Wanting What's Best — But for Whom?

How to make parenting decisions that will help all kids — not just your kids.

I’m so excited to be running a Q&A today with author Sarah W. Jaffe, whose book Wanting What’s Best: Parenting, Privilege and Building a Just World comes out today (Happy Pub Day, Sarah!). This is a book that will really make you think about the ramifications of your parenting choices. The seemingly small decisions we make as parents on behalf of our kids can have ripple effects, and sometimes, their broader impacts can make things harder for other people’s kids (and especially for families who already have less than we do). Wanting What’s Best will help you think through what you can do to make the world a better place not just for your children, but for all children. I highly recommend it.

I asked Sarah about her inspiration for the book, the broader issues we should keep in mind as we make parenting decisions, and the “mistakes” we sometimes inadvertently make when we get involved in advocacy.

Sarah, what inspired you to write Wanting What's Best? 

From 2013-2020, I worked as an attorney for kids in foster care. In that job, I saw kids who really had nothing—most of my job was spent advocating for these kids to get such basic things, like the ability to attend the school they’d gone to before they entered foster care, or to have visits with their siblings.

Then, I had my daughter in 2017, and started meeting other new parents who were demographically similar to me: college-educated, upper-middle class, many of them White. I was struck by the contrast between the lives of the foster kids and the kids in my local “2017 baby” group, but also by the amount of anxiety that parents in my peer group had about their kid’s well-being, and the energy we all seemed to put into making sure that our already-advantaged kids were even more advantaged. I certainly wasn’t immune to any of this — like many new parents, I constantly had the feeling like maybe I was screwing everything up — but I also had a feeling of unease. It felt disturbing to be drawn into wondering whether Babyganics cleaning spray was organic enough (an actual topic of conversation at one of my parent meetups) in my social life, while dealing with kids who were literally living on the street in my work life.

The Varsity Blues scandal only increased my desire to look for other people who were rejecting the hyper-intense parenting culture that seems pervasive in my demographic. That scandal felt like a clear indictment of a kind of parenting that’s all about just getting more for your kid, and a clear illustration of the dark places that path can ultimately lead.

I wanted to figure out if there was maybe another way of being a “good parent” that wasn’t just about getting more, or getting “the best,” for my own kid. I’m so grateful to have talked to dozens of people in the writing of this book who have offered a different way forward. I think it benefits parents, kids, and society at large when parents reject a mindset of scarcity and individualism, but it’s definitely not yet the cultural norm in my demographic to think that way.  

What are some of the ways privileged parents inadvertently contribute to inequalities? What are some examples of choices we make that have ramifications we didn't intend — but that we should definitely be aware of?

Something that comes very naturally to privileged parents—and, again, I’m certainly not immune to this tendency—is demanding disproportionate time and energy when things don’t work our way. I give an example in the book: In the fall of 2020, my then-3-year-old was going to a childcare program that was in a park, but they didn’t have a license to operate without having a physical facility. The school was temporarily shut down by a city agency until it sorted out the paperwork. Instantly, the parents had an email chain where they were coordinating, figuring out who was a lawyer, who knows someone at city hall, what time was the mayor’s radio show so we could call in, flooding the local representative’s mailbox with messages…etc. This was all happening during the early days of COVID, so, you know, there were some other rather pressing things going on in New York City that the mayor’s office might have needed to deal with.

There are times you need to go to the mat for your kid, and that’s particularly true for parents whose kids have IEPs, medical needs, who are facing discrimination — but school principals, mayors, or anyone else who we might be trying to get to pay attention to our problems have limited time and energy. The sociologist Jessica Calarco writes about how the most privileged parents tend to suck up time and attention, particularly in the school environment. I think all of us with power could stand to be more cognizant of that fact. Part of “moving through the world with privilege” as Megan Hester put it, “is that you think that what you want is what everyone else wants.” The parents I talked to for this book take a bigger picture approach to advocacy, and ask not just “will this help my kid” but “will help improve conditions for all kids, including those who might not have advocates with as much time and knowledge of navigating these systems?”

Another thing that privilege allows you to do is to figure out a way that you can make the system work for you (and your family), rather than trying fight for systems that work for everyone. If we can get our kid into their dream private college, we have very little incentive to demand that our states stop slashing the budgets of state colleges (as they’ve been doing since 2008). If our school can fill in funding gaps with parent fundraisers to continue to offer music class or whatever else, we don’t see the harm that budget cuts are doing to schools that can’t rely on PTAs to fill in that gap. The parents whose stories are featured in the book are rejecting the idea of just getting a “workaround” for their family, and are looking at the bigger picture and fighting for systems that benefit their whole community. Heather McGhee’s book The Sum of Us helped me understand that a lot of the reason that we don’t have these strong systems that benefit us all — childcare, schools, higher education — is because of White supremacy. The U.S. has a long history of rejecting social programs that would benefit people of all races because people in power had a “zero sum” mindset, where any progress for people of color comes at the expense of White people. Her work shows just how stunningly wrong that is, and how much it has cost us as a society.

Speaking of schools, what are some of your key pieces of advice for parents who may be considering school or daycare options for their children? What are some issues and characteristics we should consider or ask about that we often overlook or forget?

The daycare question is a hard one, and becoming more so with each passing day as daycare centers are closing left and right. I just saw a Facebook post from a woman in Seattle who got on several daycare waitlists one week after she found out she was pregnant back in November; she’s due in August and is still something like 65th on every list. She was asking in her post about whether it would be inappropriate for her to bring cookies to the director of the daycares where she’s languishing on the waiting list. Well, yes, you shouldn’t try to jump the line with cookies, but I have so much sympathy for the terrible situation she and so many parents across the country are in when it comes to finding a daycare at all, much less a daycare that treats their workforce well. I’m increasingly convinced, given that the federal government is clearly not about to pass some comprehensive subsidized daycare program (though they still should!) is that the way forward is for more municipalities to follow the model of the amazing parents and other activists in Portland, Oregon who passed a ballot initiative to have subsidized high-quality daycare for all families, where teacher salaries start at $18/hour.

In terms of schools, a lot of that chapter is focused on segregation: Segregation is alive and well, despite having been outlawed for 68 years. There are huge race and class disparities between schools often within a few blocks or miles of each other. And we’re just kidding ourselves if we think that kids at both sets of schools aren’t aware of those disparities, and learning powerful messages about their place in the world. The grassroots organization Integrated Schools, particularly their podcast, has been crucial in helping me, as a White parent, confront the reality of segregation as a modern-day social ill, not as some bygone chapter of history that ended with Brown v. Board of Education and Ruby Bridges. Their work is a really important part of the chapter. The on schools, I hope, is an exciting starting point for parents who want all kids to attend strong, integrated, well-funded schools that serves all families rather than accepting that there’s a tiered system, and just trying to get our kids into the top tier.  

You also discuss issues surrounding how parents pay and manage nannies. Many parents pay nannies "under the table" and assume that's what's best for everyone. Can you walk me through the various reasons you should absolutely be paying nannies on the books? And can you tell me a bit about why we should be wary of considering nannies (or referring to them as) "part of the family"? 

There are, I think three main reasons to pay on the books: First, is just the legality. You can be hit with a serious fine if you are found out. COVID starkly illustrated another reason: If you were paying your nanny on the books when COVID first started and many people were not having their nannies come in, they could qualify for unemployment payments. Parents who were paying under the table had to either pay for childcare they weren’t using or leave their nannies high and dry. Finally, there’s the more amorphous reason: When compensation for care work is off the books and invisible, it contributes to its devaluation. It also makes it impossible for domestic workers to retire; off the books work is literally invisible to the social security administration.

The “part of the family” thing is tricky. Paying someone to care for your child can feel really uncomfortable, and the “part of the family” line can be a way of dealing with that discomfort. One of the nannies I interviewed said that she definitely had felt like part of her employer’s family but that that has to “happen organically” and that “there are going to be some families that treat you as part of the family to take advantage of you.” That’s a sentiment that I’ve seen in the writing of some great writers who discuss workplace culture; Alison Green of Ask a Manager and Anne Helen Petersen have both written about how workplaces that say you’re “part of the family” tend to have a problem with boundaries and appropriate compensation. So it’s just a phrase that carries a lot of baggage, and can allow you to ignore the uncomfortable fact at the heart of being a domestic employer: Your home is someone’s work place, and you have obligations as an employer. I like the framing that Tatiana Bejar from the advocacy organization Hand In Hand shared with me in an interview — that we need to think about the way we treat domestic employees as an expression of our feminism and our political values.

You interviewed a lot of parents who are also activists in this book. What did you learn about what effective activism looks like? You also talk about the "darker side" of activism. What are some things that privileged parents should keep in mind or avoid when it comes to fighting for causes they care about?

Making change, even on the local level, takes serious commitment and time. The parents in Evanston, Illinois, who moved their school to a “one fund” model in which all PTA money is shared equitably across the district, or the parents in Portland who passed a ballot initiative for universal childcare, put in so many hours without knowing if those hours were ever going to pay off. They stood at tables and gathered signatures, or met with the dozens of schools in their district. The parents in Portland faced a lawsuit; the parents in Evanston faced various accusations about their motives. It took focused, sustained effort, and much of it not glamourous. But they did it, and their communities are the better for their efforts. I think that local activism is not just an antidote to despair — it’s really the only one that consistently works. And we all need some antidotes to despair particularly since 2020, and maybe even more particularly this month.  

On the other hand, there’s a few different ways that activism can go wrong. First, there’s some truly ridiculous movements afoot currently; the fact that school board meetings are being hijacked by White parents who are deeply opposed to their children learning about racism in this country is really infuriating, but, frankly, those people aren’t going to be reading this book.

I think the more relevant concern for parents reading this book is to be wary of anything that makes you feel like a savior. Growing up as a privileged kid who cared about social justice, I was given the message repeatedly that I could “save the world” and “do anything.” And who doesn’t want to save the day? There’s a lot of glory in that. But that framing doesn’t encourage you to understand the work that’s already being done, to listen to the people most affected by the problem you’re trying to solve, and to take direction from them, to move money and other resources to them without needing credit. JPB Gerald, who I interviewed for this book and who has his own book coming out, talks about the “altruistic shield” as a psychological mechanism that prevents us from hearing any criticisms if our intentions are altruistic. That’s a dynamic that gets played out again and again. So I hope that readers of this book are inspired to become local activists, but also thoughtful activists.

My Well newsletter last week answered common questions about fentanyl: What is it? Why is it so dangerous? How are people getting exposed? What can you do to protect your loved ones, including your kids? I know you don’t need another depressing topic in your life, but in this case, knowledge is power.

Then, here in this newsletter, I shared details about the conversation I had with my tween about fentanyl. If you missed it, check it out here.

Thanks for all your Covid well wishes. My kids and husband have recovered, and so far, I haven’t gotten it. We’re feeling very fortunate as everyone’s infections were quite mild.