Parenthood; One Job that Comes with Zero Training

Parenthood must be one of the few jobs that you never see advertised. Parenthood is rewarding, but also surprising and challenging. After all, what other occupations carry so much responsibility and yet come with so little training? Can you imagine anyone in their right mind voluntarily choosing to apply for a post with a job description like this?

Wanted: Parents
Hours: Limitless
Time off: Virtually none - at least during the first five years in post
Payment: Usually none
Sick pay and health benefits: None
Training: Minimal
Working conditions: Exhausting
Skills required: Unlimited, but applicants should be willing to take on cooking, cleaning, washing, nursing, teaching, taxi-driving, first aid, ironing, blame-taking, and counseling
Responsibilities: Enormous. The development of the next generation.

There can be few jobs that are more important than being a parent At times the task seems nearly impossible, and almost guaranteed to end in tears. Whether it is the fear that strikes every caring parent when their baby is ill, the uncertainty about whether their child is developing normally, the inevitable anxieties that arise when they first develop the beginnings of independence, the worries of school days, or even the sadness that comes when they finally leave home (or the feeling of somehow having failed if they don't) - every step of the way is filled with the potential for sadness and worry.

And yet parenthood is also the most stunning, wonderful, happy, enriching, overwhelming, and fulfilling experience that any human can ever experience. Can there be any other reason that we all, thankfully, totally ignore the imaginary job description given above, however true it might be, and give the major portion of our lives to this remarkable role? There is far more to parenthood than stress and responsibility. My husband and I have had more pleasure raising our son than from anything we could ever imagine. If anyone ever offered me the choice of going back in time and not having any children in exchange for all the material goods that I could ever wish for the most luxurious car, the ultimate fashion closet, the fastest most state-of-the-art computer, a luxury home, and Bill Gates' income - children would win every time. I find myself counseling people who are unable to have children, and who would give everything they have in exchange for a child of their own.

Nevertheless, in a curious way, it is this very pleasure that compounds some of the stress that parents can feel. They know parenthood can be wonderful, and yet they simultaneously feel an intense sense of simply not being able to cope with it all, of feeling ungrateful or guilty for being, stressed. While it feels perfectly acceptable to get stressed about something bad, like root canal work or redundancy, to feel stressed about something as positive as parenthood can leave parents feeling intensely guilty as well.

Not every family is the traditional mom, dad, and 2.4 children so beloved of television sit-com writers. These days there are many possible ways that you may have become a parent. You may be a traditionalist, having fallen in love a while ago with the person you wanted to spend your life with, and after a planned length of time you both started on the family that you have now. Or it may have been an earth-shattering totally unplanned shock. You may have started a relationship with someone who already had a child or children, and are now facing some of the problems that being a step-parent brings. Or you may have - after a long and apparently never-ending battle with bureaucracy - managed to adopt a child. Whichever way you found yourself in parenthood, you can be sure that there will be times when it certainly won't be easy.

Many problems arise when parents, especially in the first few years, fail to appreciate that they are not alone in experiencing some of the powerful emotions that they are feeling. They look around and they see everyone else appearing to cope so much better than they are. It can be a very lonely time. However, the simple fact is that one-third of parents feel unprepared for parenthood, and even after the birth of their first child one in five parents still feels unprepared. The chief causes for this are the remarkable amount of extra work that is involved in being a parent, the considerable reduction in time that parents have for themselves, and the reduction in their social life that new parents experience. Even though the joys of parenthood are a genuine and tremendous compensation, there is still no doubt that being a parent can be a genuinely stressful time.

The concept of occupational stress has been around for many years. If you are an airline pilot, there is likely to be a whole army of psychologists and therapists who will be on hand to study the stresses that might affect you and your performance. I have been much involved in writing and lecturing on the problems of stress in the medical profession. Like parenthood it can be both intensely rewarding, and intensely stressful. Businessmen, nurses, and teachers are just a few of the other professions that have come under spotlight, and for whom stress counseling may be available. But parenthood is still all too frequently perceived as something you should just get on with.