You Should Get Out More
Three reasons why having fun without your kids is good for them, too.
A quick reminder that I’m running a flash sale for Father’s Day through Sunday! I have given three (!) talks this week about my experience writing this newsletter, and I just want to say: Your support is everything. It’s a really hard time right now for journalists — so many publications folding and layoffs happening — and it means so much to know that I still have readers who appreciate what I do. Thank you all.
Last weekend, I shared on social media that while my husband was out of town, I’d hired a babysitter so that I could go out with friends and sing karaoke. (At the last minute, karaoke was — heartbreakingly — canceled. I met up with a friend for dinner anyway.) The night before, I’d hired a different babysitter to catch up with different friends.
Seeing my tweet, some people reached out to me offline to ask: Wait, you book babysitters to go out to see your friends? The implication, I sensed, was that occasional date nights were maybe worthy of logistical planning, but nights out with friends weren’t.
Today I’d like to rid you of this notion. It’s crucial to spend time away from your kids and do things *just for yourself*. Even, yes, if it requires hiring a babysitter.
Deep down we all know that it’s good to do things for ourselves. The problem is, we believe these needs are not worth meeting if they require more than a bit of effort. We think, Well yeah, sure, I’d love to go to a movie with my best friend, but I could only make that happen if I ask my mom to look after the kids, and that’s too much to ask of both my mom and the kids.
In making these decisions, we’re basically saying: I’m not worth that much. Or, perhaps, My own pleasure is not worth making my kids a little sad. This may feel especially true when our partners are away. As one friend put it, “I feel like it’s my duty to be home with them while he’s gone.”
My duty. Those two leaden words. They’re such a sad distillation of our culture, which holds mothers accountable for everything that has to do with our kids. When psychologists at the University of British Columbia interviewed mothers as part of a small landmark study, they found that all of the moms felt “an unrelenting and total sense of responsibility for the health, welfare, and development of their children.”
We believe our kids always have to come first, and therefore that doing something for ourselves is a moral failing. We’re expected to thoroughly and joyfully embrace motherhood while sacrificing ourselves to its demands.
As the poet Adrienne Rich wrote in her book Of Woman Born, the institution of motherhood involves an “invisible violence” that is rife with “guilt, the powerless responsibility for human lives, the judgments and condemnations, the fear of her own power, the guilt, the guilt, the guilt.”
No wonder we never leave the house.
But here’s the thing: There’s an assumption embedded in these beliefs that is fundamentally wrong. That assumption is that our children fare best when we sacrifice our time and well-being for them.
In fact, if we look at the research, we can find many reasons why this is patently false — why booking a babysitter and going to karaoke actually helps our kids, rather than harms them. If we want to be good parents, and we want our kids to thrive, then taking time for ourselves — even if it requires an annoying amount of logistical planning and causes our kids sadness in the moment — is not something we should sacrifice. Or feel guilty about.
Not convinced? Here are three science-backed reasons why kids benefit from our nights out and pursuits of joy.