NEW YORKERS: come to our party with RealClear tomorrow (10/1) & our talk at the Catholic Worker about Geno Baroni, DEI, & Ethnopolitics in Newark on Friday (10/2)
Recently I spent an hour stranded in a bus shelter as a large storm passed through my city. I had forgotten my umbrella and was travelling back from a work event, so there was nothing to do but wait. Three of my colleagues were with me, so after a few minutes of mindlessly tapping on our phones, we started chatting. All of them were around ten years older than me and had kids, and as I am a new parent, the conversation naturally drifted onto kids and childrearing. The conversation was a fascinating microcosm of the kinds of discussions I’ve been hearing lately, showing a marked divide between elder millennial approaches to parenting. (For the sake of their privacy, I’ve changed their names to something more thematically appropriate: Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar).
We quickly got onto the topic of toddlers using phones and tablets, and how bad it is for kids.
“You are so lucky,” Eliphaz says. “There’s finally research that tells us how bad it is. We didn’t have that when we were raising our kids.”
I’m not sure how to respond. Why would you need a scientific study to tell you giving your two-year-old a smartphone is a bad idea?
Bildad seems to be coming from a similar perspective. “Trusting the science isn’t always best, though. It keeps changing all the time.” She exhales a heavy, performative sigh. “We were told to sleep-train our kids by letting them cry it out, but now all the studies say that it spikes their cortisol and causes attachment issues. So we’ve basically damaged them both.”
Never mind, Bildad is a doomer. Not a helpful attitude when it comes to kids.
“It’s just a matter of how you approach the science,” Zophar chimes in. “You need to be looking at meta-analyses of the studies.” The other two nod while Zophar shifts her tote bag to the other arm. “I got both our kids a psychologist when they started school. It felt like the responsible thing to do.”
And there you have it. The orthodox elder millennial approach to parenting. An overreliance on expert opinion which hobbles them from doing the very thing every single generation of human beings has done before them — raise children.
“It’s crazy how people used to just trust their family members or religious leaders about how to raise kids,” I say, tongue firmly in cheek.
“Thank god we have science,” Eliphaz says with no trace of irony. “I would hate to have raised kids back in the day. Imagine some priest telling you want to do.”
“I do wonder though,” I say slowly, keeping my voice even, “if there’s a point at which you have to just trust your own gut? Decide what seems right to you and your partner. Science is great, but no study is actually about your kid. It’s all extrapolations from things observed in other people’s kids.”
Zophar scoffs and crosses her arm. “No I don’t trust my gut instinct, actually. That’s what my parents did and do you have any idea how much therapy I needed because of them?”
“I don’t want to pass down generational wounds,” Bildad concurs.
I shrug. I have some sympathy for them, I really do. But it’s fascinating to me how similar they sound to the people from ‘back in the day’. The reliance on a class of clerics they trust implicitly. The belief in generational curses. The desire to assign responsibility to anyone but themselves.
Eliphaz tries to break the tension. “It’s crazy you’re even allowed to have a kid without passing some kind of test. Like, we make people get a license before they drive a car but anyone is allowed to have a kid? I’m basically still a kid!”
Eliphaz is a forty-two-year-old middle manager who likes to play Elden Ring once his kids have gone to bed. He’s a poster boy of the worst aspect of elder millennial men — the never-ending Peter Pan syndrome. This kind of thing drives me up the wall. The feigned helplessness of calling the tasks necessary to preserve a very comfortable existence ‘adulting’; being the victim of your life even as you cross into middle age; viewing your kids as a burden to overcome in your already super difficult life. And then the inevitable descent toward the nadir of victimhood — discovering your deep-seated childhood trauma.
“I get wanting to do better than your parents,” I say. “But I don’t think anybody is a perfect parent. Will doing what some study says make you better than them?”
Zophar frowns. “So you’re saying we should ignore research and just guess?”
I hold my tongue. My nature is to keep arguing until I’ve said something I regret, but I’m really trying not to do that anymore. I do understand the utility of science to the human race. I get that we learn from the past and develop our knowledge. But I also don’t think research is some hermetically sealed truth machine. Studies can be biased and funding dictates what gets researched. The replication crisis shows how junk much of the ‘science’ really is. And even if the studies were all exemplary, no scientist will ever know your kid like you do. Aside from me and my wife, nobody else is my son’s parent.
What’s struck me most about this conversation with my elder millennial colleagues is how passive they render themselves in the course of their own lives. Once you believe that life is coming at you instead of coming from you, you’ve already lost half the battle. Thanks to our complex and wondrous minds, we have the incredible ability to make a heaven of hell and a hell of heaven. How you view the world really does determine what kind of world you live in.
Etymologically, the word ‘world’ is a funny one. It gets used interchangeably with ‘earth’ or ‘universe’, but its origin in Old English was ‘wer-ald’, with ‘wer’ meaning ‘man’ and ‘ald’ meaning ‘age’. It was a personal term. Your ‘wer-ald’ was the lengthy and breadth of your life, much more temporal than spatial. So the ancients knew what we tend to forget, that each of us does have a large say in determining the nature of our existence. We can, as my colleagues demonstrate, create a world for ourselves in which everything is too hard, kids require experts, and scientific studies are our only life raft on the stormy seas of parenting. Or we can create a world in which I am perfectly capable of raising kids, of raising my son, and it’s a world in which my son will raise me in the process. I can choose to believe that I will become a good father through the process of fathering. I can seek advice and expertise, of course, but not out of a fear of ‘screwing him up’ or out of a desire to abdicate my responsibility. Instead, I can raise him out of a desire to love him. And I can also be loved by those who are giving me advice on how to do so.
Raising a child can be communal, not in the sense of abdicating responsibility to the faceless commune, but in the sense of creating thicker and deeper cords of relationship with those around you. Childrearing is incredibly vulnerable, and so it offers one of the best opportunities for building true community. Recently, a friend who is a pastor (and also an elder millennial) expressed that I may be fathering my son out of fear instead of love. He noticed that my approach with teaching my son right from wrong had an overlay of anxiety, as if I was scared my son would grow up to be a bad kid if I didn’t teach him this lesson as soon as possible. It was not an easy thing to hear, but nor was it an easy thing for him to say. But he said it in a caring way, and I took it to heart. Our friendship has never been stronger or deeper.
The instinct to defer your personal discernment, and forego relationships with people who actually know you, in favor of following the advice of some random scientific study published somewhere is a dangerous habit. Parents are meant to parent their own kids, that is their responsibility. They are not called to be generalists but specialists, particularly focused on the wellbeing of their own child. And, as I am still learning, they are called to parent from a place of active love and not out of fear or passivity.
The main source of parenting advice I'm interested is that of parents who already successfully raised good kids.
I'm an elder millennial and this is not how I parent. And I don't know anyone who parents like this. I live in Salt Lake City, which has a fair number of educated, progressive, neurotic millennials, but even they do not parent their kids the way you describe. Sure, they all read Emily Oster, but few of them seem to rely solely on her (or any other "expert"). And a few of them allow their or their kids' therapist to intrude too much into the inner workings of the family. But those folks also follow their own instincts if Emily or the therapist seems off base.
How my husband and I do it: We reflect on what seemed to work on us when we were children and we apply that knowledge to raising our own kids. Of course, we make a few tweaks (no piano teacher that smacks them when they make a mistake). I follow my gut We let teachers, fellow parents, and grandparents do what they will when our kids are left in their care. I don't hate my parents, so replicating their flawed approach is good enough for me. My husband and I love our kids. We hang out with them. We listen. It's not hard.