The first full week of summer for my kids this year revealed just how fragile our schedule — and really, the whole precarious choreography of modern parenting — actually is. And I’m tired.
Before I go on, I want to first acknowledge a few things. I do work that I love and feels meaningful. My partner is employed, engaged, a wonderful father, and supportive in ways that matter every single day. These things alone put me in an echelon of #lifegoals that I fully understand many aren’t afforded.
But that’s also what makes this so striking. Even with all of that, the structure of parenting in today’s society feels like it’s constantly threatening to collapse under its own weight.
The conundrum of modern parenting is this: Regardless of your baseline, privilege or precarity, modern parenting is incredibly hard in very similar ways. The hallmarks include an unrelenting mental load, working hours that don’t align with school, camp or child care schedules, and a cultural expectation to be simultaneously available, informed, emotionally present and oftentimes family cruise director.
And summer. Well, summer amplifies all of it.
Camps that run from 8:15 a.m. to 12:10 p.m. or 9 a.m. to 2 p.m.? Who exactly are those for? Not full-time working parents. Not even part-time working ones, really. The number of shared spreadsheets I’ve seen just to coordinate child care, camp drop-offs, enrichment activities and coverage is something straight out of a Fortune 100 logistics war room. Except this is your life. And the return is mainly whether your child’s week resembles the right mix of meaning and boredom-induced creativity and not screen-induced chaos.
Most of the planning and coordination typically falls to one parent in the family, the “COO of Family Operations.” The spreadsheet champion, finder of backup babysitters, coordinator of play dates and social calendars because your kids aren’t old enough to have access to a device to text and hardly anyone has a landline anymore. The one with the invisible to-do list running silently in the background 24/7.
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It didn’t used to be this way. Or at least, not this specific version of “this way.” The second half of the 20th century gave rise to the social acceptance and possibility of dual-income families, leading to more financially thriving family units and a generation of latchkey kids who roamed the streets and had no access to the internet because it didn’t exist yet. But now, in the first half of the 21st century, the institutionalization of dual-income (and often multi-income) households as a requirement to survive is firmly cemented in the ethos of modern parenting. The problem is that none of the systems that make thriving possible have been institutionalized along with it.
School schedules still reflect an era of single-income families and stay-at-home parents. Quality child care remains prohibitively expensive. Parental leave is limited, if available at all. Summer programs assume a parent or trusted guardian is floating nearby with a flexible schedule and an open wallet. None of the scaffolding was redesigned for a world in which both parents are working full time and often still can’t afford to live within a reasonable commute to work.
There’s also the myth of flexibility. Yes, some work remotely or have hybrid schedules. But “remote” doesn’t mean “available to be child care.” You can’t be mentally present for your job and physically present for your child and emotionally present for yourself at the same time. Something always gives. Usually that’s sleep. Sometimes, it’s sanity.
We like to say parenting is a full-time job, but let’s be honest. Modern parenting is full-time plus with the reward of raising people who are hopefully prepared to navigate an increasingly complex, uncertain world where more than half of the jobs that exist today won’t exist by the time they graduate college, and nobody knows what the new ones will look like. Moore’s Law has accelerated not just our technology, it’s collapsed the half-life of parenting strategies.
And instead of support from those who have navigated these waters before with their own era-appropriate struggles, we simply hear, “This is what you signed up for.” To be honest, I’m not sure that’s entirely true. I signed up to love my kids and help them grow into good people. I did not sign up to explain active shooter drills in kindergarten or to be on call year-round as family cruise director while working full-time.
The fragility of modern parenting that so jarringly exploded for me last week is not a singular event. It’s part of an ongoing, accelerating unraveling of a system that hasn’t evolved with the times. But fragility isn’t failure, it’s a signal. Maybe, if enough of us do this important work out loud instead of silently, we can move beyond acknowledging the brokenness and toward the messy but necessary work of continuously evolving to something better, together.
Annie Tsai is chief operating officer at Interact (tryinteract.com), early stage investor and advisor with The House Fund (thehouse.fund), and a member of the San Mateo County Housing and Community Development Committee. Find Annie on Twitter @meannie.
(9) comments
“The radical of one century is the conservative of the next. The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopts them.” [Mark Twain]
"Old School" is the name we give Progressives that got stuck in a certain time and stopped learning and adapting. There are plenty of examples throughout history.
"Old School" conservatives did not like the automobile because of the noise and the smell and the danger for horses and pedestrians, affluent progressives pushed the novelty.
"Old School" conservatives called on-street parkers "squatters" and progressives turned it into one of the largest government subsidies for people with too many cars.
Now it's "old school" people that keep pushing the car-centric agenda without even understanding that part of history or how they are being scammed.
The other day I came across a semi-satirical article about the generational wars between Boomers, Millennials and Generation Z. The article however was focusing on the fact that Generation X is almost forgotten in that discussion. And the reason the author was giving was that no one wants to mess with Generation X because they are too feral and you don't want to poke the bear. These guys were raised by hippies and druggies and were basically feral and living in the wild. This is the generation where both parents had to bring in money to make ends meet. They left in the morning for school and weren't let back into the house before dinner. This is the generation that was roaming the streets on Schwinn bicycles and enjoying their freedom, they went everywhere within a 5 mile radius. To this very day the one percent of Americans that are commuting to work on bicycles can be traced to these from the late boomers and early Generation X.
But the conservative media invented the "It's 10 PM. Do you know where your children are?" and followed up with the "Stranger Danger" panic stories. After that the "right to self-transportation", freedom and self-esteem was stripped off these kids. They became victims of the "parent taxi" - arguably the most polluted place a child spend regular time at.
And since cities never adapted by providing safe-routes-to-school and around town, both parents need a car because start and end times never sync with work schedules. Kids aren't allowed to develop the freedom and self-esteem that only self-transportation can provide.
So yes, the fact that cities are build for cars is very important to this topic. It explains very well how progressives turned parents into helicopter parents, messed up our cities and replaced bicycle freedom with obesity, asthma, and depression. But now these progressives call themselves "Old-School".
Raising kids has always been challenging. This area and this age are not any different from the olden days. What has changed is parent daily involvement in their children's activities. For some reasons they must believe that their kids need camps, special activities and continued challenging courses to make them better prepared for life. As Michelle said, leave them alone, take their smartphones away, and let them explore. To blame vehicle proliferation for keeping the kids safely inside is beyond preposterous. We have been developing a generation of children that has never seen actual wildlife, does not know where milk comes from, is afraid of spiders and comes running home screaming when a stranger walks by. These parents are feathering their own nests with unintended consequences and I feel for them.
Evening. I can with confidence say that my kids know and can do all of the things you reference that “a generation of kids do not know” and yet at the same time, still feels real. I received dozens of texts about today’s column and hundreds of comments online in ardent agreement.
One thing is for certain - if you are not in it right now, you most likely not understand it. I do not fault anyone for this of course, but I do ask that you take the time to listen and perhaps not superimpose your expectations based on your generational experience on what so obviously is being felt by so many. Because it is very, very real.
Hi Annie - I am old school and have 7 grandchildren, all quite athletic and intelligent. My observation is that peer pressure, combined with fear concocted by the news media, are much to blame for the alarming trends that you so perfectly articulated. I realize that all generations have unique challenges and that pushing back is fruitless. Nonetheless, I cannot be alone in remarking that parents need to take more control over raising their children instead of sports coaches, the camp industry, and the education conglomerate dictating how our youth should be prepared for their future. Do many parents feel pressured to transferring their responsibilities to these external forces "to keep up with the Joneses?"
It is both interestingly and unfortunately much deeper than that.
I noted in the piece that dual /multi income generation has now become institutionalized as a requirement to survive in the first half of the 21st century. This is multi-layered and is more than just making rent or affording the cost of living. High quality healthcare, social security, and 401k's are all tied to employment. So if you don't work (including entrepreneurship, which often takes longer hours than standard full time employment), you are at a significant long term disadvantage that hits you for your last 20 or sometimes 30 years of life. The rate of divorce is still in the 50% range, and women in particular who do not work during their prime earning years of 21-40 are almost never able to "catch up" to the earning potential for women who stayed in the workforce, compounding the impact of not contributing to retirement accounts in the early years. Unless healthcare and retirement are unwound from employment, there are few options but to work.
As well, given that women are 70% more likely than men to have their jobs disappear due to artificial intelligence and automation because in part due to that many women from prior generations entered the workforce after raising kids and largely remained in tactical and operational roles, staying in the workforce during the prime earning and growing years to develop into more strategic roles which have a lower probability of going away is critically important.
So daycare in the early years is not a choice - it is, very simply, a requirement. One that many mothers I know would love to choose otherwise but the cards are so stacked against alternative options that it's not worth the risk of paying for that choice for the rest of one's life.
Yes, raising kids in our area is increasingly challenging.
One other reason is the fact that parents are required to shuttle their kids to various locations via car. Gone are the days when it was safe to let the kids walk or bike a mile or two to school or after school activities or let kids play in neighborhood streets. This isn't due to stranger danger; it is because we have designed our streets to allow drivers to travel as quickly as possible between two points and park as close as possible to their destination. The cost is safety for those who would like to walk or bike, perhaps because they cannot afford a car or are too young to drive. Yes, it may mean that parents can drive their kids a few seconds more quickly, but in the process we are chaining parents and kids to their autos.
right on target. I think the private auto is a social engineering problem, not a traffic engineering problem. should be handled like smoking - make it socially unacceptable.
the whole corruption around car infrastructure is even worse than people understand. Car infrastructure just appears. No advocacy groups needed, no collection of signatures, no long meetings, no arguing between council members, never any money issues, no grants needed. car infrastructure - good and bad - just shows up. Sidewalks have been outsourced to residents - who might not care. Public transit is run by politicians and staff which never use public transit themselves. Bike infrastructure - a known tool to support physical health, mental health, pollution, GHG emissions, the wallet and more -,is still always a battle.
Either something is seriously wrong with San Mateo Democrats. No one who wants to be good, would be that bad. Or in other words, you would have to pay me to be that incompetent.
Annie, you ask: "Camps that run from 8:15 a.m. to 12:10 p.m. or 9 a.m. to 2 p.m.? Who exactly are those for?" The answer: for the KIDS! While I agree that there need to be more summer child care options for full time working parents and these summer camps help fill the gaps, it is not necessarily best for kids to go to "Tennis Camp" all summer for 8-10 hours a day. I personally would not have wanted my young kids to attend school or camp from 8-6 to accommodate parents who need child care. These camps are fun enrichment options for kids to try a new sport or activity, work on skills in a sport they already do or get exercise and play outside with friends.
In addition there is the issue of staffing. Most day camp "counselors" are high school students who have their own activities. My son for example, is a coach at a flag football camp that runs 8:30-12. He then has his own football summer practice that starts at 2:00 or 3:00 p.m. It would be difficult to find the staff to run a camp all day until 6:00 p.m.
As a Gen Xer I also think we need a cultural change, which you alluded to. Kids don't need to be scheduled all day in the summer. After a certain age (younger than most modern parents think) they don't need adults watching them all day. The only good thing to come of the Covid nightmare was in the summer of 2020 when camps and sports were shut down in the Bay Area. My son was 11 and he and his friends had an old-school 1980s summer running feral in the neighborhood, riding bikes, exploring, and getting kicked off closed playgrounds by local "Karens" who threatened to call the police (who didn't care, thanks Burlingame PD!) If more parents opted out of the camp racket, kids could just hang out together in the summer like we used to do.
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