Against Ambitious Parenting

There is a central tendency among my social circle with regards to children. This tendency might be described as “helicopter parenting, but good this time, I swear.”

Often though not always this is laundered through that old bitch, Education. Elaborate plans to keep them out of public school by any means necessary. $200/mo early reading software. Bespoke probability theory and category theory curricula.

More concerning: stated plans to inculcate certain values. Worries that daughters specifically must be raised to be Agentic or else they’ll fail to make anything of themselves at all. Intentions to shield the fragile child brain from pernicious hungry algorithms, or other corrupt influence.

It’s puzzling! It’s strange. It seems we all share the same posts about how sad it is that childhood seems to be going away. How a delimited existence is a dim thing for a child. How Gen-Z is all fucked up because they never learned how to go outside. I can’t speak to Gen-Z, but I agree it’s sad that nobody lets kids just play outside anymore.

And yet. And yet. We share these posts, and then happily go back to discussing our plans for carefully delimiting our future children’s existences. And it isn’t that I think early reading software is a bad thing. It’s not bad to be excited to teach your kid stuff, or hope they’ll share your values, or wish to spare them the public school tedium you yourself experienced, or worry about how they will come up in the age of optimized attention-eaters. I don’t think anyone here is set to ruin any childhoods. And yet.

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I live in a culture of optimizers. Superhuman users, flashcard doers, productivity maximizers. Driven, ambitious people—I am one such myself. But when I’m asked if I plan to apply my drive and ambition to the raising of my children, I am surprised by the firmness of my no.

I am not a believer in the Bryan Caplan school of parenting-doesn’t-matter (although I probably do endorse his actual parenting style). If we can’t detect any of the effects of parenting through standard social science methodology, that is an indictment of the methodology, not of parenting. Parenting manifestly matters. My parents made numerous decisions that made my life go better or worse than it otherwise might have.

But still, something about the idea of raising children ambitiously strikes me as monstrous. Not monstrous as in evil; monstrous as in malformed. A category error.

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I think my parents mostly made the right calls, by the way.

Insofar as I was ever intensively parented, I probably would have preferred not to have been. In defiance of You Can’t Teach Your Kids To Be Bilingual, my dad successfully kept me fluent in Russian, my mother tongue—no peer group or dedicated immersion, just sheer fucking gumption on his part. Was all his effort worth it?

Honestly, probably not. It’s neat that I’m still fluent in Russian, and maybe I’m unfairly discounting the benefits of having two first languages, but mostly I remember it causing a lot of stress and conflict. I know my dad’s proud of himself for succeeding at it, but I don’t look back on it too fondly.

But mostly my parents left me alone, and mostly that was the right call. I knew they’d have my back if I ever needed them—my dad was a terrifying nightmare to countless school administrators—but none of my most beloved childhood memories involve my parents at all. They involve me, at various ages, striking out alone into some unknown place and discovering it for myself, making a discovery, meeting someone new.

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The title was kind of clickbait. I’m not really against ambitious parenting. It just doesn’t exactly make sense to me.

It’s difficult for me to think of my son as a project. He is, for the moment, physically still a part of my body. But ever since I saw his face I have thought of him as separate from me. This is a brand new person! How grand. How terrifying. How utterly outside of my control.

I’m not one of those people who wanted a baby. I like babies, but it’s a gentle sort of liking: I am glad they exist, I enjoy seeing them, but they don’t overwhelm my heart more than a moderate amount of joy. I don’t expect to be so lukewarm on my own baby. But I didn’t decide to have children because I wanted a baby. I wanted a person.

When I think of my son as he will be in the next few years—an infant, then a toddler and young boy—I mostly feel impatient. I want to know more about him sooner. What will he look like when he’s grown? Will it be anything like my parents? What will his adult voice sound like? Will he be short like me, or tall like my husband? What will he choose to do with his life?

I’m sure he’ll make a charming baby, once he is out and about and no longer occupied with headbutting the underside of my ribcage. But it’s thinking about him as a young man that really grips my heart. A sulky teenager ignoring me at the dinner table. Only barely remembering to wave at me as I drive away from his freshman dorm. Getting on a plane to take a job across the country.

I badly want to meet him. I want to know the person that he’ll become. And mostly, I can’t help but feel that he’ll do the becoming on his own.

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Imagine placing a paper boat into a creek and walking alongside it. The boat sometimes gets stuck behind rocks and tangled in branches, and you gently get it unstuck. The creek grows into a larger stream and ultimately a river, and you walk along the bank, no longer always being able to reach the boat to help it. At a certain point the river grows quite wide. Sometimes you can’t even see the boat. Whatever happens to it out there in the rushing current, you probably can’t help. You can only watch and hope.

Finally you come to the end of the river where it pours into the sea. The boat goes on until it meets the horizon. You stay on the shore.

That’s the win condition.