The idea that your fetus, baby, child will respond to a series of correct inputs from pregnancy forward and the guilt as you fail to input correctly—I lived largely on cheese sandwiches with chili crisp and fried clams during my pregnancy—is the most pernicious part of parenthood so far. This is what the researchers, influencers, friends, family, etc would have you believe. This is what you yourself would like to believe because then it would even be possible to do it “right.”
In reality your child is a person, just like you, and barring actual neglect is not going to wildly swing between success or failure because you did or did not let them watch Ms Rachel, or fed them solids instead of purees first. IF ONLY IT WERE THAT EASY.
My kid loves books and people more than toys, so all the wooden Montessori shit in the world isn’t going to do it for him. I had nothing to do with his taste. But what a dream it would be if I could make him healthy, intelligent, thoughtful, kind, just by making sure he always wore soft butch Kate Quinn outfits and never played with anything made of plastic.
I remember when my daughter was born banning all princess stuff and making sure I dressed her in blues and greens. Then when she was two, she one day announced she was a queen and refused to wear anything but fancy dresses for the next 4 years. She’s now 14 and a smart meat head jock, who reads the Brontes, and I just know that if she was an input/output machine, none of this would make sense.
Your daughter seems SO COOL. Brag time: He's now 19 months old and learning to talk. The other day, he was looking at a book that is not about farming, but has a picture of a tractor in the context of different vehicles. He pointed to it and sang "E-I-E-I" which means "Old McDonald Had a Farm," not a song that references tractors. He learned about tractors and farmers from his farm animal playset which includes a farmer figurine and tractor. I *died.* I am not going to be able to control anything about how this kid moves through the world, he is figuring it out his damn self already.
A genius! My son was similar. Before he could really talk he recognized the songs on spotify he wanted to listen to and would be a tiny little DJ. Kids just come out how they come out. I don't think our job is to mold them, but to just help them be who they are gonna be and given them a safe place to land? I have given up on parenting books and now I am just a human being and it's great. We are having a good time.
My twins turned out so very gifted, much smarter than I am, and really into math. I thought well ok, I'd better nourish this somehow, since public school first grade teachers were buying algebra books with their own money. So I tried an after school enrichment program, and one twin explained to me gently that they liked math, but a normal amount, so doing extra wasn't the thing. I mean, I want to go home and relax after work myself. So I sought out books and resources and summer programs as much as i could, and finally the school district put them on a bus to middle school for algebra when they were in fifth grade. And expected me to pick them up and drive them back to the elementary school. I said I can't, I'm a working widowed mom, and they figured out who to call in transportation. Now they are graduating and heading off to college together, most likely as math/cs majors. There is no one size fits all. Just love them, love them, love them, and respect them as individuals from day one.
The perception that I had to do a ton of things right and not mess up at all was most definitely a factor in me choosing *not* to have kids. Not the only factor or most important one, but an undeniable one.
It's a hard mindset to rid yourself of. And most days I feel like I don't have it then something will happen like signing up for classes for high school and I'll have a little spiral. Not complying with the cultural expectations is ROUGH truly.
Oh, I have so many thoughts. Thanks for this one and sharing this book. Looking forward to reading it. It does take a village to raise a child, but the village is on fire, and those who lit the flames got an app to help us pretend it’s not on fire.
1. My sister's stepson (born 2012) just got in trouble for trying to look up porn. It reminded my sister (born 1989) about our parents finding suspicious things in the browser history and subsequently putting passwords on things. She said to stepson, "my parents had to sort of be pioneers in this field and figure the internet out as they went." (Fortunately/unfortunately, our mom is a computer programmer. Not hard to figure out at all, LOL.)
2. The Letters from an American post on Mother's Day mentioned how an older woman (born 1903) who was influential in the author's life gave credit to the washing machine for helping liberate her and her mother from constant laundry. I guess they were lucky to avoid the chore creep mentioned above. Sigh.
So, I imagine if you switched from hand washing to a washing machine, the other forms of labor would not feel as heavy. But I'm sure this person didn't escape the feeling that with their newly found free time, they had to put it all in their kids rather than themselves.
And re-reading the piece, I did note that the older woman mentioned getting to have more free time to socialize with her friends, but not anything that her own mother got to do *instead* of hand-washing. And if she didn't have that feeling of, like you said, put it all back into kids/household, would she have even know how to spend leisure time?
(I really *am* asking that of anyone with a background in history. I know the wealthy always had access to hobbies/amusement, but not how much the average person did in more-modern but still past times.)
I’ve worked off and on as a nanny since the late 80s. The biggest change in this profession, aside from the ubiquity of work from home parents, is the technology. 35 years ago I might speak to the mom/dad (99% mom) on the phone once a day. Now we have constant contact via our smartphones. Some nannies are expected to update apps throughout the day w/ every diaper change, nap time, bottle, solid food item, etc. Parents want pictures/videos throughout the day. But also, don’t be on your phone all day!! I had a nanny friend who didn’t send pictures from storytime at the library and was scolded and told it was “unacceptable.”
As frustrating as this new dynamic is for the childcare provider, I feel for the parents, and especially the children who are monitored by camera basically from the moment they are born. I also watched it play out as a parent myself, you’re a bad parent if you don’t track your child via phone, you’re a bad parent if you do. The tech gives us a false sense of safety and control.
It is absolutely a search for safety and control in a world that has none. But one day I just stopped logging all the nursing, the diapers, the naps. My kid sometimes went too long without a diaper, sometimes we changed him in short succession. Sometimes he didn't nurse exactly every three hours, sometimes he spent three hours nursing.
Later, when he started daycare, I was annoyed to find I was now subject to *their* logging. They were changing his diaper 10-14 times a day (literally!) presumably every time they saw even the faintest hint of the wetness indicator going blue. If they didn't log those diapers, I wouldn't have known or been annoyed that they were being so wasteful--I could have just brought in more diapers for them more frequently without the added stress of knowing they were sopping up tiny amounts of baby pee with my dollar bills. Do I love getting pictures? Yes. But I prefer that they focus on caring for him.
I like sharing pics but sometimes it’s a distraction and I do get annoyed. It’s just the world we live in and the way the job is now.
I get the necessity of logging things if you have multiple ppl providing care, or if you’re trying to figure out newborn patterns, but I think it also robs parents of their ability to read a child’s cues, trust their intuition, etc. and can create unhealthy fixations on stuff that just doesn’t matter that much. Sleep schedules and wake windows also trap caregivers/children in a rigidity that’s unnecessary. (Not always! All families and kids have different needs and sometimes it’s the only thing that works.)
There was a brief period when my kid was a baby where I decided I was going to figure out how to get him to sleep, dammit. I started keeping a log of his naps, with every piece of information I could think of -- time down, time asleep, time awake, what we did right before, whether he was swaddled or not, how he was swaddled, I don't even know what else, but a lot of stuff.
It wasn't until I was crying over the log, trying to see some kind of pattern or SOMETHING that would make him go to sleep, that I realized I was treating my child like he was a computer and just needed the right set of inputs and would sleep, and how absolutely ludicrous that was.
So I just stopped trying to get him to sleep, and started counting success as putting him down for a nap at regular intervals, whether he slept or not. And then a few months later when he fell off the growth charts I learned how to stop paying attention to whether he was eating or not and started counting success as offering him food at regular intervals. And I stopped worrying about whether he would read as early as I did and started counting success as reading to him at regular intervals.
And now he's 8 and he sleeps, and he eats, and he grows, and he reads so much he sometimes brings a book to the grocery store and walks around reading with one hand on the cart so he doesn't have to pay much attention to where he's going.
I'm pretty sure we've all done that trying to get the baby and ourselves more sleep! It's maddening! And yeah, when you get to that point where you realize they are just their own little people and you can't control it all, it's so freeing.
It's so messed up that we have to find out on our own, because everyone trying to sell us stuff is so loud! I tell this story all the fucking time, to everyone who will listen, along with how easy it was for me to breastfeed with very little effort, because that's another thing we don't talk about enough, how sometimes "Breastfeeding Super Mamas" just got really fucking lucky (me!) and if your breasts don't want to cooperate all the effort in the world won't make breastfeeding simple or easy or even possible, sometimes.
I know! I think when we're in that baby phase any advice feels like judgment. And a lot of times it's people telling us to "treasure these moments because they go by fast." Which is true but very unhelpful when you haven't slept in a year. I'm on the opposite end now and 17 feels harder than a baby!
Oh this book sounds great! My kids are 17 and 12. When I was pregnant for the first time in 2007-08 video baby monitors were WAY too expensive for us. And our daycares never had cameras.
In hindsight I'm glad I couldn't survey my kids every move. I think it's made it easier to let them wander and roam the neighborhood as they've gotten older. We do have the Apple Find My app so if I really need to know where they are, I can check my phone.
And I do have the best technology ever invented for coping with children, the daily anti-depressant, to keep me sane.
I love my kids, and the family we are. It’s been fascinating raising them—three boys, all radically specific people with their own destinies, as it turns out. And when they were little, this shit made me bonkers! I hated the peer pressure and all the bullshit expectations.
My youngest is about to graduate from high school. He’s doing great after some very real struggles. His brothers who are 20 and 25? Also doing great! None of the details we are told to obsess over when kids are little actually matter.
Things that do matter? Reading, having fun together, doing active things, making food together, letting them explore interests, not making them do stuff they don’t want to do (sports, for 2 of my 3 boys).
The mommy wars when my girls where little where bonkers. It started with bragging about making their own baby food and special baby carriers, then who's crawling/talking first etc... then quickly evolved into competitive sport about taking them to dance/swim/sport.... I never knew how to engage with other parents in these competitive conversations. They always left me speechless. I wanted to ask them what I was thinking: is it ok with you that I don't care enough to spend my life driving around the state going to travel dance/soccer etc competitions? The other parents always assumed that we were all on the same page, signing up for this. Na, I'll pass. We spent our time relaxing and discovering the world, working on art projects, going hiking, cooking together. Now my kids are 16 and 19 and they're on their way to being well adjusted, emotionally whole adults who still love exploring their world with or without me.
My colleague's oldest child went to prom last year and I was shocked when she explained that prom in their school district is TELEVISED (I think CCTV) for parents to gather and watch in a nearby location. Can you imagine???? My kids are still younger and I was so angry to learn that the expectation for overbearing parental monitoring apparently never ends! Maybe when they get to college? Ugh.
I do not have kids but someone I know has two kids at college, and she still tracks their locations and expects them to Facetime almost every day. As someone who only ever called home once a week (long distance, early 1980s), I cannot imagine...
I personally do not understand why you would track your kids in college like that. To be fair - I wasn’t terribly big on tracking them before college either. It’s too easy to get worked up about the little things that don’t matter as much and as a result make them much less forthcoming about real issues.
I see it though. My one kid is still in college and she has schoolmates that are shocked that we don’t talk on the phone every single day and that I don’t contact her professors or track where she is or do her paperwork. But….my kid also is comfortable managing her business and traveling on her own. She will be a functional adult. My other child needed some paperwork handholding a bit longer but that was okay too.
I might sound a little preachy about it but honestly I have a job, a household and I wanted to have some free time of my own. Mostly it seemed exhausting to do all of that and I couldn’t figure out who it benefited in the long run.
With both my pregnancies I refused to have sonograms. My midwife admitted they weren't medically necessary and I didn't want to know the sex of my babies so there didn't seem to be a point. Most folks didn't really understand my reluctance to submit to this basic procedure, but there was some instinct that kicked in, that having children was going to require something from me that, control-freak that I tend to be, was very foreign-- a submission to mystery.
My children's infancies and early childhoods were brutal in many respects. The lack of sleep, the post-partum depression, the breastfeeding struggles, the loss of a sense of self, and absence of support from their father, even though he was there, sleeping right next to us. So, I don't have romantic notions about motherhood, especially mothering small children. For every exquisite moment of tenderness there is another (or more) of feeling like you are drowning with no land in sight. And I still don't know, now that they are 17 and 22, what the fuck I'm doing most of the time, but at least I'm used to that now.
My early instinct that I was submitting to mystery, to not knowing, has served me. I've never sought to optimize my children or my parenting. I've trusted that who they are and what I need to be in order to mother them will reveal itself, or the latter won't and we'll all survive anyway. When I watch, at a grateful distance, I'll admit, what seems to be the contours of modern parenting I can't help but think that missing in all of the apps and hacks and online community is a certain resistance to admitting nobody fucking knows what the hell they're doing as well as a certain confidence that if you just keep doing it in the way that seems to work for you and your particular children that you'll figure it out. Everything won't be perfect. You won't be perfect. They won't be perfect. It will be exhausting and brutal and, if you gather some kind of IRL community of like-minded folks around you, it will mostly be okay and beautiful. And when it isn't, you'll deal with it.
I was a single mom from the very beginning and as much as my divorce broke my heart at the time and was the last thing I wanted (my kids were 4 and 18 months old), the house became happier and more peaceful overnight, and my workload diminished because I was no longer cleaning up after a grown man, doing his laundry or having to deal with his shitty moods in addition to doing all the things for and with my kids, and working full-time :) I don’t usually “write this out loud” but figured I would in a comment thread in your comment section.
Yup I finally screamed at my cancer patient husband and he left for his mom's down the street. I felt like shit, but it was instantly easier. How can someone so uninvolved in his kids' lives feel 100% fine about second-guessing my parenting? I was happy that was over.
You sound like an incredible mother who loves their kids - and your kids know they are loved. Congratulations. That's a real accomplishment and is a testament to the fact that you have given of yourself for them. I hope this last Mothers' Day you got a moment to bask in that, and accept that the sacrifices you made are worth it for them and for you.
I think this is the next wave of programming parents, especially women, to be consumers. I liken it to the women of the 1950's who had extra time because they had washing machines, but were programmed to believe they needed a special type of cleaner for all sorts of tasks etc., when only a few were perfectly fine for years before then. Commercials used fear mongering to tell folks they'd better get XYZ or their house will be contaminated/they will be shamed for not being spotless, etc. Some people fell for this so strongly they developed OCD and then passed it on to their kids. Its still working, now with the apps etc. I don't understand how people don't see the fear mongering sales pitch for what it is (a fear of harm to you/family and/or of being judged by peers critically). I'm afraid of a lot of things, like dictatorships, corruption, religious nationalists, but I'm not afraid of a little dirt, and I'm not interested in someone selling me something to monitor my kid.
Also I feel like it’s worth mentioning how much all this technology is addictive by design. Not sure what the connection is to the repression of rights but feel like it is
The thing I read and kept reminding myself of when my now 30 year old daughter was a baby was “the good mother only *thinks* about throwing the baby out the window!” Worked for me.
I kept asking my mom about the twins, "are they cute?" She adores them to this day and always said they were darling. Then one day, as we were wrangling them plus their adhd three year old sibling, I asked her why I kept asking her that. She said, "because you'd just as soon leave them out with the garbage." My Own MOTHER.
I’m the mother of five had my first child in 1993, I adopted my fifth child at 49
I’ve just seen a steady escalation of more being asked of women more blame for women and language that hides what it really feels like to be a overworked mom.
I love being a mother more than anything in the world and it’s never been harder
I’ve been taking an agile class for work and thinking about how all of the parenting things I used 30 years ago were “low-tech, high-touch” — I co-slept, used a sling and cloth diapers, breastfed, etc (some of which I realize not everyone has the privilege to do).
But – and this is dorky – but I had also been thinking about how some agile stuff could be applied to daily life with my kids, like interactions over tools, simplicity, just enough to get the job done, etc.
Anyhow. There are so many new gadgets these days. Until she died in the early 80s (she was in her 70s), my great-grandmother kept washing clothes by hand, using a wringer, and hanging them to dry. She said it was easier than using machines, and until about 10 years ago that confused me – but it doesn’t anymore.
I so look forward to this book.
The idea that your fetus, baby, child will respond to a series of correct inputs from pregnancy forward and the guilt as you fail to input correctly—I lived largely on cheese sandwiches with chili crisp and fried clams during my pregnancy—is the most pernicious part of parenthood so far. This is what the researchers, influencers, friends, family, etc would have you believe. This is what you yourself would like to believe because then it would even be possible to do it “right.”
In reality your child is a person, just like you, and barring actual neglect is not going to wildly swing between success or failure because you did or did not let them watch Ms Rachel, or fed them solids instead of purees first. IF ONLY IT WERE THAT EASY.
My kid loves books and people more than toys, so all the wooden Montessori shit in the world isn’t going to do it for him. I had nothing to do with his taste. But what a dream it would be if I could make him healthy, intelligent, thoughtful, kind, just by making sure he always wore soft butch Kate Quinn outfits and never played with anything made of plastic.
I remember when my daughter was born banning all princess stuff and making sure I dressed her in blues and greens. Then when she was two, she one day announced she was a queen and refused to wear anything but fancy dresses for the next 4 years. She’s now 14 and a smart meat head jock, who reads the Brontes, and I just know that if she was an input/output machine, none of this would make sense.
Your daughter seems SO COOL. Brag time: He's now 19 months old and learning to talk. The other day, he was looking at a book that is not about farming, but has a picture of a tractor in the context of different vehicles. He pointed to it and sang "E-I-E-I" which means "Old McDonald Had a Farm," not a song that references tractors. He learned about tractors and farmers from his farm animal playset which includes a farmer figurine and tractor. I *died.* I am not going to be able to control anything about how this kid moves through the world, he is figuring it out his damn self already.
A genius! My son was similar. Before he could really talk he recognized the songs on spotify he wanted to listen to and would be a tiny little DJ. Kids just come out how they come out. I don't think our job is to mold them, but to just help them be who they are gonna be and given them a safe place to land? I have given up on parenting books and now I am just a human being and it's great. We are having a good time.
My twins turned out so very gifted, much smarter than I am, and really into math. I thought well ok, I'd better nourish this somehow, since public school first grade teachers were buying algebra books with their own money. So I tried an after school enrichment program, and one twin explained to me gently that they liked math, but a normal amount, so doing extra wasn't the thing. I mean, I want to go home and relax after work myself. So I sought out books and resources and summer programs as much as i could, and finally the school district put them on a bus to middle school for algebra when they were in fifth grade. And expected me to pick them up and drive them back to the elementary school. I said I can't, I'm a working widowed mom, and they figured out who to call in transportation. Now they are graduating and heading off to college together, most likely as math/cs majors. There is no one size fits all. Just love them, love them, love them, and respect them as individuals from day one.
The perception that I had to do a ton of things right and not mess up at all was most definitely a factor in me choosing *not* to have kids. Not the only factor or most important one, but an undeniable one.
It's a hard mindset to rid yourself of. And most days I feel like I don't have it then something will happen like signing up for classes for high school and I'll have a little spiral. Not complying with the cultural expectations is ROUGH truly.
Oh, I have so many thoughts. Thanks for this one and sharing this book. Looking forward to reading it. It does take a village to raise a child, but the village is on fire, and those who lit the flames got an app to help us pretend it’s not on fire.
What a timely post, for two reasons:
1. My sister's stepson (born 2012) just got in trouble for trying to look up porn. It reminded my sister (born 1989) about our parents finding suspicious things in the browser history and subsequently putting passwords on things. She said to stepson, "my parents had to sort of be pioneers in this field and figure the internet out as they went." (Fortunately/unfortunately, our mom is a computer programmer. Not hard to figure out at all, LOL.)
2. The Letters from an American post on Mother's Day mentioned how an older woman (born 1903) who was influential in the author's life gave credit to the washing machine for helping liberate her and her mother from constant laundry. I guess they were lucky to avoid the chore creep mentioned above. Sigh.
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/may-10-2025
So, I imagine if you switched from hand washing to a washing machine, the other forms of labor would not feel as heavy. But I'm sure this person didn't escape the feeling that with their newly found free time, they had to put it all in their kids rather than themselves.
And re-reading the piece, I did note that the older woman mentioned getting to have more free time to socialize with her friends, but not anything that her own mother got to do *instead* of hand-washing. And if she didn't have that feeling of, like you said, put it all back into kids/household, would she have even know how to spend leisure time?
(I really *am* asking that of anyone with a background in history. I know the wealthy always had access to hobbies/amusement, but not how much the average person did in more-modern but still past times.)
I’ve worked off and on as a nanny since the late 80s. The biggest change in this profession, aside from the ubiquity of work from home parents, is the technology. 35 years ago I might speak to the mom/dad (99% mom) on the phone once a day. Now we have constant contact via our smartphones. Some nannies are expected to update apps throughout the day w/ every diaper change, nap time, bottle, solid food item, etc. Parents want pictures/videos throughout the day. But also, don’t be on your phone all day!! I had a nanny friend who didn’t send pictures from storytime at the library and was scolded and told it was “unacceptable.”
As frustrating as this new dynamic is for the childcare provider, I feel for the parents, and especially the children who are monitored by camera basically from the moment they are born. I also watched it play out as a parent myself, you’re a bad parent if you don’t track your child via phone, you’re a bad parent if you do. The tech gives us a false sense of safety and control.
It is absolutely a search for safety and control in a world that has none. But one day I just stopped logging all the nursing, the diapers, the naps. My kid sometimes went too long without a diaper, sometimes we changed him in short succession. Sometimes he didn't nurse exactly every three hours, sometimes he spent three hours nursing.
Later, when he started daycare, I was annoyed to find I was now subject to *their* logging. They were changing his diaper 10-14 times a day (literally!) presumably every time they saw even the faintest hint of the wetness indicator going blue. If they didn't log those diapers, I wouldn't have known or been annoyed that they were being so wasteful--I could have just brought in more diapers for them more frequently without the added stress of knowing they were sopping up tiny amounts of baby pee with my dollar bills. Do I love getting pictures? Yes. But I prefer that they focus on caring for him.
I like sharing pics but sometimes it’s a distraction and I do get annoyed. It’s just the world we live in and the way the job is now.
I get the necessity of logging things if you have multiple ppl providing care, or if you’re trying to figure out newborn patterns, but I think it also robs parents of their ability to read a child’s cues, trust their intuition, etc. and can create unhealthy fixations on stuff that just doesn’t matter that much. Sleep schedules and wake windows also trap caregivers/children in a rigidity that’s unnecessary. (Not always! All families and kids have different needs and sometimes it’s the only thing that works.)
There was a brief period when my kid was a baby where I decided I was going to figure out how to get him to sleep, dammit. I started keeping a log of his naps, with every piece of information I could think of -- time down, time asleep, time awake, what we did right before, whether he was swaddled or not, how he was swaddled, I don't even know what else, but a lot of stuff.
It wasn't until I was crying over the log, trying to see some kind of pattern or SOMETHING that would make him go to sleep, that I realized I was treating my child like he was a computer and just needed the right set of inputs and would sleep, and how absolutely ludicrous that was.
So I just stopped trying to get him to sleep, and started counting success as putting him down for a nap at regular intervals, whether he slept or not. And then a few months later when he fell off the growth charts I learned how to stop paying attention to whether he was eating or not and started counting success as offering him food at regular intervals. And I stopped worrying about whether he would read as early as I did and started counting success as reading to him at regular intervals.
And now he's 8 and he sleeps, and he eats, and he grows, and he reads so much he sometimes brings a book to the grocery store and walks around reading with one hand on the cart so he doesn't have to pay much attention to where he's going.
I'm pretty sure we've all done that trying to get the baby and ourselves more sleep! It's maddening! And yeah, when you get to that point where you realize they are just their own little people and you can't control it all, it's so freeing.
It's so messed up that we have to find out on our own, because everyone trying to sell us stuff is so loud! I tell this story all the fucking time, to everyone who will listen, along with how easy it was for me to breastfeed with very little effort, because that's another thing we don't talk about enough, how sometimes "Breastfeeding Super Mamas" just got really fucking lucky (me!) and if your breasts don't want to cooperate all the effort in the world won't make breastfeeding simple or easy or even possible, sometimes.
I know! I think when we're in that baby phase any advice feels like judgment. And a lot of times it's people telling us to "treasure these moments because they go by fast." Which is true but very unhelpful when you haven't slept in a year. I'm on the opposite end now and 17 feels harder than a baby!
Oh this book sounds great! My kids are 17 and 12. When I was pregnant for the first time in 2007-08 video baby monitors were WAY too expensive for us. And our daycares never had cameras.
In hindsight I'm glad I couldn't survey my kids every move. I think it's made it easier to let them wander and roam the neighborhood as they've gotten older. We do have the Apple Find My app so if I really need to know where they are, I can check my phone.
And I do have the best technology ever invented for coping with children, the daily anti-depressant, to keep me sane.
I love my kids, and the family we are. It’s been fascinating raising them—three boys, all radically specific people with their own destinies, as it turns out. And when they were little, this shit made me bonkers! I hated the peer pressure and all the bullshit expectations.
My youngest is about to graduate from high school. He’s doing great after some very real struggles. His brothers who are 20 and 25? Also doing great! None of the details we are told to obsess over when kids are little actually matter.
Things that do matter? Reading, having fun together, doing active things, making food together, letting them explore interests, not making them do stuff they don’t want to do (sports, for 2 of my 3 boys).
Yes, all of this! Congratulations to your graduate! And to you for raising three grown-up people!
The mommy wars when my girls where little where bonkers. It started with bragging about making their own baby food and special baby carriers, then who's crawling/talking first etc... then quickly evolved into competitive sport about taking them to dance/swim/sport.... I never knew how to engage with other parents in these competitive conversations. They always left me speechless. I wanted to ask them what I was thinking: is it ok with you that I don't care enough to spend my life driving around the state going to travel dance/soccer etc competitions? The other parents always assumed that we were all on the same page, signing up for this. Na, I'll pass. We spent our time relaxing and discovering the world, working on art projects, going hiking, cooking together. Now my kids are 16 and 19 and they're on their way to being well adjusted, emotionally whole adults who still love exploring their world with or without me.
My colleague's oldest child went to prom last year and I was shocked when she explained that prom in their school district is TELEVISED (I think CCTV) for parents to gather and watch in a nearby location. Can you imagine???? My kids are still younger and I was so angry to learn that the expectation for overbearing parental monitoring apparently never ends! Maybe when they get to college? Ugh.
As a person who works in higher ed I can tell you that the monitoring does not end when they go to college.
UGH!!
booooooooooo!
I do not have kids but someone I know has two kids at college, and she still tracks their locations and expects them to Facetime almost every day. As someone who only ever called home once a week (long distance, early 1980s), I cannot imagine...
Wowwww
I personally do not understand why you would track your kids in college like that. To be fair - I wasn’t terribly big on tracking them before college either. It’s too easy to get worked up about the little things that don’t matter as much and as a result make them much less forthcoming about real issues.
I see it though. My one kid is still in college and she has schoolmates that are shocked that we don’t talk on the phone every single day and that I don’t contact her professors or track where she is or do her paperwork. But….my kid also is comfortable managing her business and traveling on her own. She will be a functional adult. My other child needed some paperwork handholding a bit longer but that was okay too.
I might sound a little preachy about it but honestly I have a job, a household and I wanted to have some free time of my own. Mostly it seemed exhausting to do all of that and I couldn’t figure out who it benefited in the long run.
With both my pregnancies I refused to have sonograms. My midwife admitted they weren't medically necessary and I didn't want to know the sex of my babies so there didn't seem to be a point. Most folks didn't really understand my reluctance to submit to this basic procedure, but there was some instinct that kicked in, that having children was going to require something from me that, control-freak that I tend to be, was very foreign-- a submission to mystery.
My children's infancies and early childhoods were brutal in many respects. The lack of sleep, the post-partum depression, the breastfeeding struggles, the loss of a sense of self, and absence of support from their father, even though he was there, sleeping right next to us. So, I don't have romantic notions about motherhood, especially mothering small children. For every exquisite moment of tenderness there is another (or more) of feeling like you are drowning with no land in sight. And I still don't know, now that they are 17 and 22, what the fuck I'm doing most of the time, but at least I'm used to that now.
My early instinct that I was submitting to mystery, to not knowing, has served me. I've never sought to optimize my children or my parenting. I've trusted that who they are and what I need to be in order to mother them will reveal itself, or the latter won't and we'll all survive anyway. When I watch, at a grateful distance, I'll admit, what seems to be the contours of modern parenting I can't help but think that missing in all of the apps and hacks and online community is a certain resistance to admitting nobody fucking knows what the hell they're doing as well as a certain confidence that if you just keep doing it in the way that seems to work for you and your particular children that you'll figure it out. Everything won't be perfect. You won't be perfect. They won't be perfect. It will be exhausting and brutal and, if you gather some kind of IRL community of like-minded folks around you, it will mostly be okay and beautiful. And when it isn't, you'll deal with it.
" ... and absence of support from their father, even though he was there, sleeping right next to us."
Yep. I came up with the phrase that he was "there but not there."
This is why when women say, "I don't want to be a single mom." I often reply, "You already are!"
I was a single mom from the very beginning and as much as my divorce broke my heart at the time and was the last thing I wanted (my kids were 4 and 18 months old), the house became happier and more peaceful overnight, and my workload diminished because I was no longer cleaning up after a grown man, doing his laundry or having to deal with his shitty moods in addition to doing all the things for and with my kids, and working full-time :) I don’t usually “write this out loud” but figured I would in a comment thread in your comment section.
Yup I finally screamed at my cancer patient husband and he left for his mom's down the street. I felt like shit, but it was instantly easier. How can someone so uninvolved in his kids' lives feel 100% fine about second-guessing my parenting? I was happy that was over.
You sound like an incredible mother who loves their kids - and your kids know they are loved. Congratulations. That's a real accomplishment and is a testament to the fact that you have given of yourself for them. I hope this last Mothers' Day you got a moment to bask in that, and accept that the sacrifices you made are worth it for them and for you.
I think this is the next wave of programming parents, especially women, to be consumers. I liken it to the women of the 1950's who had extra time because they had washing machines, but were programmed to believe they needed a special type of cleaner for all sorts of tasks etc., when only a few were perfectly fine for years before then. Commercials used fear mongering to tell folks they'd better get XYZ or their house will be contaminated/they will be shamed for not being spotless, etc. Some people fell for this so strongly they developed OCD and then passed it on to their kids. Its still working, now with the apps etc. I don't understand how people don't see the fear mongering sales pitch for what it is (a fear of harm to you/family and/or of being judged by peers critically). I'm afraid of a lot of things, like dictatorships, corruption, religious nationalists, but I'm not afraid of a little dirt, and I'm not interested in someone selling me something to monitor my kid.
“capitalism disguised as comfort” —genius and describes our culture right now
Also I feel like it’s worth mentioning how much all this technology is addictive by design. Not sure what the connection is to the repression of rights but feel like it is
The thing I read and kept reminding myself of when my now 30 year old daughter was a baby was “the good mother only *thinks* about throwing the baby out the window!” Worked for me.
I kept asking my mom about the twins, "are they cute?" She adores them to this day and always said they were darling. Then one day, as we were wrangling them plus their adhd three year old sibling, I asked her why I kept asking her that. She said, "because you'd just as soon leave them out with the garbage." My Own MOTHER.
I’m the mother of five had my first child in 1993, I adopted my fifth child at 49
I’ve just seen a steady escalation of more being asked of women more blame for women and language that hides what it really feels like to be a overworked mom.
I love being a mother more than anything in the world and it’s never been harder
thank you for the article
"Direct improvements to the lives and labor of women correlate with a backlash to their freedoms." Mic drop.
I’ve been taking an agile class for work and thinking about how all of the parenting things I used 30 years ago were “low-tech, high-touch” — I co-slept, used a sling and cloth diapers, breastfed, etc (some of which I realize not everyone has the privilege to do).
But – and this is dorky – but I had also been thinking about how some agile stuff could be applied to daily life with my kids, like interactions over tools, simplicity, just enough to get the job done, etc.
Anyhow. There are so many new gadgets these days. Until she died in the early 80s (she was in her 70s), my great-grandmother kept washing clothes by hand, using a wringer, and hanging them to dry. She said it was easier than using machines, and until about 10 years ago that confused me – but it doesn’t anymore.