"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?

If that is so, how do you explain those parents who mistreat or even murder their own children?

They are defective human beings. Sociopaths.

That's how.

If that is so, how do you explain those parents who mistreat or even murder their own children?

and writing stuff like this is when you know you’ve lost the debate! What about….(random extreme thing), what about, what about?

🙈🤷‍♀️

Or, in other words, there is no magic parental empathy injection; you can be an uncaring, neglectful or sociopathic parent without an iota of the empathy a non-parent might have.

Mistreatment of children is not always in the extreme.

Yup. My parents were abusive but they weren’t sociopaths. Damaged people who had no business having kids, but that’s way more common than most people are comfortable admitting. Hence they’re all monsters, and the parent empathy gene theory is intact.

@fitzwilliamdarcy I mean it wouldn’t be a gene would it, that would make no sense in your argument.

@fitzwilliamdarcy @PussBilledDuckyPlait you’ve both obviously been through something and I am sorry. But parents who say they have an empathy/ connection with their child that a non parent cannot understand is not who you need to be focused on and angry about.

Indeed @PussBilledDuckyPlait !

It's interesting, isn't it, in these threads where posters such as @Mark19735 (oh so empathic because they're a parent, doncha know?) basically tell non-parents to fuck off, no-one talks about the oh-so-caring-because-they're-parents sociopaths, isn't it? Or the selfish people who become parents? Or the narcissist parents?

No-one says "As a parent, I drink too much and neglect my children".

But apparently "As a parent" gives someone a magical insight into deep emotion that is completely unknown to anyone not a parent.

It's BS.

I haven’t read the whole thread but I have read the OPs messages.

About 12 years ago I was working as a fairly senior ICU ‘trainee’ doctor- 8 years into post graduate and a year from being a consultant.

I did not have children at that time.

One night a 14 year old came in as a crash call after an incident, in cardiac arrest. Myself and my colleague (same age/ grade) attended as the airway and intensive care seniors.

We could not save this boy despite all and everyone’s efforts.

We were all devastated. But the people on the team with children were, for a while, inconsolable. My close colleague cried for hours after, I had to take her bleep from her to attend other calls. She felt this child’s death so much more than me, thinking of her own children at home asleep and thinking about the child’s parents receiving this most awful news.

I was upset- really upset- about the child’s death but not in the same way as my colleague who was a mother.

Fast forward a few years- working in paediatrics- when I was heavily pregnant with my second child and toddler at home… I regularly had a quiet cry in the loos after doing my rounds on the children’s cancer ward.

Point of long ramble is: having children massively intensified or chanted my own visceral responses to children suffering in a way I couldn’t have anticipated.

That doesn’t take away from that fact that before children I felt huge empathy for children and families. It just made it feel more personal and therefore much more acute.

On that basis I vote YABU.

Sorry, I would have replied sooner but I was on a thread on pistonheads arguing why not having a car makes my opinions on the latest BMW especially relevant - at least as relevant as theirs. I can't believe how rude and dismissive they were.

And then I went onto Tripadvisor and got into a bit of a spat when I left some reviews on holidays to places I'd never been to. I mean, who are they to say that my opinions are any less valid than theirs. You don't have to have been to a place to leave a review about it - AIBU?

I make no comparison between the absolute levels of empathy in parents and non-parents. I simply state that most parents attest to having increased their empathy and feeling when discussing topics related to children being harmed since they themselves became parents. It's a reasonable hypothesis that non-parents have even more capacity for even greater empathy than they already experience, based on the testimony of all the other people who have become parents. But clearly the ones posting here are all 100% OK with their lot, all tickety-boo, and have no issues or hang-ups at all. They just hang round a forum for parents complaining at how left out they feel when parents discuss parent-y things.

Now, I'm off to find some GC forums to tell them how trans women are feeling left out and excluded by all this biological essentialism. I mean, who's to say that a biological man doesn't feel more feminine than a biological woman, right?

*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*

Someone is saying "as a parent" and it conveys an emotional stratum or two that other parents will feel, too, - this sort of thing "as someone who has had experience X" enables people to express/have a small empathetic connection with others.

It seems to me you have a chip on your shoulder about people being parents, expressing themselves in the light thereof, and want to justify the fact that you feel entitlement to some sort of injury when it happens. imo YABU to seek it on MUMSnet.

I had to read this twice+ (don’t have my glasses on) but bravo 😂

Fair points 😂

Mark You are repeatedly failing to comprehend the difference between an opinion and an emotion.

Take your example: arguing why not having a car makes my opinions on the latest BMW especially relevant - at least as relevant as theirs

Your opinion on, say, how smoothly a particular car drives or how well it takes corners or whatever other things people who are car experts share views on, will of course be informed by your experience of driving it (you wouldn't actually have to own a given car to have experience of driving it, but I get your general principle).

However, many people are 'into' fast cars, they are passionate about luxury cars, Porches and Ferraris and so on even if they have no hope of ever owning one. That is an emotion rather than an opinion. And, conversely, many people hate petrol-guzzling fast cars because of their environmental impact and wouldn't dream of ever owning one - an equally valid emotional response.

I think this comment summarises why OP gets annoyed. The obvious answer is you do need to experience something to really understand it, this is with anything including having children. And often they're saying it, as you might "as a sister", "as a fellow whatever" or similar. But also many people do use that wording and come from a place of superiority, particularly when the default is you might have a "chip" to even question it, and secretly you probably want kids yourself (which is the dumbest response and there are a few on here who do this), and how dare you come on mumsnet to ask anything if it's not all about the muuuummmmmm

Well clearly there exceptions! But I wpuld say for most parents this is the case. Before kids if something happened to a child I would feel sympathy like most people but afyer kids it's different, I can't help but think about what it would be like if it was my child and I feel much sadder and want to be closer to my children at the time

And then I went onto Tripadvisor and got into a bit of a spat when I left some reviews on holidays to places I'd never been to. I mean, who are they to say that my opinions are any less valid than theirs. You don't have to have been to a place to leave a review about it - AIBU?

^ to be fair I often think has this reviewer even been here because it sounds nothing like where I went 😂

The truth is, and a huge reason as to why our society is in such an awful state, is that the vast majority of people don’t actually give a shit about unjust situations unless they can personally relate to them (eg fathers of girls, parents of teens, people with disabled siblings etc.)

Well I suppose it might just be the majority of Mumsnet users. Perhaps the outlook is not so bleak.

I am with you OP.

You didn’t ‘simply’ state anything 😂

Posting views on a BMW or holiday resort is very different to the ability to express empathy which in case you weren’t sure means imagining what someone else feels. You can’t imagine the mechanics of a BMW.

The truth is, and a huge reason as to why our society is in such an awful state, is that the vast majority of people don’t actually give a shit about unjust situations unless they can personally relate to them (eg fathers of girls, parents of teens, people with disabled siblings etc.)
Has anyone actually said they didn't give a shit until they had children though?

Acknowledging that your emotional reaction is different when something resonates personally is different to not giving a shit beforehand.

The weird thing is that people like the OP seem to look for offence in how others express their own emotions.

@LaPerduta Sorry I disagree. I mean I get what you're saying that yes, I'd still feel a tremendous amount of empathy for the child if I wasn't a parent but since becoming one, my reaction to thinks like this has intensified quite a lot! It immediately makes you imagine the same happening to your own child and your natural, maternal protective instinct & emotions kick in.

It's totally different

I even explained to my mother how to cross the road safely the first time she took my child out for a walk...

Omg me too! She just smiled & nodded but I couldn't help it. It's like a visceral need isn't it!?

*things like this 🤦🏼‍♀️

The weird thing is that people like the OP seem to look for offence in how others express their own emotions.

Not remotely it.This thread has turned into a bunch of parents telling childless women that they know our emotions better than we do. I don’t think that anyone is wrong to find that insulting.