We’re all talking about the same thing
My December Substack feed had two separate narratives which captured my attention. There was a article discussion on proper screen usage, brought about by Dorota Talalay ’s article “The results are in: we have been way too complacent about screens”. This article was an exceptional diagnosis of possibly the biggest societal problem of our age – screens replacing socialization and other human needs. Her solution, however, is too unwieldy.
The second narrative was about the morality of “hating”/not liking/not wanting kids, started by Jameela Jamil’s honest and deliberately incendiary article about not wanting to have kids. There were many visceral reactions to this post by parents who, of course, actually like kids. Charlotte Stephens does a great service summarizing the reasons why parents were always going to hate Jameela’s article. And just as expected, many parents on Substack took the bait, launching into tirades about how children are a vulnerable, necessary group who shouldn’t be treated with such apathy. The points they made are true, but they do nothing to persuade those apprehensive about parenthood to have kids of their own.
If we take a step back and look at these conversations more closely – one group discussing not wanting kids while the other encourages parents to remove the TV from the living room as a moral directive – we can see that these groups are circling the same conversation.
The conflict stems from an impulse to parent our children as best as we can, only to turn around and hold others to our own standard. But this desire to raise kids well has been taken too far, making parenting harder and more emotionally taxing than it needs to be. Parents trying to do their best end up ridden with guilt from comparison and exhaustion. As a result, prospective parents, particularly mothers (who will always have a disproportionate burden in child rearing), look around, see how much work it is to parent, see how much ridicule and shame mothers receive, see moms who are trying so hard they lose themselves to burn out, and so they opt out.
Too much pressure on parents is helping no one
Of the many responses to Jameela’s now notorious article, Dylan Macinerney’s was the one that resonated the most with me. Inspired by his brilliantly measured piece, I will try to give Jameela’s letter the most generous read I can so that we can learn something from it. “I Don’t Like Kids (X3)”, polarizing as it may be, is worth engaging with because, as Dylan points out, “The Anti-Kid Argument Is Winning.”
While certain points from the article were sensationalized or hyperbolic, there was a thread through many of her frantic bullet points that is worth untangling.
One central claim Jameela makes is that the costs and risks of having children, especially for women, are significant. The most salient risk to a woman choosing to have a child is the risk of death or of serious medical complications. This by itself cannot be the sole reason so many women are opting out of having children today, as this risk, while still tremendous, has never been lower for mothers. This is why many people discuss the opportunity cost associated with having kids, making the point that women have never had more agency to do something other than have kids. They argue that while the absolute risk of pregnancy and childbirth has lowered with time, the alternatives have never been more appealing.
Jameela also feels that the social pressure put on mothers is too high. “I reject the new wave of shaming that is inflicted upon mothers for not being perfect in every way.” I think this is the key line in the entire essay. A lot of people rolled their eyes at the supposed hypocrisy of Jameela simultaneously not wanting to have kids and claiming that she would be too motherly and too involved in their lives. But I think it’s a reasonable reaction to a parenting culture that keeps making motherhood unsustainably difficult. Motherhood, particularly among a sort of conscientious group of people who truly want the best for their kids, has become a totalizing experience. Jameela fears she would lose herself in it, likely because she has witnessed friends who have lost themselves.
Shaming starts for mothers as soon as they are pregnant. We begin to shame them for their caffeine use, then for exercising too little (or is it too much?). Then the big day arrives, and we line up to judge mothers for their location choice and their use of medicine. While they recover from childbirth and deal with postpartum depression, we begin to judge them for the way they choose to feed their child. While they face exhaustion, we judge them for their sleeping arrangements. We judge them if they don’t go back to work, or if they go back to work too soon. We judge them if their parenting is too lenient, or if they discipline their kids too much or in ways deemed unacceptable to people who probably experienced the same treatment when they were children.
Shaming has a structural advantage over compassion in our modern discourse. This is because judgmental parents broadcast their judgment, while more measured people tend to keep to themselves. The airspace gets ceded to the judgmental, and the likeliest people to combat them are judgmental too, just with a different, equally ardent prescription. In the way that a tolerant society must root out intolerance, harsh, unproductive judgment must be judged harshly by those least inclined to do so.
This ever-present culture of shame is sitting at the fingertips of any mom who dares to turn to social media seeking advice. No matter what choices you make, no matter how badly you want to do what’s right for your children, someone will be there to tell you that what you are doing is wrong and that you are not good enough.
Women like Jameela are looking at what motherhood would entail, making a risk-assessment, and determining that the risks of pregnancy, childbirth, and then 18 thankless years of self-sacrifice spent failing to meet everyone else’s impossible standards are greater than the risk of never knowing the sort of overwhelming love you’re told you experience when holding your child in your hands.
If we believe that parenthood is good, then we have to stop making it look like martyrdom. Rather than shaming the people pointing out the real, structural ways that parenthood appears daunting, we should make parenthood less daunting, structurally.
If we take Jameela at her word and accept that she thinks she would be too protective, too controlling, and too involved in the life of her kid to maintain her own identity, then rather than calling her a liar, we should take seriously the underlying problem – she has thought about the prospect of motherhood and has come to the rational conclusion that it would be too hard to do a good job raising a kid. And she would want to do a good job.
Should I have children if I also like watching TV sometimes?
Let’s return to the question of screens, but this time thinking about the already great friction experienced by parents. I believe Dorota Talalay correctly and persuasively diagnosed a serious problem with screens, but her solution is too imprecise – casting a wide net against all screens when a narrow one would suffice.
Getting rid of screens and removing your smartphone from the time you spend around your kids, as recommended by Dorota, may be the best practice, but it is also practically impossible without heroic effort. Though she argues that removing screens from the house will ease the need for supervision in the long term, I know many parents who do not see it the same way. Further, asking parents to remove all screens from the house and reorient their lives makes the job of parenting appear that much more all-consuming to non-parents.
And then there is another problem – not all screen use is bad.
In her perfect response to the question of screens, aelle gracefully reframes the problem by encouraging people to focus on living full lives. In this way, screen use can be additive to a full life rather than parasitic. Charles Olney shares this intuition, arguing that while you should certainly pay attention to how much screen time your child gets, the correct amount is not zero.
As I’ve written before, some uses of screens – particularly social media and algorithmic feeds designed to addict – are genuinely toxic. But aside from the bad uses of screens, there are good uses, okay uses, and not great uses that can be totally fine to lean into during difficult times.
Screens can be used well as captivating story machines, toys in the rotation that can be brought out to give mom and dad a break. And as Cartoons Hate Her notes, the laws of screen morality should obviously allow for some indulgence during sick days. The way you use screens matters far more than whether you use them at all.
The difference between using TV sparingly and giving a child nearly unlimited TV is the difference between giving them a piece of candy and feeding them candy for every meal. And if a bit of screen time is like a bit of candy, giving a 10-year-old child a smartphone is like giving them delicious, candy-coated cigarettes. An easy, digestible rule of thumb is that it’s fine to let your kids use screens sometimes, but it’s never okay to let the screens use them.
Many parents, especially mothers, are struggling to keep their heads above water. They need a release valve for the pressure they already feel before they can imagine adding more pressure. This is why we have to think clearly about which uses of screens are bad, specifically – because parenthood has to be livable. And not just for the top 5% of people with the most time to devote.
The only people today who would follow a no-screens directive are a subset of the most conscientious parents. Importantly, these parents are probably already doing nearly everything they can for their children. It is quite likely that screenless children would, on average, be more sociable, more focused, and have better life outcomes than a control group of kids with unfettered screen access. But what if the actual outcome of pushing a no-screens standard for the conscientious parent is that fewer conscientious people have kids?
More intensive parenting, fewer kids, and no benefit
We’re spending more time than ever with our kids, and it’s not clear that anyone is any better for it. A famous Pew Research Poll showed that between 1965 and 2011, the amount of time that dads spend with their kids tripled. Over that same time, the amount of time moms spend with their kids doubled too! And crucially, the fertility rate dropped significantly over this time period, meaning that parents were spending substantially more time parenting far fewer children. The kids, meanwhile, who most commonly now have either 1 or 0 siblings to play with, would be much better served spending time with other children.
The wisest person on Substack, father_karine, makes this point clearer than I can:
Some great parenting authors make this point too. Elena Bridgers discusses how she doesn’t like playing pretend with her children – so she doesn’t. Instead, she lets her kids play pretend with friends. The end result is a happier parent as well as a child who spends more time with friends, and a child who can learn that their place in the world is not directly at the center.
Wanting more kids and wanting to spend more time and effort on each kid are in direct tension. Wanting more kids and wanting better kids are not.
In many cases, the diminishing returns of increased parental attention have already turned negative. Elizabeth Grace Matthew is the author with the best instincts on this point. She intuitively bristles at ideas which add labor to parenthood without clear benefits. Her essay “Parenting Doesn’t Have to be This Hard…”, makes this point explicitly. This article illustrates the totalizing self-erasure experienced by mothers who are trying very hard to do the right thing for their child. She argues that certain tactics employed by these self-sacrificing moms are counter-productive, noting that gentle-parenting, which clearly adds difficulty to the parent, can also be bad for children if it encourages them to ruminate on unhealthy emotions. She also makes the point that “Having kids can be a lot easier and more fun if you just remember that you’re the grown up.” Gentle-parenting works for some parents, and that is a great thing. But if it isn’t helping you, it has to be okay to try something else.
We know that parental intensity does not reliably lead to more virtuous, better adjusted, or less selfish adults. Sometimes less really is more with parenting. That’s good, because it gives parents an obligation to focus on themselves from time to time since doing so is also in the best interest of children. By putting themselves first on occasion, parents can maintain the parts of their lives which give them purpose. They will also be modeling this for their own children, so that parenthood does not appear to be such a self-annihilating hellscape.
So many dimensions of shame for women have such little proven impact on childhood outcomes that doing what works best for the mom is clearly the best possible advice. When an airplane experiences turbulence, we are told that the responsible thing to do is to put on your own oxygen mask before you help your child. The logic is that someone who is struggling to breathe will not be as useful or as clear-minded as someone who has taken care of themselves. This same logic applies to parenthood. A mother burning out from self-neglect will not be able to respond as well when her child truly needs her.
If we keep raising the bar for good parenting, there will be people who stop trying to jump over it. But the people being driven away from parenting out of a fear that they wouldn’t live up to their own high expectations are the exact sort of conscientious people who would make excellent parents.
“Good” parenting must be attainable for more people
Today it is easier than ever to be an inattentive parent – there are countless apps that will do the hard work of raising mal-adjusted children for you. Yet those who strive to be good parents (which is most people) have to face unprecedented challenges of technology and a crumbling social support structure. So then why are we making it even harder on ourselves to be good parents?
In a world where so much is working against parents, our response has been to accept the world for what it is while asking individual parents to take on more and more responsibility to compensate. I think this response is exactly backward. The systemic problems eroding childhood and making parenting an uphill battle will not go away by individuals digging in. They require systemic solutions. Instead, we should accept parents for who they are, then those of us with extra capacity should put it toward demanding better from the world.
If Dylan Macinerney is right that parenting no longer speaks for itself, it means that we have to change our language. We have made the ideal of parenting feel unattainable. In a world with high opportunity cost for those who decide to be parents, that is a disaster. We need to make parenting look less like martyrdom and more like something compatible with a life worth living. This means lowering the bar.
Lowering the bar allows parents to maintain their own identity, children to grow up in a world that does not revolve around them, and makes room for more people to choose parenting without fear that it will overrun them. The ideal parenting style, then, is whatever style works best for the parent.
This is of course not to say that absolutely anything should go, but rather to admit that each parent-child relationship is different, and that the people most qualified to make strategic parenting decisions for their children are the ones for whom the decisions matter the most. The best way to mother or father is the way that enables you – the person who cares most deeply about your children – to actually do it.
There are already so many axes on which parents, especially mothers, harshly judge themselves and find themselves lacking. Instead of adding more dimensions on which we can judge each other, we need to soften the ones we already have. For some parents, taking away the 30 minutes of peace that Bluey provides them is just one more burden in an already thankless job.
Parents should model the sort of sustainable self-compassion that they would like their own kids to embody with the next generation. Endless worry about maximizing your child’s outcomes and endless rumination on imagined harm creates anxious households and children who know that the world revolves around them.
If children are an objective good, then parents need to extend grace – first to themselves, and then to others. Your well-meaning opinions about the best way to raise a child should be in service of helping more parents succeed, not fewer attempting it.
Parents need to give ourselves permission to be “good parents” in whatever ways we can; permission to put the oxygen masks over our own faces so that parenting is not such an uphill battle; permission to sit back at the end of the day and appreciate the transcendent works of art that we have created. Our children stand as testaments to the fact that what we’ve accomplished is beautiful – that what we have made is good.
If the perception of a good parent is that they must lose themselves and work relentlessly to the point of burn out, more and more people will follow Jameela’s lead and opt out. Jameela was right that modern parenting would consume her. But she’s wrong that it has to be that way.
Some excellent points here. As a small example, I got totally shamed for saying that I intended to have my middle schooler ride the bus home from school. I actually cried over it. It's this sort of thing that makes being a parent and a working adult so draining.
My friend asked me a while back how her mother could have 4 kids and made it seem effortless, while she is struggling with 2 and barely holding on. She then launched into a story about how her mom would send her outside, at 5, to play in the large property warning her to never go near the pond on their property.
I then asked my friend if she would do the same with her kids, even now at older ages.
She said no.
Which is where I said that's how your mom could relax, clean, and cook. No one was at home to be taken care of. The difference is that her responsibilities fell off during the day when her kids went to school or outside to play.
Letting a 5 year old have free reign of the yard for hours by themselves isn't the wisest choice, but we've all seemed to forget that children can also do a lot of things by themselves. We need a middle ground between the days of yore and constant surveillance. We need a middle ground to that substack user of never having children's movies on and enjoying our own lives. Sometimes, a little Bluey absolutely hits. Other times? I'd rather do anything than watch a cartoon.