Four Reasons Parenting Sucks Right Now

And what Ug and Ugga, your friendly foraging couple, would do differently.

The upsides to being a parent are obvious to anyone who has kids—so I’m told—but there’s no doubt it’s a tough job. That’s why I find it unfair that, in addition to time-worn struggles, modern parents have at least four additional ones. But don’t worry. Ug and Ugga, drawing from tens and thousands of years of successful parenting, are here to restore some common sense.

Modern Problem #1: It Costs Too Much

To exactly no-one’s surprise, it turns out that raising a child in the U.S. today costs more than it did in 1960. Yes, that’s adjusted for inflation, and no, it doesn’t include college.¹

One might assume that this only affects the lower and middle classes, but that’s not necessarily the case. The price of “luxury” expenses—for example, private school, piano lessons, or bougie child care—has outpaced “essential” ones like clothing and food. As this article puts it, “the higher a family’s income, the more was spent on a child, particularly for child care/education and miscellaneous expenses.” So if you have something of a financial buffer, don’t fret—the demands of modern parenthood will see that it’s gobbled up.

Of course, many families could live below their means. They could send their kids to public school and insist on state college; they could put their foot down on travel sports. But we all know why they don’t. “Poverty is a social status,” Marshall Sahlins writes in Stone Age Economics, “a relation among people.” So is wealth. Money often has less to do with whether a person can obtain the necessities of living and more to do with whether they can fit into the group of people to which they belong or aspire to belong. And since the basics of raising a child haven’t changed much since the dawn of time, the costs of keeping up have outrun the costs of getting by.²

I also think the market continues to become more efficient at squeezing every last dollar from consumers, parents in particular. Methods of greater market efficiency include targeted ads, expanded credit card use, and the comparativeness of social media. These methods allow and encourage both the poor and rich to keep spending, often under the mistaken notion that consumption will improve well-being. It may not matter how much money you have at all, in fact: an efficient market will find a way to take it.

This is particularly true for parents because they’re such easy marks. Indeed, if you want to become wealthy yourself, I advise creating a product that well-off parents can be convinced is vital to their children’s safety or success. “If Joey keeps wearing cotton socks, he’ll get athlete’s foot and die. He needs bamboo.” “If Suzy doesn’t learn another language, she’ll be behind all her peers.” That sort of thing.

By leveraging humans’ comparative nature in general, and parents’ protective nature in specific, the market has expanded what is considered “essential” for raising a child. (My favorite is the SnotSucker, which I have been told is indispensable.) This explains one of the more common things I hear from parents: “Thank God for Amazon.” But Amazon is a double-edged sword, isn’t it? Sure, it saves you a trip to the store, but it’s also a constant temptation to buy more than you need. Even if outcomes are improved, the cost of parenthood increases.³

As for Ug and Ugga, they don’t buy this sort of stuff. Neither literally nor figuratively. They reflect on that fact that humans have successfully raised babies for more generations than they can count—without any of these fancy products. To be fair, though, they suspect that their level-headedness has more to do with not having a choice. In their village, you see, everyone lives in a cave, and no-one has Amazon yet.

Modern Problem #2: It Takes Too Much Time

From everything I have heard and seen, parents are part-time event coordinators now. (Good thing Google Calendar has so many colors, am I right?) For example, in a recent podcast about plummeting birthrates worldwide, Ezra Klein mentions that his weekends are scheduled around what will be good for his kids. This scheduled and structured nature of play is a recent norm that Jon Haidt, Peter Gray, and colleagues are pushing back against. Indeed, for most of history, play was spontaneous, not to mention mixed-age:

“Can Jack come out to play?”

Meanwhile, what were parents doing while kids bounced around the neighborhood like hot atoms, putting fingers in each other’s noses and trying to burn ants with magnifying glasses? Whatever the hell they wanted. They most certainly weren’t planning their kids’ next activity or having a sterile conversation with their kid’s friend’s parents—to say nothing of the sort of lawn furniture parents become once travel sports arrive.

Parenthood has probably always demanded more of parents than they’d anticipated. But it hasn’t always meant total forfeiture of one’s time and what that time represents. Many parents today feel that they can’t have hobbies, friends, or even moments together anymore. They frequently lose a sense of who they are outside their role as caretakers. The people around them sometimes begin to think of them as grayed-out entities, as well, like Google Calendar events that have already happened.

Part of this can be attributed to how the American economy has changed in the last 50 years. Because dual-income households are more common, parents have less time throughout the week for things like laundry, cooking, and childcare. These get outsourced or pushed to the weekend, which makes Saturday and Sunday a work-week of a different sort. As my friend is fond of saying: “I look forward to Monday as much as Friday.”

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Maybe if parents had more time throughout the week to spend on housework (including childcare), they would feel less guilty about taking time to themselves over the weekend.⁴ But I don’t think this would really solve the problem. In my opinion, the larger explanation for why modern parenthood is so time-intensive has to do with changing norms and shrunken communal infrastructure.

Modern Problem #3: Risk-Averse Norms

What allowed parents, back in the good old days, to kick their kids out of the house and say “Be home for dinner”? Or the mom from Sandlot to tell her son to “run around, scrape your knees, get dirty”? It had much less to do with division of labor in the home, or overall working hours, I think, than the existence of parenting norms that were more risk-tolerant.

But what allowed those norms to exist? Less technology.⁵

To oversimplify a bit, technology has two main effects. First, it changes the way things are done. The new way is usually better along intended dimensions and sometimes worse in unintended ones. For example, cars increase the speed of both travel and the environment’s destruction. Second, technology tends to remove or diminish the need for other people. Now that I have Substack, I no longer need a publisher to get my work out. Now that I have GoPuff, I no longer need my neighbors for a cup of sugar.

Generally speaking, then, the more technology you have, the more things change and the less you need other people. Keep in mind, too, that technology encompasses both products (like the SnotSucker) and techniques (like gentle parenting).

The pace of technological change in the parenting realm has been so significant that modern parents are often convinced that their own parents are ill-equipped to watch a child. But, obviously, babies are still the same as they were during Ug and Ugga’s time. So what’s changed? The environment. Technology has made and continues to make the world safer. As Jean Twenge argues in Generations, people should tolerate less risk when the environment contains less of it. That’s why common practices from recent generations—smoking around kids, spanking them, letting them walk to the bus-stop alone—have since become intolerable.

By and large, reducing environmental risk has been a positive achievement for humanity, but we might have gone too far: kids today might not be encountering enough risk to learn critical associated skills. In the West especially, we might have set the current norms for safety below a certain risk threshold that is necessary for key development.

Meanwhile, not only would a little more risk be better for kids’ development, it would be great for parents’ sanity. When kids walk to school, parents don’t have to drive them. When kids make their own friends, parents don’t have to schedule play-date interviews. Most significantly, when kids develop their own interests, parents don’t have to entertain them.⁶ 

For these reasons, Ug and Ugga like the idea of Let Grow. They’re sort of shocked an organization like that needs to exist, but are in favor of whatever it takes to get kids running around together, in mixed age groups, encountering risk. And they are all for bringing parents back into the land of the living. Life’s not over once you have a kid, after all, and happier parents are better parents anyway.

Once again, though, Ug and Ugga suspect that the only reason they are so level-headed in this regard is that they don’t have the option. If they could make the world safer for their children, they probably would. Of course parents in their village worry. Of course they say things like “make sure you stay away from that alligator” and “don’t take Josie to the cliffs; she’s too young.” But much of the time, all they can do is hope for the best.

Modern Problem #4: Too Little Communal Infrastructure

Let’s return to the classic scene of the American neighborhood, the idyllic one imprinted in many people’s minds even if they never experienced it. (Hopefully they’ve at least seen Sandlot.) Funny enough, this scene is similar to Ug and Ugga’s village: kids running around, playing together, and adults keeping a casual eye on them, often while doing something else: mowing the lawn, hunting, creating more kids, what have you.

What prevents this from happening now? Risk-averse norms are only half of the answer. It wasn’t only that parents of the past had more risk tolerance, you see. They also perceived less risk. When my own parents sent me outside, it wasn’t into random, hostile world. It was into a community.

By communal infrastructure, then, I mean all those things which make a group of people into a community: trust, a sense of safety, the existence of third spaces, shared norms, and so on. These are the sorts of things that are difficult to define but easy to perceive. Taken together, and especially when the prevailing norm is a risk-tolerant one, they allow parents to send their kids outside and trust that they’ll be alright.

I might sound like a grandpa on this one, but communal infrastructure in America seems to be withering on the vine. Our trust in each other, the government, and institutions is quite low at the moment. Our perception of various dangers (e.g., child abduction) is often woefully out of touch with reality. Established third spaces—I’m thinking of crèches, the free daycare in France, probably because I want a crêpe—are arguably less prevalent in America than in other countries. All this adds to the burden of parents, who must do everything themselves.

The ultimate cause of declining communal infrastructure is, again, technology. Remember, one of technology’s effects is to reduce the need for others. For example, travel and communication technology have allowed people to move away from their parents and childhood communities. Some consequences of this have been great (e.g., unique career opportunities), but many new parents end up regretting the distance from family and friends. Parenting is, after all, an extremely physical affair.

A less obvious example of technology’s isolating effect is the transition from house phones to personal phones. Anyone else remember calling a friend’s house and getting one of their parents? Maybe chatting for a few minutes? It seemed meaningless at the time, but there might have been value to these little interactions.⁷ They might have helped strengthen the fabric of community. But technology has made many of them obsolete. No more long walks up your girlfriend’s driveway, hoping against hope her dad isn’t home. Just text her instead.

The more technology a society has, the less people need one another.⁸ Maybe the reason we talk so much about community in America is that we don’t have it. That said, unlike the risk problem, I do think there are proximate—short-term—solutions. Let Grow is a good example. Long-term, though, I don’t see how technology can avoid tampering with one of the more common reasons for non-kin relationships among humans: mutual aid. A common way to become close to others has always been to need them first, and like them later.

Indeed, Ug and Ugga are confused about what holds modern American society together. Hunter-gatherers, after all, lived in tight-knit communities of around 50-300 people. Everyone spent ample time around each other. Children tended to be raised by the group, if not intentionally then by default. Most tribes had a deep intimacy with their land and were fiercely protective of each other. My guess is that most had a relatively-unquestioned belief system, too.

Suffice it to say, things are a bit different now.

A Family in Lonelyville

Let’s ground all this in an example. Say a family moves to Lonelyville. A few months in, the parents want some time to themselves on a Saturday. So they consider letting Rebecca, aged 11, go to the park. In previous generations, 11-year-olds would have been babysitting, but times have changed. The parents aren’t comfortable letting Rebecca travel on her own, and even if they were, they’d be judged harshly by their new neighbors. Unfortunately Rebecca, having just moved to Lonelyville, doesn’t have any friends yet.

Plus, with so few children around and the residents of Lonelyville constantly in flux, the park has gone to shit. Needles and trash, that sort of thing. Not the best place for a child. Well, do you think the neighbor—what’s his name again?—would let Rebecca play in his backyard? His is much bigger than ours. Ah, but is he CPR certified? Probably not. And what did the sex offenders website say again? You can never be too careful these days. Boy, we could really use our parents at a time like this, but they’re halfway across the country. Oh well, wasn’t there that kid down the street that looked about Rebecca’s age? Maybe we can send her parents a text, have them all over for a drink, and vet them for the future.

This entire sequence was solved for Ug and Ugga each day with the rising of the sun.

“Hey, it was great having you all over for drinks. Kendra was absolutely delightful! We’d love to all get together sometime again for a playdate. Maybe send us a few times and we’ll send you a few ideas?”

Good thing Google Calendar has so many colors.

Conclusion

Parenthood has always been hard and there are solid evolutionary reasons for this. Because the process of natural selection acts at the level of genes, organisms evolved to be particularly precious about their offspring, who carry their genes forward. Moreover, humans have some of the hardest parenting to do, given how long our children are helpless.⁹

In our maligning of modern parenthood, we have to be careful about romanticizing the past. However, there is good reason to believe that parenting is harder now, or harder in a different way now, because of the reasons listed above. There is also good reason to believe that things can change. While I do see technology, in general, continuing to make the world safer (which means less tolerance for risk) and more individualistic (which means less reliance on others), I also think solutions exist for the tradeoffs.

Some of these solutions even involve technology. Research, after all, is a technology, one that is showing how low levels of risk might impede child development. And Let Grow is a technology, too, one that can hopefully move things toward more communal involvement. Hell, I could even see implanted GPS trackers providing parents with enough peace of mind to let kids be kids again.

In the final analysis, Ug and Ugga don’t know exactly what good parenting is, but they’ll recognize it when they see it. It will look a lot like it always has.

1. I just learned that my alma mater is now charging around $90k per year for tuition, room, and board. Always nice to see my brain appreciating in value.

2. Robert Frank’s Luxury Fever touches on many of these points in finer detail.

3. Greater efficiency usually means lower costs for consumers, and this is indeed the case with individual Amazon products. It’s just that the bundle of “necessities” is greater.

4. A friend who works in private equity was told that his performance slipped the year he had his first child. Bewildered, he suggested that becoming a parent had something to do with it. His managers told him: “That’s what the weekend is for.”

5. I mean, if not for technology more generally, there would be no need to invoke Ug and Ugga for this article, because humans would still be living (and parenting) like them.

6. Risk-aversion is also extending the length of parenthood. Parents worry about their children earlier and later in the lifespan. Consider this: when my mom was 11, she got her first job. Now, most 11-year-olds can’t even sit in the front seat. In Ug and Ugga’s village, kids become at least partially independent at young ages. They take on significant roles early in life.

7. Apparently all sorts of casual, low-stakes interactions—for example, chatting for a few minutes with your barista—can boost mood. (Glad we have researchers for this.) Unfortunately, many of these interactions are also “inefficient,” “unnecessary,” or “redundant.” Even now, I don’t really need a person to pour my coffee; a machine could do it.

8. I’m making this claim broadly, but of course there are exceptions. Japan comes to mind. Basically, norms (including culture) are very powerful and can mitigate these effects. But I think technology will always exert some gravity in the direction of individualism.

9. The reason for this is pretty fascinating. Current thought is that larger skulls evolved to house larger brains, which made childbirth increasingly dangerous. So evolution settled on a compromise which involved an earlier birth date (to get the head through the birth canal) and longer childhood (to allow for the brain’s full potential).