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Comment by watmough | Hacker News Reader

Yes, I completely agree. If you have anything other than complete unconditional love for a child under about 10, then it seems possible there's something very very wrong.

Its almost like he's talking about someone else's kids that he's baby sitting.

Small children are a blank canvas. Good and bad. Mine is sitting down quietly paging through a book whilst I tap this in on the iPad. Moments ago, she was blundering about with a blanket over her head. A day ago, she was tired, and apparently determined to crack her head open by falling onto a metal bed frame.

It's life, the most precious thing in the world. Love it while you can.

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This really bugs me. Why can't we have a normal range of emotions here? Yes, we are predisposed to enormously love our children. But it's just a massive bias, not an absolute requirement.

Acting like anything short of complete and unconditional love with absolutely no complaints or downside somehow means that there's something wrong with a person just suppresses completely legitimate feelings and makes it difficult for people to figure out how to deal with the inevitable problems and bad parts that will occur.

> Yes, we are predisposed to enormously love our children. But it's just a massive bias, not an absolute requirement.

You're not getting the entire point of Jeff's post if you are saying something like this. If you aren't a parent, fair enough, you simply don't understand. No disrespect intended but this is the truth.

If you are a parent, we should clarify that "unconditional love" doesn't mean no complaints or downsides. Nobody here is suggesting that.

What does "unconditional love" mean in this context, then? Are we still allowed to hate the little fucker temporarily because they got shit everywhere? If so, how's that mesh with the unconditional love?

My point is just that it's apparently unacceptable to complain unless it's also tempered with something like, "but it's awesome and great and they're wonderful and it totally outweighs the downsides!" The moment you talk about your children as troublesome without explicitly bringing up all the wonderment and joy and love, you get accused of having mental problems. Bambax presented a view of parenting where the children aren't absolutely wonderful all of the time. He fails to add on the socially mandated "but they're the best thing ever", and as a consequence people start wondering about his mental health, just because he presents a realistic picture of parenting. This, to me, is sick.

Often this comes up in the context of a conversation with people you don't know very well. (Like, on an internet forum.) When you're discussing some subject X with people you don't know that well, and you complain about X, people might get the impression that you don't much care for X. For all values of X, not just kids.

People that mostly like their kids and kids in the abstract, but nonetheless want to complain about some aspect of kids (understandably!), may not wish to create the impression that they're not into their kids. So they make sure to include a disclaimer in their complaint that their kids are wonderful, etc.

It's different among close friends -- there you find people complaining that their kids kept them up all night or whatever without feeling the need to include a "my kids are wonderful" every third sentence. Because their close friends know this implicitly.

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