We managed to get in touch with Lucy Huber and she said the idea to post these thoughts popped into her head while she was attempting to wrangle her two-year-old out the door to his nanny share.
"Every morning we go through the same process which takes roughly an hour," Huber told Bored Panda. "Convincing him to get dressed, actually getting dressed, getting down the stairs, getting into the car seat. All of these things take at least ten minutes with a two-year-old because they just have to move at their own pace. It's not always a bad thing, I'm glad my son enjoys playing and asking questions, and taking his time to look at things and be curious. But it can be frustrating when you're trying to go somewhere because you never know how long he will take and if you try to rush a two-year-old, it usually ends in screaming."
While virtually every parent is going through these things, according to Perri Klass, M.D., and the co-author of Quirky Kids, some do have it worse than others.
"If you have a child with a more challenging temperament, the truth is that you may have less fun parenting on a day-to-day basis for some of your child's life," Klass told Parents.
Which is kinda reassuring. That means it's completely normal to feel frustrated that your kid seems more difficult to manage than all three of your friend's kids combined. Or to be upset that your parenting is being unfairly judged by strangers and family who think they've done a better job.
It's not just a question of perception. Science has already proven this. Research by Harvard University psychologist Jerome Kagan, Ph.D., suggests that an infant's temperament at birth is a good predictor of a child's behavior in adolescence.
Kagan found that 40 percent of babies have a calm disposition (they're not overly ruffled by stimuli like light or noise), and years later, these kids actually remain chill.
However, as many as 15 to 20 percent of babies enter this world with a more "reactive" temperament, which can make their parents politely call them a "handful."
In Kagan's study, these babies recoiled from light and noise and were hard to soothe. So if you have a difficult baby, does this mean you are destined for an even tougher future? Not necessarily.
"There's always that nature-versus-nurture controversy," Nancy Snidman, Ph.D., director of the child development unit in psychology at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, who conducted the research with Dr. Kagan and continues to study the temperament of children, explained to the same outlet.
"Parents, other kids, and teachers can help shape a child's personality and coping skills over time." This basically means that what someone might consider good parenting may not have as much of an impact on babies, whereas older kids with a tougher temperament can benefit the most from it.
"I don't think child-free people are clueless [about parents' struggles]," Lucy Huber said. "My tweet was about people with babies, which are more portable and have fewer options than toddlers, but still. I think it's just that before you have kids you think you'll be different than other parents and then it turns out you're really not because there's a reason other parents do things the way they do."
"Having kids is so much harder than you think it will be and for different reasons. I definitely thought I'd travel when I had toddlers but then you realize it's honestly not worth it. I think before you have kids there's this impulse to believe that you won't change your lifestyle when you have kids, as if changing your lifestyle is a sign of failure, but when you actually have kids you see that it's not a failure to change how you live, it's a privilege to adjust your life to this new person who has different needs than you."
Huber said that as a parent, you learn to adapt to those needs, and in many ways, the transition becomes joyful. "I probably won't be traveling to Paris any time soon but I have found so much joy in showing my toddler simple things in the world, like a fish pond or a dog park. I don't need my son to see Notre Dame because he's still fascinated with simply going to the local library and when I get to see it through his eyes, I am too."
