Parenting culture and how to change it

And also do you know how?

“What do they always tell you on airplanes?” My wife was pregnant, and I was talking to a financial planner for a podcast episode. “Secure your own oxygen mask before you help others.”

Boy did I love that. I used it all the time. And I believed it—right up until we actually had a baby. And then I found out the truth: most of being a parent is operating sans oxygen mask.

A couple weeks ago I was at a playground in Belmont when I heard the panicked yell of adult humans.

Three parents rushed to save my son, who was…not falling. “He’s okay,” I said,

through a forced smile, embarrassed for some reason. My child was on a play structure, close to an edge, and if these people hadn’t screamed, the worst very well may have happened: he could have fallen. Onto a padded ground. He would have registered pain and a lesson: how to avoid falling. Natural consequences teach kids—harsh, effective. But not here.

And I get it, times have changed.

I grew up in Lexington in the nineties, and the playground in the center of town was for fun and also character building. An elaborate wooden castle with bridges and ramps and runways, hiding spots, tunnels, towers, bees nests, the entire thing was one giant splinter gauntlet. The ground was mulch except for where all the mulch had been worn away, leaving hard packed earth that always found our knees. At the end of hide and seek, one kid would emerge from some crevice under the structure, the space just large enough to slide a math textbook, covered in dust and mulch and debris, looking like a camouflaged sniper.

Parents were found in emergencies, the odd hovering parent did exist, but they were just that: odd.

Three decades later, at a Belmont playground, adults shuffled around kids, bent-over, hands outstretched like NFL linemen trying to recover a fumble. There will be no falling down here.

My friend and I were talking about intensive parenting, which has been proven by science and research and common sense to be bad for a parent’s mental health.

“Didn’t we already kinda know that?” I asked. My friend and I stood watching our kids run around, and we talked about The Daily episode called “The Parents Aren’t Alright” that dives into US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy’s warning about excessive stress caused by parenting.

It all made so much sense. Didn’t we know kids need freedom to explore? And they need our trust for that exploration! Just look around—the playground is for the kids, not for us.

I was going on about how my job is not to constantly entertain or monitor when we heard the screams of terror directed toward my child. Not because he had been hurt, but because he might have been hurt. So I climbed the metal structure, ducking down to avoid the low roof, eye level with other toddlers, and tried to hold my kid’s hand.

Time to hover.

My child did not want his hand held—but that’s okay, I wasn’t doing it for him, I was doing it for the other parents. I abandoned my beliefs because I wanted the adults to feel comfortable. See? I am not neglecting my child! What’s this shame I feel?

“He’s pretty sure-footed,” I said to no one in particular, heat in my face. Because I wasn’t hovering, other playground parents felt the need to widen their hover umbrella over my child. When we’re in hover-mode, we can’t help it.

This is how intensive parenting thrives, though: by sheer numbers.

When intensive parents outnumber those of us who believe the playground is for the kids, that it’s their space to solve their own issues, to organize their own games, and to imagine things with their own brains, someone always ends up looking like a negligent parent.

As an adult on a playground, I’m constantly forced into the sharing conversation. This talk is for show, and exclusively for the other parent, who I, in theory, am not talking to.

“Buddy, that’s not ours,” I say, ostensibly to my two-year-old, “you need to give that train back to that boy. We need to share, okay?” My two-year-old has no concept of sharing and according to the American Academy of Pediatrics, no two-year-old does. This is something that they figure out after three and a half years of age, but just so the other parent thinks I’m a good guy, I’ll pretend with them.

Also: it should be against the law to bring toys to a playground. The playground is the toy! Why are we introducing conflict and then surprised when conflict happens? I know why: because everyone else is doing it. So when my kid takes another kid’s toy, and that kid stands there like, hey, parent, go get that toy for me, and their parent is looking around feverishly for my kid’s parent, who happens to be me, guess what dawg, YOU DID THIS TO US!

Unfortunately, I’m not this unhinged. I understand we are mostly all hyper parenting, intensive parenting, hovering, floating, whatever, because it feels like that’s what regular parenting is now. Half of us are imploding out of what looks like love but feels a lot like fear.

Fear that something bad will happen to my kid, that my child will be behind in some way, that I will cause unintentional, irreversible, long-lasting harm, and the answer, instead of trusting a kid, is to hold onto them as tight as we can.

In Finding Nemo, Marlin talks about his lost son, saying, “I promised I’d never let anything happen to him.” Dory says, “That’s a funny thing to promise…you can't never let anything happen to him. Then nothing would ever happen to him.”

We saw this movie twenty years ago and thought, Amen, Dory. I see this now, and I know Dory is right, but I can’t help but parent like Marlin, because I’m surrounded by Marlins.

Finally we have a doctor, an admiral, a Surgeon General, telling us what that cost is: our mental health.

Unfortunately, the stress doesn’t stay just with us. Murthy’s advisory says, “The mental health of parents and caregivers can have profound impacts on the well-being of children, families, and society.” So, for the health and safety of our children, we must chill out. Doctor’s orders.