Parenting is Not a Tech Incubator

Against the entrepreneurial spirit

I have a few hard rules about speaking on parenting in any public forum. I break these rules all the time, probably, but they exist. They help me keep my mouth shut more than I might otherwise, which is always a net benefit.

One of those rules: never sell out my children. Don’t undress their worst behavior or their most embarrassing tendencies or their confessions of endearing vulnerability to any passerby who’s paying attention. This one’s hard. To speak about parenting is always a test of one’s boundaries. It’s either the 30,000 foot check-in—“everyone’s good; here are their ages and grades”—or it’s stories which attempt to capture the joys, dramas, and surprises of the average day, and sometimes the average half hour. Put it another way: we’re banal or we’re narrative, and it’s hard to stick to the former, even when writing.

Since I am not going to sell out my children for a blog, though, some of my ranting below will be a little bloodless. My wonderful kids are not going to be used as counter-weights to all these absurd, utopian blather pieces that claim to solve parenting. But I want it to be clear that my frustrations come from a place of actually raising children without the ability to endlessly tailor my own circumstances. You’d think that’d be everyone’s situation, but apparently not!

For example, I recently came across this blog post. The premise is simple: “No couple - much less single parent - can meet all of their child’s needs and their own. And yet very few people raise their kids in community. In the US, 71% of children grow up in single family homes.” So far, so good. Call me a fellow traveler, at minimum. What the piece goes on to discuss, however, are examples of community living that include:

1. An independently wealthy author who moved his family “from Belgium to an eco village in upstate New York”

2. A cohousing community in the Bay Area, called Radish

3. A “baby coworking club” existing entirely, it seems, of work-from-home friends¹

4. A creative commons on a literal chateau in France

The obvious criticism isn’t even the one I’m looking to level; that is, “congrats on being rich!”² I’ll even cop to being piqued when I should probably just be, I dunno, inspired or something. The point of this lifestyle voyeurism isn’t to suggest you or I also move to France or, God forbid, the Bay Area. It’s to suggest that alternatives exist, and that you might find your own magic math in your own way.

But the actual examples are in lock-step with the great and demoralizing lie of modern America. You, such pieces insist, are endlessly customizable, and so is your situation. You, too, can move to D.C. and live next to your best friends, kickstarting a village that no longer exists organically. You aren’t surrounded by people who don’t have real jobs in the real world and can set up shop in your house for an entire workday? Change jobs. Change cities. Change friends! “Here’s what I’ve discovered,” the independently wealthy man who moved from Belgium to New York—which is totally fine and obviously not a big deal for most of us—says about parenting: “much of that strain is self-inflicted.”

Ah. Nice. It’s not that we were born into a century or an economy or a culture that puts roadblocks between us and a completely different material possibility—we’ve shot ourselves in our own foot! I might wish I could live literally next door to my friends or family or job or school, or have all of that conveniently delivered to my neck of the woods like so many packaged goods—or, even better, I could deliver myself somewhere new, being a totally fungible apparatus of attached dependents and credentials—but instead I’ve chosen to live with people I’ve actually known all my life. I don’t make enough money to do whatever I want, but I could at least kill every relationship God gave me in the name of drinking herbal tea with eco-members—I mean, house-friends—on a communal patio!

If I were trying to give such people the benefit of the doubt, and I will try, there’s perhaps a spiritual paradox lurking in these endlessly glib testimonies. Give up your community so you might have community. Renounce so that you may receive. May I be so convicted, and so called, if that’s the case.

Currently, though, I’m someone who rejected the convenience of my own upstate New York³ life in order to be embedded in community. My wife and I have also worked incredibly hard so that our primary childcare is either one of us or a grandparent. That’s involved several different configurations, such that I’ve worked part-time, been at home full time, and now work full time. Our kids will know their grandparents as everyday relations.

I even have one of those impossible friend groups. Seven to eight guys I’ve known for at least fifteen years, and in some cases twenty or twenty-five years, get together in some combination most Thursday nights. We’re all married and almost all have children aged ten and below. Our wives have their own chat. Our families do things like “daddy dinner night” and weekend gatherings when we can.

So far, so utopic.

Except my wife, a pediatric PA, works on one side of the Denver Front Range and I work on the other. Our jobs are more or less locked in, currently, given the balance of childcare and more. We live in what is technically a townhouse; it has two stories but is the size of a decent condo. We love it. No one we know lives in the compound. Almost no one in the compound has children even though there are many couples our age and younger. The few families that do prefer their children stay indoors and use screens.

Unless I can convince my closest friends, even a few of them, to build a commune, or join an artistic cult in France apparently, we’re never going to be neighbors and intimates at the level described in these think-pieces. I might live with other generations of my family at some point—that’s even my hope and goal—but living in the same-ish town is as good as it gets right now. I could maybe acquire a LEGO set community by leaving my home state and church and lifelong comrades, but that seems like a pretty strange decision to make in the name of “doing life together.”

Too many of these scenarios, in fact, are not re-creations of the inter-generational norms of pre-modern parenting, or whatever. They thrive at least partly on who gets thrown off the wagon. Maybe I’m too focused on this one blog post, and on its linked examples, but where are the actual family members? Where are the friends who can’t live right next to you because they are already living near their parents? Where are the dangerous cousins and aging grandparents and morally catawampus siblings? They’re not in the commune, sounds like. They’ve been discarded in the name of a daycare startup.

Again—I admit—there’s a possible religious ring to this conundrum.⁴ The bespoke kid club isn’t an altogether universal or helpful solution, but maybe that’s the point of these essays. Maybe such parenting solutions—build your own village!—are meant to be ascetic orders cut off from the current world, shining ideals we try to mimic, but to which most of us will never be called. They’re islands. They exist among neighborhoods no longer full of children but which were planned for children, hence all the unused playgrounds. The neighborhoods with families overflowing without this intense intentionality are poor, new to America, or McNeighborhoods where millennials keep moving their 1-2 children so they can live on iPads and drink sparkling water in peace.⁵

I’m not trying to attack your life, by the way. Unless you love sparkling water. What I’m trying to articulate is that these aforementioned blogs and articles are the upper-middle class’s version of vlogs. They’re decorations against which you bang your forehead. I’m glad a statistically insignificant percentage of parents are figuring out how to replace both the dearth of children in general and their own deracinated familial lives.

I actually am glad! That’s also what I am trying to do!

But these solutions always downplay the actual constrictions of what it means to be a parent, to be a friend, to even (should you dare) be friends with parents you’d never let half-raise your child. As exhortations, they fall for the same trap as too many other types of parenting advice: let kids be the absolute center of your decision-making, and change out anything in your life that doesn’t fit your preferred whim. Make life neat. Even better if your brother-in-law isn’t around.

The hardest parts of parenting, what’s more, aren’t hanging out all day with four-year-olds. Yes, sometimes that’s really rough! But the hardest part is facing down the force that sometimes wakes between yourself and your child, the actual battle of wills and values and temperaments that requires you to decide in this moment, if in no other, how you will parent. The overall burden can be shared, and should be; it’d make these vital interplays behind closed doors easier, in my opinion. But your children will always know who you are and how you react when no one else is around, and no amount of fake uncles and eco-friendly communes that employ a private cook will relieve you of that onus.

We must disaggregate the parenting function. Yes. Please. It’s still gonna be messy.

1. Lord forbid two people should marry each other and still have work that deals with the physical world.

2. Some of these folks aren’t insanely wealthy, I know. No more than my cohort, probably.

3. Somehow the greatest place in the world to live?? Also, I was there for a three-year master’s degree and we never planned on staying. But we almost did. It’s that wonderful.

4. Not that I think any of these practitioners see themselves as a kind of latent Bruderhof community, to be clear.

5. At least one of my children would love to live on sparkling water. I don’t understand it! It’s just water that tastes bad.