Scientists begin research on a newly documented pediatric medical condition. Ailment is triggered by environmental shift — namely to the parent’s bed in the early morning hours.
Observable symptoms:
Child exhibits gravitational pull towards parent’s body, and then seems to spontaneously generate at least 8 additional elbows and knees which are used as unconscious weapons of assault.
While not thought to cause permanent damage to the child, there are strong early indicators that the resulting poor night’s sleep is indeed contagious to adults.
- But really, there’s a market for this.
- The Mysterious Origins of the Phrase ‘The Whole Nine Yards.’ Spoiler: an unsatisfying ending.
- My daily abbreviation count has increased exponentially since being back at work: “sg,” “ty,” “iirc,” “wrt,” “afaik,” “lmk,” “wdyt,” & on & on… I joked with a colleague that my pings were becoming almost unintelligible unless you were fluent in corp-speak. He sent me this.
- I am so glad to know I’m not the only one who has felt this:
Dave and I caught up with a couple of old friends this weekend. As we recounted our most salient experiences during the pandemic, my friend confessed she and her husband were really aggravating each other in the beginning. Thrust as many of us were into suddenly being around our significant others non-stop, they each cited a number of pet peeves that became unavoidably omnipresent: she left water cups on every surface of the house, his typing was unforgivably loud.
As they realized their communication was reduced to not much beyond nagging and irritating each other, they came up with an idea: they would jointly blame Chad, their new imaginary roommate who was the real culprit of all of these recurring offenses. It wasn’t her, but Chad who couldn’t keep track of just 1 water cup. And they’d be fine to work in close proximity if not for Chad’s obnoxiously loud typing habits. Suddenly they were on the same page — and laughing about it.
Not only is this brilliant marital advice, but it’s also a bit of a relief. After all, I have long felt guilty that I have a large box of maternity clothes — which I no longer wear or need — taking up valuable floor space in our bedroom, but it turns out it was Chad’s fault all along.
With parenting, and with overtly limited time resources these days, I think a lot about the concept of choosing my battles. Apart from basic functions like a consistent bedtime and good nutrition, and more to the point: when should I be pushing my kids towards their “potential,” and when should I recognize that they are who they are — innately, and already — and to materially push against that is to squander my time with them? All of this in the context of wanting to give my children the strongest springboard from which they can launch their life’s trajectory and find fulfillment and happiness relative to their individual goals… suffice it to say, the stakes feel high.
There is a Freakonomics episode called “The Economist’s Guide to Parenting: 10 Years Later.” It’s a follow up to an interview of — you guessed it — economists who weighed in with their approaches to parenting 10 years prior. The podcast culminates in a nature and nurture discussion:
“How powerful are the hereditary forces of nature vs the many factors that constitute nurture? And how do nature & nurture blend in a given person? It’s plainly not a simple thing to sort out. Just think about schooling: the older a kid gets, the more time they spend outside the home, with their peers. There’s some evidence that peer influence can be very powerful. That said, parents are the ones who choose the school they attend and – to a lesser degree – what kind of peers their kids will spend time with.”
I think about my experiences with my own siblings — the people I have the longest-standing observational history with. (NB: another fascinating read about the only people who know you “from cradle to grave”: The Sibling Effect by Jeffrey Kluger.) I look back at childhood memories and consistently think, “isn’t it funny; so-and-so has always been that way,” and “they still are.”
One of my brothers, for instance, has always been curious, even-keeled, and self-assured. He was the kid who taught himself Cat’s Cradle, and complex Origami designs, and Rubik’s Cube algorithms until he qualified to compete at the World Championship (yes, there is such a thing). He had his strong springboard into adulthood as a University of Michigan graduate, but it took him several years to figure out what he actually wanted to pursue after graduation nevertheless. In those years, he was guided by his curiosity, pursued a handful of different passions, and evinced a great deal of patience with himself until he broke into the computer programming world and kicked off his (now successful) career. I have to wonder how my parents – watching their intelligent, talented, college-educated son move home and wait tables at Outback Steakhouse for an extended period – balanced their desire to force him to channel his untapped potential with recognition of his lifelong style of methodical pursuit of his interests that cannot be rushed.
His story is only one of the five of us, but it gives me the sense that the macro view of how each of us turned out was almost a foregone conclusion, albeit perhaps in slightly different settings.
As one of the economists resolves: “the main punchline of this work is, yes, that nurture is greatly overrated.” Then again, another reflects, “who cares? You do the best you got with what you got. So if it’s 80% nature, it still leaves me with 20%. If it’s 20% nature, it leaves me with 80%. Either way, I want to get that part of the puzzle right.”
I suspect that, when the boys are grown, I will look back on these childhood years, see their behavioral and personality trends, and recognize how futile some of the battles I fought were in light of that. For better or worse, however, this suspicion is not markedly useful in the day-to-day moments when I debate digging in or letting go of a contentious topic.
Earlier this week, a colleague of mine shared an observation from his grandmother. She told him: “you will spend more time with your children as your friends than you will raising them.” This time of life with such small children feels high stakes, but it is limited. When I picture my future self sitting around the dinner table with my adult sons and simply enjoying their company, I do admit it takes a little bit of the pressure off of today.
4 boys, 4 anecdotes that perfectly describe their respective dominant personality traits. See if you can guess who is who: J, O, A, or C.
1: this bro innately prefers all things off-brand: Donald over Mickey, Luigi over Mario, even secondary colors like green over primary blue.
2: this bro is the “domino that won’t fall” according to his teachers. When the entirety of his class successively wakes from nap-time cranky or crying, he is – without fail – smiley and content.
3: this bro is a living study in developmental conflicts between impulse, logic, and responsibility. Immediately following losing his temper with a friend, he will be receptive to conversations around empathy for his friend, and then – completely of his own volition – run over to said friend’s house to apologize in person for his actions.
4: this bro comes home with the following note from his teacher — after a class assignment that would have been counted complete if all he had done was simply scribble a few lines using the crayon of his choice.
Answers: (1) O (2) C (3) J (4) A (of course).
There have been a few occasions recently when I learned of people going through a challenging life event — the kind of event that will result in them measuring time as “before” or “after” it happened. It’s intimidating to know what to say in those situations, and humbling to know that there is nothing you can realistically do to materially help assuage their pain.
That said, and while I won’t claim to be any kind of an expert, I do think I’ve stumbled into some practices that have worked:
- Put it in writing.
I always reach out via email or text as a first pass. This serves several functions:
A) It gives you time to craft the right tone, which can feel clunky in sensitive situations.
B) You can explicitly state that they do not need to respond to you at all if they’re not up to it.
C) Because it’s not live or in real-time, they don’t need to “perform” a reaction for you (including appreciation for your outreach). They can focus on what you mean to convey, which is to… - Suggest specific ways you can help.
None of these “let me know how I can help” banalities — give them a “menu” of pre-vetted ideas and make it easy for them to green-light things, and get the ball rolling that way.
Examples:
A) Sending care packages of activities for kids – either to buy their parents a little time to mentally breathe, or simply give them something novel to do during the sometimes torturous waiting period. I love the “mess free” coloring kits or epic bubble bath supplies for this one.
B) Ordering an Instacart delivery of groceries, or DoorDashing dinner on set days of the week so they can remove the mental load of meal planning or stopping at the store amidst the early stages of adjusting to a new trauma.
C) Offering to come let the dog out periodically or watch their kids for part of the day. Make it so they don’t need to return home while they may be busy with hospital visits or prepping logistics to accommodate a new situation, and try to bake in a way for them to have their spouse with them so they have their own support on-hand, too. - Make it about you.
Even in their lowest moments, it’s hard for people to accept help when they know they can’t reciprocate. I address this head-on by reminding them what’s in it for me: the privilege of being helpful in a moment someone needs it.
Here’s how I phrased it to a friend recently after I tossed out a couple of ideas: “please let me help if these things would be at all useful – or if anything else comes to mind. Imagine if the situation was reversed and how desperately you’d want to do something to feel like you lightened the smallest bit of load for your friend in a difficult moment.”
Here’s how I phrased it to a relative stranger who will never be in a position to “repay” our exchange: “it’s not often we get to feel like we can personally ‘pay forward’ the many kindnesses we all rack up in life, so I appreciate you letting me feel like I can play a small part of your fresh beginning.”
Be good to each other.
when your two twelve seeds
pull off the wins, you almost
HAVE to stop and flex.
Prior to the pandemic, I made an event of a grocery run for me and a child (or two, or three). Our local grocery had a selection of free cookies and strong coffee, and the boys would indulge in the former while I indulged in the latter. They liked selecting the cereals, or granola bar flavors, or cake mixes. They animatedly “drove” the race car shopping cart and, in one particularly disgusting moment, discovered some kind of partially consumed beefstick in the cab of the vehicle and… you know, finished the job. (Before you wonder what I was doing that I didn’t intercept that activity, I refer you to an entire post devoted to Steve the Wine Guy & other members of our grocery’s cast of characters).
When COVID hit, not only were we no longer comfortable having the boys join me in the store, but we wanted to minimize total time spent of exposure overall. I therefore planned for 2 weeks of meals at a time — breakfasts, lunches, dinners, and snacks without any additional care to help prepare in our snippets of time between parenting and work — for our family of 5. What did this practically mean?
1. I suppressed minor panic attacks when I would arrive to empty shelves of items featured on my list: bread, meat, Spaghettios. I contemplated showing “proof of children” when they rationed things like gallons of milk or packages of chicken.
2. My cart was so full — so comically full — that after the first few runs, I deployed a new strategy of checking out and loading up the car after the produce + meat + bread sections, then coming right back in and doing another round through the aisles + dairy + frozen section.
3. How does one store all these precisely planned & purchased groceries once they’re finally offloaded in the back hallway? Enter: “the Panic Pantry.” Highly perishable, fresh food was stored per meal plans in the kitchen refrigerator and pantry. The basement’s Panic Pantry was where I stashed less perishable foods, staples we’d dip into in a pinch, even bunches of bananas bought while they were still green so that — by the time we consumed all of the fresh fruit we had bought upfront — we still had fresh fruit even starting day 7+. By the time we were on days 11 – 14, we were having meals made of thawed meat, frozen vegetables, and boxed carbs like rice or pasta.
At some point, over a year after everything began, I had to bring a boy with me to the grocery again. We went back to fitting our groceries all in 1 cart as we planned for only 1 week at a time. And we finished our last snacks from the Panic Pantry.
In two years, we never went hungry. We never had any noticeable nutritional deficiencies. I have a lot to be grateful for with respect to how we weathered the pandemic as a family. But I’ll be honest, it breaks my heart a little bit that only J remembers what a big deal those free cookies once were.
