“Have you ever wanted not to be a parent anymore?”
Have you ever wanted not to be a parent anymore? is the title of a post dated January 4th on Blogging Baby.
“Never thought this” were the words that came first into my mind.
In the Blogging Baby post, Jen Creer describes meeting a friend—the mother of a special needs child—and asking her what she wants to do in this new year; the friend’s response is “‘I don’t want to be a mother or a wife anymore.’”
I have known other mothers who have said this; I can say that these are hard words for me, also a mother of a special needs child, to hear. Creer, in full empathy, notes that her friend’s special needs son “is simply an exhausting person to be around– and it would not be easy to feel at ease leaving him in someone else’s care.” These words also make me sad. I more than sympathize with what Creer’s friend feels, but when it comes to talking about children with special needs, saying that one does “not want to be a mother or a wife anymore” has complicated undertones, as suggested in the previous post on screening for Down Syndrome. And when one’s child has autism, which was not too long ago considered to be caused not simply from bad parenting but “by parents who wish their child did not exist” (Source), the question “have you ever wanted not to be a parent anymore?” has a long history.
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POSTED IN: Family, Health, Parenting, Psychiatry, Psychology
4 opinions for “Have you ever wanted not to be a parent anymore?”
Julia
Jan 9, 2007 at 9:50 pm
I just want an occasional break. :) But I cannot imagine life without my husband or without ANY of my children.
ashley
Jan 9, 2007 at 11:00 pm
Yes. I have felt those feelings, but they have been brief thoughts that I never took seriously.
I’ve imagined what it’d be like to walk out the door in the morning without responsibilities.
I’ve imagined living a different life… one that was childess, one with children but divorced, one where I chose another path in life, one where I had adopted more children, one where we I had one kid versus two, a different job opportunity, a different major, that kind of stuff.
True, parenting is certainly not what I expected it to be (my whole world as it’s become). As I have read and listened to other parents, this seems to ring true for many. But what also rings true, is how much love I feel for my children. So huge there’s just no word for it. And I couldn’t imagine a single moment without them.
ebohlman
Jan 10, 2007 at 12:54 am
It ought to be noted that “if you had a chance to do it all over again, would you still want to be a parent” is the absolutely classic Research Methods 101 example of how the results obtained from random (”scientific”) samples differ from those obtained from self-selected samples. If you use a random sample, you get an overwhelmingly “yes” answer. If you use a self-selected sample (mail-in poll in response to magazine article, “call 1-900-blahblah” or “click this radio button on my page” you’ll get a strong majority saying “no.” The simple fact is that self-selected samples consist almost entirely of people with very strong feelings about the subject in question, and people who are dissatisfied with their lives feel it more strongly than people who are satisfied. You could call it “bitching bias.”
Kristina Chew, PhD
Jan 10, 2007 at 3:13 am
Parenting turned out to be much better than I expected—to be honest, I never thought too much of what it be like until I was expecting Charlie, and then there was Charlie in my arms. When I was younger, my thought was to “wait” before having children, but once Charlie was born, eveyrthing changed.
Ebolhman, I really appreciate your explanation of random vs. self-selected samples in regard to this question. (A thorough student of the humanities, I have never taken a statistics class.) I will say, I had a very difficult time writing this post and went through several revisions before posting.
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