The kids are all right, p.1
The Kids Are All Right, page 1
Copyright © 2024 by Ben Blair and Gabrielle Blair
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available
ISBN 9781523526505 (paperback) | ISBN 9781523528158 (epub)
First Edition September 2024
To our favorite people in the world:
Ralph, Maude, Olive, Oscar, Betty, and Flora June
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction Why we didn’t want to write a parenting book
1. Stepping Off the Reliable Path to Success How to let go of the reliable path to success (that is no longer very reliable)
What to do when sports become a part-time job and your kid hates piano lessons
How to help your kid gain confidence or excel at something
How to get comfortable with a school you’re nervous about
How to Let go of expectations around high school traditions
Why you can stress less about your kid s getting into college
why you don’t need to worry about your child’s future career
2. Staying Flexible and Open to Change Why we remind ourselves our child is not us, and our childhood is not their childhood
Why flexibility is key
How to make family bonds that last
3. Building Connection and Fostering Independence How to build A family culture with intention
How working together makes you closer
Why we don’t expect our children’s baseline emotion to be happy
How to use your home to create the life you want
How to manage screen time
How to respond when your child rejects your religion
How to help your child Leave Home
4. Looking to the Future What we owe our kid's and what our kid's owe us
Why we believe in taking the long view
Acknowledgments
About the Authors
pagelist
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Landmarks
Cover
Table of Contents
Introduction
How to let go of the reliable path to success (that is no longer very reliable)
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Why we
didn’t want
to write a
parenting book
Hello there. We’re the Blairs, Ben and Gabrielle. We’re here to give you permission to quit Little League, to think differently about screen time, and to let go of the stress about your kid getting into college. We’ve been married since 1995, and we have six kids—four of them are eighteen years old or older, so technically, we have raised four kids, and are raising two more. By the time this book comes out, we will be down to one kid under eighteen.
Ben did his graduate work at Columbia University, earning a PhD in Philosophy & Education, and is currently the president and cofounder of Newlane University, an online university. Gabrielle graduated with a degree in graphic design and was one of the OG mom bloggers back in the aughts with her blog, Design Mom. She’s maintained an influential public presence through her writing since 2006 and is the author of two books, both New York Times bestsellers—Design Mom: How to Live with Kids, and Ejaculate Responsibly: A Whole New Way to Think About Abortion.
When you’re a parent of six and in higher education and the creator of an online community of millions of readers, most of whom are parents, you field a lot of parenting questions. Over the years we’ve heard from thousands and thousands of fellow parents who have shared their questions, concerns, dilemmas, and worries. Questions that have become more and more urgent.
Parents today are worried. They really want to get it right, and to get it right from the very beginning. We’ve heard it all: Am I feeding my baby correctly? Is my toddler getting enough educational play? What if my child didn’t get into our preferred preschool? Do I need to take a second job to afford a house in the neighborhood with the best elementary school? Are my kids getting enough family time? Is my child participating in enough extracurriculars? Are they taking enough AP classes? Do they have enough friends? Are they getting too much screen time? What if they don’t get into a good college? What should they major in?
Of course, most of these questions are ones we’re unable (or unqualified) to answer. We’re not perfect parents and we’re definitely not clinical e xperts. So why do people keep asking us for advice? We think it’s because we represent a safe forum where parents can voice their worries and concerns, and because people (whether they know us in real life or just through our online presence) can see how much we enjoy parenting. They can see that we’ve built a family culture that prizes adventure, creativity, and togetherness. They can observe that our kids actually like one another, that they enjoy spending time as a family, that they are smart and talented, confident and independent. They see college degrees from impressive universities. They see that we’ve disrupted our kids’ schooling, but somehow our kids have gotten a good education despite those complications.
But we never wanted to write a parenting book.
For one, parenting is deeply personal. When someone comes to us to ask for parenting advice, it feels like there’s no way we can get it right. We don’t know their child, we don’t know their marriage or partner (or not-partnered) situation, we don’t know their finances, we don’t know their health status, we don’t know how they were raised. It feels so fraught—the chance of us offending them instead of helping them seems so high. And then there’s the issue that too often, what’s hard about parenting is not personal at all—it’s systemic.
No parenting book is going to give you universal basic income, better childcare options, flexible work hours, an engaged co-parent, a supportive workplace, a well-funded school, or a tight-knit community. Any one of which would immediately lighten a parent’s burden—and certainly more than any book could.
So again, we didn’t want to write a parenting book. At the same time, we know so many parents like us are overwhelmed, hungry for advice, and obsessing over any parenting decision where it feels like we can assert some control—second-guessing what activities we sign our kids up for, responding to mistakes (real or perceived) that our kids make, fearing the unknown (will my kid have a successful career?), making choices based on our own childhoods because that’s all we know, worrying when our kids seem out of step with their peers, making major sacrifices to access specific schools, camps, programs, coaches, etc., and dealing with the impossible standards the world puts on our kids, and on us as parents.
We know because we’ve been there ourselves. But in the twenty-seven years we’ve been parents, we can tell you that in our experience, the idea that any of these parenting decisions are high stakes is all a big myth. A big lie. And the stress about these decisions gets in the way of a lot of the important stuff.
We didn’t set out to forge an unusual parenting path, but soon after we became parents for the first time, we found that we saw the best outcomes by reacting to what was actually happening, instead of worrying about what we thought should happen, or what other people would think about what was happening. And those reactions led to some unconventional choices.
Our path has involved moves from New York to Colorado to France to California and back again to France. (Waving hello from Normandy as we type.) Our path has involved developing careers that allowed us the flexibility to work from home years before “remote work” was even a thing. Our path has involved three of our kids skipping their senior years of high school—and missing prom and other senior-year rituals that seemed so important in our own childhoods.
We know that this unconventional path is not available—or even the best choice—for every family. But we also know that in forging our own path, we’ve inadvertently avoided many of the stresses, anxieties, and traps that seem to be a hallmark of modern parenting.
So why didn’t we get stressed out about schools? Why are our kids so independent? Was moving abroad worth the effort? Why didn’t we get bogged down in “getting it right”? We’ve spent a lot of time looking back to understand (in hindsight) whether this was all just the “luck of the Blairs” or whether there was some overarching philosophy or wisdom that could be extracted and shared with other parents. We’ve come to the conclusion that yes, there were a couple of significant shifts in our thinking that set the foundation for how we parented—and that they could shift your thinking too.
And that’s why we decided to write a parenting book.
The first major shift was to reject the idea that there is a “reliable path to success”—that if we follow specific steps along a specific educational path, our kids are guaranteed prosperity and happiness. And that our main job as parents is to do whatever it takes to keep our kids on that path.
The second big shift we made was to realize—and accept—that our child is not us, and our childhood is not their childhood. This means constantly reminding ourselves that our kids are their own people and the world they live in is different from the world we grew up in.
These shifts were not easy to make, but they have become guiding principles for us. Whenever we find ourselves worried about a child or facing a tough parenting decision, or when we’re knocking heads with one of our kids and can’t seem to see eye to eye, it’s almost always because we’ve lost sight of one of these two guiding principles. We may feel panicked as our child seems to be veering away from the reliable path to success and we’re worried about their future. Or our child is resisting a decision we’ve made for them based on what is familiar to us, or what we would have wanted when we were young, instead of what actually makes sense for them in this moment of their own particular childhood.
As soon as we remember to bring the guiding principles back into focus, suddenly we are able to see the situation more clearly, the stress diminishes, and we can respond to the issue without fear.
In the pages that follow, we have tried to spotlight a variety of scenarios or questions that send us back to these guiding principles. We also want to share other things we learned as we shifted away from more familiar models of parenting: how we encourage independence while prioritizing shared experiences; how we make time for music and sports without letting activities take over our lives; and generally why we take the long view about this parenting thing, because we’re not just raising kids for eighteen years, we’re building relationships that we hope will last a lifetime.
We also hope to provide a portrait of the unusual but wonderful path we have taken as parents. Admittedly, as we build this portrait, we focus on positive outcomes, and we know that focus might make it seem like parenting has been really easy for us. But you already know that nothing about raising a family is “easy.” Our parenting story has been characterized by experimentation, trial and error, decisions prompted by financial or psychological necessity, thrilling moments, glorious and challenging years, failures, backtracking, path switching, fits, starts, varying levels of anxiety and tension, hope, and despair. But life as a parent is like that. And our experiences and conversations with other parents suggest this is the rule more than the exception.
Now that the season of intensive hands-on parenting is largely behind us, we’re in a position to look back and really evaluate what worked. So, we want to share what we’ve learned. We want to offer what we wish we had known earlier. Ultimately, we are writing this book to help calm your worries, to try to reassure you that whatever the parenting challenge you’re facing, it’s probably not your fault. And despite the challenges you feel today, and the worries you may carry about the future, there is reason for a lot of hope and a lot of joy in parenting—and it starts with shifting your mindset about some of the stresses and expectations you bear as parents.
We have loved being parents. It has challenged and stretched and transformed us. It has been beautiful to share a life with each child through ups and downs and witness each become their own person. We have really enjoyed it. We enjoy it still! And we believe our ideas can relieve some of the pressures and burdens of modern parenting, so you can enjoy it as well.
We hope you’ll conclude, as we did, that there are many paths to a fulfilling life. The future looks bright, and the kids are all right.
1
Stepping off the Reliable Path to Success
How to let go of
the reliable
path TO
success
(that is no longer very reliable)
In order for you to succeed as a parent, your child needs to succeed. And in order to do this, they need to be exposed to Mozart in the womb, and be reading by age four so they can excel in preschool, so they’ll make it into a good elementary school, so they’ll be accepted in a high-achieving middle school, so they can attend an impressive high school, where they should take a large number of stressful AP classes, and participate in plenty of time-consuming extracurriculars, and then go through the brutal and humbling process of college applications, so they’ll be accepted into a respected university, which will lead to an important job, which means they will have a successful life.
