"As a parent..."

[LaPerduta]

I've just read about a local teenager who was recently subjected to a rather distressing mugging. The person who posted about this said that, "as a parent," she found this horrifying.

AIBU to think that it is not necessary to be a parent to be able to feel empathy/sympathy towards a child who has had a traumatic experience?

As someone who is not a parent, I find this trope to be quite insulting and it's usually completely unnecessary to state. (I'm assuming the person who posted details of the attack doesn't actually mean that they would have found it acceptable had they not had children of their own.)

Why invoke a pro-natal hierarchy, unnecessarily?

This.

Why do childfree people try minimise the impact being a parent can have on you?

It's like you have to pretend that becoming a parent doesn't change you, so that you don't offend childfree people.

Is there any need for this, really?

Some women who want to become a parent never do. Why hurt someone just for the sake of a witty comment on social media. Ffs.

Exactly this. Being a parent has changed my whole being.

This!

Plumbear2 I'm honestly curious, do you truly feel that you feel the exact same pain of a parent who's child has been attacked, or as in the pp's example -murdered -, simply because you also have a child.
Not that you can imagine/empathise/understand but that your feelings are the same as theirs in a situation where their child was attacked but yours was not?

You don't feel the parents pain as if it were your own. To suggest you do is grief tourism at its finest.

You empathise, of course, but you don't feel their exact pain.

@CrackerAndPudding and @ItsThePlayBusDingDing

Nobody is saying 'as a parent I feel the exact same as someone who's child is ...

That would be ridiculous

Agreed, before I had my kid, I was furious as on Women's Hour there was this same insinuation. Of course you can have empathy without having had a child!

Acornsoup Plumbear2's exact words are "Yes I do feel the pain of the parents."

So yes, someone is saying that

It's because I feel the parents pain as if it was my own child.

Someone did say that.

I can't relate to this. Yes being a parent has changed my whole life immeasurably. My life is COMPLETELY different to how it was. I love my children more than I can say. But parenthood hasn't changed ME. I'm still the same person. Ok, perhaps a little wiser, maybe less selfish because I have to put the kids needs before mine. But I can't say its fundamentally changed who I am. Pre-kids I was always affected by other's suffering, particularly animals and children because they're so vulnerable and helpless. I've always cared deeply about the environment and what we're leaving for the next generation. I didn't have to become a mother to care about others, to care about children. I remember being so deeply affected and upset by James Bulger's murder and I was only 17 (20 years before I had children of my own). There are plenty of people without children who are extremely empathetic. I completely understand the point the OP is making.

You don't feel the parents pain as if it were your own. To suggest you do is grief tourism at its finest.

Yes, this. I have noticed that this site has more and more of people like this and I don't understand their motives, unless it is a competition to feel more than other people.

I am a parent. I had my first at 25 and I am now 50 so for half my life I have been a parent.

I still have no fucking idea how it feels to lose a child.

I also have no fucking idea how it feels to have a child seriously ill.

I'm nothing but grateful for the fact that I don't know these feelings.

I can feel sympathy for people I know who have sick children, or have lost a child. But that sympathy isn't more or deeper than my childless sister because I have children....because it is not my children.

You’re not more empathic because you’re a parent. The fact that having to put someone else first is apparently a shock and a wholly new experience to many is not evidence they’ve grown as individuals.

I have not personally seen anyone become more active in supporting the safety and rights of children in general after becoming a parent themselves. Their own children, sure. Other children? No.

I voted YABU.

I'm a new parent and my whole life has been flipped upside down and everything has changed. I had no idea what was to come. There are films/shows/books I loved that I can't touch now. News stories about kids seem to upset me more - they did upset me before but not to the same extent. The story of the runaway couple who left their baby in the cold for example - horrible, cruel, inexplicable. I don't think I felt more than a childless person, but that baby would have been born the same week as mine and it hit me hard.

It's becoming a sad world that you really can't say anything without upsetting someone. 'As a parent' is not an offensive, racist, phobic phrase. And weird to be complaining about it on a forum for mums, no?

I don't like this phrase, it's patronising. Reminds me of a male friend who I've known since college said staightfaced to me recently that as a father of a young girl he has become really aware of gender inequality. I find I like him a lot less since then 😠

And as a Grandmother, parent to a 20something and a teen, I suggest you calm down.

You are insulting parents that have had their teenagers murdered.

Can you really say you feel the same as them?

If course you can't.

Steady on now.

*Of course.

Let's just hope@Plumbear2 that you never feel the true pain of loss.

Then again, you'd probably thrive on it. Woe is you.

From the moment I had my first child, my life took on a very sombre hue in the background. I mean, I'm happy, life is fun-joyous, even- but there is a darkness lurking inside that is equal to the love I feel. Its like an unopened chest of terror and horror that permanently lives inside you, locked for now, but you never know if it will ever open. You have to live with this potential for emotional pain on another level and it's very difficult to explain how this dark shadow is cast over your life even when your children are the best thing that ever happened to you. I was always very maternal, loved children and felt very sensitive to news involving children before I had them. Now that I do (I've 3), that bone crunching, nauseating potential for devastation is a possibility in my life, and I feel it. When I say, 'as a parent...', I mean 'your chest of horror has been opened' and that means something that I can't even put into words. It doesn't mean that childless people don't care, or don't have the emotional skills to put themselves in the shoes of a parent, or even to have their own feelings as a regular concerned and compassionate citizen. For me it far transcends that. Its seeing someone living your nightmare and I feel it horribly.

I think some things you feel worse as you imagine your own kids. You don't know what it feels like as you are not a parent, just as I don't know the intensity of feeling about other things that I am not, such as homophobia or racism. Doesn't mean I don't feel like it's awful, and shouldn't happen and is wrong.

I feel more intensely about things that happen to teens now mine are teenagers.

Sometimes as a parent is relevant, (possibly kids getting hurt, kid related stuff) sometimes it's just wanky (general politics)

I really feel intense empathy with the mothers of kids who have been hurt as I know how much it would hurt if something happened to mine.

We all approach the world from different perspectives, and we all bring our own biases and subjectivities to the way we experience things. Sometimes that’s relevant, sometimes it’s not.

For example, I can use empathy to imagine to some extent how it feels to be a Mum of a black son in the US, and the particular anxiety that must evoke, but I don’t accurately know how that feels in my gut.

She was reading that situation as a parent imagining how it would feel if your child was violently mugged. You were reading it as a human empathising with a fellow human being violently mugged.

I don’t think one perspective is inherently better than the other.

Exactly.

You should be grateful that you cannot comprehend such loss.

The boy murdered was 2 years above my daughter at school. The 14 year old charged with his murder was in the same year.

The pain and fallout has been heartbreaking. But I cannot claim to feel the same loss.
Even to think that is beyond insensitive.

It's hormones! It'll calm down soon.

My god I feel the pain, and have felt pain bringing my 2 up, and with a grandchild comes another level of fear.

I know everyone can sympathise and empathise and feel physical pain, whether they be a parent or not. You don't need to be a parent for that.

I just can't stand to hear that someone KNOWS the pain of losing a child - in any manner. Whether it be miscarriage or murder. It's insulting to the owner of that pain.

And there by the grace of God... Rather than trying to make it an issue that you FEEL THEIR pain, just be thankful that, really - you don't.

Yep, blummin hormones! I used to cry at Neighbours - and that was when it was rubbish 🤣