Illustration: Xia Qing/GT

People with kids often complain that it's not easy being a parent. Well, it's not meant to be.

After all, you have a choice. You can become a parent or, given today's wide array of effective contraceptives, decide not to. Nobody's forcing you.

So, if you do choose to become a parent, you should be at least a little bit ready for the responsibility it entails. And that includes not constantly moaning about how difficult it is.

On the other hand, it does take a lot of patience. For instance, my son is obsessed with cars. He can already pick out car logos at a hundred meters, and he's right nearly all the time. That would be fine, except that I am not even remotely interested in motor vehicles, so it's not exactly a thrill for me.

He also loves to talk about cars - all the time. He walks down the street saying things like, "Daddy, that's a Volkswagen. Daddy, that's an Audi. Daddy, that's a Kia." That's what I mean when I say patience. If you haven't got much of it, you'd better think twice about becoming a parent.

You also lose a lot of your personal freedom, that's for sure. With a four-year-old jumping up and down on your foot and yelling, you might forget what "free time" and "personal space" even mean. When you've got a kid hanging upside down on your back and yelling about wanting you to get down on your hands and knees so he can ride you like a horse, it's kind of hard to remember what being footloose and fancy-free felt like.

You have to spend a huge amount of time doing things you don't want to do, like watching your kids play, making sure they don't end up running under a bus, and getting them dressed. All of that while trying to remember what you were supposed to be doing next.

On the rare occasion that you're out after dark, you look at all those 20-somethings hanging out in bars and clubs, and think, that used to be me. Nowadays, you're mostly too tired even to think about being out after 9 pm, so fancy stuff like socializing with friends is not really on the agenda. That is unless your friends also have kids around the same age, in which case you can exchange child-related information with them in the park. But functional talk about diapers, pacifiers, and nursery schools doesn't exactly push the same buttons as chatting excitedly about movies and rock bands.

Still, that's what being a parent is like. It's not exactly all bad; it's just that your life is completely different from what it was before.

So, if you are thinking about having children, you'd better mentally adjust to the fact that you're not going to be able to carry on doing most of the things you did in the good old days of your youth. And if you do still decide to have kids, just don't say I didn't warn you.

This article was published on the Global Times Metropolitan section Two Cents page, a space for reader submissions, including opinion, humor and satire. The ideas expressed are those of the author alone, and do not represent the position of the Global Times.