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I'm amused by and a bit embarrassed for all those people (mostly middle-class) who want the status associated with parenthood but who haven't quite come to terms with the fact that they can no longer live as though they don't have children. Recent Broadsheet postings have mentioned issues involving screaming children on long plane trips and free admission for infants to expensive theatre productions--both of which allow a certain kind of parent to continue to delude themselves that having children hasn't drastically altered their lives. Or the Patron Saint of Self-Delusion Herself, Caitlin Flanagan, who advocates that mothers stay at home and devote themselves to childrearing and housework, but who appears proud of the fact that she knows neither how to cook or do laundry and couldn't even get her sons through toddlerhood without a nanny. And the SUV stampede of the last several years--it has less to do with being safe and more to do with not driving a minivan, which just screams domesticity. Oh, and have you heard about the $85 designer diaper bag designed not to look like a diaper bag?
That's about as pathetic as married middle-aged guys on business trips who take off their wedding rings and pretend to be single.
Raising a kid is hard work and requires sacrifice. It sounds as though these younger men and women have grasped this, at the same time that their counterparts in their 30s and 40s are wringing their hands and whining all over the Style section of the New York Times and the bestseller section at Borders about how haaaarrrrd it is and how they had to give up their identities and lives and so forth and why are all those mean-spirited people in the expensive restaurants giving them dirty looks when they bring their "quietly fussing" broods in, anyways? Doubtless some of these kids will in fact change their minds ( pace my childfree compatriots), but I like to think they'll be going into it with their eyes open...and that, as a result, they'll be better parents.
