Maybe you just know bad parents

Parenting isn't hell or even anything resembling it

I should stress up front that I happily spend very little time these days caring about what celebrities say, even if they say things that sort of directly implicate my life in some way, as pop star Chappell Roan did recently when she claimed that “all of” the parents she knows are “in hell” because they’ve had children:

“I actually don’t know anyone who’s happy and has children at this age … I’ve literally not met anyone who’s happy, anyone who has light in their eyes, who has slept.”

Again, I normally have very little interest in responding to this sort of thing, either the stupid celebrity comments or the intolerable context in which they ferment—the two or three angry moms who respond on social media, the fifty or sixty response pieces criticizing those moms written by aging left-wing writers at dated media outlets, the handful of poorly written essays at conservative outlets criticizing the left-wing response pieces. This is all just dead gas, late-stage Internet stuff, tiresome and boring. I checked out of this economy years ago and I can tell you my life is just so much happier.

But since Chappell Roan’s comments do have some bearing on the zeitgeist—since the relentless assertion that parenthood is “hell” has had a measurable effect on the shape of our society, most notably by helping to drive birth rates to legitimately dangerous lows—I will just say this if nothing else: If the only parents you know are ones who consider their vocation “hell,” if you know not a single parent who is happy, if every parent you know is devoid of “light in their eyes” and so forth, here is a pretty reasonable conclusion: You probably only know bad parents. That’s it.

Again, this cynical view of parenthood is ubiquitous these days, so it’s not much of a shock to hear someone, especially a childless celebrity, make the claim Chappell Roan did. Many people are primed to nod understandingly and agree that parenthood is indeed hellish, and the mothers and fathers within it are perpetually miserable and unhappy. Concurrent to that, it’s generally considered bad form to criticize parents who are experiencing this form of “hell:” You’re supposed to sympathize with them, and concede that, yes, parenting is just one long inferno, it all sucks, it’s understandable that you hate it and your life is miserable. It’s this weird requirement that you have to just kind of go along with this sort of thing if you hear parents say it.

My counterpoint is this: If you’re a parent and you feel this way, you’re doing it wrong and you’re parenting badly. This feels inescapable. If you’re just completely miserable, and angry, and unhappy all the time at being a parent, you’re very likely, at the very least, suffering from just a crippling type of negativity and pessimism and bad outlook. In more acute cases, if you’re a mother you might have severe postpartum anxiety or depression; if you’re a father it might be something else; in either case you’re not addressing the crisis in the way it should be addressed. But, yes, if you’re this miserable as a parent, you’re messing it up somehow.

Take it from me: We know many dozens of parents—surely many more than a Gen Z pop star whose primary fanbase appears to be gay people and men who have castrated themselves—and I am sure I would not describe any of them in the way that Chappell Roan describes the parents she knows. Some of them are more stressed and some are less so; some have more stressors in their lives, others less; some of their kids are a handful and others are more mellow and most of them are somewhere in between; some have a sunnier, more upbeat outlook and others are more irascible. In other words the parents we know run the entire gamut of human experience and emotion. In a large enough group, which admittedly is increasingly rare these days, you see just about everything. But I would not describe any of the parents we know as “in hell” or terminally, chronically unhappy. They’re all pretty fine! The rare instances where one encounters a parent like those that Chappell Roan encounters, it’s almost universally ascribable to some external factor—a mental illness or condition of some kind, maybe—rather than the normal stressors of parenthood, which anyone can rather easily deal with.

All of which is to say: Don’t let clueless celebrities scare you off from being a parent. Don’t! As any normal, healthy parent will tell you, the life is an immensely, incalculably rewarding one, full of riches and treasures you simply cannot comprehend until you actually start having children. Yes, it can be stressful at times, sometimes very stressful. That is true of everything—literally everything—worth having. But if you approach it with sanguinity and grace and humor and understanding, if you reach for those things when it gets hard and hold them in reserve when it’s easy, you’ll be fine. If you are feeling called to be a parent but are worried that it will be “hell,” don’t worry: It’s not. Go for it!