To think that children will fit in around OUR lives, not the other way around?

[HonestQuestion]

I am sure I'm going to get flamed for this but maybe there will be some good advice too! (I have NCd)

DH and I were talking last night about how we intend to bring up children. We have seen friends and family where DC rule the roost - everything is organised around the children. The children aren't ever left to their own devices to play; the parents are constantly playing with them and distracting them with activities. The TV is always switched to children's channels, not the news or anything adult. Evenings with the family have to be run on the children's schedule for naps and snacks and feeding.

Even when they are in bed, the mums are held hostage to the DC speaking over the walkout talkie and summoning them to the bedroom plenty of times before they finally go to sleep. We meet up with our friends for lunch or dinner or a day out, and always seem to come home not really having had much of a chat or catch up with our friends - because the day or evening is always all about the children - we all have to be in their thrall!

It seems the experience of raising a child these days is so far removed from how DH and I were brought up. We remember being left to our own devices to play, watching the news and learning about the world from it, we remember that the adults ruled the house - my dad would never have dreamed of having kids' TV on all evening when he got home from work!

And it's so far removed from how we want to raise our children. We don't want to lose 'who we are' and what we find interesting. A friend of ours said on FB the other day that she is going on a mini break and leaving her DC alone overnight for the first time in 3 years! I can't imagine being like that! And I can't imagine having a DC, meeting up with friends but spending that time constantly entertaining the children.

AWBU? I have my hard hat ready...

Honest I agree with quite a bit you originally posted. My parenting style follows some of what you say.

However, you are sounding a tad silly when you talk of your possible 11 year old which might not be for 12-15 years (who knows) not having mobile data access.

You do not know what the technological world will be like then. You might have no choice. It might be an absolute necessity.

I thought I knew a lot too but you cannot make sweeping statements as to what you will and won't do. It doesn't work like that.

OP my DD is in her first year of secondary school. She has to go online to find out what her homework is and to access school resources including textbooks. We don't make her wait til we're home from work so she can do this under supervision because it's impractical. By the time she does her GCSEs I reckon all their homework wil be submitted online too.

I think there is a whole lot of different things thrown into the OP.

For example it is entirely possible to have your life change immensely when your children are born AND to tell a toddler not to interrupt. It's not like a sky package where if you sign up for going to a farm instead of a museum on a Saturday then you get the interrupting toddler and cbeebies on 24/7 as an inevitable part of the package.

OP, you are guilty of the "being a parent changes everything" as much as anyone by presuming that you will not still be an individual when you are a parent - you seem to think you need to sign up to some church of parenting and have no more choice. It is either "be a chum" or "be what I was before exactly". It isn't like that.

From my own experience of 3 relatively easy children, it was much much nicer when we accepted we now had children and adapted our lives to that. It is more fun to go for a walk on a beach with friends with a cup of coffee in hand chatting while kids run around, then sitting in a hip coffee house reading the papers while toddler climbs the wall (more fun for the other people in the coffee house too)

Your children only need you to really adapt like this for a very short time -it is a lot of fun and you can make some great friends while doing it. My own parents (I was reared in the 60s/70s) gave us what OP would probably describe as a child-centered life. They loved us having our friends home, they went out with us on sat and sun for walks/drives/to the park, they say the baby/toddler years were the most fun they had. My best friend's parent were the same. Most of my friends of similar (ancienst) ages had childhoods which involved parents spending time with their kids, going to matches to watch them, sitting with them in the evening, eating with them, adjusting their social lives etc. It isn't actually a new thing to want to make room for your child in your life.

If you got a lodger in the house, you wouldn't expect your life to go on exactly as before so why would a whole dependent person whom you love be any different?

Will your 11 year old be different to the other 11 year olds OP?

Nothing like an expert with zero experience.

My DD is 12yo.

When I was pregnant with her there was no such thing as an iPhone. Mp3 players were revolutionary new tech and iTunes appeared while I was pregnant. There was no social media, no digital TV, even broadband wasn't widely available.

I could not have begun to imagine how much technology would have altered our lives by the time she started secondary school. Certainly, any rules I might have formulated back in 2003 would have been completely redundant a decade later.

I think the OP is being naive at best, disingenuous at worst. And the comment about modern parents raising their children as friends was downright goady. However, I wish her and her DP well in their journey to parenthood and I wish their future children fortitude, resilience and patience.

fusion it doesn't seem at all pointless to me to consider how my partner and I might want to parent. For one, if one of you thinks the ideal is to breastfeed until the kid is 12, and the other expects them to be shipped off to boarding school at 7, it's better to flush that info out before we both bring a child into the world.

More broadly, since there are now 19 pages of responses saying (not exclusively) just you wait and you won't know what hit you, looking at what other people are doing, and thinking about why they might be doing it, is helpful and instructive. Posting that I hope to do X really doesn't warrant responses telling me that I'm not allowed to contemplate out loud how we might want to raise children because we haven't yet had those children. I'm sure there are lots of things you think about, look forward to, worry about, discuss, ahead of actually experiencing, and nobody attempts to censure you as it'd be rude to do so.

Well we'll have to agree to disagree then won't we? I'm going to carry on raising my year 7 child as I see fit, and just because you don't agree it doesn't make me a bad parent.

Our high school supports safer Internet use rather than no internet use, and has given talks to parents about this. I know my child hasn't got round the parental locks and we've had no fighting/issues via whatsapp either.

I would offer to come back in 12 years and see if you've changed your mind - but I can't be bothered. Mine will be adults so I'll probably be posting for advice asking how to get them to move out

Haven't read the whole thread but I reckon you may be in for a shock if u have children

Yeah, that pretty much sums up the thread.

Nothing like an expert with zero experience. Exactly.

I keep coming back to this thread even though it's not doing me any good. I think it's the sheer preposterousness of the OP's assertions that make it somehow clickbait.

Oh blimey. I thought most parents just made it up as they went along! That's what I do anyway.

Give the OP credit for her chutzpah though. It takes some confidence brass neck to appoint yourself an expert on something you a)know nothing about and b) have no experience of.

I think you are missing that no one is censuring you, just suggesting it's not likely to be very fruitful. It really is one of those areas in life, sort of like falling in love or experiencing a serious illness or bereavement, where you can't preplan your path, and where if you do, it can lead to an unhelpful amount of rigidity that causes suffering.

There's a great article here on what are called "transformative experiences" - the type of experiences you can't rationalise about before you've been there. I think we've all had some experience of them, in one way or another.

What you can do ahead of time a little, I think, is establish a certain sense of shared values - e.g. you can establish that you both share broad values as a couple e.g. in your attitudes and approaches to life's major issues (how you approach life, love, death, politics and taxes) but not really in operationalising how you will apply these to parenting except in very broad areas (e.g. you can of course choose whether a child will be baptised in a certain faith and if moving house, consider local schools and proximity to wider family etc). You just can't really choose or outline what you will do in lots of cases e.g. you might value raising independent, resourceful, resilient kids, say, but find that what YOUR child needs to get there is a million miles away from what you imagined.

My own experience wasn't particularly extreme but I had worked for many years in behavioural support and had had a huge amount of training in child development and the principles of learning. I had assisted families in toilet training children with severe special needs and with sleep difficulties. I had Very Strong Opinions on how I would deal with any issues with feeding, sleeping, toileting and aggression when they arose, ala Supernanny.

I was hopelessly - and I mean hopelessly - unable to carry it out with my own. Laughably so.

I had dreamed of my child having a special teddy to help them nod off to sleep after their lovely bedtime routine, and enjoying bedtime books and some gentle music - but my first born can't stand music (he literally covers his ears if you sing or play a CD), didn't enjoy being read to after the age of about 2 and threw away every beautiful teddy we ever gave him). I dreamed of long leisurely bath-times where we would all be laughing and splashing. My eldest thought of bath time as some sort of water torture and would claw at our backs while putting him in. Every thought I ever had was tested, tested, tested. More than I ever imagined or dreamed possible.

And as I said, it is human nature to dream and fantasise.. but once you start deriving "rules" about what's likely to work for you based on snapshots of other people's experiences, it tends to come a cropper.

A friend of ours said on FB the other day that she is going on a mini break and leaving her DC alone overnight for the first time in 3 years! I can't imagine being like that!

Of all the slightly unrealistic stuff in your post, this one stuck out. Not everyone has someone reliable/local/willing to leave their DC with for a weekend or even for one night. I know some parents who have masses of free childcare from willing relatives (and lots of them take it for granted) but if you don't have this then it's genuinely difficult to go away without the children.

Presumably you do have loads of willing minions who will take your perfectly behaved, compliant future DC while you swan off to enjoy your mini breaks without the inconvenience of children, OP?

Every thought I ever had was tested, tested, tested. More than I ever imagined or dreamed possible.

^^ this

These friends of yours not having the news on around children sound quite sensible..the news even at 6 o'clock isnt really child friendly material. There are images young children should not see and talk of rape and sexual attacks etc.

Maybe just maybe these parents have actually made a conscious decision NOT to expose their children to the news rather than a penchant for In The Night Garden

We wanted to avoid a routine but it really didn't work ds needs his routine and he's never been for a sleepover as he still doesn't reliably sleep through and I don't want pil to have to deal with it. He's 2 this month, we have afternoons etc to go out and have kid free time

I do hope the OP can take something useful away from this thread. She's asked whether her expectations are reasonable and broadly, the consensus is no. We're not saying it to point and laugh - well, a bit maybe, but there is a lot of useful information on here too. Parenthood is a one-way decision, and I often think it's a shame (making a sweeping generalisation here) that the childless adult world so seems to ignore mothers and/or write us off as rubbish whenever our kids behave less than perfectly. You know? I have a PhD, and I used to design chemical processes for drug manufacturing. I'm not an idiot. Nevertheless, my kids have sometimes come to blows in the supermarket over who gets to ride in the trolley. If I can't stop that happening, sure you can blame me and say you'll do better, but isn't it worth considering that I might be quite good at this, this sort of thing might be a hard-to-avoid aspect of parenting, and you might want to be ready for it, and factor that possibility into your decision to have kids (and when, and how spaced out, and how many, and when/whether you will go back to work)?

And btw I had twins who were in a sleep routine at 5 and a half months and went to bed at 7.30 regularly every night until they dropped their nap at 3 and 3 months (and then were able to be more flexible). So you know, I'm quite a hardass. But when they're awake, they are who they are!

I held a lot of the same thoughts as you, pre-kids.

DH and I used to visit friends with kids and come away shaking our heads, saying how much better we'd do X, Y and Z and that we wouldn't tolerate A, B, C.

I'm embarrassed now. I'm glad it's only DH I ever shared those thoughts now. I don't necessarily parent in the same way as those friends, and there are things which we said we would/wouldn't do, and have stuck to. But we still just didn't get it, at all.

And, you know, it's one thing to hold these thoughts - most of us did to a greater or lesser extent.

What strikes me as quite incredible as that you'd come onto a huge, worldwide parenting forum and tell us all how you're going to be a far superior parent, and how modern parents just aren't doing a very good job of things at all.

Man, it takes a whole new level of - I don't even know what the word is - to do that! 👍🏽

SIL was like OP. I somehow managed to say nothing.

She almost had a breakdown when DN arrived and didn't just "slot in."

Good luck OP

I think my life has fallen into the middle ground. It has adapted around my family's needs, but it is recognisable from before too.

Life started changing from pregnancy because I first felt ill and exhausted, then I ended up with very painful mobility problems. Life slowed down and was already different when DS1 was born.

The first year, he waa quite portable. He was a calm baby who would sleep anywhere (but not through the night). Being a bottle refuser, I couldn't go far from him for long, but he could usually come with me. Being a baby, we could stick him in a carrier and do things like hiking. Not quite on the scale of before, but we didn't have to stick our old lives in the box.

DS2 changed life some more. He was an easy portable baby too, but life is just more awkward when balancing the needs of two children.

At the same time many friends were also having first or second children. What had once been two couples had now become 7-8 people making things like staying overnight much more awkward just to fit in a room.

I still keep elements of my pre-children life. I've kept a hand in some hobbies. While proper mountain climbing isn't viable at present, the DCs love camping and a mini "mountain" a short drive away. I have changed some interests too, and that's natural that my life is different from 6 years ago when it all started to change.

I think keeping an essence of ourselves is healthy. Babies change and grow and our children's needs and demands of us change until they aren't dependent on us for their basic needs, and we do need ourselves in tact at the end, but we will be changed by the process, and mostly for the better.

It's normal to have some ideals before going into parenthood. It's normal for them to be ditched in survival mode along the way. I've still got rose tinted visions of what lies ahead, even though I've been doing this parenting malarkey for 5 years and know that my DCs have their own agenda...

OP, Schnitzel is right about a lot of secondary school homework or resources now being online.

It will be even more so by the time any child you have (and I do hope it works out for you) reaches that age.

my DD3 is 13 and sometimes begins or completes a bit of work that way on the school bus. As an 11 year old she did so too. Data, whether via home wifi or mobile data, will become more essential over the next decade I think. Not less. You will not be able to hold your theoretical 11 year old back like that. It won't be as simple as you seem to think it will be and planning to do it is pointless. Perhaps by then all exams will be done online instead of written at desks in the school hall. Who knows, but all the rules in the world that you want to make will not stop it. You might as well give up trying before you even start there.

I always find childless people who think they know it all hilarious. It reminds me of that quiz on "are you ready to be a parents", especially "test 2" (knowledge).

www.mykidstime.com/for-parents/ready-parent-take-14-step-parenting-test/

OP, I think you are confusing different age groups. Your friends whose lives are dominated by DC probably have under 5s. Your and DH's memories are probably of being 5 or older. Older children are (in general) more flexible about being put to bed in a strange house, more able to play quietly so parents can chat, etc.

(usual disclaimer: not read whole thread, may be repeating)

I think it's more likely that you'll be getting your eleven year old to put the parental locks on the technology as you'll gave been so busy for eleven years, you will have rather fallen behind with it all!