Image by Please Don't sell My Artwork AS IS from Pixabay
Friends, did your parents play with you? I mean — did they really get in there and pick up the Barbies and the Tonka trucks and the paper dolls and the stuffed animals and play with you? (Are Tonka trucks still a thing? They def should be because they are sweet as hell.) For most of the kids I knew growing up, the answer was "no."
I want to pause here for a moment and say that this doesn't mean our parents weren't playful or that there wasn't play in our family life. My parents engaged in tons of pretend play with us. They played with puppets and played board games and card games and Wiffle ball and racquetball and also a great made-up game that we would play at the end of the gardening season where you use the hugest most overgrown zucchini you can find as a bat, and rotten tomatoes as the ball, and basically there are no winners or losers or score but it is gloriously, hilariously messy and fun.
And I'm not also trying to suggest that no one ever sat down on the floor with me to play, because they definitely did, especially when I was really little. But I also played by myself a lot, from what I remember, very happily. (I'm treading lightly here because my mom subscries to this newsletter, hi Mom! I love you!) I played with my Barbies and my sweet-ass Tonka trucks and my paper dolls and my She-Ra figurines by myself in my room, and I'm sure I talked a blue streak all the while because I'm not great at being quiet, but no one was managing my play, as far as I remember.
As a parent in 2021, I manage my kid's play a lot more than I'd like to — probably a lot more than I should. I also manage her schoolwork and her hygiene and her sleep and, you know, pretty much everything, a lot more than I'd like to or more than I should. But if we wanted our kids to play by themselves more, how would we do it?
My husband was telling me about how he listened to a podcast about how to teach your children to play by themselves instead of w you and I was like “wait but my parents never played with me, how did they do that?” and he was like “the podcast discussed that. Nobody knows.”
— Lucy Huber (@clhubes) May 24, 2021
Would it be a good thing if our kids did play by themselves? I feel like the answer is "maybe," because it depends on whether they are safe and loved and what their experience of "alone" looks and feels like. I have thought and written often about the apart-but-together sense I remember from my own childhood — that feeling of happily playing knowing that an adult is near enough to talk to, but doing their own thing. That specific dynamic is what I strive for as a parent, but it's also, as the tweet above suggests, mysteriously hard to achieve.
Big Feelings
My suspicion is that, if we want our kids to play by themselves (or to let us use the bathroom without an audience), we have to be able to withstand (or distance ourselves from) our kids' discomfort. We have to accept that they might not be happy all the time while we are, you know, not playing with them. And this is hard for us, partly because the culture of modern parenting suggests that happiness is the ultimate goal.
Parenting books (with notable exceptions like Carla Naumburg's wonderful "How to Stop Losing Your Shit With Your Kids") rarely make room for the fact that parents, too, have big feelings, including our discomfort with our children's unhappiness. (Side note: should there be a Daniel Tiger-like show for us parents, where a soothing animal who never wears pants sings us songs like "Check, check, check the school folder / Every single afternoon" or "It's OK / to prioritize your own self-care"?) We're supposed to just exist, quietly doing all the right things all the time so that we don't ruin our kids, but that feels really hard when they are sad or mad about things like shoelaces being too tight or having to go to bed.
The influence of Freudian ideas about the importance of early childhood are, in many ways, still with us, keeping us awake at night worrying if that one time we snapped at our kid because they were taking too long in the bathroom will make them grow up to be a sex pest, or whatever. That's why I was so relieved to read that "it just doesn’t appear that parenting—whether mom and dad are permissive or not, read to their kid or not, or whatever else—impacts development as much as we might like to think."
Writing for Quillette in 2015, Brian Boutwell made the compelling argument that the stuff we do as parents is just not all that important. I found this so shocking the first time I read it that I literally gasped, then read it again, then forwarded it to several people. It flew in the face of everything that I thought I knew or understood about what I was supposed to be doing as a mom. I'm still working on internalizing this idea, questioning it, turning it over in my mind, and thinking about what it could mean if it were true.
I don't know if I'm convinced by Boutwell's hypothesis, because I am neither a social scientist nor a geneticist. But I do like to dream a world where we could all consider kids' behavior with curiosity, without worrying whose "fault" it was that a kid's behavior is inconvenient for us, and just ... meet that kid's needs. It seems like that would be good.
Am I A 'Nice White Parent'?
As I mentioned in my last newsletter, my kid went back to in-person school this past week, and I was so nervous, but it went great. This kid absolutely loves school, you guys. But as relieved as I am that the transition back to in-person learning went smoothly, there's a nagging issue that's also bugging me, which has to do with the actual learning that my kid is doing.
During remote school, it's become clear that a lot of the work that's being assigned isn't really furthering my kid's learning at this point, and I don't know what to do. I'm going to pause here for some irony, because I literally wrote an article about the very question I'm wrestling with right now! I was thrilled to speak with someone from the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth for this piece, because as a kid, I participated in their Talent Search program, taking the PSAT while I was in elementary school (and then bragging about my score on the English portion on the school bus, which I regret, lol).
But I have hesitated to put the tips that I wrote about into practice because, well ... I don't want to be that mom. And my desire to not be that mom has only intensified during a pandemic that has pushed educators to the absolute limit, and strained relationships between families and schools to the breaking point. I'm insecure in my ability to have this conversation with my kid's school in a way that will feel productive and cooperative for all of us. I'm somehow afraid both of not standing up for my kid's needs, but also of being too pushy?
And underneath it all is a discomfort with the idea of using my privilege only to benefit my child, and not the students in my chlid's school with the highest need. If you have ever navigated this particular struggle, I'd love to hear from you. How did you weigh the value of tailoring your child's education to their needs vs. advocating for changes to the system itself? Is this a false binary? Is there really a "problem" we need to "solve" here if our kid is maybe, possibly, not being academically challenged to the absolute fullest extent possible? For me, these questions point to bigger questions about what the point of school really is, why we send our kids to school, and what we expect them to get out of that experience. You know, just little things like that!
Quote of the Week
"Adults are still persistently trying to engineer a more perfect society via mass public-education bureaucracies. This fact is what I find most interesting. After all, no matter what a parental generation does with its children, those children will still create the future new social world. What other result could there be?"
— Tony Waters, "Schooling, Childhood, and Bureaucracy" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012)
This Week's Links
Some things I've bookmarked this week:
How to Grant Your Child an Inner Life (Jess Row, The New Yorker)
Parents Are Still Screwed (Dan Sinker, The Atlantic)
American Moms are Being Gaslit (Jess Valenti, All In Her Head)
Closing Notes
This has been the second installment of weekly newsletters highlighting what's been on my mind about parenting, education, and possibly other topics. Please forgive me my typos and be warned, as always, that there may be swearing. If you found this newsletter from a link or a friend, why not subscribe? It's free! :) And I'd love your feedback on any and everything you read here. Be well and if this is a long weekend for you, I hope it is restful and enjoyable.