What Becoming a Parent Does to Your Happiness

One thing: False messaging about stranger kidnapping risks; it creates unwarranted fear and that profoundly changes parenting.

Kids are generally very safe (per FBI's very diligent stats) on their own. However, LEO and media continually mash common custodial dispute and runaway numbers with super rare stranger kidnappings and present a level of risk that is nearly a lie.

Compounding this is news reporting of distant tragedies as if they occurred in our own community.

Another thing is the extinction of free ranging for kids and the critical life skills (independence, interdependence, problem solving) they learned there. We've replaced free range areas with walls of no trespassing signs and swapped necessary unsupervised time with a constant adult presence.

Elementary age kids need an increasing amount of time w/o adults to learn how to function. We've robbed them of ~all of that and opted to pointlessly exhaust adults instead. Why? Apparently to feed a patently false LEO/Media narrative that kids alone are in immediate danger of harm.

ref: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-wisconsin-missinggirl-dat...

Being a parent is one of the most difficult processes you can undertake, but, at least in my experience, it is by far one of the most constantly rewarding, fulfilling, and satisfying things you can do.

Do I wish I could take a two-week vacation any time I want without needing to move mountains to arrange the delicate logistics of babysitting? Obviously.

Would I trade that for the warm, rich, and socially complex environment where I feel deeply connected to those around me and where I feel like I can make a real, immediate, tangible difference in the world. Of course not.

So much of modern life has shed the human parts over the course of history and is now devoid of the intangible human essence that provides the ingredients for a good life. Parenting is one of the few remaining undertakings that hasn't lost what makes being a human being around other human beings so special.

I think a lot of society's day-to-day schedules are set by old farts who have already been up 2-3 times before dawn to urinate anyway and don't realize that younger humans, and especially adolescents, are just working with a different circadian rhythm.