Voices
WHEN I WAS SINGLE and saw
parents losing it with their kids,
I used to frown at them. I’ll never
be like that, I promised myself.
But single people are pathetically
naive. They don’t know what it’s
like to spend fourteen consecutive
hours with a child. They don’t understand how that massive span of
time allows for every single possible human emotion to be bared:
anger, fear, jealousy, love... all of it.
More to the point, they don’t realize what little assholes kids can be.
They have no idea. When I was in
middle school, they brought in a
lady who had traveled to the South
Pole to speak to us. She told us
that, at one point during the trip,
she became so cold and so desperate for food that she ate an entire
stick of butter. We all were disgusted. But she was like, “Yeah,
well, if you had been at the South
Pole, you would have had butter for
dinner too.” Parenting is similar in
that you end up acting in ways that
your younger self would have found
repellent because the circumstances overwhelm you. What I’m basically saying is that having kids is
like being stuck in Antarctica.
I’m not sure any group of parents
has ever been subjected to as much
widespread derision as the current
DREW
MAGARY
generation of American parents. We
are told, constantly, how badly we
are f*cking our kids up. There are
scores of books being sold every day
that demonstrate how much better
parents are in China, and in France,
and in the Amazon River Basin. I
keep waiting for a New York Times
article about how leaders of the Cali
drug cartel excel at teaching their
children self-reliance.
And it’s not just books shitting
on us. We hear it from our own
parents, who go to pathological
lengths to remind us that we hover
too much, or that we let the kids
watch too much TV, or that we’re
letting our kids eat too much processed dogshit. We’re SOFT. That’s
the stereotype. We’re soft parents,
and our kids will grow up to be
free-range terrorists because of it.
We see the stereotype in movies
and ads and TV shows and on the
news, in study after