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Warning: Men with kids are not husband material

Co-parenting in Kenya is a war. It should be peaceful but it isn't. While the rest of the world was evolving into proper adults with good manners we might have all missed the memo. Here, we hate the people we had children with, and we wish them nothing but doom.

Here men quit jobs to avoid paying child support and women go on social media to ask whether they can remove the baby daddy's name from the birth certificate.

Here, we take each other to court and fight bitterly for custody in a way that only leaves hate and resentment. And in the middle of that, single people are somehow expected to give dating opportunities to people who couldn't put their children's needs above their selfishness, and need for revenge, and I do not know how that works but it is the sort of situation I never want for myself.

Children should ideally have two healthy parents who demonstrate through actions what a happy home is but in the Kenyan context, we exchange children like smuggled goods on Friday evenings. Parents meet in parking lots to do the exchange and they rarely ever have the courtesy to say hi to one another. They just thrive on bad blood and resentment.

In the Kenyan context, co-parenting looks like writing long rants on Facebook and going live on Instagram to complain about a baby daddy who only provides by bringing two bars of chocolates for the kids twice a year. This is not a poverty-driven solution. People here just choose to go on road trips every other weekend with different girls instead of paying child support.

Co-parenting in Kenya is also accusing and fighting each other online over things that could be solved by a tiny conversation if we had only evolved well enough to have developed even the tiniest bit of common sense. Here, co-parenting is as brutal as the cold war and it comes with a clause that insists you must make the other parent's life as hard as possible.

The worst behavior

A parent will have children on the weekend and refuse to return them to the other parent just to punish them. They will even ghost them and part of all that drama is a baby daddy and that is women should be wary of dating men who have children. Unless you love being caught in a crossfire, you do not want to be the woman who is always getting blamed by the mama for her baby daddy's failures.

I do not know what prompts this but a man will have the worst behavior ever and the blame for his actions will entirely fall on the woman he is with. He will be irresponsible but instead of holding him accountable, they will say you bewitched him or manipulated him into not paying child support.

If someone is a baby daddy it means they couldn't pull out properly, or they were not responsible enough to wear a condom, or their sperm did not have any respect for the emergency pill she took the following morning.

Baby daddies with several children are especially a group of people that display a total lack of discipline. It is okay to have one child because mistakes happen even to the best of us but having multiple children with multiple women is more of a character flaw than a genuine mistake. It is a display of a behavioral pattern and you do not want to deal with a person who cannot control their fertility when wearing a condom is as easy as breathing in when you do not have a cold.

That is the sort of person who will make you a stepmother in your own marriage by getting the househelp or your sister pregnant because they lack any form of respect, self-control, or discipline. They only care about sex and anyone who only cares about sex is always a dangerous person to have around you.