Are You A Good Parent?

The idea of this post has been bouncing around in my head for a few weeks now. I wasn't sure if the title could be overlayed as a Part 2 to the different personality types out there. The emotions experienced during the week of the incident were already high due to a different and unrelated event so I could be blowing things out if proportion (again). Here goes...it seems that when you ask a woman if she has children, they take offence when the answer is no. It is as if you just asked them a question that violates their human rights. This situation happened with my dentist and I am sure that it was some sort of miscommunication from the last time I had visited her. Apparently, donning a mask also blocks hearing, as this isn't the first time that a conversation with a healthcare worker seemed strained. Perhaps reading lips is more important in our daily lives than we realize. What happened in this particular conversation is that I remember asking which area the dentist lived in, the last time that I saw her. In the time between visits, I must have imagined her living in that area with her family. At this visit, I continued that conversation by asking which school her kids went to.

She responded by asking me to repeat myself because I don't think she could believe her ears. She said that she didn't have kids and that she still travels back to Toronto to see her parents every weekend. This completely changed my perception of who I thought she was. Was she even married or in a committed relationship? How far off was I from the possibility that she could have kids? I was so dumfounded that I refrained from asking any further personal questions for the remainder of my visit.

This brings me to the question of whether or not we should be asking women if they have kids. Many seem to become defensive when they have decided that they will not bear children. It is as if someone will try to convince them otherwise and they get their defenses up, ready to fight for their right to not have kids. My mistake with the dentist was to assume that she had moved here with a family, but I suppose it was none of my business.

In the future, I will treat this question as sensitive as, "What's your ethnic background? or "What religion are you?" Asking any question regarding race, ancestry, age, creed, disability, citizenship, religion, family, marital status, sexual orientation, sex/pregnancy, income, gender identity, or record of offences in a social setting violates the Human Rights Code. I now realize that asking about family status is a sensitive topic. Yet, how are we to get to know our community better if we can't ask questions relating to any of these subjects? Where does that leave us on topics for appropriate conversation? Back to the weather...

This brings me to the title of this blog: Are You A Good Parent? When we ask people questions that might make them feel uncomfortable, we teach our kids that it is okay to ask these types of questions. I know that kids don't need a lesson on how to become more blunt! However, if we can find topics that don't relate to someone's appearance, personality, age, and now family (!), we can truly alter the art of our conversation where every interaction sparks new ideas and topics, independent of what your kid said at school that day.

Additionally, for women who cannot bear children, bringing up this topic can cause immense insecurity and high emotion. It is a deeply personal question, if you stop to think about it. When other women only want to speak about their kids and how their lives revolve around them, this can quickly become a sore spot for women who have received the diagnosis of infertility. From a woman's perspective, we should build up other women, fertile or not. I vow to never again assume that a woman has kids. Although, where I live, there is a 99% chance that they do. It is imperative that we become more sensitive to the types of conversations that we are having with the people around us, in the likely case where our conversations tend to keep gravitating back towards our kids' lives.

Using my friendly neighborhood AI, I asked what it takes to become a good parent. The answer was obvious:

1) Be loving and affectionate while still providing parental guidance.

2) Be a skillful communicator. Listen to your child and communicate with them effecitvely.

3) Be able to manage stress. 

It is quite possible that women who don't want to have kids have already done this research (without an AI, of course) and have realized that they cannot do these 3 things with a small human that has exited their body. Let's hope that they know something about themselves that we don't because I can't imagine my life without my little human being a big part of it. However, for their sake and for the sake of living in a post-COVID, high anxiety world, let's refrain from using this line of questioning with every person that we meet. Treat the person as if you didn't notice that they were Black, Indian or Chinese and childless...you will become a better parent for it!