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 to bars of chocolates for the kids twice a year. This is not a poverty driven solution. People here just choose to go on roadtrips every other weekend with different girls instead of paying child support.

Co-parenting in Kenya is also fighting each other online over things that could be solved by a tiny conversation. Here, co-parentingcomes with a clause that insists you must make the other parent’s life as hard as possible.

A parent will have children on the weekend and refuse to return them to the other parent just to punish them. Part of all that drama is a baby daddy and that is why 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 about her baby daddy’s failures.

I do not know what prompts this but a man will have the worst behavior ever and the blame 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 but having multiple children with multiple women is more of a character flaw than a genuine mistake. It is a display of a behavioural 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 step-mother in your own marriage by getting the househelp or your sister pregnant because they lack respect, self control, or discipline. They only care about sex and anyone who only cares about sex is a dangerous person to have around you. They will be out there collecting diseases and having children.

And as if that is not enough, baby daddies have a terrible entitlement towards their baby mamas. They never let go fully. You think they have moved on and the next minute they are angry because the mother of their kids has chosen to date or to marry.

You choose to date them and you will always feel like the second option because when they are not frustrating their baby mamas, they are trying to sleep with them.

I am not one to judge, but if I was dating, I would avoid men with children. They are an explosive landmine.