Andrew Bomback and "Long Days, Short Years"
On heliocentric parent-shaming, the one thing his dad never did, and why 5 is a magical age for kids (and their parents).
Andrew Bomback is a physician and writer whose “Long Days, Short Years: A Cultural History of Modern Parenting” is out now from MIT Press. The book offers an insightful overview of some of the many ways American parenting has evolved over the generations.
Tell me a little bit about your book, and what you hope people will take away from the experience of reading it.
The book began as my exploration of my own parenting and trying to figure out what I was doing well and what I was doing wrong. And that sort of leapfrogged into a broader examination of some of the trends that a lot of parents today are dealing with. By the time I got to finishing the first draft, I realized the more important things I’m saying relate to everyone, not just me, and my experiences are more examples rather than paradigms.
The way people are parenting now in the 21st century is so different and so unique from every other generation of parenting, and the changes that are occurring to parenting are occurring so much faster. The difference between our generation and our parents’ generation of parenting is so much more far apart than our parents and our grandparents were, or our grandparents and their parents. The transformation of what it means to be a parent is at hyper speed right now. There’s a lot of reasons for that, but I think it makes parenting right now seem like a very high-stakes field, a very anxiety-ridden field, and it doesn’t seem like there’s an off-ramp.
I think of my own mother, who at one time said to me, “You guys have it so much easier because you have all these options. You have indoor playgrounds, you can take the kids on rainy days, you have all these activities at your library that are so awesome.” But then she sort of caught herself and said, “Then again, you guys were fine entertaining yourself.”
We have all these options, and it actually just makes the job harder, not easier. If you’re not taking advantage of the options, you feel like you’re not doing the right thing. I felt like saying, “You weren’t as involved as my wife and I are involved!”
They were probably doing something else. They left us alone.
Right, and family size has shrunk. Parents are working harder with fewer kids. It’s like, we really should be doing a better job.
It’s like there’s no excuses.
Right, if they end up being bad at science, it’s my fault. All these other parents are probably going to be going to STEM Club. It’s keeping up with the Joneses.
And there’s new breeds of parent shaming that this generation deals with. Parent shaming is not new; the traditional model has been the grandparents or the in-laws shaming the parents. You’re going to let him get away with that? It’s been a vertical form — one generation to the next, and pretty confined to within the family. But now it’s within the generation. Your peers will parent-shame you. It’s a heliocentric version of parent shaming. There’s all these folks coming out from around the circle saying, This is what you should be doing. Or it can be, Why aren’t you using this product? Why aren’t you watching this show? Why are your kids staying up to this hour? It can be in all these different versions. And parents hear it all the time.
As most people my age, most of my socialization is with parents of other kids, but it feels like so much of our conversation is based on what products we're consuming that make parenting better. There’s definitely this idea that you can buy your way out of most problems — or at least buy your way onto the path. And that’s another interesting part of it — the problematization of things that are actually sort of typical of children. Crying is sort of a normal part of childhood. Interrupted sleep is sort of a normal part of childhood, or kids not wanting to go to sleep.
Or so many things. They don’t want to eat their broccoli. Maybe they’re just a person who doesn’t like broccoli!
There’s a saying — something like “Dare to be the adults that we want our kids to be” — but maybe you flip it and say, “Dare to remember the children we were.” We were picky eaters; we didn’t want to go to sleep on time. We only liked buttered noodles. There are things that we are now making into problems, when they may not be as weighty as we think.
I grew up with someone who, every time our family would go out to a Chinese restaurant, he would order wonton soup without the wontons. We would always make fun of him a little. He’s grown up to have a great life, we’ve gone out to dinner since, and he still is a pretty boring food eater. But it hasn’t in any way affected his quality of life. And the thing was, back in the 80s when this was happening, it was like, everybody knew it. No one ever forced him to eat nutritional supplements. So that approach that his parents had was great. I think nowadays we’d be like, Why is he not trying things?
What stuck with you the most from your research as you worked on this book? Is there anything you wish you had known when you started out as a parent?
The demographics of parents, which should have been very obvious, was sort of like an “aha” type thing: the fact that parents are having their kids older, and generally having their kids when they’re a little bit more financially secure and having smaller families. Those sort of demographic trends explain a lot of why parenting has become so weighty right now. Because if you’re older, you have all these childless years in which you can sort of compare this version of life when I was independent versus this version of life when I’m the opposite. And when families are smaller and you have more resources because you’re having your kids later, it kind of takes away all excuses and puts the pressure on you even greater. It plays into this idea that you really should be doing a better job. You have money, you have stability, you have wisdom, there’s no excuses.
And some statistics jump out at you, like the fact that a stay-at-home mom in the ’80s compared to a working mom now spends the same amount of time with her kids.
Right — oh my god, that one floored me when I first read it. It really stuck with me.
If you dissect your day, other than when you’re working, it’s pretty much all children.
Can you name something that you’ve chosen to do differently as a parent, compared to your family of origin?
When I think about things my father did in terms of, like, parental responsibilities, they were really few and far between. He would serve as an assistant coach for the Little League team and play catch with us, but I’ve never eaten any food that my father has prepared. I’ve never seen him prepare food. So that’s sort of a gender-specific thing. I think men are still doing less than women in general as parents, but I think men are doing more than they used to.
I think the more general thing that I am doing, and I see a lot of parents doing, is the hyperscheduling. It may have started in our generation, but it didn’t really blow up. I had activities, and I had extracurricular things I went to, like religious school, but it never felt like there was this calendar packed with activities where there was a high level of coordination needed to pull off the activities. That’s sort of unique to parents today. Without a very good calendar and organizational scheme, a lot of parents are going to feel that they’re not able to pull off what they’re trying to do.
I think one of the interesting things about the first few months of the pandemic, some parents realized how overscheduled their kids were, because these activities were gone. There was an initial reaction of, Maybe we are overscheduling our kids, but within a few weeks, parents were like, We need that schedule back. How much of it is just to give parents a break, and how much is to concertedly cultivate our kids toward this optimization? There’s definitely a great degree of relief when you drop a kid off at an activity and know that, for 45 minutes, someone else is in charge of them. I always say that 5 is a magic age, because that’s when you can drop them off at a birthday party.
Yes! When you get that “drop off” invitation to a birthday party, that’s such a moment as a parent.
But in terms of our generation, we are scheduling at such a higher level, and there’s so much coordination to pull it off. I think of that picture from the Cat in the Hat; he’s got like the fish and the cake and he’s on the ball — to some degree, that’s the state of the modern parent.
I remember growing up, two afternoons a week I went to Hebrew school and maybe one afternoon a week I had a violin lesson. But I also remember a lot of afternoons where I would just come home after school and watch 3 to 6 hours of cartoons. With my kids, we have a no weekday TV policy, but on the weekends, I watch them veg out in front of it, and I think, “It didn't stunt my intellectual growth. Am I being too restrictive?” Again, we have all this information and all this pressure in our faces where people are like, TV is bad, reading’s better, even better is if you’re playing a board game with your kids. There’s all these levels of what you can do, and the advice comes from so many different corners. It comes from everywhere.
That makes me think of another generational difference, which is that, even if you had Hebrew school and violin lessons or whatever, I bet you were walking there or taking the bus. And nowadays, we’re taking our kids everywhere.
The independence of kids — their ability to function on their own — it’s probably going to be the thing we look back on as our biggest mistake. I’ve been asked, what was the biggest lesson of COVID? And for me, it was that kids did better than adults. They understood the rules better, they adapted better, they complied better and they probably will emerge less scarred because they did it. They were so pliant. That sort of flexibility is something we forget about our kids. They haven't grown into their fixed ways. I was at a panel, in the audience, and there was a panel of people in my field and someone was asking, What do you do if you have a great job but you have to move? They were like, You move. Your kids will be fine. If it’s a great job for you, you move. They’ll be upset at you for a week, and then they’ll adapt.
Name something that’s hard or challenging for you at this particular time in your life or your kids’ lives.
The biggest challenge that I face right now is trying to strike this balance between getting your kids to do something because they’re cooperating, versus they’re just obeying. It’s not just semantics. You can pretty much get a kid to do anything if you say, If you don’t do this, you’re getting X. But is there a way to enlist them to do something because they know it’s the right thing to do and the productive thing to do? When you’re a harried parent who’s so overworked and stressed out and you need your kids to clear the table, it’s so much easier to say, If you don’t do this, there’s no dessert, or you don’t get to do a bedtime story.
You can always get the kid to do it, but what you really want them to do is to think to themselves, It’s our job to clean up because Mommy and Daddy made dinner. So getting that cooperation is a really big challenge.
It used to be that parents would just say, You’re expected to do this, and this is going to be the consequence if you don’t. It’s definitely effective, but it may not have created a new breed of parents equipped to do it differently. And it’s so much more resource-intensive this way. There’s a better way to do it, but it takes a lot more time and a lot more patience and a lot more resources, and even though we don’t have them, we still have to do it.
Even now that I’m done with this book, I still read parenting books and am interested in all these things that come out. In the past five years, I’ve probably read 50-60 parenting books. My parents, the two of them who have four kids, I would say probably in their entire life they maybe read a few parenting books over a 20-year period. And we’re just consuming ALL this advice — and that doesn’t even count advice from social media, blogs, newsletters; it’s everywhere. There are these sources that you have access to consume.
Sometimes it’s really reassuring — like my friend, he was like, I’m not the only one who hates Spirit Week. The idea that there are other people who are dealing with the same things. If we’re going to get through this pressure-filled period in our lives, you have to sort of pick and choose from what’s available. There’s no correct syllabus; there’s no, like, these are the 10 books you read and you’re done. You sort of alchemize it into something that applies to the kids you’re specifically raising.
Tell me something wonderful about your kids.
They are the brightest kids, meaning, like, energetic. At 6 in the morning. But that’s great for me because I’m a morning person, so they help start the day in a way that you just — you go from zero to 60 right away. And maybe this is because they’re all still young and they’re not these underslept teenagers, but they make sure your day starts at full energy. And that’s something I appreciate, because I’ve always been the morning person, and it’s nice to have company in the morning that’s at the same level of energy. The pleasures and joys of kids clearly outweigh all the anxieties and pressures.
Thanks to Andrew for talking to me about his excellent book! You can find “Long Days, Short Years” wherever books are sold, and you can find Andrew on Twitter at @asbomback.