The SRO of Parenting
Defusing the arms race, plus praise for my husband
I quite enjoyed this from
: “Moral Standards For Parenting Need To Be Achievable By Mediocre People.” Ozy takes as a given you’re hoping for replacement-level fertility (rounded to 2 children per woman), and argues that, therefore:You can, for example, create a standard that only 50% of people can meet, but then the average mother must have four children—so your standard must be achievable by someone who has six or eight kids (to counterbalance the mothers who only have one or two).
What’s more, some people who would be good parents don’t want to have children. So if you would prefer not to pressure people who don’t want kids to have kids, your standards of minimum acceptable parenting need to be even lower.
Some of the standards Ozy thinks you can (and should!) throw out include “kids need individual bedrooms” / “kids deserve to be breastfed for a year or longer” / “parents should never yell at their kids.”
Some of those will feel more morally neutral to you (I’m trying to get three kids in a room by the end of the summer), and others will be a little more morally charged (I think it’s good to use a big voice when a kid is on the precipice of danger, but I also raise my voice in situations I don’t feel great about).
I like that Ozy frames lowering standards as part of justice to the poor. It’s good to help people have the basic goods of life, but it’s bad to set legal or cultural standards where you eliminate a category of goods or lives that the poor can achieve. It’s why I see Ozy’s prescriptions for parenting as akin to SROs (single room occupancies).
SROs are a kind of low cost living that many cities have made illegal to build or to rent. They’re minimal, much like dorm life (you get a bedroom and share kitchen + bathroom with other lodgers), but they give poorer renters a foothold in an otherwise unachievable city. And it’s easy for the good of having somewhere to live outweigh the substandard nature of the home.
For right now, I’m very focused on tax policy at work as the reconciliation bill works its way through Congress. But in the later summer and fall, I’m going to be taking a look at childcare regulations and the SRO-level of legal childcare. Some cities (cough Washington DC) have made it illegal to employ preschool teachers who don’t have college degrees. That reads as a banning-SROs move to me. But I don’t have finely grained views on e.g. different carer-children ratios. I’m hoping to develop them.
It’s good to focus on the simple parts of good parenting that are in reach for all parents. And for more on that topic, let me point you to my husband’s contribution to a Washington Post symposium for Father’s Day:
“You can just do things,” declares a popular meme. My personal variation on this is “You can just give good things to your children.”
…And good things don’t have to be instrumental or aimed at optimizing your child. This isn’t about playing Mozart to raise your baby’s IQ or SAT scores. Do it for the joy of sharing what is beautiful with a new person you love.
Give what is good, starting with the gift of your presence.
On a similar theme from a (fair warning) swear-ier dad:
Before Olive was born, I thought I was going to trade pleasure for purpose, like I was about to become Batman or something. And for sure, the early hour wake ups and long stretches walking in circles around your living room until they fall asleep can feel like a kind of noble grind. But outside that, there’s so much more fun than I was expecting. Dancing in the kitchen. Finding your inner local am-dram thesp when reading a picture book out loud. Tossing her three inches up in the air and feeling like a one-man Oblivion ride. I haven’t enjoyed myself as much in years, and she’s not even saying or doing anything yet.
Being a parent (especially a dad) may give you more permission to openly enjoy good things. And, for
, quoted above, pushing a stroller also makes him feel seen and welcomed in a different way:Suddenly, women, children and the elderly are getting out of your way in the street or shop doorways. Cars stop to let you cross the road. You get to experience life as someone society deems worthy of compassion and assistance. For most men, that’s pretty mind-blowing.
Being a dad makes him a good thing in the world, in the eyes of others. It’s important that this not be men’s only avenue to feel welcomed and worthy of compassion, but there’s a reason it’s a traditional one.
A couple SROs that I’ve found personally frustrating:
- Leaving your kid to sleep in a public place or even in the car at all. There have been so many times I tried to run to the grocery store and my kid(s) fell asleep en route. All of a sudden the 30 min errand has to now take 2 hours because we have to wait.
- Parks without fencing to block kids from going into the street. It’s not unreasonable to have kids going to the playground to play by themselves (although this can get you a CPS call in many places), and older kids can keep an eye on younger ones within reason. But I also think it’s hard if you have kids in a range of ages when the design of a place requires hyper-vigilance to prevent tragedy.
- The household employee limit for tax filing being $2300. Let’s say I wanted to do something common in centuries past - hire a teenager to help me with household projects or simple tasks. I’m not talking a full blown maid. I’m saying like 10 hours a week of chores (dishes, so on). With minimum wage in our area of $16, I can only hire someone for 14 weeks before I have to report them for taxes. Now I have to get a payroll company, file with the EDD, and pay unemployment if I fire them (even with cause). We have basically stripped away a middle tier job option to allow teenagers to learn to work, and that would make child-rearing significantly easier. Given the increase in the cost of living and so on, it makes no sense to me that the limit for reporting to the IRS isn’t higher - say $10k. Call it a paperwork reduction act!
- Most controversially, car seats. It takes so long to get 3 small kids into car seats compared to the way they used to pile in. If you believe some economists, there’s little evidence that car seats do much to save lives after the first 1-2 years (maybe longer rear-facing). This is kind of related to 1, because it’s a lot more frustrating to pop out for a 5 min errand someplace when it’s going to be 10 min to load everyone in and out of the car.
Omg. So mych to say here. Im in the midst of going through the process to open a daycare and i've also built and managed affordable housing using section 8. I wrote a piece for Comment on raising density standards (and lowering standards overall) in housing and i could write a similar piece on childcare, but will wait until we've been open a year. so many hoops. We've already burnt through one employee who was helping us with the process because she couldn't handle the incessant webinars, trainings, and janky web interface ...but i think shed be a great child care worker.
That said we've visited centers that are rated 5 stars (our quality rating system) but the places are dark, kids are crying and workers are scrolling on phones. So its not lower standards i want, its less hoops and better check points.
On the topic of lower standards in parenting, i definitely did not go for any special vaccines schedule, though it was popular in my social circle. Public schools are where we started including free preschool (although we later changed to a Catholic Montessori for the sake our children having more joy in their lives) Also i was all in on medicated child birth and 6 months of breast feeding, as opposed to year(s). I typically only do 1 dentist appointment a year per kid, though 2 are recommended. Im pretty lax on screen time, though i can be convinced by anxious generation style arguments, and haven't allowed social media. Shared rooms, yes. One of my kids was in a closet for a while. Mostly used clothes. No sports before 3rd grade. Old mini vans. I gave up car seats at age 3. Ive appreciated Emily Osters guidance on the "what really matters" questions... And car seats are so so after the infant stage.
I do think, to change this parenting arns race, we have to stop crafting motherhood as a professional job for college educated women, who dedicate all of their ambition toward their children; left with this framing the bar is always rising and yes, younger onlookers are like "no way do i want this."