Choosing to be Dog Parents because You’d be too Good at being Regular Parents

My girlfriend and I have two dogs and zero human children. Based on how we care for our dogs, it’s a good thing that we don’t have kids.

We would not be bad parents. We would probably be too good. Excessively good. Like, smotheringly good. We would be too attentive, too involved, too obsessed.

We love our dogs, so very much. We are kind of obsessed with them. Not even “kind of.” So much time and attention, not to mention money, is lavished upon these mutts. We do so much, dedicate so much of our lives to making them happy. It makes me wonder and awe at just how much of an excessively loving nightmare we’d be as parents.

We recently went to an expensive (overpriced) stand-up show in the city for my girlfriend’s birthday. Before the comedian was done, maybe three quarters through their set, we got a text from our landlords that our dogs were barking. So we left. There was a moment of hesitation, but we booked it out of there pretty quick and raced home. Granted, this was in large part because we didn’t want to piss off our landlords, but it was also out of concern for our dogs. It turned out it was Riley, the younger and more anxious of our dogs, who was doing most of the barking. He would bark about a dozen frantic times, then Kirby would throw in two or three solidarity barks. The reason he (they) was (were) barking so much? Because we never leave them alone like that. We are so devoted to our dogs (and also have the schedules of elderly people) that we hardly ever go places without them, and not for extended periods, and not at night. We do not go out and leave them alone late into the evening, and because we had, Riley was freaking the fuck out. It was past his bedtime and we weren’t there to tuck him in and kiss him goodnight, so he lost his shit.

How would we ever be able to leave our children alone? With the way we coddle and baby our dogs and spend nearly every hour that we can with them, we’d probably be the same, or worse, with human children, and they’d likely end up as attached and desperately needy as our dogs. How old would they have to be before we could leave them alone to go out for an evening? They’d probably be screaming and crying anytime we tried, well into their teens or early adulthood. They would be crippled by our love into pathetic dependents.

We give nearly everything to our dogs. If they were children, we might give more than everything. We’d give everything we have and then keep giving until it killed us. The thing is, there are still things we want to do. We want to do things with our lives that we’d be unable to do if we gave our whole lives over to children. We want to travel, have adventures, do fun and maybe sometimes risky shit. We want to be at least a little selfish, and you cannot be selfish when you have kids. Selfish parents are shitty parents, and we couldn’t be that, because we’re too goddamn obsessively loving. Given that, it’s good we don’t have kids, and don’t plan to anytime soon. A lot of people shouldn’t have children, many because they’d be bad at it, but some because they’d be too good.