Parenting is My Refuge Right Now
We don't talk enough about the emotional support that love can offer us
Pillow fighting with a unicorn. Rollerblading in the park. Planting tulip bulbs to spruce up the front steps. Enjoying the first ice cream of the season. Being flabbergasted by the contortionist at the circus. Drawing daily comics. Earning their first karate stripes. Busting out some serious kitchen dance moves. Sharing surprising arthropod facts. Going away for a teen Shabbat retreat. Playing Hues and Cues and Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza. Joining the crew for the spring play. Holding band practice in our basement. Baking their first lasagne. Getting an iridescent mauve manicure. Teaming up with Mom to pull some April Fools’ pranks.
Both my kids are having a pretty great spring. When we sit around the dinner table on Friday nights and share our wins for the week, there’s always a long list.
I think the saying goes that you can only be as happy as your least happy child, but what I don’t hear acknowledged as often is that it works in the opposite direction too.
I’ve been feeling lots of feelings about the state of the world, as is my wont.
But almost every day I spend hours with my kids, and I feel very lucky saying my kids are basically pretty happy. Obviously, I want them to be happy. I’m happy with them and for them. And they make me happy.
This can be a controversial opinion! I hear there was a little viral moment this week where Chappell Roan said on a podcast "All of my friends who have kids are in hell. I don't know anyone who's happy and has children at this age... anyone who has light in their eyes.” “This age” = 27, which, okay.
Parents and non-parents had a lot of REACTIONS about that, which my friend
unpacked ably.The research is indeed pretty ambivalent about whether parenting, writ large, brings emotional benefits to us, the caregivers.
This paper describes it as “a mixed bag.” They find “parenting was associated with more positive emotions than nonparenting, but also more negative emotions.”
I totally buy that. I just happen to think that a fuller range of emotions, good and bad, makes for a richer life.
Similarly, this review finds “some studies indicate that parents are happier than nonparents, whereas others suggest the reverse.” But the benefits include, again, “greater positive emotions,” not to mention, “greater meaning in life.”
Speaking of a meaningful life, this spring is reminding me in all kinds of ways of the spring of 2020, when parents desperately tried to keep things normal and cheerful while being not-so-secretly terrified.
I have some weirdly bright memories of those days. We rented a little cabin upstate for a while, and camped out in its backyard. I ran a half-marathon by myself on country roads, where snow fell on forsythia as yellow as a school bus. We baked a lot. My mom taught art classes every week to the kids over Zoom. We all memorized Hamilton. We banged on our mailbox with a wooden spoon every night at seven, along with our neighbors up and down the block. After a dozen years of traveling all the time for work, I never had to go on any trips, ever.
Half a decade ago, my kids were three and eight; they had much less sense of what was going on. I was also, myself, younger, and we had all of us, us Americans, seen less shit than we have now.
But even though I have a teenager now who keeps up with the news and comes along to protests, both my kids are still showing me how to live in the moment, and enjoy it.
It reflexively bothers me when people say that kids give them hope for the future, because that’s a major burden to place at their feet. It bothers me even more when people go the opposite way and pathologize children and youth, with moral panics and concern trolling. (Especially when they make a lot of money doing this, and write bestselling books about it).
As I put it when I moderated a panel last week on the “youth mental health crisis,” we should be careful to note that there is not anything inherently wrong with the kids. There are many things very wrong with the world, and the kids are especially sensitive to that. They are the canaries in our coal mine. We need to be doing more to protect them, and also to build on and amplify their many strengths.
And joining them in unfettered joy, celebrating their wins, dancing when they dance, seems like one great way to do that.
Some good links
Future Chicken is a kids climate show and “digital universe” that I love and support. They were featured recently in Canada’s Globe and Mail: “Future Chicken wants to hatch hope for your ecoanxious kids” .
Here’s a clip from Future Chicken interviewing the fabulous “Plant Kween”:
Climate Mental Health Network, where I’m an advisor, has released a Climate Emotions Toolkit—an evidence-based resource for teachers. Download here!
I published an article about threats to Head Start — and the orgs and states that are standing up to protect childcare access— in The Hechinger Report/The 19th News.
Could not agree more, Anya. Parenting is such a source of meaning and FUN! It's more important now than ever.
thanks for sharing -- and feel the same about my kids in many ways. They give me space to be silly, ridiculous, and laugh about anything and everything. Levi, my 7 year old, turns our living room into a pretty cool disco party on a regular basis. They really don't care if an editor cancelled a story or rejected a pitch or didn't even respond to me. Overall, hard moments are easier because of them.