Adults Without Kids

Whether you have one kid or multiple kids, you understand what it means to stay up all night without sleeping because your child won’t sleep. You understand what it means to feel pain. You understand that your child relies on you for everything in their life. You have a deep first hand knowledge of how hard being a parent is. And you know what it means to feel like you’re on cloud nine with your child.

Before you had a kid though, you only had an idea of what it was like to be a parent. You understood to some degree that parents don’t get to sleep as much as they’d like. They spend many of their free time playing with their kids and cleaning up after them. But your knowledge was probably quite passive in nature, and you didn’t think too much about it. There are lots of adults like this out there.

As a parent, you’re going to have to be patient with these adults that don’t understand what it actually means to be a parent. They may say things that make no sense about your child or how they should act, but you don’t need to be rude in response. It’s perfectly acceptable (and probably necessary) to correct them when they say something that’s ignorant, but you shouldn’t be rude about it.

For your friends that don’t have kids, you may need to help educate them on some of the things that will no longer be a possibility now that you have kids. Want to go out for drinks in the evening with little to no notice? Good luck trying that. Unless you’re going to try to bring the baby along with you (which you can’t to a bar anyways), you’re going to have to gracefully decline these invitations.

Being invited to weddings, or other events can be done with kids (plenty of people bring their kids to such events), but don’t be offended if your newly wed friend doesn’t exactly understand that your child isn’t going to be able to follow every rule or be quiet all the time. Young kids don’t somehow magically turn into beings that understand everything they should be doing because they’re going to an official event.

If you’ve yet to have kids, do your best to understand what it might be like to have a child that can’t be left at home, doesn’t understand anything, and is trying to learn about the world. There’s not some magic way to speak to them that they’ll simply understand. For the first couple of years, they’re not going to understand a lot of what you want from them or how to act. They’ll need to constantly go with you.

As a parent, you should do your best to help others understand what to expect as a parent. If they comment or do something that makes no sense, kindly explain to them how things actually work. They’re probably not trying to be rude, they simply don’t have the knowledge to be able to fully understand what it means to you. If they get offended, then they’re probably not mature enough to understand what having kids really means.

Being a parent is different than being single. You won’t be able to do everything and anything you want. Help others to understand this as well.