10 Critiques About That NYMag Piece
Kids vs. No Kids is a false binary and not all kids are a**holes
I’ve largely avoided the discourse around the explosive Cut piece that came out earlier this week, “Adorable Little Detonators,” posing the question around why adult friendships can survive so much, but not the divide around the child-free and the childless. Aside from DMs from my closest parent friends and some text chat with our babysitter who all met the article with various points of critique, I wanted to form some thoughts before opening my ears to what the entire internet had to say.
I’m going to try and focus more on what feels either unacknowledged, misbegotten generalizations of entire cohorts of people, and issues I take with argument framing and tone, which (in my mind) delegitimizes them, rather than taking jabs directly at the writer. But, I do feel rather alarmed at what feels like an enormous failure of editing and what feels like an intentionally clickbait-y cover piece. As a person who has worked in media and digital product for a long time, this feels explicitly and strategically designed to provoke.
Obviously, if you haven’t read the piece yet, it’s worth reading, but the core argument is that in adulthood, there’s nothing more divisive amongst friends than the juncture at which some have kids and some do not, and it can create friction, distance, and destroy a lot of friendships. The article is written from the POV of a childless woman in what I’m guessing is her mid-to-late thirties, surrounded by many friends who’ve had kids or been pregnant recently. She has feelings and they are strong and she finds anecdotes and quotes to support said feelings about your unwelcome packages of joy.
My main critiques/complaints:
Parents vs. The Childless is a problematic and false binary that necessarily homogenizes each group and assumes a fairly shared POV around pathways to getting to either parenthood or not having kids.
There’s a real lack of differentiation between childless-by-choice, childless-for-now, and childless-not-by-choice and how grossly different the set of perspectives might be relative to friends/friends with children as a result.
The writer places a huge emphasis on the lifestyle compromises made by parents and that to maintain friendship one also has to compromise these as well. She projects the value of childless friends to parents as being a “portal to their childless life” as though if one had not had children the pre-child lifestyle is still exactly what they’d be participating in. (i.e. getting drunk + going to Coachella).
The writer’s conviction (or insecurity) that parents feel their topics of conversation or children’s needs are superior to anything she might bring up is riddled with layers upon layers of assumptions about 1. What parents feel 2. What parents care about 3. What is objectively more interesting.
General cynicism about children’s existence in the world — the view that they are an obstacles, “assholes,” agents of chaos, generally in the way, of something that would theoretically keep flourishing in their absence. This reduces and objectifies children as inconvenient accessories to their parents rather than entities with their own personalities, interests, curiosities, and ways of enhancing the world.
Relatedly, her admission that learning another friend is pregnant and not even being able to muster her canned line about meeting her “new bff” is…appalling? Not the fact that she can’t say it, but that she has a canned reaction that’s so performative. Imagine all her pregnant friends finding out how she feels through this article…
The article’s failure to address (at all) the systemic reasons parents often have to make very compromised choices about their time (lack of childcare, cost of childcare, highly individualized parenting styles being celebrated, nuclear family structures being reinforced over community support structures.). Late stage capitalism slaps parents in the face, which honestly is the bigger “tectonic shift” of no kids—> kids if there is one. There’s one parenthetical comment about money being another barrier between parents/non-parents. Again, see Exhibit A: Major Structural Failures.
The premise that friendship is based on “being out all the time.” Most of my friendships pre/post kids tbh have been maintained through texting, DMs, and the phone, not because of kids, but because I have to… work.
The characterization of “dedicated [parent] friends” as the ones who are able to be most dismissive of their children and prioritize their childless friend. Is a dedicated friend really the person who accommodates you even at the potential expense of their and their child’s well-being? This feels like a very narrow and surface-level view of dedication and friendship.
The idea that the “heroic parent archetype” is driven by parents who changed nothing about their lifestyle post-kids, including going to Coachella. LOL.
*I do believe that Samin Nosrat is likely an extremely generous non-parent who feeds her community and would like to go to her house for dinner.
Anyhow, I’m curious what y’all thought so please drop some thoughts in the comments!
Recommendations:
To read: Energy Makes Time, a great essay by Mandy Brown on refaming how we think about time, and how being attuned to what we have the energy for can help us create time for what we need. I co-sign all of this.
To read: This thread on the Evil Witches Newsletter on “What Made Your Summer Better” which is full of an array of tiny victories and life hacks.
Life hack: The biggest quality of life improvement in the last few weeks has been using shared Apple Notes to keep track of Groceries, House To-Dos, and Kids’ School, Scheduling + Childcare Needs. I literally did not know you could share a Note until 3 weeks ago. Now we both add to these mutual to-do lists, and we can see when the other has taken care of something on it. It makes sharing tasks 1000% less naggy!
To Listen: The new James Blake album, Playing Robots into Heaven. Excited to see him play in a few weeks. Related, this interview he did recently on the Broken Record podcast. His comments about not wanting to be a parent seem uncharacteristically flippant but the rest is good.
To Watch:
We saw Oppenheimer and I enjoyed it more than I expected. A little dialogue-heavy but genuinely entertaining for a 3 hour movie.
Season 3 of How To With John Wilson (HBO), which I find is a polarizing show, but feels both novel and old school in its lo-fi footage + comedically analytical commentary.
A bunch of older movies including rewatching Lost in Translation (not as good as I remembered), Fire Island (gay romcom, very cute), Kicking & Screaming (Noah Baumbach’s first movie, very endearing), and We Don’t Live Here Anymore (babyfaced Mark Ruffalo, Laura Dern, and Naomi Watts in a very charged adaptation of the Andre Dubus story).
Still, the documentary about Michael J. Fox’s enduring battle with Parkinson’s is incredible—both the story, the editing, and him.
To visit: Lofty Pigeon Books, a cute new bookstore open in our neighborhood
That’s all for this week. Till next time!
I drafted a "short" essay in response to this but here's a "succinct" revision: I've only recently learned that coping with major life changes and transitions in friends' and loved ones' lives requires emotional maturity, patience, responsiveness, compassion, and resilience. I do not claim to suddenly possess any of these qualities in abundance now that I am a parent but I can see how severely deficient I was in these areas before I gained firsthand insight into how radically one's whole brain/body/life changes with parenthood. I now try to view anything anybody is going through—an illness, chronic pain, taking care of a sick or elderly relative, separation and divorce, job loss, etc.—through this lens.
Though I've always been excited by friends having kids and have wanted in every instance to be steadfast and supportive, I also experienced major confusion around how to sustain a friendship post-baby—what should I expect, what is expected of me?—as well as grief when the shape of those friendships inevitably changed. Importantly, I did not have the tools to identify that what I was feeling was indeed grief until recently. At the time I interpreted the shift in dynamic in ways that were reflective of my own insecurities and fears.
One of the major sociocultural conditions of our time, it seems, is how deeply we lack the community models and attitudes that teach us, implicitly and explicitly, how to adapt not only to sea changes in our own life circumstance but those of others, i.e., how to be a loving and accepting presence for a friend when *their* life has become more complicated or more boundaried or less flexible or less of what *you* would consider fun. This lack of adaptivity is converging, too, with a zeitgest-y obsession with only doing what makes us feel good, what brings us immediate pleasure and gratification, what perpetuates "good vibes only," what is easy and convenient, what does not require a modicum of discomfort or effort. I can't help but worry that all of this makes for a beastly form of neo-individualism, and threatens the messy richness that comes along with living alongside folks who do not share one's exact interests, priorities, constraints, goals, and passions.
I could go on, but I hesitate to do so before reading the article (though I do feel thoroughly briefed after reading your summary and critique). At the risk of leaving this at a loose end, I'll only add that the apparent subtext of the article—that friends with needs, limits, responsibilities, dependents, etc. should be separated out into distinct categories based on their ability and willingness to behave as though they do not have needs, limits, responsibilities, dependents, etc.—leaves me with a heavy, tired heart.
So many good points. My initial huge double take was the “can’t wait to meet my new bff”. Setting aside your very valid point as to how appalling it is that she thought up a canned response, why would that be the line? In what world would a parent want to hear that? It’s presumptuous and silly on so many levels.