The Others

Illustrations by Johnny Acurso

As I type this, I am in a Brooklyn café popular with families. Across the room, a woman is letting her toddler run around and scream her face off. Now, I have a three-year-old. She’s currently at home with her mom while I attempt to get some work done (which is suddenly proving rather difficult). If my daughter were here with me, I am pretty sure she would not be running all over the café screaming her face off. This is partially because she knows better and partially because I’d pack her up and leave if she refused to be reined in.

Yet Slacker Mom has made no moves to collect or restrain her shoeless, table-climbing, alphabet-shouting, salt-shaking maniac. Instead, she looks at her friend and says, “Ah, parenthood.”

Uh, excuse me, ma’am? I haven’t seen you do anything remotely resembling parenting. And now the maniac is unloading a sugar container all over an empty table.

Suddenly, it dawns on me: More often than not, I dislike other people’s kids. This revelation triggers a crisis of self. Namely, does that make me a bad person? Or worse, unfit to parent?

My hypothesis: Not every parent loves children in general. (Maybe that’s why New Yorkers put it off so long.) The fact that you’ve spawned doesn’t require you to automatically cherish all of God’s little creatures. Sure, I love my own kids with a purity I didn’t know was possible. But other youngsters are ill-behaved, constantly sick, loud, clingy, messy, bitey, plane-seat-kicky and generally tedious. I decided to make some calls to investigate my disdain.

“I think it’s very natural, very normal,” Dr. Ruth Peters tells me. Peters is a clinical psychologist who frequently appears on the Today show to talk with Matt and Meredith about parenting and kids. She’s already made me feel a little better about myself. “People have a really low tolerance for other kids’ misbehavior, even though their kids may misbehave also,” she continues. “It has a lot to do with the age of your child: If you have a toddler, you’re much more tolerant of toddler behavior; if your kids are older, you sort of forget. Your tolerance levels go down as you age.” Okay. But although I have a toddler, I don’t really have toddlerance.

Tony Weber feels my pain. A Brooklyn-based digital marketing strategist who writes a daddy blog (Cheeky’s Hideaway, croutonboy.typepad.com), Weber admits, “I periodically want to launch a little toad into the East River with a trebuchet.” He’s speaking my language—Weber and I should start a support group. “I tend to bathe in the glow of my own child’s awesomeness (except when she needs to pee for the fortieth time in the last hour), and I get pissed if other kids are (a) louder, (b) pushier, (c) in my daughter’s way when she wants something, or (d) already sporting ironic hipster outfits. I think dwelling on how annoying other people’s kids are actually helps build a little psychological distance from the whole parenting thing, which is like a shot of cortisone when your kid won’t come down off the goddamn slide at the local playground.”

His friend Liz Gumbinner, a Brooklyn-based mother of two and the cofounder and editor of CoolMomPicks.com, tells me, “I’m more shocked when I do like a baby.” She confesses she didn’t even like her own best friend’s kid at first. Awesome! “I tried so hard to be the best friend playing with the baby,” she says. “But I couldn’t wait to put the baby down. Some babies just suck. I spent 36 years of my life not being a parent. It’s hard for me to suddenly know how to play the game. I wish I could be okay with other kids being all snotty and horrible. And I wish I could be okay with having my seat kicked all the way across the country on a flight. But I can’t.”

On that last point, she’s not alone. Last year, an online Maritz survey found that 73 percent of respondents said they would like to see family sections on planes. Also last year, Southwest Airlines began experimenting with designated rows for family seating. As a parent, I find the idea of segregating families to be unsettling. But as someone who hates being on long business flights with other people’s screaming kids, I rejoice. Verily, I am conflicted. And once again, I’m not the only one. “Why should I be subjected to someone else’s bad kid if I’m thoughtful enough to give mine some Benadryl before the trip?” Park Slope mother Amy Sohn asks, 73 percent joking.

Sohn, a novelist whose next book centers on Brooklyn parents, is actually fairly disturbed by what such proposals suggest is happening at a deeper level. Her own mother, she says, grew up in suburban Philadelphia in the 1950s and was raised by neighbors, aunts and uncles as much as she was by her own parents. “It was like having three sets of parents, all interchangeable,” says Sohn. “We really all belong to a common community. You should be able to discipline children who aren’t your own. But the sense of a common interest in breeding good values is gone.” Can you even imagine reprimanding a stranger’s child on the playground? What if someone you didn’t know scolded yours? Where it once took a village to raise a child, it seems the village is increasingly expected to bend the rules for and adore our children.

I suspect Sohn is on to something. So I call Dr. Alvin Rosenfeld, a New York–based child psychiatrist who has written four parenting books including The Over-Scheduled Child. “What’s funny is that often children who are really intolerable get that way because the parents try so hard. They try to be giving and understanding, rather than realizing that along with all that, they should set some boundaries,” he says. Indeed, the mother of my tiny café nemesis appears to set fewer boundaries than a Burning Man orgy hostess. Then Rosenfeld says something that fills me with relief: “There’s this implicit assumption that we love children, this idea about kids that they’re all innocent. But children are individuals. And you don’t have to like every individual.”

Good thing I like my own children (well, the toddler anyway; the newborn hasn’t done much to impress me yet). So it’s my job to keep them from turning into loathsome little beasts. “Kids are supposed to be self-centered. We have to teach them how to be less so,” says Rosenfeld, who points out that Jesus taught his disciples by example. “That’s where our word discipline comes from. He embodied a way of living that we want to emulate.” Rosenfeld also brings up Hillel the Elder, the renowned rabbi who predated Jesus and is supposed to have said, “What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow.” Do unto others—the Golden Rule. “That’s all of Western ethics, in a sense,” says Rosenfeld. “If you don’t teach your kids that, you haven’t introduced them to culture. It’s not complicated.”

So, after giving it some thought, I’ve come to terms with the fact that there are some kids I may never like. Not yours, though. I just love yours.