Family Unfriendly

Highlights

Parents also worry that if they don’t hover over their children at all moments, something horrible will happen—or they’ll be judged as neglectful parents. Somehow Mom and Dad have become full-time chauffeurs, Secret Service agents, and playmates—while both parents work full-time jobs. (Preface)

One data point made my jaw drop: While today’s dads do much more parenting than our dads did, and today’s moms are employed much more than their moms were, today’s moms nevertheless spend more time taking care of children than their mothers did. Someone has convinced us that parenting should involve much more effort than any generation before us put in. This is madness. I wrote this book in order to shout as loud as I can: the tiger moms and helicopter parents are doing it wrong. And if you are the average parent and are nagged by feelings of inadequacy, then the main thing you’re doing wrong is worrying too much. (Preface)

If we’ve come to think there might be a trained kidnapper around every corner and that we really cannot trust our neighbors, we have unwittingly adopted an uncharitable view of our fellow man. If we believe we will have failed as a parent if our kid misses the honor roll or gets cut from varsity, then we have an impoverished view of our own children. And if we hold a zero-sum view of thriving in life—that one man’s gain is another’s loss—then it becomes harder to love our neighbor and welcome others. (Preface)

Our culture teaches parents that you need to hone your daughters and sons into high achievers at a young age, and that you have to give them every advantage possible: tutors, lessons, equipment, private training. It takes up all of your money and your time. Overly ambitious parenting, often unchosen or unconsciously chosen, is one big reason that parenting seems so hard and so costly in modern America. If you think that raising kids requires you to hire personal trainers and drive every weekend to lacrosse tournaments three counties away, or that you need to pull every possible lever in order to get your daughter into Cornell—lest you risk failing as a parent—you will believe you cannot possibly have more than one or two kids. (p. 4)

Parents, especially college-educated and ambitious parents, would find parenting less daunting if they realized two things: First: What really matters is not that your child get into an Ivy, dominate as a varsity pitcher, or go to nationals in Irish dance. Those are good things, yes, and should be celebrated when they happen. But they are icing on the cake. What matters far more is that you give your kids a happy childhood and build an environment for them that cultivates the virtues that will make them happy and good adults with meaningful lives. And there are often trade-offs between the pursuit of achievement and the pursuit of happiness. (p. 6)

Second: You have less of an impact on your children’s outcomes than you think. To a large extent, each child is his or her own person. Nature, chance, environment, and social circle will determine the adult he or she becomes more than parental nurture will. That may sound a bit depressing at first, but upon reflection it becomes liberating. Parenting doesn’t have to be as intensive as your yoga classmates make it out to be, and parents don’t need to have everything as put-together as your typical Instagram momfluencer. (p. 6)

It’s the message of high stakes at a young age—or “high-quality parenting,” as some scholars would put it. “Excessive pressures to achieve and isolation from parents” were two factors identified by Columbia researcher Suniya Luthar. A huge part of that pressure is simply getting into a good college. In fact, the pressure that harms so many affluent kids may not come primarily from the parents, but from the schools they send their kids to. If your daughter’s high school—public or private—sold itself to you as her best path to the Ivy League, it might also be her most likely path to anxiety and depression. (p. 20)

Let me explain what I mean. “Have lower ambitions for your kids” is a motto I came up with many years ago for reminding parents that D-I scholarships, MVP trophies, and first-chair clarinet may be good things, but for many parents and kids, striving for them will not maximize happiness. The motto is also a joke. Our ambitions for our kids ought to be astronomical, if we’re talking about the things that truly matter. As a Catholic, my ambition for my children is the highest: that they share in the glory of God for eternity in heaven. In more secular terms, my ambition for them is to develop the virtues that lead to a life of meaning, lasting satisfaction, and true happiness. It doesn’t get much higher than that. (p. 25)

Successful kids aren’t good. Kids are good. (p. 27)

When people learn how many kids we have, I once told a New York Times writer for an article on big families, some react as if they “found out we went around in a horse and buggy and drew all our water from the well.” 

The author of the article, Laura Vanderkam, who has five kids herself, interviewed a handful of big families for the story and included an insight that is certainly more valuable and relevant than any of my “systems.”

The most important observation was this: Big families “often learn a liberating secret: Many ‘requirements’ of modern parenting aren’t requirements at all.” (p. 30)

A leading cause of America’s parenting headache is the belief that we need to do so much. There’s a norm of maximum-effort parenting, and in some cases, helicopter parenting—with constant hovering and surveillance of our children—is considered mandatory.

But looking at big families is revealing, and Vanderkam in the Times had some eye-opening research: “while mothers of three children experienced more stress than mothers of one or two, mothers of four or more experienced less; a Norwegian study found that living in a large family was associated with lower levels of stress and anxiety in children, too.” Put another way, if you ask a mom or dad of six, seven, or eight kids, “How do you do it?” the truthful answer is, “To be honest, I often just don’t.” (p. 30)

The “secret” here is simple: You don’t have to do all the parenting things you think you need to. Yet our culture increasingly demands intensive parenting, which makes the whole family thing a bigger headache. (p. 30)

Most American parents could benefit (themselves and their kids) from ignoring their children a bit more and trying a bit less hard. (p. 34)

Yes, raising children is the most important job that parents have. But no, that doesn’t mean that the best way to do it is through constant attention and constant presence. Parents’ sanity matters, and our sanity is served by time away from our kids. (p. 35)