Does Anyone "Deserve" To Be A Parent?

This is a more complicated question than we often realize.

Just for context upfront here, I’ve currently spent about $31,000 trying to be a dad, and I’m rolling zeroes on all that. It’s hard, and obviously days purporting to “celebrate” mothers and fathers can be triggering, even if I’m happy for 99.3% of people who get to climb that particular life mountain. Would I be lying if I didn’t admit it all causes some resentment? Absolutely, I’d be lying. There is some resentment involved in the whole infertility journey.

I also happen to watch a bunch of true crime. Just this morning, I came across two gems. In the first one, a couple in Bunnell, Florida that had three kids had the cops called to their house, which was essentially a tenement filled with cockroaches, feces, kids trapped in a room without air circulation, and drug paraphenalia:

They got popped with three felony counts of child endangerment, which somehow in the court system became one misdemeanor case of child endangerment and they got their kids back. A few months ago (this video is from 2021), the father got popped for cocaine. Not sure what the current status of the kids is.

Then there’s this one:

In that one, a mother in Ohio — who admittedly seemed to have postpartum psychosis — got mad at her baby (7 months), threw it across the room, slammed it into a dresser, and stabbed it. The baby died. For more judicial context, she got 15 years to life. I have no idea how the bottom of the sentence was 15 years, but I ain’t no judge either. That’s a long video but the interrogation scenes within it are nuts. Check it out.

So then you ask yourself: does anyone deserve to be a parent?

You hear the word “deserve” bantered about sometimes in parental discussions. Usually it’s tied to: