You can have fun as a parent

Plus: the mental workload, a decimated low-cost housing option, and more

Good morning! It’s Wednesday, and here’s this week’s post.

But first, a question for you: Substack has a feature where you can add an audio version to each post. Basically, I could read the essay portion, and you could listen to it instead of reading it. Would that be of interest? Tell me in the comments if so.

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A take I haven’t written elsewhere

You can have fun as a parent

the evening view from our apartment in Positano

Friends, I am back from vacation in Italy with some pretty huge news: You can have fun as a parent. I know, I know: Big if true! But I have personally experienced it, and, as a journalist, I felt duty-bound to tell you in this, the second installment of what I suppose is now an annual tradition of me returning from a trip and talking about travel with children. Here’s last summer’s inaugural edition:

A (very partial) defense of the online anti-kid misanthropes

Just as then, this is not occasioned purely by my having recently looked more at historic buildings than headlines. I mean, it’s not not that, but it is also occasioned by a new round of parenting and fertility discourse.

This one began with a post positing that the fertility crisis “is not that mysterious.”¹ The problem, you see, is money: “Everywhere in the world young adults are uncertain they can maintain a job and decent lifestyles long term as they’re constantly reminded their livelihood is provisional to the market and finance, and you expect them to think about kids?”

That got shared by another person, who declared with equal confidence that actually it’s not money. It’s “more of a spiritual issue,” significantly influenced by how “way more cultural weight is placed on things like personal growth and career achievement and ‘having fun.’” (Just for the record, this is incomplete but the better explanation of the two.)

Then that got shared by Aella, who is—actually, you know what? If you aren’t already aware of Aella, let’s just say she’s got a large online following and is known for her candor. Aella argued that “the reason for low birth rate is that our quality of life has increased in almost all aspects besides childrearing. The more luxury we have access to, the more luxury we lose out on by having kids.”

And finally, all this came to my attention thanks to a share from Reason’s

Liz Wolfe

, who correctly observed that this notion that children take away all your nice things is simply not true:

I’m not gonna claim that having kids has no costs, that you don’t lose out on discretionary & leisure time. But upper-middle-class anxious types overstate the losses and are unimaginative about the possibilities. Like: You can take your kid to a fancy restaurant with you. You can travel. You can have a social life. This is allowed.

To her case, I’ll make three additions. First, as I noted in my reply on X, travel with children is doable—but it is quite physically demanding when they’re very young.

To be clear, our trip was great! It was also tough to be one of two adults lugging baggage for five people because three of them can’t pull their own weight and, indeed, one often needs to be carried herself. I can’t tell you how much I was consciously grateful that I’d been (by my middling standards) on an above-average running schedule over the prior year. It would’ve been far more difficult had we come to this trip with chronic pain, disability, or simply an average laptop job fitness level.

How to become a runner

Second, someone replied to me on X to suggest that traveling with children ages 6, 6, and 2 is a mistake: “But why would you travel with kids that young. They hate it and probably won’t remember it.”

Literally all of this is wrong.

Was there whining? Oh, for sure. The transatlantic flights were rough. The children greatly objected to having (having!) to see inside the Colosseum. One time, walking up a steep hill after frolicking at the beach, one twin declared that he “really, really, really wished he were dead.” Another time, also on the hill, the other twin scream-inquired WHY we brought him there, to one of the most beautiful places in the world. But not 20 minutes before and after these outbursts they were giggling with delight over waves and sea glass and lemon sorbet. The balance was easily, overwhelmingly positive for all involved. They did not hate it.

Nor will they forget it! I mean, yes, they’ll forget some of it. The youngest will forget the most. Yet our twins speak fondly and often with surprising accuracy and specificity about vacations from years past. They ask to see photos, and they share memories unprompted.

And even if they don’t remember much of this trip, I will remember, and that matters too. I can still have fun even though I am a parent. You can too. You don’t have to stop having fun because your child might not have a photographic memory.² That’s silly. (It seems like a very Instagram-brained take to suggest that lack of clear memories later would invalidate an experience itself.)

This brings me to my third note, which—if I may venture more of a meta-commentary—is that it is important to have fun as a parent and make evident that you’re having it.

Partly this is a subset of an argument I made earlier this year, which is that the notion that having kids will make your life unrecognizable is not a selling point for most people! Yes, children inevitably change things. But they don’t change everything, and parenting is not the end of fun.³ It is good to provide solid info on this point when childless people make influential but false assumptions.

Telling people kids will change them in ways they can’t possibly fathom is not a great way to pitch having kids

It is also good to make sure your own children know you are still having fun. I touched on this in my recent CT piece about millennial and zoomer dads:

And it’s not only the responsible side of child-rearing in which these dads excel; just as significant is that they have friends and hobbies. […] They delight in their kids and show them that this delight does not subsume all the other goods of life. They demonstrate daily that entrance into fatherhood, while not always easy, adds far more than it takes.

Children are blessedly oblivious about many things, but insofar as it’s possible, I think it’s good to help them understand that their existence is not a joy-killer. And it is possible. You can have fun as a parent. Remember, this is first-hand reporting here.

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Intake

• What’s on Her Mind: The Mental Workload of Family Life, by Allison Daminger (for review at CT)

• Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call for Evangelical America, by Russell Moore

• The Genesis of Gender, by Abigail Favale—read this on the trip on a rec from

  Leah Libresco Sargeant
  ; thought it was great

• “The church of the chronically online,” by Kendall Vanderslice for Common Good

“The printing press took the Scripture out of the hands of the elite and put it in the hands of every man,” a fan posted on X to the podcast hosts, urging them to recognize their role as shepherds of an online congregation. “Social media has moved the pulpit the same way.” […]

The result is a crisis of ecclesiology — a crisis that is priming a generation already wounded by the church for another round of disillusionment and pain, as well as a crisis that puts writers, podcasters, and social media influencers in the impossible position of pastoring an audience that follows them online.

• “The FBI took her $40,000 without explaining why. She fought back against that practice—and lost,” by Billy Binion for Reason

• “How cities and states decimated America’s lowest cost housing option,” by Rebecca Baird-Remba and Alex Horowitz for The Pew Charitable Trusts

• “An era of authenticity (or something like it),” by Jessica Roy for The New York Times

• “ChatGPT gave instructions for murder, self-mutilation, and devil worship,” by Lila Shroff for The Atlantic (I understand that the LLM is just copying from extant, human-created text online; nevertheless, I cannot stress how much this headline is not clickbait)

• “Church in a time of brain rot,” by Jeff Bilbro for Christianity Today

A recipe that approximates the mild pepper pesto on the best pasta I had in Italy:

• 5 + 1 cubanelle peppers

• 30 basil leaves

• 4+ tbsp good parmesan (not Kraft)

• 4 tbsp pine nuts, cashews, or almonds

• 2+ tbsp olive oil

• 2 cloves garlic

• salt and pepper

• a little water if needed to get a pourable sauce

Blend all of it together fresh, except the 1 extra pepper. Mince that and add it after the blending for texture. Serve on hot or cold pasta. Drizzle a bit more olive oil at the end.

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Output

New work:

None! But I did post trip photos on Instagram:

bonnie.kristian

A post shared by @bonnie.kristian

Newly relevant work:

On a far more serious note, given the horrific recent reporting on the starvation of children in Gaza, I’ll share a piece I wrote for Reason on the plight of Palestinian civilians soon after the war began:

Heading into this past weekend, 1 million civilian Palestinians in Gaza were warned to flee ahead of an Israeli ground incursion. But how can they flee? Where will they go? Borders are sealed. Gaza is small. Again, about half the population is children. People are moving, but their options are limited.

A Reuters report published Thursday told the story of a 31-year-old Palestinian man named Ala al-Kafarneh. He fled his home “with his pregnant wife, his father, brothers, cousins, and in-laws,” first to a coastal refugee camp, then elsewhere, after Israeli airstrikes hit around the camp. “On Tuesday night, an airstrike hit the building where Kafarneh and his family were sheltering, killing all of them except him.”

Kafarneh’s position is unfathomable—a pregnant wife and unborn child, dead and recorded, nameless, in the list of family casualties. Would it surprise anyone if he turns to violence now?

That is not to say he would be justified in seeking a violent revenge. To say that is to take a step toward moral madness, toward a cycle of escalation and chaos, not justice, mercy, or any other good. But it is to say that violence, by its nature, tends to spread. Once loose, it overruns moral boundaries and bends our souls into grotesque shapes. We are each responsible for the violence we commit, each to blame for the wrong we do, each apt to respond to evil with evil. Blood is on the hands that shed it, but it tends to spill all over.

Read the rest here.

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1. also very big if true

2. As they say, I cannot remember the pizzas I’ve scarfed any more than the gelatos I have slurped; even so, they have made me.

3. Honestly, beach days are in some ways better with kids. You get less time in the big waves, but you’re never just laying there, sweaty and bored.