Last weekend my kids were borderline insufferable and spent 90% of their waking hours bickering about who had more of anything, or trying to climb on my lap. They resisted every suggestion (what to eat for breakfast, to go out to play in the snow, which pants to wear), and by lunchtime on Saturday I was very weary and irritated. I did what I do when I’m having a rough weekend and can’t get the kids to leave the apartment: bemoan the difficulty of child-rearing in NYC, browse Zillow in the bathroom, think about how ungrateful my children are despite their abundance of options, and play NYT Spelling Bee.
My latest and perhaps obvious take is that parents are exhausted by having to constantly manage the number of choices available to their kids. Kids’ desire to have both specific things combined with their unreasonable expectations, lack of understanding of logistics, and need for immediacy puts one in a constant and endless state of managing what’s offered.
While some of this is parental boundary setting (or failure thereof), there are many other sources of this choice abundance—Amazon, the candy aisle at the grocery store, ordering dinner on Seamless, Hulu-AppleTV-Netflix-Disney+, and simply living in NYC and encountering things on every walk. I decide to look into what the experts have to say about giving your kids choices, with this idea that if I reduce the choices I can reduce the exhaustion.
While it’s great to give kids a say in things, too many or too big of choices can overwhelm them or put too much pressure on them. Give young children the choice between only two things. If they don’t or can’t pick between the two, don’t offer a third…
If you give children choices once, but not the next time, they naturally get frustrated and protest. Their confusion often results in them "pushing back," questioning, or refusing to comply as a way to determine where the "real" boundaries are. Adults often end up viewing this "push-back" as uncooperative or acting-out behavior when it is really just a way for children to determine the extent of their power.
If one night you say, “What do you want for dinner?” and the next night you say, “We’re having lasagna and you can’t have anything different,” they are likely to whine or protest because boundaries become confusing.
I think about what to do with this information, our confused boundaries, the fact that I’ve both asked my kids what they want for dinner and told them what they’re having many times. That given the option they want sushi, specifically from Silver Rice, with the cucumbers cut very thinly, with the soy sauce in the little plastic cup rather than in the packets and preferably not touching the wasabi. They’ve learned to be extremely particular, understand that everywhere they can ask for something, that even if I give them two choices, there’s an unending waterfall of other options they still know exists.
I ask Ada one day if she wants to try rock climbing, and she says she does, so I sign her up, watching the calendar like a hawk for open sessions, putting in my credit card info, while also thinking about the childcare gymnastics required to take her to the climbing gym after school on a weekday. A few weeks later, when I tell her she has rock climbing after school, she says she’d never wanted to go in the first place. That she’d never agreed to it. That I’d never actually asked her. I hadn’t given her a choice. She says she’d rather do piano and she also wants to do Girl Scouts. She knows of kids who do these things and that I should sign her up.
Instead of telling her she IS going, I say I’m not sure about piano, but she could do dance or chess. Or skateboarding? I quickly recognize this is too many open doors for a six year old. Activities—and the sheer number of them on the table—feel expendable. She rolls her eyes and says, “well, actually, I don’t want to do anything. I’ll just stay home and draw.” I’ve overwhelmed her, and she’s retreating.
I wonder how much of this is being six and how much is because children are fickle and how much is not my fault at all. I remember mid-pandemic the relief of not having to make choices because we couldn’t go anywhere or do anything. It was terrible but also liberating. I am weirdly nostalgic for this particular release of pressure.
I try to avoid pedantic talk about appreciating the options that I never had. That other kids don’t have. I think about how much work parents all over must be doing to try and anticipate the things that will edify their kids, that their kids will do without resistance, how much time mothers spend researching the activities, filling the grocery cart with things they hope their kids eat. That it’d be great if mothers didn’t have to do all the work of removing 99% of the noise. If there were just fewer decisions to make, we’d all be so much better off, but the spigot just keeps on running.
Recommendations for the kids:
To wear: These Smartwool socks for kids are the cutest. These Bombas Valentine’s Day sock packs are also very cute.
To do: Socrates Sculpture Garden and the Noguchi Museum are having a light sculpture workshop and Lunar New Year celebrations this Saturday, 2/5.
To make: Depending on your level of aspirational/DIY, this Kids Made Modern Valentine’s Craft set is a good starter kit for this Hallmark holiday
Brooklyn parents: Ada has loved the after school program and mini camps at Textile Arts Center: weaving, sewing, marbling, soft sculpture, dying. It’s the crafting of my dreams.
Recommendations for the grown-ups:
Listen: Chameleon: Wild Boys is the real life podcast mystery you’ve been waiting for, with new episodes dropping each week. Set in a small Canadian community, two brothers emerge from wilderness and claim they’ve lived entirely off the grid and eat copious amounts of fruit. But who are they really?
To eat: This Bi-Rite x Bittman citrus box is calling my name.
To cook: Dduk Guk is the traditional Korean rice cake soup I grew up eating on the Lunar New Year. I also love Hana Asbrink’s other Korean-ish recipes on Food52.
Heartwarming: This video of David Byrne singing One Fine Day with the Brooklyn Youth Chorus at National Sawdust in 2019.
Read/Watch: Amanda Hess’s piece, “Mommy is Going Away for a While,” on the “antiheroine of the moment,” the mother who leaves, with protagonists like Olivia Colman’s character in “The Lost Daughter.” In this vein, also recommend “Run,” the 2020 HBO show about a mother who flees her family and spends a week on cross-country train trip reuniting with her ex, and “Scenes from a Marriage.”
Happy Lunar New Year to those celebrating, and happy mid-winter to everyone else. The groundhog says there will be more winter, but who’s to believe him.