Children Raising Children At Home

Whatever teachers are doing with kids at school, there is one thing that people have come to appreciate: they keep the little shits out of your hair so you can go about doing whatever it is you feel you want to do with your life without having to hear their whining about being hungry. Again. After all, why shouldn’t you get to do whatever you feel like doing, which is your right because you are the center of the universe with no responsibility for anyone.

Here is where, ordinarily, I would conclude with a grand thought about America: I might venture that cross-society parental stress under pandemic could forge a new parental voting bloc. That perhaps now universal child care will be regarded as a necessity, not some kind of indulgence. But the kids are asking for lunch, and I have to break it to them that all the hot dogs are gone.

That’s Farhad Manjoo, spokesmodel for the disaffected digital native, who concedes his privilege while admitting it makes him feel like a failure to be a failure.

Attempting to work full time while rooming with, feeding and educating one or more children during the pandemic is not going well — not for me, and not for most people I know. Though we are embarrassingly indulgent of self-care, neither of us feels as if we are doing anything other than failing at everything, every day.

Kids. They want to eat. Every single day. So demanding. So hard. Apparently, Manjoo wasn’t aware of this when the stork dropped them off. They aren’t just fashion accessories when they do adorable things you can post on Instragram to show all your friends how cute your kids are, and by extension, what a wonderful parent you must be to have such happy children. They’re yours when they’re up all night crying, vomiting, having diarrhea in their expensive nappies and, yes, demanding yet again to be fed.

It’s like the parent who buys a two-seat roadster because, you know, it’s really cool and aren’t they entitled to a really cool car? But then there’s no place to put the car seat so society owes them an SUV as well. Why society? MSNBC’s Melissa Harris Perry explains.

The logistics of life used to be the rules within which we lived. If you had kids, you had to arrange your world to accommodate them. You might want that job, but you had kids. The immediate reaction to this banal reality is that the burden fell on women, which of course was sexist, so it was unfair. And indeed, if that’s the route one chose to take, that would be unfair.

So take a different route, Be a stay-at-home dad, Mr. Mom, if you will. Hire a nanny if you can. Live with the grandparents, or at least close enough to drop them off daily. Kidpool with the neighbors even. But figure it out, given the circumstances. When you’re crafting your life, do so in a way that addresses all your needs, not just the things you like and desire, like a fun job that fulfills your aspirations but precludes your kids from having a parent and requires you to lock them in a closet under the stairs for lack of parental involvement.

There are parents who can’t make this happen. Single parents whose circumstances are not of their making are screwed here. They didn’t ask for a spouse to leave or die. There are people who didn’t make bad choices and have no good options available to them, and these are the people for whom a safety net must be provided. But the Manjoos?

But across demographics and income levels, the pandemic has undone many of the supports parents usually rely on to manage raising children while working. If even fancy me is faring so poorly, I can’t imagine how others — the single parents, the front-line-worker parents, the newly unemployed parents — are coping.

And what about their neighbors, the Karens?

Actually, I don’t have to imagine it. Parental burnout under lockdown has been a hot topic these last few weeks. “The parents are not all right,” writes Chloe I. Cooney in the online magazine Gen. The New York Times’s parenting section abounds with warnings of and solutions to burnout. And when I asked my Twitter followers how they’re faring as working parents, I was bombarded with dozens of tales of woe.

Of course having children is hard. It’s always been hard, because they’re almost like real little people. And being homebound, particularly with no end for the foreseeable future, means that the suck will continue to hamper parents’ doing what they want to do and they little bastards just won’t go away after the cuteness has run dry.

The question remains whether this is society’s problem to fix or yours. Will, as Manjoo ponders and Perry pontificates, this produce a parental demand for universal child care? Will parents hand over the kids to public school teachers to parcel out their religion, their empathy, their language and behaviors, so parents can go about making the world better without brats hanging on to their aprons?

Will the Secretary of Education let you see your li’l darlings on Zoom once a week after they’re taken to the education center to be reared in the government approved fashion?

People have been having children for a very long time, which explains why you exist. And they are mix of love and wonderment and, yes, hassle and annoyance. They require care and feeding, love and a lot of time. But they’re your children. You made them. You kvell over their successes and cry over their difficulties, and they are a part of you.

You know what children need? Parents. Not parents with a really cool two-seat roadster (not that it hurts), but parents whose world includes whatever is necessary to be a parent of their children. It’s going to make your self-indulgence harder, but get over it. They’re yours.