Our kids don't need everything to be easy
Parenting in a frictionless world has its own set of challenges.
Greetings from sunny Los Angeles! Heather’s back this week with a hot take that’s been burning a hole in her brain for months. Parents, are you ready?
Millennials parent with specificity. Before our babies were even born, we used apps that followed their growth in utero and compared them to produce. We knew exactly what those little pineapples were up to, and except for childbirth and a few massive transitions that swept the ground out from under us, our generation tends to make it our jobs to maintain as much control over our kids as possible.
A couple weeks ago, I found a video on my phone from when Ruby was just born. We’re talking fresh—maybe a day old. There I was, looking like I had just run a Spartan Race in a nightgown, swinging a side-angled blanket burrito of Baby Ruby from left to right, using whatever ravaged remains of my diaphragm I had left to push a “SHHHHHHHHHH” out from my lips.
“This is how babies like it,” I said, with the confidence of second-time mom who had just finished her refresher read of Dr. Harvey Karp’s The Happiest Baby on the Block. I looked absolutely ridiculous. In fact, if I could overlay a narrator’s voice into the video, he would say:
“This was not the way her baby liked it. She would spend the next six weeks desperate to figure out what would make her baby the happiest on the block.”
And once we did—once we put together the exact routine and conditions to satisfy her—we would’ve held onto it forever. Had she not continued to change, of course.
Think about those early years of parenting when we develop these habits. I frame them as our habits, not our kids’, because we’re the ones who create them. By studying and accommodating our children’s micro-needs, we curate environments of certainty that appease them and seem to make our lives easier. At least, we think they do.
For example, Hazel never liked to nap as a toddler, but we really wanted her to nap. So, one of us would lose two hours of our afternoon tickling her back to the sweet sounds of acoustic covers on Spotify until she’d fall asleep for 45 minutes and then awaken like Godzilla emerging from the Pacific. You couldn’t look at her. You couldn’t talk to her. She needed an applesauce pouch and 20 minutes of whispering in order to rejoin society. And we played along, for far too long.
This is how the story begins. How we begin to equate parenting our kids with removing friction from their lives. How love and ease begin to lock hands. How we lose sight of the plot over time.
I’ve spent a lot of time wondering why Douglas and I began our parenting journey this way, but I can’t pin down just one reason. The most obvious answer is that every generation wants to do better than their parents did, and even though that’s an overgeneralization, I still think it explains something about the millennial parent mindset. When we try to lay the groundwork for something to be easier for our kids than it was for us, we’re thinking about ourselves and our own experiences. It comes from a place of love but probably also some projection.
We also have access to much more information than previous generation of parents. When we had questions, the internet had answers. Never were we short on listicles about the best sleep sacks for your growing baby, or recipes for the best homemade purees, or message boards to troubleshoot our sleep training woes with a digital village of other parents just like us. We sought security in the approval of these internet experts and armchair sherpas, because they were there and easy to compare ourselves to. Children don’t come with an instruction manual, and even at the risk of being shamed by a stranger, that uncertainty felt too terrifying to face alone.
We are also the first adults to test run the culture of optimization that’s now a standard feature of American life. We were expected to keep pushing, keep striving, keep going to reach the nebulous trophies of achievement laid out for us as kids. But the message did not meet the moment when we grew up. The Great Recession conflated the fallout of predatory lending practices with our personal ability to control outcomes that were truly outside our control. I know I felt it. Douglas did, too.
When we did start to earn money, we knew what fragile footing we stood on. A sense of insecurity transcended work and compelled us to minimize drama in every area of our lives; not only to keep us moving forward in our careers, but again, to self-soothe our anxieties by controlling what we could.
We get to control so many of the parenting decisions we make. There are harder ways to do things, and easier ways to do things. I think today, it’s a common problem to get confused over which is which.
In March 2020, our daughters were four and one. Peak COVID arrived during our busiest season. Suddenly, we had no respite from all those cute little habits and routines and rituals we created for our kids. These were not critical things. They were things like peeling the skins off their apples and pressing them into little animal shapes with cookie cutters. One by one, they weren’t a big deal, but altogether, they were destroying our time and energy.
I was too burnt out. Too touched out. And with Hazel getting older, I started to question whether the benefit of accommodating her every whim was outweighing the harm it was doing to us. I knew it had nothing to do with my unconditional love for her. But the more I thought about it, the more I grew unsure if we were even doing her any favors. Were our little fruit kitties just preventing her from learning out how to eat an apple with the skin still on?
What’s our end goal in clearing life’s early brush—to pave a flat road for our kids?
We all know we can only take them so far, and I’d argue, it’s not as far as we suspect when they’re little. Moments for them to exercise their own judgment arrive without warning. By the time they’re seven or eight, they’re spending as much time without us at school and activities as they are at home. You want your child to be flexible. You want them to be able to solve problems. You want them to be able to succeed with the second option when their first choice isn’t available.
We also need to realize that our kids are native to a frictionless existence. They will only know a world with Apple Pay and money stored in phones. They know that things you need can just show up at your doorstep. The ease of it all presents a challenge that now exists across the socioeconomic spectrum. Many kids believe life is simple due to a combination of us making things simple and capitalism hoping they will buy into that lie.
If you’re looking for solutions, I am not here to give them in absolutes. We still give into the girls all the time, because we love them, and it’s what we do.
But we also never shy away from potential moments of friction when we believe there’s something valuable on the other side. They may not appreciate it now, but we trust that someday they will. Because the real goal isn’t to make life seamless for our kids but prepare them for when it isn’t.
We’d love to hear from you. What’s one thing you’ve either stopped doing for your kids or are thinking about letting go of? What’s something you like making easier for them?
You Up?
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Have you ever sold yourself on something you wanted to be true?
Built to Grow
This newsletter’s a bit late this week, because we’ve been in Los Angeles for the Altruist Build to Grow Summit. We both spoke on panels covering technology and growth strategies, but honestly, the company was the best part. To quote the great Carl Richards: “Human connection is a luxury good.”
We’re feeling rich in that right now. More, more, more!
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