—

My son has almost drowned twice, and both times, it was my fault. He had been frolicking in the shallow end for 45 minutes in both cases. Then I got distracted for a minute, and when I glanced back, he was gone. There were multiple people in the pool with him each time, some within a couple of feet, a few of them relatives — and nobody saw that he had drifted back to where the water deepened and had sunk below the surface. The only reason I noticed was because when I looked for him, he wasn’t there.

These two experiences are among the most traumatic of my life, and they were pretty scary for him, too. Thankfully, he was fine, at least physically. But the incidents proved to me that drowning kids don’t call for help; they don’t kick or splash. They just sink and quietly disappear. They also revealed to me that swim lessons — which my son had taken after the first near-drowning — weren’t failsafe, and having adults around simply isn’t enough. I want to dig into the data on these two realizations in more detail today, because to me, at least, they were surprising. And they are crucially important, because more American kids die from drowning than from car accidents; drowning is the leading cause of death in kids ages 1 to 4.

Subscribe now

Swim Lessons Are Not a Panacea

I have absolutely nothing against swim lessons — I think they’re crucial, and both my kids have taken them. But swim lessons can be dangerous if they cause caregivers to become overconfident about their kids’ abilities and watch them less closely.

In a 2014 study, researchers repeatedly surveyed parents over the course of eight months as their preschoolers took swim lessons. As the kids acquired more lessons, parents began to believe that their kids knew how to keep themselves safe in potentially dangerous water situations — that they were, for instance, good judges of their own swimming ability and knew to stay away from pools when unsupervised, which aren’t things that swim lessons generally teach.

The parents also began to assume that their kids needed less careful watching around water, which isn’t always true, either. In another study, researchers asked parents to judge how well their kids had mastered various swim skills in their lessons and found that parents overestimated one in every five skills. (This overestimation of swimming competence tends to be especially bad among fathers.)

In a recent technical report on drowning prevention, the American Academy of Pediatrics warned about this phenomenon, noting that “parental perceptions regarding necessary levels of supervision change as children progress through swim training, potentially to the detriment of the child’s safety."

Why aren’t kids who take swim lessons safe? Because, in part, young kids typically don’t learn survival skills in swim classes. “Mostly, what these lessons do is prepare the child for swimming by making them comfortable in the water — getting their face wet, going under the water — and teaching them some rudimentary skills,” said Barbara Morrongiello, a professor at the University of Guelph in Canada who studies parent safety practices and drowning prevention, when I spoke to her a story I wrote for Slate.

Share

There’s nothing wrong with this; if classes foster a love for water play and swimming, that’s great. What’s bad are parents’ assumptions that the classes do more. “Swimming programs for youngsters under four shouldn’t really be considered a drowning prevention strategy,” Morrongiello explained.

That’s because the ability to survive a near-drowning typically requires more than just the types of water skills that keep children afloat in normal swim situations. Kids might drown because they’re really tired, have gotten a muscle cramp, or have been injured during water play — and they need to learn what to do in these specific situations to stay safe. Children are also especially at risk after falling into water fully clothed, because clothes make swimming more difficult. Cold water has the same effect. Last summer, my nine-year-old daughter, whom I’d considered to be a strong swimmer, had to be rescued by a lifeguard during a swim test at camp in a very cold lake.

So even if your kid has had ample swim lessons, don’t assume that you can leave them be in the water — or half watch while you’re chatting with friends. Which brings me to my next point.

Subscribe now

When kids drown, adults are usually nearby — just not fully paying attention

A few days ago, my wonderful former journalism student Anna Gibbs wrote a powerful piece for Slate highlighting the data showing that most child drownings occur when adults are close by. She writes:

More often than not, children drown in the presence of their guardians, not their absence. A study back in 2004 that analyzed the drowning deaths of 496 children under 14 years old showed that, alarmingly, only 10 percent of the victims were completely unsupervised when they drowned — in other words, 90 percent of the children who died had an adult nearby who did not see the drowning occur. Drowning happens right under the noses of parents who, often, are aware that their child needs to be monitored in the pool, and who are trying their best to do so.

That’s because it doesn’t take much of a distraction to render supervision ineffective. “It’s the knock on the door,” says Amy Peden, a drowning prevention researcher at the University of New South Wales in Australia. “It’s the call on the phone.”

Gibbs talks about the many and various ways adults get distracted: They use their phones, they do household chores, they socialize with other adults. She also cited data suggesting that roughly 40 percent of drownings happen in the presence of other children, perhaps because there’s a notion of safety in numbers. Sometimes, though, kids swimming with other kids can put everyone more at risk. A couple of years ago, in yet another near-drowning episode — this one less scary because I saw it as it was happening and acted fast — I had to jump into the pool to rescue my daughter and her cousin while they were playing in a hotel pool together. Her cousin had accidentally floated into deep water and grabbed my daughter for support, which pulled them both down. And yes, we were at a hotel pool surrounded by adults — but no one but me noticed them as they disappeared under the surface.

Give a gift subscription

When Gibbs asked Sarah Denny, the pediatrician at Nationwide Children’s Hospital who headed the AAP’s technical report, when parents could safely ease up on supervision — would a 13-year-old who’s a strong swimmer be okay on their own? — Denny firmly responded: “If someone is in the pool, they need to be supervised at all times.”

Here’s Gibbs again:

As kids become more competent swimmers, drowning does become less likely, Peden says. But getting older brings other factors into play, such as substance use, swimming in natural (and riskier) bodies of water, and overconfidence. Denny recalls once when her son hopped in the pool at the beginning of a summer and swam across it, a lap he had done in past years. Halfway across, unaccustomed to the swim, he started to sink; she jumped in with her clothes on. After toddlers, adolescent boys are the most at risk of drowning. In fact, at all ages, boys are more likely to die by drowning than girls, usually about twice as often. But once they become teenagers, that jumps to almost 10 times as often.

I realize that this may all sound very scary. And you know I don’t like causing parents anxiety. Going by the numbers, most of your children will be just fine as they swim this summer, but I do think it’s important to be aware of the data and to understand what close supervision really means and why it’s essential. If this information helps to save one child this summer — or prevents one of you from having a terrifying close call — it will, to me, have been well worth it.

What are your thoughts or experiences? Share in the comments!

Share

Leave a comment

One thing I deeply care about, as I’m sure you know, is trying to help parents and kids navigate uncertainty. And as a newly separated mom in my late 40s, I have recently become even more acquainted with uncertainty. So I immediately bought and read Elizabeth’s book and knew its insights would be perfect to explore here.

Subscribe now

How to Fall in Love with Questions follows Elizabeth’s journey of discovery as she grapples with tough questions that have kept her up at night about relationships, identity, and purpose. It’s a beautiful read, and I found that it resonated deeply with with the work I’ve been doing lately around self-exploration and self-acceptance.

Today, I’m running a Q&A with Elizabeth (who also has a wonderful Substack, Time Travel for Beginners) that digs into some of the concepts she explores in her book relevant to parenting and adulting. We talked about helping kids navigate uncertainty and low self-esteem, how safety differs from protection, how to spot sketchy parenting advice, and more. Her book covers tons more ground, though, so I highly recommend you read the whole thing!

In my book Hello, Cruel World!, I talk about the value of modeling comfort with uncertainty in front of our kids, because doing so helps kids understand that we don’t always have to have answers or opinions — that there is value in taking time to reflect, think, and even do research before coming to a conclusion. Given all you’ve done to learn to embrace uncertainty, what are your key recommendations for parents who want to do the same?

So many things! Let me try to boil it down into the biggest one: In the most uncertain moments, choose curiosity over fear, and connection over information consumption.

Let me tell you a quick story that illustrates this. When my son turned four-months-old, he went from being an okay sleeper to a horrible sleeper. He was up every 90-minutes at night and his naps were a disaster. I spiraled down the sleep influencer content rabbit hole, consuming everything I could find on infant sleep. I spent my days and nights tracking his sleeping and eating patterns with the rigor of a scientist racing to discover a life-saving vaccine.

Nothing. Worked.

The more information I consumed, the more I bought into the illusion that there was one right answer if I could just find it, and that this answer offered not only the answer to my sleep problems but…all of them. I was falling into a common trap: Research suggests that we can get addicted to information – and answers – the way we get addicted to junk food. We crave more and more, while never satisfying the deeper desires underneath.

What are those deeper desires? Often, it’s to feel connected, to feel less alone in the uncertainty we face, in the big questions we hold. And this makes sense: Community evolved to help us feel safer in times of uncertainty. Modern neuroscience research shows that when we’re embedded in a supportive community, our cortisol levels drop.

As I continued my feverish experimentation, I discovered that even on days when I’d gotten sleep, I was still stressed. The sleep struggle had revealed another set of questions about my new identity as a mother, co-parenting, and how my anxiety might impact my son.

These were questions that couldn’t be answered quickly, or through online sources.

Instead, what helped me the most was tending to a deeper desire: Connection and community. The best I felt during that time was when I went on a walk with another mom who was facing similar sleep challenges. Neither of us had the answers, but we were navigating the messiness together.

The TLDR: Some questions in our lives are answerable through outside sources, others are not (or at least not quickly). It’s crucial to know what kind of question you’re asking so you know the right strategy for addressing the discomfort you might feel. In my book, I share a framework for starting a questions practice to help guide folks through this process.

I love this sentence from your book: “Instead of defining safety as being protected from difficulty, safety meant being able to sit with any kind of difficulty.” As you explain, the ability to accept uncertainty relates to the ability to face challenges and try new things. What are some ways we can help ourselves recognize that uncertainty is okay, even good, when it comes to supporting growth and identity development? How can we come to understand the concept of safety as being different from protection?

It’s helpful here to consider a weight-lifting analogy, because uncertainty tolerance is like a muscle. Just like you wouldn’t go to the gym and start lifting 100lb dumbbells if you’ve never strength-trained before, we need to start smaller when it comes to building our ability to not only tolerate uncertainty, but also recognize it as a source of growth and development.

Starting smaller can look like finding low-stakes ways to practice tolerating uncertainty. That could be not looking up the menu for a new restaurant before you go, or trying a new class at your gym, or meeting a new person for coffee.

Or you could practice tolerating uncertainty with a Zen koan, which is the topic of the chapter you quoted from. Koans, which began to emerge in China 1000 years ago, can be short stories, paradoxes, or questions that help us with our ability to tolerate the unknown. Because koans cannot be answered or solved through rational thinking, they can help teach us a different way to exist with the unknown.

The bottom line: It’s impossible to protect ourselves — or our kids — from every struggle or challenge in the world. Safety through constant protection, then, is an illusion. Instead, true safety emerges from “uncertainty strength training”, and the ability to face, rather than avoid, the challenges in our lives.

Share

In your book you talk about the fact that sometimes, the best way to alleviate difficult feelings is to pay more attention to them, not less. Can you unpack this and explain how to tune into our feelings when they are uncomfortable? Why is it sometimes not helpful to try to understand the "why" behind feelings?

Kate Alcamo, a marriage and family therapist based in Maryland, gave me a helpful analogy for how to conceptualize a different way of relating to our uncomfortable feelings: It’s like riding a horse. When we’re feeling anxious or upset, our instinct might be to try to control the feelings by suppressing, ignoring, or even feeling guilty about them. But that’s a lot like trying to control a high-energy horse by pulling on its reins. The horse responds to your stress not by calming down, but by going even faster, and maybe even bucking you off.

Instead, she recommends “dropping the reins” — taking a moment to relax, let go of the struggle for control of your feelings, and instead getting curious about them. You might ask: What are my emotions right now, and where am I noticing them in my body? What are they trying to tell me? Does this feel heavy, dry, hot, or have a shape, smell or color?

Searching for why you’re feeling a certain way isn’t necessarily bad, but it can perpetuate an illusion: “If I can figure out why I’m anxious about this, or I’m acting in this way, I won’t do it anymore and I’ll be okay,” therapist Kaitlin Nunamann told me. The problem is that’s not always how self-reflection works. Sometimes it might help you understand yourself better, but other times it might surface even more questions. Instead, Nunamann recommends anchoring to what you can know and control: how your breath feels, where you’re holding tension, how you might release it.

Tuning into your embodied, emotional experience by dropping the reins, getting curious about it and rejecting the simple “why” narrative can all help us process our emotions more effectively.

I love the point you make about the fact that the people you love may sometimes “act in ways that feel insensitive, aloof, or uncaring,” and that part of loving them is to “be curious about why they’re acting that way and to listen to their response even when you’d rather throw up your hands.” These are wise words that can help us respond to seemingly unsavory behavior in our kids (and our partners). What are some ways you’d suggest engaging in this kind of curiosity with our kids when they are pushing our buttons? Is it about paying attention to them, considering their perspective, asking them questions?

Let me first say that this is not easy. Even if you’ve written a book about questions! But I’ll share another story that I’ve held onto since writing the book. It comes from Sarah Schnitker, who pioneered research into the science of patience, and is currently a professor at Baylor University.

When I visited her in Texas, I got a chance to meet her (delightful) young daughter, too. Schnitker told me something I think most parents can relate to: motherhood gives her the most regular tests of patience in her life. But it has also helped her learn something important: If she does manage to stay calm during inevitable tantrums, constant questions, or other interruptions, she receives something invaluable.

“Especially in these young ages, when kids show serious emotional dysregulation, it’s very easy as a parent to be like, ‘Stop it, I don’t have time,’” she told me. “But there are times when I sit with it a little longer and ask the question, ‘Is there a reason you’re doing this?’”

When Schnitker gets curious about what’s happening, she’s found her daughter can “verbalize something that changes the whole experience — suddenly, her reaction makes sense, and our relationship is better.” Patience, she told me, gives Schnitker the “opportunity to see her daughter develop into a different person.”

You talk about the self-help industry in your book, which I found fascinating. Among other things, you explained that self-help approaches can either be open or closed. In closed systems, if an approach doesn’t work, you’re told it’s because you’re the problem — you’re not doing it right, etc. These approaches are often not very helpful. In open systems, on the other hand, people are encouraged to take the advice that works and leave the rest — these approaches often include caveats like “this may not work for everyone.” I was relieved to recognize that my parenting advice seems to fall into the open camp, phew! But I’m wondering — because there’s so much parenting advice out there (much of it bad) — how best can parents tell the difference between closed and open self-help approaches? And why are closed systems so unhelpful and how do they relate (if at all) to our relationship with fear and uncertainty?

Your advice *definitely* falls in the open camp — which is why I love it (and use it)!

You’re asking such an important question. Let me start by saying: Staying vigilant against closed self-help systems can be especially difficult as a parent. When you’re sleep-deprived, stressed, and time-scarce, you’re even more vulnerable to these predatory self-help tactics (hello, me at 2am scrolling Instagram for sleep solutions).

You’ve nailed it as far as one way to tell the difference. Another way of looking at self-help systems comes from returning to the fear and curiosity paradigm: Is this person encouraging me to get more curious about the challenge I’m facing, and strengthen my own ability to identify solutions and answers? Or, are they trying to create a structure where I’m increasingly reliant on them and their answers? Am I becoming increasingly fearful that if I don’t follow the plan exactly I’m messing everything up? Is the approach encouraging more curious independence or fearful interdependence?

Interdependence, of course, can be a good thing: We all need to rely on other people for help and expertise. But! Be wary of folks who don’t actually have your best interests in mind, particularly if they keep dangling the carrot of enlightenment or absolution with just one more (paid) course.

You wrote that you have struggled throughout your life with self-worth problems — you felt like you had to prove your worth through your actions and achievements and that your love for yourself was conditional. I've written about research suggesting that perfectionism in kids is often rooted in these kinds of contingent self-worth issues. What helped you address your own issues the most?

This is an ongoing journey for me, and I’ve tried so many different therapeutic practices (I explore many in the book). What has helped most: the act of mental time travel, and in particular, imagining myself as a little girl. It has been easier for me to feel love and compassion for that version of myself, which I can then start to extend to the present version of me. The psychological term for this is called “temporal distancing.” Evidence for this practice suggests that when we imagine how a past or future version of ourselves might handle a particular struggle, the present version of ourselves can gain more perspective.

Something else that has helped: Asking questions of myself during the day like: What would help me feel cared for in this moment? Healing the relationship I have to myself starts with my own behavior, treating myself like I’m worthy of care throughout the day even if I don’t achieve all of my goals.

Subscribe now

Share

I had to admit, though: Going into this trip, I felt anxious. I have social anxiety that crops up in certain situations. I can give public lectures without losing my mind, but if you put me in a group of friends or acquaintances for an extended period of time — even people I really like! — I inevitably start to feel self-conscious.

It feels like this: I don’t have enough interesting things to say. The things I say are boring or weird. I start to second-guess whether I really deserved to be invited, whether anyone actually wants me there. The more anxious I feel, the more I socially withdraw, which fuels a vicious cycle.

Going into this trip, I couldn’t help but wonder whether I’d be battling these demons yet again.

Subscribe now

But this time, the voices in my head were muted. They weren’t gone, exactly, but I could talk them down. I would notice when I felt self-conscious, and then recognize that this was my anxiety talking. The loveliness of my friends helped, too — anytime I started to apologize or make myself small, they buoyed me back up.

It felt like a huge shift. I have recently been trying to tune more into my body and feelings, notice my self-limiting beliefs, and find insight and peace through journaling and meditation. This spa trip illustrated that something really is changing.

Share

Another thing happened that weekend, too. When I left the spa, I drove to Newark Airport to fly to Chicago for my niece’s high school graduation. I told myself I’d write a newsletter on the plane. As is often the case, I had a few ideas about what I would cover, but I hadn’t made a final decision.

When I opened my computer on the plane, I stared at the blank page and nothing came to me. Not a thing. Usually my mind is going a million miles a minute, planning my work time, planning my writing. But I just sat there, time ticking by, staring at the screen.

Although it was frustrating — I needed to write this damned newsletter! — I didn’t fall into a panic. I felt the voice in my head coo: It’s okay. This is actually pretty cool. The anxious chatter in my head has always been there, and it has always felt so important — but now that it was gone, I sure didn’t miss it. And with it gone, I felt a new serenity, a levity.

This emptiness in my brain felt less like a failing than a gift.

Subscribe now

Both of these tendencies, I realize — the social anxiety and the drive to keep achieving — are rooted in a belief that my self-worth is a reflection of how I act and what I do, rather than something that exists no matter what I do. The constant anxious chatter — “I need to do this” or “I need to be better at that” — consists of tales I have spun my whole life that haven’t served me.

I have known this for a while (thanks, therapy!) but I have struggled to actually translate that insight into change — into new tendencies, new feelings, new ways of moving through the world.

These two experiences, which happened over the course of a single weekend, illustrated that I’m finally making progress. And this progress is (ironically) why I don’t have a well-thought-out reported essay for you this week. Instead, I have something quieter: a handful of observations from a weekend when my mind finally gave me some room.

I know that the anxious voices will return. But perhaps I am in a place in which I can hear them less loudly and urgently. I may not have silenced them for good, but I no longer believe everything they say, and that feels meaningful.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

Something happened this week that illustrated this lesson for me. Although it involved my dog, not my kids, the broader truth can definitely be applied to parenting.

Subscribe now

On Saturday, my kids were with my ex and I had plans to go into the city to meet friends. I planned to leave at 12:30pm. I let my dog out in our fenced backyard at 9:45am and went to my office to do a bit of work.

Then, a half hour later, I remembered: I had gardened the day before and left the backyard gate ajar. My dog Ozzy is a smart pup, and I knew that he’d be able to nudge it open and escape.

Sure enough, I ran to the backyard and he was gone.

Ozzy has run away a few times. He likes to explore the woods (thankfully he rarely goes near the street — he’s scared of cars), smell the smells, and then come back home, usually within 45 minutes. He’s very hard to find and lure back before he’s ready.

Still, I went outside to see if I could find him. I couldn’t.

Share

I went back inside, nervous. What if he didn’t come back? How would I find him? Would I have to cancel my afternoon plans? I fretted for a while, knowing that the clock was ticking and I needed to jump in the shower and get ready to go. I went back outside and phew, there he was, in the woods near the driveway. I grabbed dog treats and the leash and went out to get him.

As soon as he saw me, he started running away again.

I cursed under my breath as I followed him, but he was determined. He wasn’t ready for his walkabout to end. He trotted up a neighbor’s long driveway and I realized that more chasing would be futile. I wasn’t going to be able to corral him. I went back home and peered out the front windows every few minutes hoping to see him approach so I could let him in. He didn’t appear.

Subscribe now

Then I had a thought: Maybe, just maybe, there was a lesson in here for me. Maybe I needed to trust that Ozzy would be OK and that he would come home when he was ready. Maybe this was an opportunity to let go. After all, I didn’t have control over the situation. There was no way to force Ozzy to come home.

I got into the shower. I was a little worried: What if he came to the front door while I was in the bathroom and I couldn’t let him in? But I tried to relax, let go, and enjoy the warm water. When I got out, I noticed that my front door was wide open. Had the wind blown it?

I walked into the kitchen, and there was Ozzy, panting loudly on the kitchen floor. He’d somehow opened the front door and let himself in. I started laughing. It figures: As soon as I’d relaxed and stopped trying to force an outcome, he returned home.

Share

I couldn’t help but think about how this applies to parenting. As they grow up, kids are more and more out of our control. We wish we could get them to behave the way we want them to and to make the choices we want them to make. But we can’t. Sometimes, if we push them too hard, they run fast in the other direction. Sometimes, we are better off letting go and trusting that our kids will survive on their own — and that they will come to us when they truly need us.

Certainly, there are times when we need to help our kids or scaffold their experiences, but the research suggests that parents today do that far too often. By letting go and trusting in our kids’ abilities, we can help them learn and develop — and strengthen our relationship with them, too. There’s plenty of research suggesting that autonomy-supportive parenting helps kids thrive (and I guess it’s true for dogs, too).

So yes, Ozzy ran away and almost derailed my Saturday. But the experience reminded me that worrying when situations are beyond our reach does not help, and that pushing our kids to do what we want can incite them to push back even harder. There’s power in reminding ourselves that we are not able to curate all of our kids’ experiences, nor should we.

When I saw Ozzy trot up my neighbor’s driveway, he was the happiest I’ve ever seen him. He escaped and it was scary for me — but for him, it was a perfect Saturday morning. And although he loved his bout of independence, he soon enough returned back home.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

Often, the sacrifices we make as mothers are invisible. We make a million little choices in which we put others first. These can be hard to see, because they are so automatic. I’m trying to get better at noticing and acknowledging them, but it is hard.

Yes, I know that we don’t have to make all of these sacrifices; often, nobody directly asks for them. But this expectation to put others first has been drilled into us since we were little girls — through what we were praised for, what we saw modeled around us, and what we were taught to want.

Subscribe now

To highlight the sheer number and absurdity of our sacrifices, I’m sharing five things my best friend and I have done in just the past week. And I want to hear your stories in the comments. Let’s make these sacrifices more visible to everyone.

• One of us went to a dance school fundraiser titled “pliés and pinot,” which was supposed to be a 60-minute introductory ballet class — VERY CHALLENGING when you’re in your 40s, by the way — followed by a 30-minute wine and cheese reception. The ballet teacher misunderstood and thought it was a 90-minute ballet class, and none of the 20 women in attendance spoke up to tell her when she kept going. They literally tortured themselves just to be polite.

• One of us was asked a question in a therapy session and then, before answering, said “Don’t worry, I’ll be brief.” Even in therapy — a place explicitly designed for her to talk — she felt compelled to apologize for taking up space.

• One of us had a mug explode boiling water all over her stomach, creating a massive blister, and instead of taking care of it, she continued to run the online fundraiser she’d been tasked with leading. She treated her medical emergency as less urgent than her volunteer obligations.

• One of us was told by an HVAC repairman that she “speaks like she’s a podcast on double speed.” Even her words, she realized, had been trained to get out of the way.

• One of us had a terrifying experience with an off-leash dog that led to bruises, scrapes, and a wrist sprain but didn’t want to get angry at the dog owner because he was the father of her kid’s friend. Even injured, she found herself protecting everyone else from discomfort.

  What are your stories from the past week (or month, or year)? Please share in the comments!

  Leave a comment

  Share

Buy my books!

A few months ago, I wrote about my recent feature in Scientific American, “The Kids Are All Right.” It explored the growing body of research suggesting that in many realms, youth today are doing better than youth of the past: They are more empathetic and inclusive, and they are less impulsive and narcissistic.

This is not what most adults and parents believe, however. In a recent survey conducted by Common Sense Media, 61 percent of U.S. parents said they thought kids today lag behind past generations in their morals and values.

Certainly, there are reasons to be concerned about kids when it comes to their relationships with technology and their mental health — but in other, more character-driven areas, our bleak assumptions about kids just aren’t supported by the evidence. (On the mental health front, there’s a bit of good news too: A study published recently suggests that youth suicide has declined since the launch of 988, the free suicide helpline.)

So why, then, is the public so misguided? And why are all the headlines so damned terrifying1? This was one of the key questions I addressed in my Scientific American piece. I’ve always been interested in how biases and perceptions shape our interpretations and beliefs, and what drives them, so the “kids these days” panic felt like the perfect rabbit hole to jump into.

Share

My research first led me to the work of Central Connecticut State University psychologist John Protzko, who directs the university’s Assumption Lab, which aims to understand the assumptions that underlie prejudice and decision-making. Yes, this is nerdy stuff, but it’s totally my jam, so I was embarrassingly excited to dig into his work and interview him.

One of the first papers I read was aptly titled “Kids these days: Why the youth of today seem lacking.” The paper, which Protzko co-authored with University of California, Santa Barbara psychologist Jonathan Schooler, investigated why adults tend to harbor negative preconceptions about youth. As they explain, this is not a new phenomenon:

Since at least 624 BCE, people have lamented the decline of the present generation of youth relative to earlier generations. The pervasiveness of complaints about “kids these days” across millennia suggests that these criticisms are neither accurate nor due to the idiosyncrasies of a particular culture or time—but rather represent a pervasive illusion of humanity.

Protzko and Schooler wanted to understand what could be driving this ubiquitous belief, so they undertook a series studies to try to find out.

Read more

Cindy and I talked about many aspects of life after divorce — the best things, the worst things, co-parenting, even dating. We also discussed the ways in which social conditioning shapes how women treat themselves in romantic relationships (especially marriage), and how liberating it can be when we are freed of them.

Our experiences haven’t been the same, by any means, yet we were very aligned in terms of how divorce (or in my case, separation) has changed us. Check out the recording and share your thoughts in the comments!

Also, paid subscribers, today is the last day to enter my giveaway to win a copy of my book Hello, Cruel World!

Enter the giveaway!

Get more from Melinda Wenner Moyer in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

Enter the giveaway!

Yesterday in The New York Times, Sam Sifton shared some harrowing statistics from the new Harper’s Index, which is featured in the May issue of Harper’s Magazine:

Percentage of Americans who say that, as children, they knew a compassionate, nonjudgmental adult: 35

Percentage of these Americans who say that their mother was such a person: 50

That their father was: 5

I read this first thing in the morning, before my first cup of coffee, and I almost started crying. These statistics, I thought, probably reflect the childhood experiences of my friends and colleagues. They made my heart break.

I mean, seriously: only half of people who knew a compassionate adult say that person was their mother, which means only 17.5 percent of adults had a compassionate mother. And if you do the calculation for fathers it’s truly depressing: only five percent of those who had a compassionate adult in their life say it was their father, which means less than 2 percent of all Americans had such a dad.

Share

Then, I thought about how parents today are raising their kids. It’s not fair to overgeneralize, and there are undoubtedly plenty of exceptions — but parenting trends today look pretty good, and they give me hope.

Read more

“Ugh, I feel so terrible,” she wrote. The night before, her 7-year-old had approached her and asked if the Easter bunny was real.

“Mommy, it just doesn’t make sense that the Easter bunny is real. How could that be true?” her daughter said to her. “But I also can’t figure out how you would be able to hide all the eggs and stuff in the night while you’re sleeping! Please just tell me the truth.”

My friend gently questioned her daughter to try to figure out whether she really wanted to know. Her 7-year-old insisted that yes, she did. It made sense, given her personality: She was, according to my friend, a relentlessly logical kid who hated not understanding things.

“So I told her the truth,” my friend wrote. “She started sobbing.”

Her daughter then fetched her older sister — who still believed in the Easter bunny, too — and dropped the news, adding that Mom was also Santa Claus. In my friend’s words, her 7-year-old announced these facts “in the same tone of voice she would have used to announce I was an axe murderer.” Then her eldest daughter started sobbing, too and screaming “No! It can’t be true!”

She, her husband, and her daughters cried about it for two hours before falling asleep.

Subscribe now

“I think I made the wrong call,” my friend texted me that next morning. “They were both saying they wanted to know the truth, but I think they really wanted reassurance that the magic was real. But I couldn’t look into my daughter’s face, just pleading for me to be honest with her, and lie! I just couldn’t do it.”

I really felt for my friend. When you feel you’ve broken your child’s heart — it’s the worst feeling in the world. But I didn’t think she actually had. In fact, I thought she’d given her kids a real gift. Here’s what I replied:

Oh no!!! I’m so sorry, that sounds sooooo hard. But FWIW, I do not think you made the wrong call at all. If your child is begging for you to tell the truth about something like that (something that developmentally they CAN handle, even if it’s hard), I think the right thing to do is to tell them — even if they then have big feelings about it. If you’d lied to her, that could have harmed your relationship in the long run because once she did find out the truth, she’d wonder about how much she could trust you in the future. She could even throw it back in your face for years — “well that one time I begged you to please tell me the truth and you lied” etc etc. Instead, you honored her request and you trusted her to be able to handle the truth even though it was going to be hard. That illustrates your respect for her!

Forty minutes later, I got another update from my friend. Her eldest daughter had just come into her room and whispered conspiratorially: “Since you were up late hiding eggs, we’ll entertain [our three-year-old sister] for a bit so you can get more sleep!”

“She seemed really happy and then she hugged me and said she loves me,” my friend wrote.

Subscribe now

Sometimes, when kids get upset — especially because of something we’ve done — it’s impossible not to catastrophize. We worry that we’ve ruined their lives, that they’ll never recover, that we’re terrible parents. But kids usually bounce back from developmentally appropriate hardships, and often, there is even more light on the other side.

A few years ago here for this newsletter, I interviewed a Candice Mills, a University of Texas at Dallas psychologist who studies how children handle learning the truth about imaginary beings like Santa Claus. She has found that the vast majority of kids not only recover quickly, but also often enjoy being in the know.

“They’ll say, ‘Well, I felt like something was wrong. And I feel satisfied to know that I figured out the problem — I’ve solved a puzzle,’” Mills said. Parents who tell the truth “provide a path forward for kids to deal with their emotions — like ‘and now it's your turn to be a Santa.’ And it can make kids feel special.”

But there’s more to my friend’s story — something that shows just how meaningful that Easter Bunny conversation turned out to be.

Share

Two days ago, her 7-year-old approached her yet again, with another big question: Were dinosaurs real?

My friend told her that yes, they were, but her daughter pushed back. “No, I want to know the truth. They seem impossible, like Santa. Were dinosaurs REALLY real?” she asked.

My friend sat down, reassured her 7-year-old that dinosaurs actually existed, and told her everything she knew about them.

Her daughter, however, still wasn’t convinced. How could she know they were real? My friend said: “Well, you have to decide who you can trust. What sources you can trust. Do you trust a search on the internet? Do you trust your mom? Would you trust a scientist if we contacted one?”

Her daughter thought about it for a minute and said: “I trust you. You said that if I told you to be honest, you would. So I believe you.”

My friend then texted me: “So YOU WERE RIGHT, Melinda — being honest with her about the Easter bunny DID teach her a lesson about being able to trust me.”

I’m not sharing this because I was right. (Okay…. maybe a little bit. It’s nice to be right, because I make plenty of mistakes!) But in all honesty, it’s not me who was right — these ideas and approaches are borne out by the research. As I explained in great detail in my book Hello, Cruel World!, kids’ negative feelings are essential tools for growth. Their disappointments and frustrations are opportunities for learning and for building coping skills — and they can also strengthen the parent-child relationship.

When we are “real” and honest with our kids — in developmentally appropriate ways, while also offering validation and support — they notice and absorb it. Our candor doesn’t quash the magic of childhood. In the long run, it can create something far more sacred.

Have you had any experiences like this with your kids? Have you made parenting decisions that you initially regretted but eventually discovered helped your children grow or strengthened your relationship? Share in the comments!

Leave a comment

Buy my book!

It’s a great question, and I was embarrassed to realize I hadn’t already addressed it. So …. how and when should you talk to kids about the war, and what should you say?

I have to include my usual caveat that what you say (or don’t say), and when you say it, will depend a lot on your child — their age, temperament, and proclivity for anxiety, among other things. (You’ll want to share fewer details and be more reassuring with anxious or younger kids.) But here are my four key suggestions, along with a few simple scripts.

Read more

Get 20% off forever

As a bonus, I am running a FREE giveaway for my book Hello, Cruel World! Paid subscribers living in the United States are eligible to win a copy. To enter, fill out this short Google form by April 30.

Enter my book giveaway!

Here are six recent popular posts that you can only read with a paid subscription:

Get 20% off forever

Share

I hear this phrase — or something close to it — from my friends all the time. Sometimes they’re talking about their careers or hobbies. Other times, their marriages or friendships. They can often recognize that they are unsatisfied or unhappy in some way, but they can’t put their finger on what, exactly, they’re feeling, why they are feeling it, or what they want instead.

Here in this newsletter and in my book Hello, Cruel World!, I’ve discussed the fact that women are socialized from a young age to sacrifice their needs and wants to preserve their relationships. The impact of this socialization — and how it plays out in day-to-day life — is chronicled in the book Meeting at the Crossroads: Women’s Psychology and Girls’ Development, written by developmental psychologists Lyn Mikel Brown and Carol Gilligan.

For the book, they conducted in-depth interviews with nearly 100 girls between the ages of 7 and 18 over the course of five years. At the age of 7, 8, 9 and 10, the girls tended to speak up about their needs and feelings, show healthy resistance to oppression, and hold friends and family members accountable. Psychologist Annie Rogers calls this “ordinary courage,” or the ability to “speak one’s mind by telling all one’s heart.”

Get 20% off forever

But Brown and Gilligan observed that as the girls got older— starting around the age of 12 — many underwent a powerful, and frankly heartbreaking, shift. Their voices and identities started to go underground. They started saying “I don’t know” all the time. As Brown and Gilligan wrote:

We found that this developmental progress goes hand in hand with evidence of a loss of voice, a struggle to authorize or take seriously their own experience — to listen to their own voices in conversation and respond to their feelings and thoughts — increased confusion, sometimes defensiveness, as well as evidence for the replacement of real with inauthentic or idealized relationships. If we consider responding to oneself, knowing one’s feelings and thoughts, clarity, courage, openness, and free-flowing connections with others and the world as signs of psychological health, as we do, then these girls are in fact not developing, but are showing evidence of loss and struggle and signs of an impasse in their ability to act in the face of conflict.

This transformation affects girls deeply as they disconnect from themselves, their feelings, and their knowledge. These patterns can persist throughout adulthood, and at a certain point, we may not even know what we want anymore or how our relationships are serving or not serving us, because for so long, we have been them ones serving them.

Share

What I’ve noticed is that in midlife, women often discover that they can’t live this way anymore. Their bodies begin to protest and tell them that they need to take care of themselves. The problem is, it’s hard for women to push through the initial foggy sense that something is wrong and uncover the true feelings, needs and wants that lurk beneath. After all, we’ve been suppressing these feelings for our whole lives. We’ve forgotten how to listen to ourselves. Our external armor has become so strong, we can’t even reach what lies below it.

I wrote about my struggles to understand difficult feelings about my marriage a couple of years ago. Two things that greatly helped me get to the bottom of those feelings were therapy and meditation. Therapists can often ask the questions that spark inner reflection — even if you don’t know the answer right away, the question has a way of percolating and provoking insight. Meditation helped, too, by forcing me to sit in a quiet room and breathe, even if just for a few minutes. It gave me the space to listen to my body and start to perceive what it was telling me.

The truth is, our bodies can tell us so much about our feelings. A while ago here in the newsletter, I interviewed psychologist Juli Fraga and psychotherapist Hilary Jacobs Hendel, the co-authors of Parents Have Feelings Too: A Guide to Navigating Your Emotions So You And Your Family Can Thrive. Here’s Hendel in our interview:

Contrary to what our emotions-phobic society tells us, emotions aren’t in the head; they’re in the body. It’s biology. We pick up on what’s happening in the world and with those around us through our five senses. Life happens, our nervous system fires, emotion ignites in the mid-brain, the vagus nerve fires in a pattern consistent with the emotions triggered, and all of a sudden, we’re gripped with a big feeling — for better and for worse.

Hendel recommended this short exercise for connecting to and understanding feelings through our bodies.

Get 20% off forever

Recently, I’ve discovered another wonderful way to connect with my deeper self: Journaling. It’s funny: For years, I’ve written about the benefits of journaling; among other things, researchers have found that it improves physical health. So I’ve always known about the good it can do, but I have never actually made the time for it.

That is, until recently.

I was in a bookstore with a friend a few weeks ago and saw the book The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron sitting on one of the front display tables. I had bought a copy of The Artist’s Way workbook at least a decade ago after my therapist recommended it to me, but I’d never actually read past the introduction.

When I saw the book in the bookstore, it felt like a sign. I’ve been struggling with concerns over my career and my finances (freelance journalism is brutal right now). Plus, as an author, I’m constantly bombarded with well-meaning questions from acquaintances along the lines of “So what’s your next book?” My answer is always the same: I don’t know if there is a next book, but either way I sure don’t know what it will be about. After seeing The Artist’s Way at the bookstore, I thought perhaps it could offer some insight.

Leave a comment

The first thing the book recommends is early morning journaling — what author Cameron calls “morning pages.” As she writes: “If there is a single simple tool that is the bedrock of my creative life — and any creative life — it is morning pages.” So recently, I started setting my alarm for 5:30am to journal before waking my kids up for school. I was skeptical. I assumed that I’d be writing down the thoughts that are already running through my head, and what good would that do?

But to my surprise, that’s not what happened. Each time I’ve journaled, I’ve had a profound realization, epiphany or idea. I close my journal feeling clear-headed and inspired, even after just 20 minutes of writing.

Why does this happen? Cameron discusses a number of different reasons. The morning pages can help retrieve parts of ourselves that we have lost. They can give us new ideas. Even if you’re just using the morning pages to write down what you need to get done that day, they can be useful because they get those nagging needs down on paper and out of your mind. “With your worries out of the way, your mind is able to roam more freely, to turn in more adventurous directions,” Cameron writes.

I haven’t been journaling for very long, but they have helped me connect with my creative side, understand my feelings and recognize what I want next.

A friend’s therapist suggested a slightly different form of journaling, which may also be useful. She suggested that my friend write down her thoughts and then review what she’d written and come up with questions about it and write those questions down. Then, she should go through and answer them in writing, and perhaps even go back to previous days and see if any new questions arise.

So if you’re struggling to understand yourself on a fundamental level — how you really feel, what you really want, where you want to go next — first, recognize that you are not alone, and that there are good reasons for your lack of insight. We have grown up in a culture that has emphasized that our feelings are not important; we learned to adapt in order to function inside it. But if you’re at a point in your life where you want to uncover what lurks beneath, I highly recommend some combination of therapy, meditation and journaling. Obviously, everyone is different and there’s no “one right way” to tune into yourself. But these strategies have opened important doors for me.

Don’t forget about the 20% off FOREVER Easter sale! Ends Tuesday!

Get 20% off forever

Share

One question I often get is this: Is it OK to drink around your kids? If they see you having glass of wine or a cocktail, will they be more likely to drink or develop problems with alcohol later on? I’ve asked this very question myself, as I enjoy the occasional beer and glass of wine and sometimes sip one while hanging out with my kids.

Subscribe now

Read more

I see and hear this take literally everywhere. A few weeks ago, a newsletter titled “30 Facts About Childhood Today that Will Terrify You” arrived in my inbox, published in After Babel, Jonathan Haidt’s newsletter. (Here are my thoughts on his book The Anxious Generation.) A story titled “America’s Children Are Unwell” was published in The New York Times last November, while Parents magazine recently ran “How to Know if Your Kid Is a Narcissist—and What to Do about It.”

Share

It’s perfectly natural to be concerned about youth these days, especially considering the rapid technological changes they are being forced to navigate. But I’ve long wondered whether the negative opinions we hold about “kids today” — and how they are faring — are actually confirmed by the science.

So I was thrilled, several months ago, when Scientific American editor Clara Moskowitz asked me if I would report a feature for the magazine exploring this very question.

Read more

One key element that the research points to is word choice: The language we use with our kids quietly shapes how they see, understand, and judge other people.

Subscribe now

Earlier this week, I was excited to discover a fascinating study just published in Developmental Psychology that sheds even more light on how parental conversations shape children’s social beliefs. The findings stopped me in my tracks, because they have important implications for how we talk to our kids about success, effort, and intelligence.

We know from past research that adults consider people with lower socioeconomic status to be less competent than people with higher socioeconomic status. Adults often perceive lower-income people as less intelligent and less capable, among other things. Teachers do the same thing, believing low-SES kids to be below average compared with wealthy students, even when the kids have identical test scores.

In other words, wealth becomes a proxy for ability.

Another tendency many of us share is to explain success and failure in overly simple, black-and-white ways — and to attribute their causes differently depending on a person’s socioeconomic status. When people succeed or fail, adults and kids tend to attribute those outcomes to a single cause, which is frequently how smart the person is or how hard they worked (though sometimes they throw luck in as a factor, too). It’s often an either/or story — successful people are either smart or they are hardworking, and if they fail, they are either not smart or not hardworking. Generally, research suggests, adults view successful low-income people as hardworking, and they view successful wealthy people as smart.

Share

At first glance, this may sound harmless — even flattering. Who doesn’t want to be described as hardworking? But the implications are surprisingly consequential, and less privileged “strivers” often end up at a disadvantage. There’s convincing research suggesting that people tend to privilege and prefer natural talent over effort (kids do this too.) Among other things, when hiring employees, bosses tend to hire “naturals” over more even qualified candidates.

There’s another problem, too: If we characterize the success of lower-income people as being the result of hard work, we can also blame their lack of success on a lack of effort. Suddenly, there’s less of a need to address the structural barriers to success: if less privileged people fail, it’s their own damn fault. And just like that, inequality can start to look fair — even deserved.

Buy my book!

In the new study, the researchers — who included the University of Amsterdam’s Eddie Brummelman and NYU’s Andrei Cimpian, names you may recognize from my books — wanted to know whether kids, like adults, view low-income people as being more hardworking than smart. They also wanted to see whether kids aligned with their parents in these beliefs, as that would suggest that parents transmit these ideas — intentionally or not — through everyday conversation. (We know, for instance, that when parents believe boys are smarter than girls, their kids do, too.)

To find out, the researchers invited 251 kids between the ages of 8 and 13, as well as one of their parents, to participate in an experiment. The subjects each read a series of vignettes about hypothetical children who succeeded or failed on school tests. Some of these kids were portrayed as low-income, while others were portrayed as high-income, based on various cues (the size of their houses, how many cars they have, whether they go on expensive vacations, etc). The subjects were then asked how smart and hardworking they thought each child was, and they were also asked why they thought each child succeeded or failed on the test.

The results were striking. The child subjects rated low-SES kids as more hardworking than smart, and they rated high-income kids as more smart than hardworking. When lower-SES kids did well, participants attributed their successes to effort rather than intelligence; when those kids failed, they attributed their failure more to a lack of intelligence than to a lack of effort. Importantly, the children’s stereotypes were similar to those of their parents. When parents showed stronger stereotypes, their children did too.

Give a gift subscription

When I read about these findings, I immediately wondered about their implications for growth mindset. Growth mindset is a research-based approach for fostering motivation that prioritizes tying successes to effort rather than to innate ability. When practicing growth mindset, parents are encouraged not to describe their kids as “smart” or “a natural” but instead to tie kids’ achievements to their efforts. (For more on growth mindset, read this and this.)

So….if effort isn’t always the safest thing to emphasize, what should parents do instead? Thankfully, the authors address this question in the paper. The solution isn’t to stop valuing effort or to abandon growth mindset altogether. Rather, they suggest emphasizing that effort and ability work together — that intelligence isn’t fixed, but something that can grow and develop through effort. We should push against the idea that a successful person must be either hardworking or smart, and we shouldn’t communicate that effort compensates for a lack of ability. Instead, we can help kids understand that people can be both — and that effort can actually build intelligence and ability over time.

Share

Based on this research, we may also want to avoid attributing the successes of privileged people to intelligence (e.g. “they are rich because they are smart,”) and we should be cautious about always praising upwardly mobile people as strivers or go-getters. As I discuss in Hello, Cruel World!, we should also try not to describe entire groups of people as being a certain way (e.g. “rich people are successful," “boys can’t sit still”) because this fosters the idea that people in the same social group all share the same underlying “essence.” Psychologists call this “essentialist thinking,” and it can easily fuel stereotypes.

To be clear, these are difficult distinctions! And if you’ve ever praised someone as hardworking — or described someone else as naturally talented — you are very much not alone. You also haven’t screwed up your kids. Still, in the future, it might behoove us to be aware of the tendency to explain successes and failures differently depending on who we’re talking about. This research is a helpful reminder that the stories we tell about success and failure matter: The explanations we casually offer today can quietly shape the beliefs our kids carry into the future, how fair the world looks to them, and whether or not they choose to fight inequality.

Subscribe now

Share

In this scene, Lady Violet Bridgerton speaks with her ladies maid, Mrs. Wilson, about the concerns she has regarding her kids. (I’ll keep this vague so I don’t spoil the plot.)

Here’s their brief exchange:

Mrs. Wilson: Can I bring you some tea, my lady?

Violet Bridgerton, looking at the portrait of her late husband: Sometimes I sit here and just stare at this portrait. We were always supposed to be in this together, through every trial. The children, they look to me for answers, and I do not have all the answers. [Turning to the portrait]: You were supposed to be here.

Mrs. Wilson: If I may, ma’am. Children do not need you to have all the answers. Or even half the answers. They only need you to love them.

“Children do not need you to have all the answers” is one of my parenting mantras. But it’s not that you don’t have to have all the answers. In many cases, it’s actually good if you don’t have all the answers. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately with my own kids — especially when they ask big questions about politics, technology, or the future that I genuinely don’t know how to answer.

I know this is counterintuitive. We’re parents. We’re in charge, so we need to be decisive. And it’s our job to educate our kids, right?

Of course we’re in charge and should share our knowledge with our kids. But only to a point. I believe we sometimes lean too far in the direction of omniscience and omnipotence. We feel it’s our duty to always present ourselves as sage (and calm) experts, even when we’re not.

Perhaps it’s because we want to maintain our power. Or maybe it’s because we think certainty comforts our kids.

These are valid reasons, of course. But there’s a case to be made for regularly saying “I don’t know,” especially today, when we are surrounded by political polarization, performative certainty, and the relentless opinion machine of social media.

Read more

So today, I’m re-sharing an interview I did in 2024 that feels very relevant right now. With everything going on in the world, some of you may be wondering what you can do to raise informed, thoughtful citizens. How should you talk to your kids about politics and the government? And why is it important that you do? I asked these questions of political scientist Lindsey Cormack, the Director of the Diplomacy Lab at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey. She’s the author of the wonderful book How to Raise a Citizen. It’s a crucial roadmap for parents who want to raise responsible, informed citizens — which I presume is all of you. I highly encourage you to check it out.

I’m so excited to share some of her helpful and very important insights below. This is a longer interview, but we touched on so many important issues and ideas and I couldn’t bear to cut it down. Enjoy!

Subscribe now

Lindsay, what inspired you to write your book?

I've been teaching college students — 18-to-22 year olds — for 10 years, and I work at a very good school. They're on top of their stuff. But it has always surprised me how little they know about government and politics. And it's not that they don't care about these things — it's just that they truly don't understand a lot of the basics.

One thing about working at a small school is that teachers get loaded up with administrative duties. My very first year, they were like, “You're going to be the point person on Get Out the Vote and voter registration.” So we started doing these things called Ducks to the Polls, because our mascot is a duck, where we take all the kids that want to go the polls, drop them off to vote, and then afterwards go for an ice cream party. But without fail, multiple of them get turned away because either they're not registered or they're not registered in this county — they're registered in their home county and didn't realize that it didn't follow them.

So I get to see, year after year, students who are crestfallen. Some of them are angry, and some of them are in disbelief. No one feels good. That's not a nice feeling to have — “Oh, I'm a grown up, and I get to do this thing.” And it's then it’s like, “Actually, you didn't follow the rules.” I know that being a young adult, it's hard enough as it is, and we make the hurdles a little bit higher when we don't give them a longer runway to understand what they have to do to participate.

I thought my book was originally going to be a book about different curricula being implemented in states that could get kids really geared up to do this. I have five research assistants, and we looked at the test scores and the different curricular standards. We interviewed teachers in nearly every state, and we came to the conclusion that this is not something that schools can fix. This is something that's bigger than that. We need parents — because there's constraints on schools right now that make it very hard to do this work. It's got to something that starts in homes. And it's not that I don't think schools are good at this, or that I don't think schools can do this. It is that right now they are not doing it, and it's very hard to see how that will change.

Share

How much — or shall I say how little? — civics education are kids getting in school right now? And why do you think schools aren't equipped to provide it?

Since about the 1940s, the time in the classroom for civics — social studies and government — has only gone down. It has the least amount of in-classroom instruction time for any subject that's taught in K-12. The modal form of delivery of government content is in the second semester of the senior year of high school is a class that's called something like “government.” Some states require it. Some states don't. Some states have a test. Some states don't. But usually, they try to cram everything about how to vote, thinking about the Constitution, and a bunch of stuff about the founding, into that second semester senior year — when students are usually checked out. It's just not the time when they can be learning things.

If we want to look at it in numbers, for every $50 that are spent on STEM education in K-12, only 5 cents go to civics. So there's just this wild disparity.

Wow.

The reasons for this are — there's a lot, but I'll give you the top line four. One is the fact that our children and schools are most often assessed based on how they do on SAT and ACT scores. That means that subjects that are not tested on those assessments get crunched out of the curriculum. It's not surprising that civics kind of get squeezed out, because since the 1980s there hasn't even been a social studies component of either of the entrance exams.

Another reason is we have this notion that schools should be sites of patriotic and civic engagement, but we also have a rich legalistic tradition of limiting what teachers can and can't say. And that spilled over into how our state legislatures talk about what can and can't be taught in the classroom, which, in the past 15 or so years, has accelerated towards things like saying, “We can't do it this way.” For instance, in Texas, you can't do action civics, which is when student groups say “I don't like that there's no basketball courts in my Rec center. I should contact the city council member.” That was allowed in Texas schools for a little bit, but it is no longer. So there's movements to curtail how students interact with things.

Then another big reason is parents themselves. In the interviews we did with teachers, nearly all of them expressed some reticence about talking about even the most basic information on government set-up because of the fear that if a kid comes home and says, “Oh, we learned about the three branches, my teacher said the President is the primary branch,” or “Someone said the Congress is the primary branch,” that it must mean [the teacher] must not like so-and-so [such as the President]. There’s the idea that parents hear this, they send mean emails, or they activate a Facebook group of angry parents, and they talk to administrators.

So it's not that they don't want to do this work. It's that they're hesitant because it becomes harder if you know that you're going to have angry people yelling at you even when you're just trying to do the basics. No one we talked to was like, “Oh yeah, we think we're doing enough.” Nearly every teacher we talked to was like, “We need to do more.” And when you look at A.P. test scores, A.P. U.S. government is the fourth or fifth lowest A.P. U.S. score out of the 30 or so that are tested, which is wild, because every one of the kids who are taking this goes on to be a citizen — but the ones who are scoring really well [on chemistry or Chinese], well, not everyone goes on to be a chemist or goes on to teach Mandarin, and those are the ones that get really high scores. So there's just something that's not adding up in the way that we're doing it. I see it in the classroom; we see it in test scores; and our interviews revealed the same sorts of things.

Leave a comment

It must be so much harder for teachers now that our society is so polarized. When I was a kid, there were conversations in the classroom about the different parties; I remember talking with friends in class about the 1988 election. But I imagine it's so much harder now for teachers foster that kind of discussion because parents are so much more polarized, and they're so afraid of blowback.

It's not to say that teachers don't do this. There are plenty of teachers who are good at this. And it's not just that parents are polarized. It's also that we have this sense of entitlement to tell our teachers what it is they can and can't teach, and we can do it so much quicker now — we can email them and they have to respond. And that wasn't true 30 years ago.

So the take-home here is that parents need to be having these conversations at home, because kids aren't getting as much as they should from school. But often there is this idea of “Oh, my kids are too young. They're too innocent. I don't want to scare them. I don't want to introduce them to this incredibly nuanced, complicated issue — let's protect their innocence.” What are your thoughts on that?

Yeah, I hear that a lot, too. I think there's a few things happening there. The idea that they're not learning from us because we're not talking about it doesn't quite make sense. They learn from what we do, and they learn from what we don't do. So if they never see us caring about politics or engaging about politics in a positive way, they can get the message that this either doesn't matter, it's not important for me to care about, or there's something distasteful about it. So that's problem one.

Problem two is that our kids are exposed to political information and political socialization whether we like it or not. And this starts even in kids’ media and literature. If you ever watch Spongebob or Dinosaur Train, oftentimes they'll have a government official. It might be a mayor, and at best, that person's sort of like a bumbling doofus, and at worst, they're out to do harm to the community. So they do get messages around politics and us not talking about it doesn't necessarily protect them from it. It teaches them something else.

I have a 12-year-old. Her daughter's school really had a hard time after October 7 in Israel, and it was tricky to think about, like, were we going to talk about this in school or were we not? And her teachers were on the side of yes, because they're going to get this message anyhow. And that's especially true as younger and younger kids have their own conduits to the internet. If they have their own devices and they're streaming their own things, or seeing their own things, the idea that we are protecting them from it — I just don't think it's necessarily true.

That doesn't mean you have to tell them things that scare them. But I do think it's problematic if we don't show them that it is important to care about these things. And it’s important that we show them the processes. We should take our kids to go vote. They should understand what that tradition looks like. They are not not getting political information if we don't choose to do it with them.

That makes so much sense.

One more thing that I think is important to think about: A lot of our kids see us saying things like “All politicians are liars,” or “They're cheats,” or “It's a dirty industry,” and that's problematic too. They don't see us saying, “Oh, the roads are nice and paved,” or “It’s good that my drinking water doesn't have arsenic in it.” So they get messages — we just oftentimes don't think about all the positives or upsides in front of them.

So we might want to try to be balanced in how we talk about the government.

Yeah. Try to find a little good in there because there are frustrations, but there's actually plenty of good, too.

Subscribe now

This brings me to a question I wanted to ask. When we're talking to our kids about politics, I one thing that I struggle with is how honest to be, especially if I do have a strong opinion. Should I really share my take, or should I try to be a little bit more agnostic, especially in terms of value judgments about individuals who might be involved in politics?

It's a great question, because we want to impart our values to our kids. It's like part of the enterprise. We made these little things; we want them to see the world in similar ways that we do.

The way that I think about politics and government in the context of parenting is that it's more important that we're raising a citizen versus a partisan. So there's stuff you're going to like about the major parties and stuff you're going to dislike. They don't necessarily have to hold those same opinions, and it's actually a marker of success in some ways when they don't, because the parties are fluid. The issues change. Personalities change. And so you can air your quibbles, or say there's there's problems, but I don't think it's an affront if your kids don't see it similarly. They live different lives. The world that they're growing up in is different than the one we grew up in. I think it's fine to have these discussions with them — but it might be better to ask them what they think, first, instead of just telling them [what you think].

I’ve heard this advice so frequently from experts — start with questions. It’s great advice. But then what if our kids disagree with us? How do we have a conversation rather than a fight? How we curb our instincts to snap, “No, you’re wrong!”

The first question that I ask in the classroom, in my house, and in other teaching settings that I’m in, is this: “What have you heard about that?” And the reason I like that as a question is because it releases the responder from having to defend an opinion or justify a thought. Instead, it sets the table with, “Okay, what are all the pieces of inputs that you have? What have you heard about that?” And when I do that in the classroom, sometimes kids will be like, “Well, I saw something on Twitter,” or “I didn't read the full thing, but here's the headline.” So, okay, let's collect all the things that we've heard.

Then I move to: “What do you think about that?” And the reason that I like to do it in that way is that we see that there's a difference between your inputs, and then there's some processing that you have before you get to tell us what you think.

And then the third question that I ask is: “What do you know about that?” And that one is where my college students start to get a little bit like, “Ooh, there is a distance between what I think on this and what I know on it.” And sometimes they feel really assured that what they know is correct. And sometimes they start to reflect and say, “Well, I know some parts.”

I actually don't think putting people in the position of having to justify their opinion to you is the work to be done. It's more to understand their perspective so that you can fold it into how you process these things yourself. I'm never in the game of, like, convincing my students I'm right. And I tell them very clearly up front that it's unlikely that they're going to convince other people that they're right. The best thing they can do is put more inputs into that other person’s stream of thought.

Share

I really like that framing. So — if your child doesn't know much about something, and they know that they don't know very much about it, how can you help them get more information that is trustworthy?

I don't have a prescriptive, like, “Here's where you should go to find out the truth.” Instead, I think the better practice for parents is to say, “Look, we're living in an incredible time where we can figure out so many things in the palm of our hand with a telephone or a computer.” What I have found myself doing with my own daughter is saying, “Why don't you take 10 minutes go figure out what you can figure out. I'll do the same, and we'll trade.” Because we do go to different places and we do say, “Here's what I figured out on this, and here's what I figured out on that.” I think the annoying thing for parents is it adds another task to our unending tasks of what we're supposed to do with our kids. But I think the benefit is you get this richer understanding of who they are and how they're learning, and they get to see what you're doing, and hopefully you model something that's healthy and good and open.

So your approach is more process-oriented than outcome-oriented.

Absolutely, yeah. Because I think when we understand the processes, the outcomes don't become as shocking or jarring or problematic.

In your book you talk about five key civic skills all kids should have. What are they?

Sure. And this is stuff that is like — before your 18-year-old leaves your house. This is not stuff you do with your 6-year-old.

The first one is very simple. Your kids should know how to register to vote, and they should know that they have to do that anytime they move. And the reason that's really important for the people who are leaving your house is because those first few years are just so transient. You might be in a dorm and then you might be in off-campus housing, and then maybe you move in with someone. And so the idea is that you need to change this every time you move. But parents don't think it's their job to teach this. And the reason that I know that is because 18-to-24-year-olds are registered in such lower ratios than every other age group. I think only, like, 20 percent of 18-year-olds are registered by the time of their birthday, when most states have pre-registration.

The second piece is a little bit harder, but I think parents need to be willing to think about and talk to their kids about the differences between primaries and general elections. We have this frenzy that is the presidential election every four years, and that's where our focal point is, but for most of the races, and increasingly across the United States, the competition happens earlier in that primary election, because by the time you get to a general election in a lot of areas, there's more Democrats registered than Republicans and more Republicans registered than Democrats, and so there's not a ton of competition on who's going to take that seat. Instead, it's earlier in that primary process — and we have primary turnout that ranges from like, 9 to 20 percent. People don't do these things. And the reason parents have to talk about this is that schools don't talk about it at all. If they talk about anything, it's a presidential primary.

The third piece is another easy one, which is the notion of federalism. The term is a little bit academic-sounding, but it's simply that state, local and federal governments do different things and have different responsibilities. It's important for us to think about, what does the state do? What does the local government do? Because oftentimes [local government] does quality-of-life decision making. Especially right now, we can see this in terms of: What kind of access to reproductive health care do you have? Are you going to have legalized marijuana in your state or not? What are the gun licensing procedures? A lot of that is state to state. And all the zoning stuff, like: What's your speed limits? Can a liquor store open here? All of that is all local stuff. And so appreciating that there's just so much more than the federal government, which is what gets like nearly all the media oxygen.

Subscribe now

The fourth one is the idea that before your kids leave your home, it is nice for them to have read the Constitution at least once. And the reason for that is it's like the rule book. It's the charter of government. And I think sometimes we have this notion that the government is just this amorphous thing. It's like pulling strings and we don't really know what's happening. The Constitution lays out a lot of basic stuff. It's not that long either. It's like 35 pages if you print it out in like 9.5 by 11 paper.

And the very last skill is kind of built into everything else. But, as a college professor, it's something that I truly would appreciate if parents could do a little more of. We need to practice having hard conversations with our kids, or ones where either we are made uncomfortable or they are made uncomfortable. The reason that that's important to me is when I get my college students, they are mostly pre-formed in a lot of ways, and so this skill development is very hard to tinker with. But they need to be okay with discomfort, and they need to be okay with the idea that other people might be uncomfortable with what they say.

It’s not that we should train them to be rude. It's that we should train them to understand that we have to talk about hard things that are difficult and that people don't share the same perspective on. Because if we are unwilling to talk about these things, we get one of two outcomes. The first is that only extremists who are convinced that they are right, and who will yell louder than anyone else, get to dominate the conversation. The second is that we just don't move forward because we're unwilling to intentionally put our focus on it.

I think about it like a medical emergency. If you ever had a medical emergency, you'd be like, “I need to talk to a few people about this. I need to figure this out.” It feels uncomfortable to confront the realities, but let's see what we can do to make this better. And I think we're in a bit of a civic emergency, where people are really mad about a lot of things. Politics doesn't feel very good. It's not functioning terribly well for a lot of people. We need to talk about it, versus think someone else is going to do it. And so parents need to really model that behavior, because it's hard to do it elsewhere.

I totally agree with you. In general, being comfortable with our kids’ discomfort – encouraging their discomfort and encouraging them to work through difficult things — is just so important. Is there anything that we haven't talked about that you really want to add?

There is one more thing. I'm hearing a lot of people say, “I don't know enough, so I don't want to be the person who [has these conversations].” We may not know enough, but we need to show that we're capable of learning more, and we need to show kids that — Guess what? You're never going to know everything. Our kids don't need us to be government trivia experts. They need us to be willing to take this on. They need us to be able to learn a little bit more, able to have a conversation. And so the idea of “Not me, I don't know enough” — I don't think that's a worthwhile thing to sit with. I think it's something to get over.

Leave a comment

Buy my book!

Given that I am putting all of my vacation expenses on my credit card, it feels particularly apt for me to be running an interview today with financial expert Stacy Francis, the founder of Savvy Ladies, a nonprofit that helps women of varied backgrounds identify financial goals and make proactive financial choices.

I was introduced to Stacy and Savvy Ladies through reporting I’m doing for a story for New York magazine (more on that soon!). I realized I really wanted to interview her about the financial trends and issues she observes working with women and mothers and hear her top financial tips for women (especially moms). Among other things, she says, many married women aren’t privy to the details of their household finances, which can cause problems down the line. Here’s what you need to know.

Subscribe now

Stacy, can you start by telling us what inspired you to start Savvy Ladies, and tell us a bit about your background?

Savvy Ladies was inspired by my grandmother, who found herself in a really unfortunate position. She was in a relationship where there was both domestic violence and financial abuse. In 98 percent of situations where there is some type of physical abuse, financial abuse is part of it. It’s another way for the abuser to control.

For her, leaving wasn’t an option. And that was something that I never really understood. But as I have continued to do this work, talking to more women, it became very clear to me that it’s an uphill battle. Leaving is beyond difficult, and what we can do is to try and help all women with financial agency and financial knowledge so that they can protect themselves from these types of situations and relationships. My grandmother ended up passing away — he promised that he had stopped hitting her, and that was not the case. He pushed her down the steps, and it wasn’t just one set of steps. It was like a very long two sets of steps. And I said to say goodbye to her in the hospital.

It made me phenomenally angry with him, and it’s what drove me into this work. I never, ever, in a million years thought that I would become a financial advisor, let alone start a nonprofit. But when you have something happen in your life — someone that you love so dearly, and you lose them — you think there could have been a way to be able to support them. And it drives you to to make things better for other people, so that they — whatever age, whether they’re 18 and starting their life, or they’re looking towards retirement — have the tools so that they don’t find themselves boxed into corners.

Share

Wow, I didn’t know the whole story there. That’s awful. Can you tell me about some of the resources that Savvy Ladies provides? I know you have a free helpline — can you talk more about that? What are some of the common themes you see in the questions you get from women?

We always say, “All roads lead to the helpline,” because the helpline is so powerful and so special. We have over 300 volunteers with all different backgrounds — certified financial planners, debt experts, money coaches, accountants, certified divorce financial planners. We are able to answer almost any question that a woman might have, and she can work however works best for her. Maybe she prefers a phone call, maybe she prefers a Zoom, or maybe she prefers an email, and she gets to work one-on-one with this expert, free of charge. It’s magical.

In addition, we have 250 financial literacy courses on any financial topic you could ever imagine. And then we also have live events and series throughout the year that women can attend with well-known speakers. Really, what we’re trying to do is give women a hug and surround them with all these wonderful ways to engage that works for them on their timeframe and when they have availability to give them the financial knowledge that they need. And we don’t income test. This is for all women, wherever you are in your journey.

Our fastest growing demographic is younger women, aged 18 to 27, and it just makes my heart so happy, because they are setting themselves up and setting their lives up to really make good decisions to have a financially secure life. [The younger woman] has certain questions like, “I’m just getting a job. Do I pay off my student loans? Do I put enough money in the my 401K, to get a match? How do I do that?” And then there might be, “I’m looking to get married. What should I be doing, and how do I prepare? How do I have a conversation with my partner? Do I get a prenup? How do I balance saving for retirement and saving for college for my kids? How do I start a business?”

Unfortunately, about 20 percent of all the women coming to us are dealing with some really difficult financial changes with divorce. They might ask, “What can I be doing to make sure that I’m I’m protected and I’m making good decisions?”

There is a journey that we all have, and our goal is to always be that place to come back to — a safe place to support women with whatever financial questions they have and wherever they are in their financial journey.

Subscribe now

I recently went to a Savvy Ladies event, as you know, and one the things that I learned was that many married women and mothers who are not managing their family’s money or even really that knowledgeable about what’s going on. Why is it important for women to know what’s going on? What are some of the conversations that they should be having with their spouses?

This is one of the most prevalent things. That’s actually why I’m so excited that our fastest growing population are younger women, because we try to get them before they get married, otherwise we lose them.

Women who are not actively involved in the finances or knowledgeable about the finances really put themselves and, actually, their entire family at financial risk. Even if you have a “happily ever after” with your partner and you don’t have a split or a divorce, 80 percent of all women will end up on their own, making their own financial decisions alone, and that’s because we outlive our partners. We always think about that happening in our 60s, 70s, and 80s, but many women lose their partners earlier. Then you are taking care of children, and you’re now trying to manage the finances. You usually have no clue what amount of money you actually even have, let alone what the household expenses are.

It’s so important for many reasons to be involved, and also have agency over your money. And it’s not just if your marriage ends or your partner becomes disabled or passes away. It’s also to protect you. So that if, God forbid, you need to be the one to step into that role, and if, God forbid, that relationship does go south, you are able to leave. The number one reason why women stay in relationships is because of money. And it’s not because they’re greedy. It’s “Am I going to be okay? Are my kids going to be okay?” These are just some of hundreds of reasons of why women need to be involved with finances and have agency over their money.

Leave a comment

What are some good ways for women to start conversations about money with their spouses? I can imagine there are some men who could respond to women’s financial questions with “Why are you asking this? Don’t you trust me?”

Number one, if your spouse is being antagonistic, saying “don’t you trust me,” that is a very big clue that there’s something unhealthy going on in your relationship. That’s just something to put out there.

A great way to address this issue is to have “money dates.” My husband and I did this every month, especially when we were first married and the kids were young. We would go on date nights and we would talk about the finances. One time we might be talking about our spending, like, “Okay, this is our budget for vacations this year, we need to visit my parents, we need to visit your parents.” We would also talk about investing and saving. What was wonderful is that we would have these really open conversations.

Most couples have very different “money DNA.” They have very different backgrounds and ways they spend money. For me, what makes me feel safe is that if I have $1, I try to save $2, and that’s because of my trauma of seeing my grandmother essentially be trapped. Having money actually presents represents physical safety for me. As for my husband, if he has $1, he’ll spend $2. So we each need to understand where we’re coming from.

Now we do don’t do money dates — it’s much more ad hoc, because we’ve been married for 25 years. But it’s fantastic because we’re able to say, “Where are we with that credit card? Where are we at with our savings goals? How much have you put in your 401K, how much have I?” And we now have our system where it’s really easy, but it was built in our early relationship.

And also, Melinda, we did therapy. The first couple of years we actually had a couple’s therapist, because we were at such unbelievable opposite spectrums in terms of money. So for some people, that’s important. We definitely did need that.

Share

There’s still often such a stigma around couples therapy, but it can be so, so helpful, especially early in relationships, to create the good communication habits.

Yeah, I mean, you’re meshing two completely different histories of money and two ways of thinking about money. One of the number one reasons that couples break up is because of money — disagreements and hiding purchases.

Shifting gears slightly: A lot of women take time off when they have kids or do part time work. What kind of financial issues or protections should women consider if they are doing this?

You bring up a great issue, because women are out of the workforce, on average, a decade — caring for either our kids or parents — and how that shows up for us is that our career earnings are drastically lower. Our ability to have resiliency, to get back into the workforce, is much more difficult, and we end up going into retirement with far fewer assets.

So what can you do? Number one, stay involved in the finances. Really important. Know where the money is, know if the budget that you have for your family is sustainable. That is really important and key. The other piece is to keep your toe dipped in, and maybe that’s just making sure that you’re involved with the PTA, or if you have certifications, trying to keep them up — just so that if you need to go back to your career as an R.N. or as an accountant or as a marketing specialist, you’ve got your network and you haven’t let it collect dust and disintegrate. It’s figuring out how can you keep some of those pieces in your life, that mental stimulation and that networking and that community.

Subscribe now

I just want to acknowledge that mothers already feel pressure to do so much — so some readers might feel a bit overwhelmed by this advice, like “Oh no, now I have to keep up with my former career, too?” But it sounds like maybe you’re suggesting little things?

Yes — like read a business book or a networking book. Or if you’re out walking your baby in a stroller, maybe you listen to a podcast. It’s what works for you.

We put so much pressure on ourselves already. You don’t need another pressure. But just keep your toe dipped in — maybe you when you go out for a girlfriends’ night out, you try and stay involved with your previous colleagues. Something like that.

Thanks, that’s helpful. Is there anything else that you would want to emphasize to women that we haven’t talked about?

One of the biggest challenges as women is that we don’t really talk about money. And it’s not that we can’t do this. We are freaking smart. It is not rocket science — but it’s our confidence level, and it’s just because we haven’t had as much experience.

I think back to the first time I got behind the wheel for driver’s ed. I was 15 and I was an awful driver. I really thought I was going to die. But I took the class, and I got better. Now I jump in the car and I don’t even think about it. I am a great driver. So I hope that women give themselves the grace to know that the reason you’re feeling some of these feelings may be a lack of confidence in yourself or not as much familiarity. And it’s just because we haven’t done it. No one would expect you to drive a car if you’ve never sat in that training, right? And so just give yourself grace. Take little bits and start your journey small and that’s all you have to do. It’s kind of like going to the gym. The first time you’re going to the gym, I hope you’re not doing a full hour-long workout on the Peloton. You’re looking at, like, 15 minutes on the Peloton, which would be phenomenal. It’s the same thing with finances.

And I feel like we’re also told we’re not good at it. “Girls aren’t good at math,” all that stuff. Which makes this worse.

There are a lot of messages that I don’t support, but I will tell you that we are just as good. In fact, when you look at the statistics, women actually have higher rates of return on their investment portfolios.

That’s great. I love that statistic. Thank you.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

I knew that it would be an intense movie, but I hadn’t quite anticipated just how painful it would be to watch — and though it’s described as a “dark comedy,” I didn’t find anything particularly funny about it. It aroused so many feelings in me: rage, grief, frustration, empathy, and validation.

Subscribe now

In some ways, the plot of the movie is absurd. It’s highly unlikely for so many things to go wrong in one (privileged white) woman’s life at once. But if you want to show people, in less than two hours, how the world perceives and treats women in difficult circumstances, this is an excellent way to do it. Through the movie’s narrative we very clearly see society’s broad disdain for mothers: If I Had Legs I’d Kick You illustrates the absurd burdens moms are expected to carry in the absence of structural supports and shows us that no matter how much moms do, they will always be criticized for not doing more.

Throughout the film, Linda tries her best to manage way too much — more than any human being could possibly manage emotionally and logistically — and yet no one she encounters seems to care, help or show any empathy. Instead, what she experiences, over and over again, is judgment, blame, and disgust.

Share

In the first scene, we see a close-up of Linda’s face as we hear her daughter talking about her. (One of the things I love about the movie that Byrne looks largely “real” and makeup-free throughout.) Her daughter describes her mother as “stretchable,” an adjective that Linda clearly doesn’t like, probably because it implies weakness. Linda’s husband, on the other hand, is described as “hard.”

The thing is, Linda’s “stretchability” is in fact a strength: It allows Linda to weather the many setbacks and crises she experiences throughout the next two hours. In the very next scene, we see Linda walking down the street holding a pizza box while listening to her daughter’s complaints that she won’t eat pizza with cheese. Then Linda stumbles, dropping the pizza, and when she opens it, the cheese is stuck to the top of the box.

Instead of cursing or crying, Linda pivots, smiles, and says to her daughter, “Oh, you got your wish! No cheese!” This tiny moment feels like a perfect metaphor for modern motherhood: We are socialized to absorb, fix, and reframe every disaster to serve those around us.

Leave a comment

This is not to say that Linda handles everything “perfectly.” I mean, no one could. (As Mary Bronstein, the film’s director, said in an interview with NPR: “That perfect mother that we compare ourselves against — she doesn't exist.”) Linda screams and cries and drinks a lot of wine but she keeps on going and never misses work or her daughter’s appointments — and yet she is repeatedly and obnoxiously criticized for somehow allowing these bad things to happen, not making better choices, and not catering to everyone else’s whims. We have seen it over and over again throughout history: Mothers are held responsible for outcomes they simply cannot control. They get kicked by everyone around them, but live in a world in which they aren’t given any legs with which to kick back.

During a session, Linda’s therapist interrupts her to critique a (smart) decision she made to keep her family safe. In the hospital, her daughter’s doctor (chillingly played by Bronstein) repeatedly criticizes Linda for blaming herself for her daughter’s illness — and then proceeds to openly blame Linda for not magically somehow curing that illness. Linda’s husband, who endlessly complains about his job, does nothing but admonish her for not staying on top of the construction crew hired to fix their ceiling.

And then there’s her male client Stephen, who shows up when Linda is dealing with an obvious emergency and is told he has to wait to see her. Instead of showing any empathy, he scoffs, “This is my time. She’s mine right now. You can’t make me wait.”

This scene illustrates another reality in Linda’s life: the male versus female double standard. To Stephen, the inconvenience of having to wait a few extra minutes clearly outweighs the magnitude of her crises. When Linda has the gall to complain to her husband about how hard it is to manage their daughter, a construction project, and her full-time job all at once, he talks over her to emphasize that actually, his life is much harder because he has to deal with a few difficult people at work. Many women will recognize this conversational sleight of hand: When sharing gets reframed as competition, and a man’s (typically minor) complaints are expected to take precedence.

Share

Watching Linda felt uncomfortably familiar — not because my life resembles hers in plot (though I do have water leaking through my ceiling right now!), but because I recognized the constant dismissiveness, the reflexive guilt, the feeling of being one logistical mishap away from total collapse. And what makes all this especially salient in the movie is that Linda is a therapist: She spends her days helping others deal with crises and manage their emotions, but she is denied the space and opportunity to do the same for herself, even with her own therapist. (Her therapy sessions were so hard for me to watch — I was truly impressed with the cold intensity Conan O’Brien brought to his first dramatic role.)

Our society holds mothers to such impossible standards that they will always, like Linda, be cast as failures. Somehow, we can and should be doing more — even when the rest of the world is undermining us, taking advantage of us, belittling us and gaslighting us. Linda very clearly understands that she is expected to feel guilt and shame: She says to her therapist that “I’m one of those people who’s not supposed to be a mom,” even though it’s unlikely any mother could have handled herself more gracefully. But in her mind — in our minds — an imaginary perfect mother always could.

In the last two words of the film, Linda whispers a promise to her daughter: “I’ll be better.” Yet the bar will always rise just when we’re about to cross it. We are told to believe that we can do better, we should be better — but no matter what we do, it will never be enough. I suspect many mothers walk through their days carrying that same quiet promise: I’ll be better. I sometimes wonder what might happen if, instead, we asked whether the world should be better to us.

Share

Leave a comment

Still, I know that those of you who are considering divorce or are even just a bit divorce-curious might like to know how we talked to our kids and what happened next. There’s certainly no “one right way” to do it, but if it’s useful to you, then here it is: the story of how we figured out what to say, what we said, and how it all went down. I’m also including a bunch of resources at the end for those who want to learn more.

Share

Read more