I didn’t want to have kids.
Whenever I saw a baby, they looked so unpredictable, happy one moment and miserable the next.
As a child psychologist, I’ve seen a lot of bad things happen to good kids.
In my own life, I know how difficult it’s been for my parents to lose my brother.
The unpredictability of being a parent, of loving someone so much and not knowing what’s
going to happen, I didn’t want to experience that.
But what I knew about parenting was biased.
Since I was the youngest in my family, I never saw a baby grow up.
Everything I knew was based on movies, being stuck behind a crying baby in an airplane,
the experience of working with families during the most difficult periods of their lives,
and living through my family’s tragedy.
This is the availability heuristic at work.
We often make decisions based on examples that easily come to our mind.
When I thought about becoming a parent, my head filled up with loud poopy babies surrounded
by sleep deprived parents on the verge of a breakdown.
Then my wife and I moved to Brooklyn.
We became friends with a couple who had a newborn boy.
This was the first time I got to develop a relationship with people who had just become
parents.
What surprised me most was that they weren’t miserable.
Sure I saw a lot of loud, poopy moments and our friends always seemed to be in need of
more sleep, but there were also these moments of discovery.
I loved being there for them, seeing our friends walk their son around our neighborhood introducing
him to what a fire hydrant is, how to pet a dog, and why you shouldn’t touch gum that
someone else stuck on a wall.
I was willing to never have kids because i thought I knew how it would make me feel.
We’re all so horrible at this, affective forecasting, predicting how we’re going
to feel in the future.
We spend so much time imagining what our future will feel like even though it’s impossible
to know what will happen, what emotions will come up, and how long they’ll last.
Unless you’ve got a Delorion, but that might lead to some universe ending time paradoxes.
Failing to predict future emotions summarizes our experience becoming parents.
We were so excited to start trying to have a baby and had no idea how hard it was going
to be for us.
We spent a long time trying to get pregnant and couldn’t.
I was ashamed, thought there was something wrong with me, I’d get jealous when my friends
became pregnant, and then I got mad at myself for being jealous.
With the help of some great doctors, we finally became pregnant and that’s when a whole
new set of emotions were unlocked.
Complete awe every time we saw an ultrasound.
Relief every time we heard a heartbeat.
Shock to learn we’re having a girl.
And lots of worries: Am I going to mess this all up?
How am I going to know what to do?
Will she love me?
Then the big day came.
There is where I was reminded again of the availability heuristic - everything I learned
about labor and delivery was completely wrong.
Nothing happens as quickly as it does on TV.
At no point did my wife historically yell, “Why did you do this to me”.
Also, affective forecasting.
The birth plan we had spent months putting together — most of it wasn’t possible,
and that ended up being okay.
I remember this moment when all the doctors and nurses were gone, it was just our new
family, and for the first time I got to hold my daughter, this person I had waited so many
years to meet, she was finally here, in my hands.
Seeing her look at me for the very first time, everything else disappeared.
Sometimes when I hold her like this and see her look up, I’m taken back to that moment
when everything was so new.
When she was born, I felt my heart expand, a love I never felt before.
It was probably the hormones - during a first time pregnancy, women experience an increase
in testosterone, cortisol, estradiol, and progesterone while men experience a drop in
testosterone and estradiol.
These changes focus parents on their relationship with each other and on taking care of their
newborn child.
I felt that.
Holding her, feeding her, helping her fall asleep, these moments gave me so much unexpected
joy.
There’s a growing body of research that suggests the more men get involved in taking
care of their kids early on, the better parents they become.
But here’s the problem — it’s very hard in American for any parent to take time off
from work to be with their newborn child.
I did it, but it took months of bureaucratic nonsense and a big cut in our savings to happen.
It hasn’t been all joy.
I’m really sleepy, all the time, like ALL THE TIME!
We just don’t have the time or energy to go out to eat or watch movies or do a lot
of the things we used to.
I have to be really mindful, present, and focused on her when I’m holding her.
This one time I was feeding her just like this and my phone rang, and I got distracted,
and dropped my phone on her, and she cried, and I felt super guilty, and had to talk to
my pediatrician, who assured me I was just being an anxious first time parent, and everything
was okay.
But it’s really hard to stop everything else in the world and just be with your child.
But life keeps surprising me.
I thought being a parent would make my job more stressful, but the opposite happened.
I care a lot less about stupid things at work.
Recent research has shown that it’s good for men and women to both work and raise their
children.
Being involved in both helps you deal with the stress of each role.
Maybe you have a bad day at work, but you get some extra cuddles at home.
Or, your kid vomits all over you in the morning and you get to escape to work.
One of the roles I’ve struggled with is all the extra stuff I do outside of work and
family, like The Psych Show.
Since becoming a parent, I’ve made half as many videos as I used to.
Everything I learned about getting things done doesn’t work anymore.
I’m going to make another video about this for Patreon about how to be productive as
a parent but for now I just want to say thank you for your patience and let you know I’m
figuring out how to make more content on a regular basis.
Six months into becoming a parent, there’re three big things I’ve learned.
The first is I’m never going to master this.
I’m never going to be able to control this.
I have to surrender to the uncertainty of parenting.
No where else in life does this happen.
Usually, you do something, get better at it, and that’s it.
But just when you think you’ve got parenting figured out, your child grows, that thing
that you were doing and helped her calm down doesn’t work anymore, and you start again
from scratch.
This is really frustrating.
It’s like playing a video game that keeps getting harder, your controller keeps changing,
It’s Zelda one minute then Street Fighter, and then it gets really weird and becomes
Bioshock, and no matter how long you play you never reach the end of the game.
The second thing is you need friends who’ve recently gone through what you are going through.
It’s like when you get stuck on a video game but look up a video of someone else playing
through your stuck point.
My wife and I CONSTANTLY text our friends who also have little kids.
They’ve helped us learn that a runny nose is just a constant thing kids get in New York
during the winter and not something we need to go to the ER for, that doing the same routine
over and over again, like singing the same exact three songs, helps your baby fall asleep,
and it’s okay if random scary thoughts about your kids pop up in your head — that’s
just something that happens when a part of you is out there running around in the world.
The third thing I’ve learned is every new thing you do as a parent is scary and you
have to find a way to deal with your own fear.
Having her sleep in her own room for the first time, taking her on the subway for the first
time, leaving her with another caregiver for the first time, it all terrified me.
But this will always happen throughout our lives - going to school, playdates, sleepovers,
camp, and college (if she wants to go to college and if that’s even a thing anymore in 18
years).
I have to learn to let go of controlling everything and create a safe place where she can learn
to cope on her own, that’s the ultimate job of a parent.
Do you want kids?
What have you learned about parenting?
Let me know in the comments below.