Hard-Won Wisdom

Gen-X Parenting Is a Win-Win, Part 4

This is the last of four posts on how we can make family life happier and more appealing for everyone. I believe that Gen-X parenting is not only easier for parents but also better for kids. A win-win! Here are the previous posts in the series:

Fight the Fertility Crisis with One Weird Trick

Sometimes You Just Have to Be Thirsty

Hey Kids, Get on My Lawn!

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When our son, Noah, was a newborn, he cried A LOT. I was on my feet for hours on end bouncing him while he screamed, and as a result I lost so much weight that people thought I had cancer.

I blame a parenting book for all that needless suffering. The book told new parents that “If your baby is still crying after you’ve fed them, changed them, rocked them, and checked for stray pins, then you haven’t tried hard enough yet.” Luckily, my husband was unpersuaded by this book. He suggested that we keep track of how much Noah cried. We discovered that he was crying at least seven hours a day, no matter what we did. We told his pediatrician, who exclaimed, “Oh! That’s too much!” and sent us straight to the hospital. Long story short, Noah was diagnosed with reflux, began taking Prilosec, and within a few weeks his true nature, as a delightful, happy baby, blossomed.

Noah at five months old, after the miracle of Prilosec.

So my first piece of hard-won wisdom is, if your baby is crying around the clock, don’t blame yourself for not trying hard enough. Take him to the doctor!

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Parents need help and advice. But most of us don’t live in close communities of large extended families, in which new parents benefit from older folks’ experience and common sense. For lack of family and community support, we turn to parenting books and the internet. But how do we decide which advice will help our family, and which will make things worse? Many parenting experts and online advice-givers push harmful ideas—for example, the idea, which is sadly popular these days, that we parents must constantly strive to optimize our children.¹ We are better off listening to people who humbly admit, “Well, I messed up a lot and learned from experience. Here’s what worked for me. Maybe it will help you too.” This old-fashioned wisdom makes life easier for us parents; we learn to relinquish control, kick back, and free our kids to explore and grow.

Learning from Mistakes

As my kids could tell you, I have made many mistakes as a parent. What follows are some lessons I learned the hard way. As you read (and cringe on my behalf), just remember that, to paraphrase John Mulaney, these are the parenting mistakes I’m willing to tell you.²

Get off the grade portal. I struggle with perfectionism and have sadly inflicted this trait on my kids on occasion. To wit, the grade portal. When Noah was in ninth grade, I obsessively checked it every day and nagged him about homework. The few times he got a B on an assignment, I would freak out. After a few weeks of this, Noah confronted me. “Mom. School is my responsibility. I will take care of it. If there is something you need to see, I will let you know. Otherwise, I don’t want you to check the grade portal ever again.” Duly chastened, I quit the grade portal cold turkey, and an enormous source of stress just vanished from everyone’s lives. Poof!

Mom doesn’t touch Legos.³ Why oh why do Legos come in those thousand-piece sets? Young children see pictures of, say, the Millennium Falcon on the box and yearn to play with the finished product, but they aren’t yet capable of putting it together. When their beleaguered mom finally finishes constructing the whole dang thing, it breaks the moment they try to play with it. Tears abound, and not just from the kids. After too many frustrating Lego episodes, I dumped all the Legos into a huge bin and decreed that building with and picking up Legos is a job for kids, not moms. Earlier generations happily played with Legos in exactly this way, after all.

Let’s (not) pretend. When Noah and his sister, Casey, were little, I tried to join in their imaginative games, but it did not go well. Honestly, I’m not a playful person. (Even our dog knows this; she takes her toys to my husband instead.) I loved hanging out with the kids, reading to them, going for walks, and taking them places with me, but pretend play? It’s just not for me.

If you are naturally imaginative and genuinely enjoy playing pretend games with your kids, that’s wonderful. I envy you! But my heretical take is that the rest of us parents are actually the worst pretend-play partners for our kids. Parents are often tempted to hijack the game to make it “educational.” Or, because we understandably want to make our kids happy, we will go along with everything they say and let them boss us around as we carry out their commands. When children play with their parents, they rarely engage in the healthy give-and-take that is normal when children play together in the absence of adults. As Peter Gray notes, kids need to play with other kids in order to grow, because

you must pay attention to the other person’s needs, not just your own, or the other person will quit. . . . You must learn to negotiate in ways that respect the other person’s ideas, not just yours. You must learn how to assert your needs and desires while at the same time understanding and trying to meet the needs and desires of your playmate.

Old-Timey Ideas

Fortunately, we parents don’t have to learn everything the hard way. We can also adopt strategies that worked for our own parents. For example, I copied these ideas from my wonderful mom:

Kick the kids out of the house. Our mom instituted an hour of Outside Time for my brother and me every day, even though this was in pre–climate change Minnesota when the temperature hovered below zero (Fahrenheit! not Celsius!) all winter long. We loved playing in the snow, and today’s kids will too (if snow still exists anywhere, that is). Noah and Casey didn’t have to do a full hour, but I did require them to be outside at least twice as long as it had taken to wrestle them into their gear.

Casey building a snow fort.

Chores are the antidote to boredom. The parenting experts will tell us that when our kids are bored, we should seize the opportunity to entertain them with enriching, educational games. Balderdash! When Noah and Casey were little and complained of boredom, I took a page from my mom’s book and offered them a chore. Casey loved sweeping and cooking, Noah loved weeding and walking the dog, and I loved checking pesky tasks off my list.

In spite of the tough-love vibe of Gen-X parenting, we are also allowed to cut our kids some slack. We don’t have to force children to choke down foods that disgust them.⁴ If our eleven-year-old is staring in despair at the fifty (!) alegbra problems her teacher has assigned as that night’s homework, we can be like my mom and do half of the problems for her. Our kids will be eternally grateful. (Thank you, mom!)

Internet Ideas That Are Actually Good

Here’s some more Gen X–style advice, for the beginning and the end of childhood.

Kelton Wright advises us to “Never try to make a happy baby happier”:

When a baby is occupied . . . there is no need to occupy them further. If they’re staring at the ceiling fan happily kicking their legs . . . you do not need to hover over them with your giant face making various rarely used expressions. Because now, you are the ceiling fan, and you can’t leave.

And Katherine Johnson Martinko tells us to do less:

Ironically, the harder we strive to give kids what we think they need (more practices and games! more rehearsals! more tutoring! more fun!), the less we’re giving kids what they actually need—more unstructured play time, more solitude, more sleep, more in-person time with family and close friends, more leisurely afternoons to read a book or hang out on park swings.

Desire Paths

Desire paths—paths people create when the paved path doesn’t go the way they want—are a metaphor for raising kids. Much as we strive to construct routes through life for our kids according to what we believe is best, they will go their own way. Kids, like parents, are people after all.

Remember Jake? The guy from last week who, at age twelve, biked halfway across Massachusetts on the first day his mom allowed him to leave his own cul-de-sac? Jake remembered that day as one of the best of his life. He went on to become a competitive amateur cyclist, in bike races and as part of a triathlon team. His mom’s efforts to “protect” him from the dangers of bike-riding backfired, to say the least.

I don’t mean to be judgmental though, because I have been guilty of the same failing—of ignoring Noah’s true interests and trying to push him along a path he didn’t desire. Music has enriched my whole life, and I wanted music to be as important to Noah as it was to me. When he was six months old, we started attending weekly Music Together classes. I say “attending” and not “enjoying” advisedly, because not only was Noah totally uninterested in the music, but as soon as he was ambulatory, he would run away from the circle of singing toddlers to stare out the window at the school buses parked outside. Nevertheless I persisted and continued to inflict music classes on Noah until he was about three and told me that music hurt his ears. Turns out he is tone-deaf. D’ohh!

So here’s some final, hard-won wisdom: Don’t force music lessons (or art classes, or sports) on unwilling children. Instead, we can heed this advice⁵ :

Parent the child you have. . . . Stop trying to make your child quieter, louder, more outgoing, more interested in things their sibling likes, and appreciate the unique and individual small person you’ve been given.

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How about you, readers? Do you have any hard-won wisdom for us? Please share your thoughts in the comments!

The Tidbit

Let’s close our Gen-X parenting series with the anthem of Gen-Xers, and of free-range kids of all ages, “Free to Be You and Me.” Sing along, everyone!

1. Think of all those parenting articles, books, and videos urging us to “boost your baby’s brain power,” for example.

2. If you haven’t heard Mulaney’s story about the Rolex, I highly recommend clicking the link. The story is both very funny and (literally) sobering.

3. I know that the plural form of Lego is Lego, but we don’t have to be so precious. Colloquial English spoken here.

4. The Search Engine podcast amusingly describes how families used to handle picky eaters: “You put broccoli on the table and then sit there until everyone is crying.”

5. I couldn’t track down the link, but the quote is from Sue Lanigan, commenting on The Morning newsletter from the New York Times on 31 December 2022.