I Want Kids But Can’t Have Them Yet: Are My Parenting Preconceptions Ignorant?
The potato salad was still cold when 4-year-old Leo dumped the entire scoop down the front of my favorite work polo. I laughed, brushed a glob off my jeans, and joked to my sister, “If this was my kid, he’d be doing a five-minute calm-down on the bench right now. No exceptions, consistent boundaries, that’s the key. Too many parents let small stuff slide to avoid a fight.”
My sister wiped ketchup off her other kid’s cheek, paused, and said, “Okay. When was the last time you got up three times in one night with a sick kid, then had to pull a full work day, then cook dinner, and still had the energy to do a perfect five-minute calm-down over potato salad?”
That’s the moment I started wondering. I’m 32, I’ve wanted to be a dad for at least five years, but right now, I can barely afford the rent on my 1-bedroom townhouse, let alone the down payment on a place big enough for a kid, and childcare costs around here are more than a mortgage would be. I’m not ready, by a long shot. But I scroll parenting reels on my lunch break, I babysit my nephews one night a week, I’ve got all these little ideas about how I’ll do things when I finally get to be a dad. Lately I can’t shake the question: are all these ideas just ignorant?
After the cookout, I started paying more attention, instead of just relying on what I read online. I added an extra night of babysitting a week to help my sister out when her partner started working evening shifts, so I’ve gotten to see the 24/7 version of parenting, not just the weekend cookout version. My first full solo night, I planned the whole thing out: we’d do homemade playdough, walk around the block to collect acorns, read three picture books, no screens before bed. Ten minutes after my sister left, Leo climbed the pantry shelf, dragged down a 5-pound bag of all-purpose flour, and spilled every last grain across my kitchen floor. Then he had a meltdown because I told him he couldn’t eat raw flour out of the pile.
I stood there, flour in my socks, my head already throbbing from a long meeting that day, and the first thing I did was pull out my phone, pull up Bluey, and hand him a granola bar. All my perfect plans went out the window before 6 p.m. That’s when I realized how wrong my first big preconception was: I thought good parents stuck to their rules 100% of the time, no exceptions. I thought inconsistent rules lead to bad behavior.
What I’ve learned since is that boundaries don’t fall apart if you bend them once when you’re tired. A lot of new parents beat themselves up over this, and I used to judge them for it too. The simple trick I see my sister use, that I used that night with the flour, is straightforward: if you need to bend a rule, just say out loud, “Today’s a special exception because [X], and tomorrow we’ll go back to our usual rule.” That gives kids the clarity they need, and it takes the guilt off you. It doesn’t have to be perfect to work.
My second wrong preconception was that bad behavior is almost always a result of poor parenting. A few weeks ago, I took Leo to the grocery store after babysitting. He wanted a lollipop before we even got through the door, and when I said no, he dropped to the floor in the entrance and screamed so loud people turned to look. I tried every trick I’d read: the deep breathing, the gentle redirection, the calm-down countdown. Nothing worked. I got that same judgmental side eye from a woman by the apples that I’d given other parents in that same spot a hundred times before. I just picked him up, grabbed the three things I needed, checked out, and left. I was embarrassed, but I also realized: four-year-olds have big feelings that they don’t know how to handle, even if you do everything right. It’s not a failure of parenting, it’s just how kids work.
I used to think that if you planned enough, you could avoid most of the messy, stressful parts of parenting. That’s the third thing I got wrong. You can plan the playdough and the nature walks and the consistent bedtimes, but kids will always find a way to dump flour on the floor or have a meltdown in the grocery store when you least expect it. For parents reading this who feel like they’re failing because their days don’t look like the curated parenting reels, one small thing I’ve seen work is to schedule 1 or 2 20-minute screen breaks into your day on purpose. Instead of feeling guilty when you turn on the TV to get five minutes to breathe, you build that break in ahead of time. It takes the shame out of it, and you don’t have to pretend you can go 12 hours straight without a minute to yourself.
So am I ignorant? Yeah, I think I still am, in a lot of ways. I don’t have to get up with my kid every night. I don’t have to choose between buying groceries and paying the pediatrician bill. I still get a full eight hours of sleep most nights, which is something most parents of young kids can’t say. All my perfect ideas are still just ideas, until I’m actually living them. But I don’t think it’s wrong to want to be a good parent, and to think about what that looks like for you before you have kids. The problem isn’t having preconceptions, it’s forcing those preconceptions on other people who are already living the job.
For other people in my spot, waiting to have kids and building all these little ideas in your head, the one shift that’s helped me is to stop sharing unasked opinions. You don’t have to weigh in on how someone else parents their kid just because you have an idea of how you’d do it. And for current parents who are tired of people like me commenting on your choices from the sidelines: most of us don’t realize how little we actually know, until we spend one full night alone with a 4-year-old and a bag of flour.
I’m still saving, still waiting, still probably have a hundred wrong ideas I haven’t spotted yet. But now, when I see a parent struggling with a screaming kid in the checkout line, I don’t stare. I hold the door, or offer to watch their cart while they get something off the top shelf. When my sister vents about having a bad day with the kids, I don’t offer my unsolicited takes. I just grab her a coffee from her favorite shop and help her clean up the dinner mess. Some days that’s all any of us need, right?
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