This Substack was originally meant to be a fun weekly mass email to friends and family because I missed the aughts heyday of personal blogging. I’ve loved having a chance to think and write about things totally unrelated to work, and I’ve enjoyed reading similar updates from the friends I’ve convinced to start their own newsletters. (And if you have one that I don’t know about, I would like to subscribe!)
This is in part an apology to those of you who found your way here from work — you’re of course welcome to hang out, but consider yourselves warned that my life is not particularly interesting.
It’s also just to say up front that I did not intend for this to be a parenting blog, and so I feel a bit bad that after last week’s brief essay on my worst parenting self, I am once again writing about parenting. But I haven’t been able to stop thinking about this column that my friend Mandy shared last week. It says, in a nutshell, that:
No matter what you think before you have kids, you’ll end up letting them watch shitty kids’ shows, including in restaurants, where they’ll also be allowed to consume the sugar you swore you’d forgo, as they’re pacified by the screens you never thought you’d use (“Welcome to hell,” the author tells parents grappling with these choices).
Gen Zers who whine about this online are naive hypocrites (“As if, at six or seven, the TikTokers, too, weren’t running around a Chili’s, screaming their little heads off”).
People should just chill and recognize that every family is doing their best to meet their own unique needs (“I, for the most part, try not to judge those needs”).
The author’s personal chill does not extend to YouTube, which she’s banned, or to her kids using any kind of tablet at home, which is also forbidden.
Before I start complaining, I should say that I did enjoy this article. I thought it was funny, and I very much agree that people without kids should feel free to sit this one out. If someone’s noisy screen is bothering you, just use your stellar interpersonal skills — the ones you’ll need to raise those perfect children — to ask them (or their parents) to turn the sound off.1
Discussions of screen time are notoriously deranged, and I appreciated that this article was an attempt at a sort of deescalation. But by the end it felt less like an argument for not judging parents for their screen policies than a plea to not judge the author’s particular choices.
Here’s how she talks about people who think kids should be able to make it through a restaurant meal without screens and sugar:
Because, of course, kids don’t care about your vision for who they are. They will be who they are and do what kids do. And eventually, we all realize how much easier parenting them is when we don’t adhere to strict and rigid ideas of how things should be and just embrace how they are.
And here’s how she talks about her own parenting priorities:
But like so many actual parents and experts, I also agree that phones and iPads, and in particular the specific content on those devices, are wreaking havoc on both our kids and us... It’s also why a few of my friends and I, along with our kids, have instituted a blanket YouTube ban and why we don’t have an iPad or any kind of tablet for them at home.
I think this one irked me in part because I’m one of those smug assholes whose child does sit calmly in restaurants without screens. And while some kids are not developmentally able to do this, I firmly believe that most absolutely can. But even for kids with relatively even temperaments and longer attention spans, it’s not easy. For a parent, it takes time and effort and more than once following through on your threat to take your toddler home RIGHT NOW if a certain behavior doesn’t stop.
Eventually for your trouble you get compliments from strangers in restaurants on your kid’s behavior, which is fun, if that’s what you’re going for. But honestly, everything leading up to that kind of sucks. I totally understand why some parents opt out — it’s definitely not impossible, but it’s really only worth jumping through those hoops if having your kid(s) regularly sit through a meal out without screens is important to you.
And I think that’s the bit that’s missing from so many parenting conversations, the idea that your decisions might not always reflect some absolute morality or the latest scientific research on optimizing long-term outcomes, but your personal preferences for how you and your family want to live your lives. Even pieces like this one that are framed as pushing back against the judgements of other parents, or people without kids, are often arguing in favor of an alternate set of judgements.
I’m not a parenting nihilist. I don’t believe that nothing you do matters. But there’s so often a world of difference between the way we talk about our own parenting choices and the way we talk about other people’s. The ways in which our own children fall short of perfect behavior are inevitable, and anyone who believes otherwise is “rigid” or delusional, while the things we’re hardcore about are absolutely necessary and justified by science. There’s certainly nothing wrong with a blanket YouTube ban, but it’s hardly the only responsible choice, even for a parent who shares the author’s concerns about kids and social media — just like forcing your child to sit through a restaurant meal without a screen isn’t the only way to make sure they’re not an ill-mannered asshole.
All of these things are hard, at least for a while. Parents are human beings working with finite stores of energy and attention, and none of us want our entire relationship with our children to be about nagging. Is everyone going to choose to focus that energy on the same things, in the same way? Obviously not. But I don’t think there’s much utility in pretending that people with different priorities are necessarily delusional or bad parents.
The good news is that I’m back on a regular gym schedule. The bad news is that I now feel really bad at working out.
When I stopped lifting heavy with a trainer last November, I’d hoped that I could find a way to maintain my lifting on my own, but I’m finally starting to feel the effects of scaling back my workouts over the last six months. There are plenty of things at the gym I don’t have a problem making myself do, but I just haven’t been able to push myself on the bigger compound lifts — I hate squats and apparently won’t do them unless someone is yelling at me about it. Even the things that I don’t mind doing on my own, I can tell I’m just not doing as well or as strenuously without someone checking in on me. Today I realized I was down 40 pounds from my highest working weight on barbell rows. It’s a huge drop, and even though it’s a lift I can probably push myself back up on, I think not doing the bigger lifts is having an negative effect on my overall strength and mobility. So, I’m going to mostly continue working out on my own, but I’m also going to find someone to make me do the big stuff once a week. I’m hoping writing it down will make it more likely that I’ll follow through.
One reason I’ve been struggling a bit to get to the gym recently (aside from just, like, life) is that I decided to start a Japanese class this spring. It’s been great, I’m really enjoying it. But I went into it thinking it would be a very chill new hobby, something I wouldn’t let myself get too worked up about or have unreasonable expectations around. And I have no idea why I thought that, I have been anything but chill about it. And somehow, despite roughly 40 years of knowing exactly how many hours are in each day, I find myself shocked and appalled that adding something substantial to my schedule has crowded out other things. Maybe 41 will be the year I figure out how to manage my time? But also learn Japanese, at least a little.
This particular annoyance isn’t even unique to children. On a recent flight, I needed my AirPods to bail me out when not one but two nearby adult humans decided to watch videos with the volume on full blast.
I just wanted to say that I’m one of those naive childless twenty-somethings that has haughtily side-eyed iPad kids in restaurants, and I wanted to thank you for giving me some (in immediate hindsight really obvious) perspective on this. Parenting seems HARD and EXHAUSTING, and also all of our ‘shoulds’ about how kids ought to behave or how we ought to parent are more a product of our own idealised fantasies of parenthood than a realistic standard. Kids are going to be kids! And they’re probably going to turn out alright anyway.
Great read!
I'm one of those "other" people, apologies in advance. But I do fitness coaching on a regular basis, and I'm one of those that can really only work out reliably with a class or a trainer. Some people are like that, and there's no shame in it (not that's what you expressed). And, as you said, having someone to push you can be extremely valuable, because most tend to cherry pick the exercises they like or are good at, which are almost certainly not the ones they need to do most. I wonder at the people that can go to the gym and do everything the way they're supposed to. It's also worth saying that those moments of working really hard, straining against limits, are where strength and skill gains are made.
I'm admittedly biased, but I can think of few other activities (parenting being one) that are as valuable as exercise. It's worth carving out time for!