenting podcast series.
Now, in the interest of balance and fairness, I wanted to point out some of the downsides of parenting.
I think it's important.
I mean, I've obviously portrayed, and it's not a mere portrayal, but I actually experience a joyful rosy glow from interactions with Dersh Wiedems.
But I think it's also, you know, fair and reasonable to talk about some of the downsides of parenting, so that Should you decide to embark upon one of the greatest adventures on the planet that of raising and being responsible for a delicate and beautiful and robust human life that you will have such as it is the benefit of my own perspectives if that makes any sense and some of the limitations that I see now This is probably not a shock to you,
but a little bit of a shock to me.
Just how staggeringly time-consuming parenting is.
I mean, I can sort of run through a typical day, just so you can keep this in mind.
I stay up a little bit later because I do my FDR work at night.
And Christina gets up a little bit earlier, maybe an hour, hour and a half earlier than I do.
Isabella gets up between 6 and 7.30 in the morning, and I get up sort of 8, 8.30.
And it's, you know, Christina needs to obviously change and she needs to brush her teeth.
Well, she's already done that, but she needs to sort of get herself ready for her workday.
So I then take Isabella for, usually for the morning.
And so then I sort of have her from 8.30 until she goes down at around 12.
And more recently she's been having longer naps, which is...
That's pretty good. She's been having two, two and a half hour naps.
And so I can get some stuff done during the day.
But for a long time, she was only having an hour nap or so during the day.
So, I mean, I get over 100 emails a day.
And that's just in my inbox, let alone Facebook and YouTube and some of the other places where people can...
Can, uh, contact me.
So, and of course, there's some message board stuff that I have to respond to.
So, I sort of, I would get the emails done to some degree when she was down.
And that was, uh, It was quite a challenge to get all that stuff done.
And then Isabella would be up and I would give her lunch.
And then it's a long haul, right?
I mean, she would be out from 2 o'clock and then she'd usually go to bed 7.30, 8 o'clock, right?
So that's, you know, five and a half, six hours.
And during that time, I would take her out.
Or if Christina was home, we'd go out together.
And, you know, that's sort of...
It's not exactly school, but it's sort of the time that we teach and talk to her about, you know, we teach her songs and teach her animals and teach her counting and words and all that kind of stuff.
It's nothing particularly formal, as you can imagine.
But that's when we get that stuff done.
And then she would go down around 8 o'clock or so, And then, and I'm sorry for this background water that will come up in a bit, then what happens is we have to clean up, right?
Because having a baby around is a pretty messy business.
There's dishes, of course, and we've got to wash her bottles so that she can have bottles for tomorrow that are clean and dry.
And, of course, there's laundry to do because having a baby is an endless cavalcade of laundry.
So that leads us to about 9 o'clock or maybe even 9.30.
It's now 5 to 9.
I'm just getting down to doing her dishes.
And that's the end of the day.
Then we have an hour or so to chit-chat, get caught up, you know, swap stories of the day.
And, I mean, don't get me wrong, Christina and Isabella and I are together for a good portion of the day.
Christina works a couple of hours a day.
And... But then Christine and I have a chance to chat in the evening for about an hour, maybe an hour and a half, and then get kind of tired, so maybe we'll watch a sitcom or something and then head to bed.
Christine will head to bed and I'll sort of go to bed and then I'll sometimes get up.
It depends on how tired I am, but I will get up and do some more work.
And then I'll sort of get to bed around 12.30 or 1.00.
And that's the day, right?
So, I mean, if you do, I mean, it's worth adding it up, right?
Just because it's an unbelievable investment of time and energy.
And this is constant.
This isn't, you know, put your feet up, read a magazine while she plays quietly, at least not with our darling.
She is a...
We're constantly in need of, and unfairly so, time and attention.
I will have maybe 30 seconds just to have a look at the board, or if a donation came in, can I eat?
You know, that kind of stuff. But there's no focused or concentrated work.
I don't do podcasts when she's around, of course, because I focus on parenting, unless she's in the backseat of the car.
So, that is some concentrated...
So, 8.30 until noon, right?
So, 8.30 until noon, that's three and a half hours, and then another five hours, eight and a half hours, plus another hour or two for cleaning, laundry, and that kind of stuff.
I mean, there's more than a full-time job with a commute, and that's just having one child.
Now, it's not, of course, like two children is double, but it's a massive investment.
I mean, this is, of course, why I can keep up with, you know, producing podcasts not quite as voluminously as I did in the past, but...
And that's why I can't write a book or finish a book or anything like that, because the book is a big deal, right?
I mean, there's the planning, there's the writing, there's the editing, there's the recording of the audiobook, there's the designing of the cover and all.
It's a big deal, and I just don't have the time.
And that will change over the next year, but right now...
It's a huge time investment.
It is massive. And, of course, it's nonstop.
There are no breaks, really.
And the next day, you're doing the same thing again.
And it makes you wonder what the hell you did with time before.
There are just things that you have to change.
I don't play video games anymore.
I might play 10 or 15 minutes of an iPod game at the end of the day, but that's about it.
So, no video games. I don't really get to read as much.
I will try and... I get reading in for my interviews with people, but it's not really much reading.
No books. It's tough to schedule, listen to convos, and I'm sorry to the people who need them, or who want them, I should say, where it's taking some time to schedule.
It's a challenge. I can't obviously do them when...
I have Isabella Solo.
So it's a challenge.
And in there, I mean, I still need to go to the gym, or at least I choose to go to the gym.
And that can be an hour and a half to sort of go there, work out, and shower and come back.
I try to do that three times a week.
So it's, you know, it's hard to get until you get it.
It's hard to get until you get it.
But it's a... FDR was a full-time job, and of course that's become a part-time job.
And parenting is the full-time job.
It's amazing.
What a time sink it is.
And that's not to say that it's bad, right?
It's just to point out what it is.
So that's something to be prepared for.
Now the other thing, and I guess I'm sure it's no huge shock to anyone, is that parenting can be really boring.
I mean, that's...
That's just the nature of the beast.
It's full of thrills, and I think I've talked about all the positive stuff, but I think let's take for granted the positive stuff and talk about the stuff which at least I find to be challenging.
Children, infants, are all about repetition.
Repetition, repetition, repetition.
That's the only way to wear the grooves of language and counting and all of that.
And Isabella recently learned her first genuine concept, which was the word, again, to have something done again.
And she is, you know, that's my name, don't wear it out.
She wants things done like literally a hundred times is fine for her.
And so when we're teaching her a song, or when I'm teaching her a song, she'll hear the song, she'll figure out her part, and she'll say, again, and we'll do it again, and we'll do it again, and we'll do it again.
And I don't care how much you love Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.
Come a hundred times, it's a little harder to stay focused than the first time.
So there's just enormous amounts of repetition that are involved.
Isabella loves putting on my shoes and walking around, and she needs help with that, and she needs to be watched constantly so she doesn't trip and fall into a wall or something like that.
So there is that aspect that she, you know, it's like...
Part of me is like, why do you want to do this again?
But she does, and that's the nature of being a kid, right?
Why does she want to throw sand in the air yet again?
Because she's figuring out that sand is different from air, it's different from water, it's different from solids.
I mean, she's just going through the table of the elements as far as textures go, and she needs to figure it out, and it takes a lot of repetition to learn anything when you're a toddler.
So, repetition, repetition, repetition.
That is just something you kind of just have to brace yourself for it.
And it does get kind of funny after a while.
You know, she likes being held and bounced on our big exercise ball, which is the only workout it's really getting these days.
And so, you'll bounce with her on that, and she'll say, again, Again, again.
And there's a phase, of course, with toddlers when they want to do things for themselves, but they're not quite ready, right?
So she wants to feed herself yogurt, but not quite ready.
And, you know, you can let her sort of mess herself up, but it just means more laundry, more work.
And we try to sort of let her do that as much as possible, but she can get a little frustrated if it's not possible in the moment, or we don't think it's possible in the moment to let her do it right away.
So, there's a lot of boring stuff.
So I'll take her to the library, which is a good place to go.
They've got lots of toys and all that.
And she wants to walk over, and she wants to play with the balls that are on the wall.
And then she wants to go and she wants to push the letters around on the whiteboard.
And then she wants to go and bang the mouse against the computer table.
And then she wants to go over to the magnet toys.
And then she wants to go over and try and pull books off the shelves, which I don't let her do.
And then we go back to the balls on the wall.
And it's like those little family circus dotted line roll-arounds.
She's just rounded. And what are you doing?
You are following her around and facilitating her play.
She's not old enough...
I shouldn't say that. She's starting, she's 15 months, she's starting to become old enough to do interactive play, right?
So, like, I'll throw a ball to her, she'll throw the ball back to me, right?
So that's starting to happen, but it's pretty new.
And for the most part, since she was able to crawl, which has been, I don't know, seven or eight months, it's been a follow her around and facilitate her play.
Make sure she doesn't hurt herself.
Make things available to her if they're too high or too low.
Tell her what they are.
You know, try and play a little bit, but she doesn't really do much interactive stuff or didn't.
And then you move on to the next thing.
And it's brain dead.
It is brain dead work.
You know, not a lot of people who would do that as a hobby.
Now, of course, it's your kid, and it's beautiful that she's learning things and all that, so I'm not trying to say it's some prison sentence, but...
It's, you know, just brace yourself for some dull times.
If you have a brain the size of a planet, it can be a little trying.
But then you just learn to do a little bit of dual multitasking, right?
I'll think about a good podcast topic or a good argument or whatever while I'm doing that stuff.
I did want to try listening to audiobooks while I was with her, sort of with a fixed earphone in one ear, but I didn't feel too comfortable because I'd get...
Into the audiobook, and, you know, my focus would last a little, and that sort of brings us to the next thing, is that I think this is pretty common, and I don't think I'm more susceptible to it than most, but, oh, my friends, I will tell you, oh, my goodness.
Oh, my goodness.
There is a continual amount of low-grade anxiety around being a parent.
And I read about it.
I remember reading about it years ago.
A woman saying, you know, it's like the focus on your kid or the thoughts about your kid and some of the worries about your kid.
It's like a demo switch you can turn down, but you can't turn it off.
And that is very true.
Whoever wrote that... Quite accurate.
There is a constant low-grade anxiety around being a parent.
And I'll just sort of give you some examples so you can sort of understand what it is that I mean.
It is true that you would rather take a body blow yourself than have your child hurt, right?
I would rather, you know, get whacked in the nuts than have my daughter trip and bang her head, which she's only done a couple of times, and she's actually pretty, she's very steady on her feet, and she's really good with that stuff, but nonetheless, it happens.
And so you're just continually aware of and alert to dangers in the environment.
Things like glass tables, of course.
Things like anything with an edge, right?
A wall or a chair to some degree or a table.
You're just aware of it because...
It's one thing, you know, if she falls, if Isabella falls, she's fine.
She puts her hands out. She's a good faller.
But if she puts her hands out and she's falling against the edge of something, she won't be able to stop herself.
And she's only done that once, and it left a bruise for about a week.
She was fine. She cried for a couple of minutes, and then she was okay.
But it's...
You just... You have to be...
So careful all the time.
And inevitably, your guard goes down for a second.
You start thinking about something else, or you reach to have a sip of your coffee, or something like that.
You know, something really important.
And then she'll trip, and you're like, oh man, you know, I should have been closer.
I should have been there for her, and I should have made sure she didn't right after right.
And now she's, again, Isabella's never broken skin, and you know, she's only had one bruise that lasted more than A day.
So she's been, I think, pain-free, injury-free for the most part, almost exclusively.
But there's a lot of...
I mean, there's times when you're there and you're alert and you're aware, but you just can't catch her in time.
You know, she wants to go up and down the stairs.
Gosh, this is another thing, which is repetition and anxiety, is that she wants to go up and down the stairs.
And for a while there, she had a habit where she would...
Go up the stairs, and then, halfway up the stairs, she would stand and turn around.
And she didn't know how to do that, and so you really had to be there.
And, at the same time, she doesn't want help, right?
So she's kind of pushing your hand away, because she wants to do it on her own, which, of course, I can completely understand.
But she wants to do it on her own, but she can't do it on her own.
And so you kind of got to be there without interfering, and, you know, you can't hold her by the back of the jacket, because if she trips, whatever, you don't want exactly to cut off her air or anything.
So it's a real challenge to...
This is continual low-grade anxiety.
Now, some of the anxiety is not even low-grade.
Again, I don't know if this is true of other parents, and if you're a parent, please let me know.
But... For a while there until I learned how to manage it better, a significant portion of my parenting was an endless disaster movie scenario.
She's in a dollar store.
We took refuge in a dollar store because it was just freezing.
And we were in this dollar store, and she wanted to play with the things on the pegs coming off the chipboard, with all the doodads hanging from them.
She wanted to play with those. And so, of course, you see these rods and these hooks coming out from the wall, and immediately you think, if she trips, she won't be able to stop herself.
One of those could go straight through her eye.
And, like, when you think of that, your whole...
You just...
You know, you just...
You get nauseous.
You're just like, oh my god, that's just the worst thing ever for her to, you know, anyway, I think you understand.
And this kind of radar is continual.
And it's necessary.
You have to do it as a parent.
I mean, because there are lots of dangers around that you need to be cognizant of.
And so, you know, giving her the latitude to play on those in that area without interfering with her when she doesn't want her help but to keep her safe, I mean, it's tough and it can be stressful and it actually can be, depending on the environment, after a while it can actually just be kind of exhausting, right? So when I take her to Chuck E. Cheese...
There's lots of stuff she can do, but there's lots of kids running around.
Oh, yeah, and the other kids running around, you know, at the library or at Chuck E. Cheese or at some of the play areas we go to.
Oh, that is tough.
You know, they're older kids, and some of them are, you know, kind of rough kids, and they're just barreling around, and I have to be the human shield at all times and all of that.
So that's tough, right?
Like, so one of the play centers I take her to, there's one of those big square rooms with all the colored balls.
And she loves to go into that room and sit down and play with the balls.
But there's sort of these corridors leading into the room and kids love to just come barreling down.
You know, the six or seven-year-old boys, they just love to come barreling down and then jump into the balls.
And, I mean, that's kind of stressful.
I have to sort of, again, be the human shield, right?
And make sure that they don't plunge into Isabella.
And, you know, after you do that for half an hour, I mean, it's tiring.
It's tiring. It's a lot of concentration.
It's a lot of, you know, obviously you don't want to put any other kids in harm's way, but you want to make sure your own kid isn't harmed and she wants to stay in there.
And it's safe for her to be there as long as you're protecting her, but you've got to keep your wits about you.
And that stuff can be tiring for sure.
Now I get what malls are for.
I really do. And I didn't understand that for the longest time.
What the hell are these things for?
But now that I'm a parent, I get it.
I get it.
I understand. Malls are where your kids can run, and they're going to be pretty safe.
And that's why it's great fun.
I'm not a big go-to-the-mall guy, but it's pretty nice.
To go to a mall, and she can walk around.
And particularly the malls we go to during the day, it's pretty quiet.
And there's lots of other parents who are there with their kids.
And I guess we're kind of lucky, in a way.
Not that the other kids aren't lucky, but...
They are in their strollers, and most of the kids are just lying there like zombies in their strollers.
I don't know how that's possible, because you can't get Isabella to stay in a stroller if you bribe her with chocolate bunnies.
And so Isabella can walk around the mall, and as long as we're alert around, she loves escalators, right?
So she'll dart towards escalators.
As long as we're alert to escalators and to any stairs, which she's going to run towards, although she doesn't do that as much anymore, but she used to.
It's pretty relaxing.
As long as she wants to go into the china shop, that's a little bit more stressful, but for the most part, it's just great in a mall.
And we're actually lucky because we're on a street.
There's no through street.
We're on a cul-de-sac, so there's virtually no traffic during the day, so she can go out and what she loves to do is grab stones and throw them into the sewer grate.
Blurp! So we can go and do that, and we can go to the park and all that.
And even at the park, you know, there's plenty of ways to brain your kid in the park.
And she, you know, went through a phase of eating sand.
But hey, I think that's pretty natural for kids.
And I hope my phase ends soon with that, because I tell you, the roughage mornings are pretty rough.
So, that low-grade, continual anxiety, punctuated with bouts of nauseous terror about the possibilities of her injury, that's part and parcel.
And again, I don't want to say like I... Biting my nails the whole time and sweating blood.
But it's there. It's there.
You just have to be alert. You have to be aware that there's a long time.
And that's not going to end for a long time.
And it started a long time back, right?
Of course, when the kid's first born, you're anxious about, you know, health and development and all that kind of stuff.
And once that's sorted out, then they're walking and crawling and you've got to take care of them there.
And, of course, now she's going to start running.
In a few months, we're going to start her in gymnastics and And then she's going to start riding a bike, and then, you know, it's going to be continual.
And God Almighty, I think back to my own childhood, and the things that I was just out doing, it's mental.
It's mental. What was going on in my community around what kids were allowed.
I mean, we were rolling at the age of five.
I distinctly remember rolling down big hills on my skateboard and biking all over the neighborhood.
That was probably a little older, six or seven, biking all over the neighborhood.
But it was a serious amount of latitude.
And I didn't know To imagine that, I mean, I don't want to be a helicopter of a protective parent, but it's definitely there.
Now, I'd also like to mention another downside to parenting, which is that it can be...
I shouldn't say...
I'm not a human being who's prone to loneliness.
I've never really...
I mean, I don't... When people talk about loneliness, like this gulf between themselves and others, I don't feel that.
I always suspect that loneliness...
is separation from the self, which is misidentified as separation from others, separation from others being in effect.
Maybe I'll do a podcast on that if people are interested, but I'm not a person who goes through loneliness much, and I haven't gone through the, you know, parents who stay at home, oh my god, to hear an adult voice, and blah blah blah.
I don't go through that so much.
Actually, I don't really go through that at all.
God, I don't know. You have to like the world, I think, a lot more to miss it.
But I will say that it is strange, given that Christine and I are complete joyful chatterboxes with each other, it is strange that we can go a whole day maybe exchanging five meaningful sentences with each other until we're alone and everything's done in the evening.
And that's a strange thing.
It's strange for our marriage, of course, which has been a fantastic conversation since the very first time we went out together.
But it's strange in the context to be around, right?
So when we're at the mall, we can try and get a conversation going, but there's going to be a continual interruption, right?
Oh, she's darting off over here, so we have to sort of split up because maybe we have the carriage with this or some shopping or whatever, and then we sort of bring her back and maybe she's a little fussy or whatever.
And it's really, really hard to get any kind of conversation going.
And actually, eventually, you could just get frustrated.
Like, it's more annoying to try and get a conversation going with Isabella around than not.
And so, that's been a big change.
And it's... It's been more so now that Isabella is really mobile.
It's been more of that kind of change than it was before.
Before, when she was crawling around, it was easier to have conversations.
But it's tougher now that she's really mobile.
So I sort of wanted to point out that aspect of things that's a real challenge.
So I miss my wife.
I miss my wife.
And it's even more odd to miss someone when you're...
You know, in the same room, or in the same outing.
So, you can try and have a conversation when we're feeding Isabella, but that's kind of tough, because Isabella can start hollering for something, or she doesn't like something, or she'll drop or throw something, and we have to sort of go and wipe it or clean it.
So, it's tough.
You know, it's like trying to concentrate on a test while having a bag of bees over your head.
It can be. So the depth and length of conversations has diminished considerably, which is something, of course, that I miss a lot.
And also, of course, and I don't regret this, but it's a change.
Of course, when we do have time, we will talk about our daughter, right?
We will talk about Isabella, what she learned, what she did, and all these kinds of things.
Like, a friend of mine was up this weekend from the States, and we were outside, and Isabella had never really been in the backyard before, this year in particular, and And we were out in the backyard, and we have, of course, a water spout coming off our back roof, and Isabella pointed at it and said, spider!
Well, spider. She said spider.
And I didn't realize what she meant for a moment, until I remembered that she'd seen a bunch of the videos, right?
She'd seen a bunch of times where There's a spider going up the water spout, and she'd only seen a cartoon water spout, but she correctly identified it as a real water spout, even though it's a different color.
She was saying, spider, water spout, so then we did the water spout song and so on.
That was kind of cool. That's a great story to tell to Christina.
Maybe not a great story for you, but it's a great story for her.
And so we'll talk about that and what she did and if anything unusual developed during the day or if she's, you know, whatever, right?
So the actual talking about ideas or talking about thoughts and feelings that are not around parenting.
And that's taken a significant backseat.
And there's a downside.
I miss that quite a lot.
So I sort of wanted to mention that as well as a challenge when it comes to being a parent.
So I just wanted to leave you with that, and thank you, of course, for listening and supporting.
And what I'd like to do is I'd like to do a podcast, if you're interested, about things, I mean, the things that you know that are going to be great about parenting.
But there are things that, to me, are really surprisingly great about parenting, and I'd sort of like to talk about that.
Oh, the other thing that I would mention as well is that I mean, Isabella is affectionate for sure.
She actually just gave me my first kiss today, which is beautiful.
And she's really affectionate, but the affection is largely feeding me food, which is nice, and thumping me on the chest and saying, da-da.
I think she thumps me open-palmed on the chest.
That's a way of giving me a pat, which is nice.
But that's relatively new, and certainly for the first 14, 13, 14 months, it was mostly a one-way street in terms of give, give, give.
And that was pretty much understood, I guess, going up front.
But it's kind of different to go through it, where it is really just a give, give, give.
And if you're not prepared for that...
I think it's really important to have these ideas of the baby nestling into you and melting into you with their arms draped over your shoulder and all that.
I'm sure that happens with some kids.
It certainly doesn't happen with my daughter.
She's just squirmy and active and all that.
So, you wouldn't want to go into parenting, at least go into parenting with the awareness of the possibility that the level of affection that you're going to receive during the early years, obviously, during the early months, is low.
And it can be...
You have to make sure you stay out of the mindset of, I've given you a lot, and so now you need to give a little in terms of flexibility or whatever, because that's not how infants operate, right?
They don't sort of go, well...
Take, take, take. Now I've got to give a little, right?
So I think that's important to remember that it is just give, give, give, and there is no reciprocity that she's responsible for for the foreseeable future.
And that's, I think, important as well.
Some of the fantasies that you have, and occasionally when she's really tired, she will do that sort of nestle and burrow in.
And she's just starting to hug a little now.
And I mean, I know that she really enjoys my company because she's very upset when I leave the room.
Or is that attachment disorder?
I think it's affection for my company.
But I just wanted to sort of be aware.
You should be aware, I think, of that possibility because it is important to be aware of that and to know that it might happen and probably will happen, I think.
So, anyway, I just wanted to point out these things that I found that are the downsides of parenting, to give you a sort of more 360 view of at least my experiences of it, and of course, I can't recommend it highly enough.
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