Becoming a parent is a life-changing event. You know your life is going to change and you wouldn’t have it any other way. You’re prepared, well as much as you can be, for the sleepless nights, dirty nappies and unavoidable chaos of parenthood. However, there’s some things you more than likely aren’t prepared for.
Here, we’ll look at the top 14 surprising things you’ll miss when you become a parent. Of course, none of these things take away from the awesomeness of being a parent. You may miss them, but when you look at your little one’s smiling face, none of it truly matters anyway…
Table of Contents
1. Going To The Toilet Unsupervised
It’s the little things you never really appreciated before that will hit you the hardest. For years, you’ve been going to the toilet unsupervised. You likely never even thought about just how peaceful and beneficial the act of going to the toilet alone is. However, as soon as your child reaches the toddler stage, you can kiss goodbye to going to the toilet unsupervised.
Yep, your little bundle of joy is going to want to know exactly what you’re doing in the bathroom. Even if you shut the door behind you, you’ll be bombarded with questions like “Mom, what are you doing?”. This will continue until you open the door, where you’ll then likely be met by more questions about anything and everything else! So, if you’re not yet a parent, enjoy your peaceful toilet visits while you can!
2. Sleeping In
Not only are you going to miss a lot of sleep when you become a parent, but you’re also going to miss sleeping in! The days of turning off your alarm clock and rolling back over to sleep will be long gone. In fact, you won’t even need an alarm – your child is your new alarm clock and there’s no switching them off!
3. Leisurely Breakfast
Following on from the last point, those leisurely breakfasts you used to enjoy once you finally did roll out of bed, will also be over. Breakfast time with kids is chaotic, stressful and far from leisurely!
There will be no more freshly squeezed juice, reading the paper, or catching up on the latest news before you get ready. Instead, you’ll be frantically trying to make everyone’s breakfast while simultaneously organizing everything your child needs for the day.
4. Peace And Quiet
The minute your child comes into your life, you’re going to be bombarded with noise. Whether it’s crying, babbling, singing, shouting, arguing or excited chatter – peace and quiet is definitely going to be a thing of the past! If it’s not your child making noise, it’s going to be the television, tablet or the endless whirr of the washing machine with all of the extra washing you now have to do!
You’ll soon discover bedtime is your favorite time of the day when finally, if just for a brief time, you’ll find the illusive peace and quiet you desperately crave.
5. Having Your Own Things
Ok, so obviously you’ll have some of your own things. However, they’re going to be locked away, out of sight and out of reach of your child. You’ll learn the hard way that anything of yours which you’ve left out, will automatically be considered “free game” to your child.
Make-up, bath products, shoes, and the entire contents of your handbag, will all no longer belong just to you. So, if you do want to keep hold of your stuff, be sure to lock it all away!
6. Extra Money
When you were pregnant, you already discovered how expensive having a child would be. However, it’s not the one-off purchases you need to prepare for – it’s the daily expenses. Extra money which you could once spend on meals out, trips to the cinema and new clothing, will now be taken up by diapers, baby and toddler clothing, afterschool groups, spending money, snacks and travel expenses.
It may even start to feel like you need a never-ending pit of money to keep up with your child’s expenses!
7. Your Nice Clean Home
A lot of parents start out thinking they’ll be able to maintain their nice clean house. However, it doesn’t take long to face the true reality that their home may never be fully clean again. Ok, so this may be an exaggeration, but it definitely feels that way when you have kids.
You can spend literally hours cleaning on the rare occasions you find the time, but within an hour, you’ll be surprised how much damage your child can do to your hard work!
8. Vacations
Sure, you’ll be going on family vacations, but the experience you’ll have is very different to your old child-free vacations! Forget relaxing by the pool with no care in the world. Family vacations can be a lot more stressful, manic and packed full of child-friendly activities. Expect to spend more time walking around petting zoos in the rain than lounging around on a beach all day.
9. Adult TV
This one is a real surprise. When you have kids, they’ll quickly take over the television. Now, you’ll be hearing cartoons pretty much all of the time. Everything you watch while the kids are up, will consist of some animated show.
What’s worse – you’ll often find yourself watching cartoons long after your kids have gone to bed or gone to school. It can take a while to realize you’re choosing to watch cartoons over adult TV.
10. Shopping
Of course, you’ll still go shopping, but your experience is going to be very different with a child! Shopping trips start to turn into more of a military operation. The goal is to get out of the house, get everything you need and get back home in as quick a time as possible. There will be no leisurely browsing or comparing the different groceries on offer. You’ll be sticking to a list and rushing around the store like there’s a ticking bomb waiting to go off.
It’s very hard to imagine what shopping is like with a child and isn’t really something you can truly appreciate until you do become a parent.
See: Essential Tips For Grocery Shopping With Your Baby
11. Romance
Romance, what’s that? You and your partner’s relationship will change A LOT once you’ve had kids. Somehow, talk of dirty diapers doesn’t quite set the mood for romance. Your child will pretty much always be there and even if you do manage to achieve a child-free evening, you’ll both be so tired from your parenting duties, you’d rather spend the time catching up on sleep or dozing on the sofa.
Of course, it is possible to create romantic evenings after you’ve had children, but unless you work hard to create them, the opportunities will be few and far between.
12. Your Bottom Step
Out of everything on the list, this is by far the most surprising thing you’ll find yourself missing. How many times have you thought about the bottom step in your home? The answer is likely never! However, when your child is old enough, you’ll start to notice your bottom step a lot more, only it’s going to have a totally different name – the naughty step!
You’ll find it’s often now blocked by your child as they sit quietly and think about what they’ve done!
13. Having Nothing To Do
Now, during the baby stage, there may be times you do actually feel bored – especially if you have a happy, sleepy baby. However, once your child reaches the toddler stage, your boredom is going to go right out of the window. You may think this is a good thing, but after months of being constantly busy, you’re going to start missing boredom pretty badly.
You’ll be craving the days where you had absolutely nothing to do. Parenting is a whirlwind which doesn’t really stop until your child leaves home.
14. Your Sanity
Out of everything you’re going to miss when you become a parent, your sanity is the thing you’ll miss the most. You’ll often find yourself questioning your sanity, wondering where the “old you” disappeared to. You’ll long for adult conversations, sleep deprivation will make you feel like you’re really losing your mind and don’t be surprised if you start talking to yourself too!
Conclusion
So, there you have it – the top 14 things you’ll miss when you become a parent. If you’re currently pregnant with your first child, you may now be terrified – don’t be! Although there are things you’ll miss, they definitely don’t compare to the number of things you gain when you become a parent. It’s a difficult and challenging journey, but it’s also a loving, joyous and wonderful one!
What things do you miss now you’re a parent? Let us know below!
I can’t hold myself back from laughing after reading the first thing as saying goodbye to going to the toilet or bathroom unsupervised. It’s bye bye to a parent’s peace and quiet time doing his or her toilet business. My little cousin does this especially when the mother is taking her bath which makes the mother now bath with her as well.
Oh yes, your comment made me laugh, too! It also brought me back to the time when my kids were growing up and I literally do not have a minute to spend in the toilet as they will come knocking down looking for me, or follow me around wherever I go, haha.
Kids can be so much stressful to take care of but all the same still fun to be with because there are some crazy funny unexpected moments they would create on daily basis that would just light up your day. This is the reason why children are the crown jewelry of any parent.
Yes, I couldn’t agree more with everything you said. Those funny unexpected moments are the rewards parents get at the end of every stressful day making all sacrifices worth it.
Honestly, it is not always easy for parents to cope as the children kept coming in after marriage. This is the luxury that singles and those yet to become parents enjoy without even appreciating that. The thing with losing sleep after the baby has been delivered is that you must be awake to ensure that the baby is in good condition before you even think of sleeping.
So, the time of parenthood is one of the toughest phase of life and there is need to appreciate all those good parents that take good care of their children on a daily basis.
My sister’s baby have sleeping issues, she would literally stay up every night as long as there is no light. So in order for her mother to have some sleep, she would have to use her phone to put torchlight for the baby to be looking at until she falls asleep before the mother can now have her own sleep. Being a parent is one of the most difficult job in the world one could ever take up.
It’s really great that your sister, the baby’s mom, understood the need of the child to have a good sleep. This is the intuition that moms need to have in order to handle the pressures that comes with being a parent.
Martinsx, being a parent is truly one of the most difficult jobs in the world – for one, you cannot resign if you feel like you’re not up to the task; it is a lifetime commitment. This is aside from the fact that you’re on call 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. You must also know how to multi-task and serve several “bosses”, haha. And yes, you have to have a sixth sense to know what your child needs and how to deal with it.
Indeed, singles will only appreciate all the free time they had when they become parents themselves. Oftentimes, free time is seen as boring moments by singles. For parents with kids, a few minutes of free time is bliss! A good few hours of sleep is luxury in itself.
Yes, parents who take their parental responsibility wholeheartedly should be recognized for their efforts because there are a lot of parents out there who run away from their responsibilities, leaving kids in unacceptable situations.
There will be huge sacrifices along the way as the kids are growing up but eventually, it will all be worth it once they’re all grown up.
Becoming a parent changes a lot of things in you, several things that you can normally and easily do would be very hard to engage in on having a baby or babies around in the house. When have playful children, you can definitely say goodbye to how neat and well arranged your house used to be because those kids are surly going to turn your house upside-down.
This is so very true, these children would keep scattering the house and making a huge mess everywhere. What I normally do when I get tired of their troubles is have them grounded in their room and not playing for some hours, so that I have some peace and quiet time before they drive me nuts.
You are both right, haha. No house will ever be without a mess when it has kids around. It’s something parents should learn to accept so they will not be frustrated, otherwise, they will really go nuts! haha
Do you know one funny thing about having children and not having is like a feeling of two edge sword. Some parents with children would complain on some occasions that the children are making a mess of their house while those without any child yet would be praying to have one that would at least scatter their house so that they have a feeling of not living in an empty home. What an irony.
Ah yes, it’s really ironic. People do tend to want things they do not have, haha. Still, I’d rather have a house full of clutter than be childless.
I can associate myself with most of these things. When I sit to watch TV, my baby immediately crawls towards me and clutches my legs. He wants me to take him in my arm and let him see the TV. He finds everything boring except the cartoon network. I can watch TV only when he goes to sleep.
We don’t put him in diapers and if we are careless, he pisses all over. I have to change my clothes a couple of times in a day.
Oh yes, vinaya, TV is another thing. As I often say, when my kids were still young, our TV only revolved around three or four channels, among them are Disney and Cartoon Network.
This was a really helpful article for me as I don’t have plans right now to be pregnant but still, I am trying to decide. There are a lot of responsibilities waiting for you since the first day of pregnancy and we sure cannot fulfil them all perfectly. I was especially very much surprised from the reality of the point of Adult TV, that even I don’t have kids but whosever kids I have been with sometimes I am just left watching cartoons for hours even after them. These are some really great points that you have pointed out that have to be remembered.