What Do Parents Actually Like About Parenting? The Quiet Moments I Almost Missed
The baby is crying. My son is building a tower and snaps at me when I say dinner is ready. I’m wiping something sticky off the kitchen chair, and I can feel the whole evening shrinking into a checklist: finish dinner, bath, pajamas, book, bed. It’s not a terrible night. It’s just that most of parenting feels like this—a series of small resistances and cleanup jobs. When I’m in the middle of it, I understand why so many people say the downsides are all they see.
So when a friend who doesn’t have kids asked me last week what I actually like about being a parent, I did that long pause thing. Not because I don’t like it. Because the honest answer doesn’t fit into a normal sentence.
It’s not the “first steps” or “first words” stuff. Those are fine, but they’re over in seconds and you’re immediately back to normal life. What I’ve started to realize is that the parts I genuinely like are much smaller, much quieter, and almost always unexpected.
Last Saturday, my daughter and I sat on the living room floor with about forty leaves she had collected from the sidewalk. She was sorting them into piles based on how ripped they were. For twenty minutes, she gave me a running commentary on each leaf—where she found it, whether it was “a good leaf,” what she planned to do with it. No games, no screens, no goal. I just sat there and listened. And somewhere in that slow, pointless moment, I felt something I can’t easily describe. Not joy, exactly. More like being allowed into her world for a stretch.
That’s what I like. The access. The way kids let you see how their minds work before they learn to perform for the outside world. My daughter wasn’t trying to be smart or cute. She was just being exactly herself. That doesn’t happen often once you’re an adult. With her, it happens daily if I don’t rush past it.
The other night, my son said “ambulance” as “am-bu-lance”—syllables flat, like he was sounding out a name. We both laughed. Then he said it again on purpose, testing if it would still be funny. It was. We laughed until his milk almost came out his nose. It wasn’t a teaching moment. It wasn’t a milestone. It was just this shared joke that belongs only to the two of us. I don’t have that with anyone else.
I think that’s the part people don’t tell you. Parenting isn’t a constant stream of love and wonder. It’s mostly logistics. But buried inside the logistics are these strange little pockets of connection. They’re not dramatic enough to put on a card. And they’re easy to miss if you’re focused on surviving until bedtime.
One thing that helped me stop missing them was changing how I looked back at a day. Instead of asking myself, “Did I get everything done?” I started trying to notice one small thing that had nothing to do with tasks. Maybe it was the way my son held the door for the elderly neighbor without being asked. Maybe it was my daughter explaining, very carefully, why her stuffed cat needed a separate chair at dinner. I don’t write these down or share them. I just try to let one of them land before I fall asleep. It doesn’t turn a bad day into a good one. But it does make the good parts visible, and they’re usually already there.
There’s another upside that took me years to recognize: watching my kids handle things without me. Last week, my seven-year-old spent five minutes trying to open a jar of tomato sauce. I offered to help twice. He didn’t even answer. He just grunted, adjusted his grip, and eventually popped the lid. Then he put the jar on the counter and gave it a tiny nod, like he’d won a small argument. I was proud of him, but it wasn’t that. It was more like seeing him become someone who won’t need me as much anymore. Strange to admit, but that’s one of the best parts—not because I want him to be independent in some abstract sense, but because he was so clearly satisfied with himself.
That moment also reminded me that sometimes the most loving thing is to do less. When I have to fight the urge to jump in, I use a simple rule: if a kid is trying something and hasn’t asked for help, I wait. Maybe I count to ten before offering. Often by the time I reach ten, they’ve either solved it or asked. That pause is harder than it sounds, but it creates room for them to feel competent. It also gives me a chance to see them—really see them—instead of just managing them.
Sometimes the good moment shows up at bedtime. The other night, in the dark, my daughter asked, “Why do you love me?” I gave some clunky answer about how she’s my daughter, but that wasn’t really what she meant. She wanted to know what I saw when I looked at her. I eventually said something about the way she takes care of her plants. She was quiet for a second, then said, “I like that you noticed.” Then she rolled over and fell asleep. I stood in the hallway for a while, a little shaken by how much a child wants to be seen.
When kids ask big questions like that, they’re not looking for the perfect answer. They’re looking for evidence that you think about them when they’re not performing. A specific detail works better than a general compliment. “You’re great” is fine. “You always leave the extra chair for your cat” means more because it proves you were paying attention.
The downsides are real. I’m not going to pretend otherwise. There are mornings when I’ve had to peel a screaming four-year-old off the floor because she didn’t want to wear the blue socks. There are evenings when I’ve thought, “If one more person asks me for something, I’m going to lose it.” The exhaustion is not an exaggeration. The monotony is not an exaggeration. If I wrote a list of what I dislike about parenting, it would be longer than this article.
But there is another list. It’s just harder to grab onto because it’s made of moments that don’t make sense until you’re inside them. A child’s hand in yours when crossing the street. The random fact about worms that your daughter delivers with total authority. The way your son says “I remember that” about something from a year ago that you’d forgotten. None of these are cures for the hard stuff. They’re not even reframing the hard stuff. They’re just real.
So if you’re someone who only sees the downsides, I get it. I didn’t see the rest either, not until I stuck around long enough to be bored, tired, and occasionally delighted. You can’t see these moments from the outside. You have to be in the kitchen with the sticky chair, or on the floor with the leaf pile, or in the hallway while your kid wrestles with a jar. And even then, you might miss them. I still do.
But every now and then, I catch one. And when I do, it doesn’t make the checklist disappear. It just makes the checklist a little less important. That’s about as good as I can describe it. I don’t know if that’s what other parents mean when they say it’s worth it. Maybe it’s close enough.
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