Whatever teachers are doing with kids at school, there is one thing that people have come to appreciate: they keep the little shits out of your hair so you can go about doing whatever it is you feel you want to do with your life without having to hear their whining about being hungry. Again. After all, why shouldn’t you get to do whatever you feel like doing, which is your right because you are the center of the universe with no responsibility for anyone.
Here is where, ordinarily, I would conclude with a grand thought about America: I might venture that cross-society parental stress under pandemic could forge a new parental voting bloc. That perhaps now universal child care will be regarded as a necessity, not some kind of indulgence. But the kids are asking for lunch, and I have to break it to them that all the hot dogs are gone.
That’s Farhad Manjoo, spokesmodel for the disaffected digital native, who concedes his privilege while admitting it makes him feel like a failure to be a failure.
Attempting to work full time while rooming with, feeding and educating one or more children during the pandemic is not going well — not for me, and not for most people I know. Though we are embarrassingly indulgent of self-care, neither of us feels as if we are doing anything other than failing at everything, every day.
Kids. They want to eat. Every single day. So demanding. So hard. Apparently, Manjoo wasn’t aware of this when the stork dropped them off. They aren’t just fashion accessories when they do adorable things you can post on Instragram to show all your friends how cute your kids are, and by extension, what a wonderful parent you must be to have such happy children. They’re yours when they’re up all night crying, vomiting, having diarrhea in their expensive nappies and, yes, demanding yet again to be fed.
It’s like the parent who buys a two-seat roadster because, you know, it’s really cool and aren’t they entitled to a really cool car? But then there’s no place to put the car seat so society owes them an SUV as well. Why society? MSNBC’s Melissa Harris Perry explains.
The logistics of life used to be the rules within which we lived. If you had kids, you had to arrange your world to accommodate them. You might want that job, but you had kids. The immediate reaction to this banal reality is that the burden fell on women, which of course was sexist, so it was unfair. And indeed, if that’s the route one chose to take, that would be unfair.
So take a different route, Be a stay-at-home dad, Mr. Mom, if you will. Hire a nanny if you can. Live with the grandparents, or at least close enough to drop them off daily. Kidpool with the neighbors even. But figure it out, given the circumstances. When you’re crafting your life, do so in a way that addresses all your needs, not just the things you like and desire, like a fun job that fulfills your aspirations but precludes your kids from having a parent and requires you to lock them in a closet under the stairs for lack of parental involvement.
There are parents who can’t make this happen. Single parents whose circumstances are not of their making are screwed here. They didn’t ask for a spouse to leave or die. There are people who didn’t make bad choices and have no good options available to them, and these are the people for whom a safety net must be provided. But the Manjoos?
But across demographics and income levels, the pandemic has undone many of the supports parents usually rely on to manage raising children while working. If even fancy me is faring so poorly, I can’t imagine how others — the single parents, the front-line-worker parents, the newly unemployed parents — are coping.
And what about their neighbors, the Karens?
Actually, I don’t have to imagine it. Parental burnout under lockdown has been a hot topic these last few weeks. “The parents are not all right,” writes Chloe I. Cooney in the online magazine Gen. The New York Times’s parenting section abounds with warnings of and solutions to burnout. And when I asked my Twitter followers how they’re faring as working parents, I was bombarded with dozens of tales of woe.
Of course having children is hard. It’s always been hard, because they’re almost like real little people. And being homebound, particularly with no end for the foreseeable future, means that the suck will continue to hamper parents’ doing what they want to do and the little bastards just won’t go away after the cuteness has run dry.
The question remains whether this is society’s problem to fix or yours. Will, as Manjoo ponders and Perry pontificates, this produce a parental demand for universal child care? Will parents hand over the kids to public school teachers to parcel out their religion, their empathy, their language and behaviors, so parents can go about making the world better without brats hanging on to their aprons?
Will the Secretary of Education let you see your li’l darlings on Zoom once a week after they’re taken to the education center to be reared in the government approved fashion?
People have been having children for a very long time, which explains why you exist. And they are a mix of love and wonderment and, yes, hassle and annoyance. They require care and feeding, love and a lot of time. But they’re your children. You made them. You kvell over their successes and cry over their difficulties, and they are a part of you.
You know what children need? Parents. Not parents with a really cool two-seat roadster (not that it hurts), but parents whose world includes whatever is necessary to be a parent of their children. It’s going to make your self-indulgence harder, but get over it. They’re yours.
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If the item in the NYT were signed J. Swift, I would perhaps understand. But that hand-written declaration of war is as much a piece of gold as could have appeared on the kitchen counter or under the locked master bedroom door in my lifetime. “U ar supid!!” is the prize in my own collection, from our oldest at 3, and although I snuck away many mornings to my office under cover of darkness (my own self-care?) while leaving the wreckage and wrestling to my far better half, it is still (What? Disappointing? Disgusting? Loathsome?) that a parent could or would ever think their little brats should be someone else’s responsibility. Every single pain has its joy. And if you’re lucky, they remain a painful joy long past adulthood. But then again, we all have a self-indulgent right to be the victim of someone.
I keep some of the old handwritten cards and notes my kids left me over the years. They are treasure.
Ah, but you came to the neucene. So you have no damages.
Maybe that old-fashioned model of “one parent works, the other stays home and takes care of the kids and the household” wasn’t such a bad idea…
The obvious retort is that it takes two working parents to “survive” in this overly expensive world. Whether that’s true or there’s a causal connection between two working parents and the cost of survival is a question that’s subsumed in the gender war. If the mother earns more than the father, so let the father stay home. If he doesn’t want to because it’s unmanly, then the mother chose her spouse poorly. Or they could be constrained to do without a new car and a matched pair of iPhones. Sacrifices happen.
SHG,
Interesting title to your post: “Children raising children at home.” For reasons you appreciate, that
peakedpiqued my interest.So, I carefully read the NYT piece you linked to at the beginning. I zoomed in on the author after reading the article. A person who looks very male wrote the piece. Farhad Manjoo.
Farhad Manjoo’s personal pronoun is “they.” “Manjoo and the Times say so proudly. See the short bio at the end of the piece and then click on the link; that is, “Farhad Manjoo became an opinion columnist for The Times in 2018. Before that, they wrote the State of the Art column” (link under “they” omitted per rules).
Perhaps Manjoo’s preferred pronoun doesn’t matter much. But, then again, the title to your post kept ringing in my mind.
All the best.
RGK
For reasons you appreciate, I was aware of that detail.
Seems like “their” de facto preferred pronoun is ‘me.’
Hell, I can’t even spell–let alone remember what you have written before.
Neither can I most of the time.
Having a baby is a miracle (and this from a non-religious person). Changing their nappies is an honor (and character building for the parent.). And waking in the middle of the night to comfort them builds self-discipline (and the ability to catch cat naps later).
After that the rewards (and parental growth) just get better.
It’s not just a job. It’s a doody.
Run away! Run away!
I’ve found this time to be a blessing. It can be difficult juggling the responsibilities of work/childcare when we are all in the house 24/7, but it is also a great opportunity. My wife, son, and I are playing more board games. Building Lego creations. Taking long walks in the neighborhood.
It requires sacrifice. Maybe we don’t get to spend time on hobbies or activities that we would personally find gratifying*, but isn’t that part of having children? That’s what we signed up for. We’re putting time and energy into our family because that’s our responsibility as a parent. And it is the primary, overriding responsibility in our lives.
I find these think pieces full of the “woe-is-me” parent problems rather alien. They seem to have a very different notion of what it means to be a parent than we do. Perhaps we are old fashioned?
* – Not really, what could be more gratifying than spending time with our son?
There was a time when such whining would have been met with a swift smack, “you’re a parent now, grow the fuck up.” Instead, complain about how hard it is to have children and you get a million likes. Are we old-fashioned?
There’s a reason things have been around long enough to become old fashioned….they worked.
Brave New World
Only practical solution. Would have potentially severe side effects, at first.
The roughest thing since the school closures has been getting my daughter the services she would normally get while in school. Other than that, the days are pretty much the same as usual. I’m just working more on different stuff with my kids than I normally would have.
I teach my daughter with the leftover summer packets we have and get coaching support from her teachers on how to make things work. My son’s become a wickedly good chess player and is picking up on rudimentary sleight of hand (I caught him pulling a Mexican Turnover in a game with peers at daycare today).
Parenting is hard. It’s also the greatest job in the world.
Hard or easy, you do it because there’s no other option. Especially when they’re as adorable as yours.
Pops,
Thanks for all your efforts. I know children can be the cause of immense suffering at times, but they seem to be worth it overall. Education will probably lag in the short-term, but the little ones seem to be adjusting like everyone else. My niece is adorable talking about seeing her classmates via videoconferencing, but it is a bit sad thinking of what’s being lost. Physical interaction can’t be replaced. We’ll make the best of it, I hope.
That being said, I’ll never understand your attraction to impractical motor vehicles.
With Love,
PK
Annoyance, sure. But suffering? Only when children are in pain, when we wish we could take their pain away and suffer in their place.
As for my attraction to certain cars, I hope someday you’ll understand.