You probably know about Lindsay Clancy, the mom currently on trial for having killed her three children in 2023. Her attorney claims she has a gnarly case of postpartum psychosis, that she was put on a cocktail of a dozen medications—for sleep, for anxiety, for depression—and that she’s not guilty, by reason of insanity. That the Valium and Prozac and Lamictal and God knows what else must have combined to make her not herself. You might not know about Kailey Erhart, the 22-year-old mother who, earlier this month, killed two of her kids, leaving the third in critical condition, telling the father, “say goodbye to your kids.” She killed her 3-year-old, Morgan, and her 5-month-old, Ava; my son, Zev, is three, and my son, Solomon, would have been a few months older than that little baby. I don’t get to decide who goes to Hell and who doesn’t, but I have ideas for who I’d nominate.

Somehow, Clancy’s trial has galvanized hundreds of supporters who’ve been not sitting shiva for her prematurely-deceased children, but using her story as a rallying cry for how moms aren’t getting the mental health support they need. “We don't feel like there's enough support for women, especially postpartum, but mental health in general,” one mom of six, who flew in from Tennessee to rally outside the trial in Massachusetts, told NPR. “As women, we're told to smile, and, you know, it's natural to be a mom. So if you aren't really into it and you can't do it well with a smile, then you're not doing it right,” said another.

These sentiments are fine. But associated with Clancy’s case, with the implication that she’s relatable in some way, they carry darker implications: That some part of her behavior was justified. That you never know when a mom might just crack. To be quite clear, you don’t need to be into it, and you don’t need to mother with a smile; you just need to not kill your children. There are standards, here, and they’re not hard to meet.

The slipping of standards is perhaps best embodied by the ice-throwing, which has apparently caught on as a form of therapy among a certain subset of TikTok moms:

@livingthruloveMy new therapy🤌🏼 #momtok #momsoftiktok #parentsoftiktok #momrage #postpartumrage #angerissues #momlife #newmom #postpartum

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“I share the hard parts of motherhood,” reads this mom’s profile. “We are in a very quiet maternal mental health crisis, and I think it’s because of this ‘intensive mothering culture’ that we have set up for moms, and what I mean by ‘intensive mothering’ is this insane pressure put on moms to provide constant and exclusive nurture and I like to add, doing it mostly all alone,” she says in another video. A video filmed several days prior shows her dropping her 5-year-old off at the grandparents’ house for a full afternoon, a routine she apparently does every other Saturday.

In a sense, she is correct: Intensive mothering—which every person means something slightly different by, but most likely refers to the talk therapy “gentle parenting” for discipline, coupled with high standards for giving kids less sugar, less screentime, “enrichment” from a young age—asks too much of moms. But she’s certainly not doing it all alone, as the child’s father and grandparents are mentioned or shown in several videos. Also: the 5-year-old goes to school. For the vast majority of the day, someone else is doing all the discipline and enrichment. Be reasonable.

Performative impulses crop up in many places. The impulse to perform “intensive mothering” in public when other people (mostly: mothers) are watching, as well as the impulse to complain about it on TikTok. The great news is that, with the exception of your state’s child protective services that might intervene if you free-range too close to the sun, there’s no cop that comes around arresting you if you don’t perform highly enough on the “intensive mothering” scorecard. Nobody’s going to come get you if you do timeouts instead of talking through disciplinary problems. They probably won’t even have much of a problem if you spank. If you let your kid watch an extra hour of screentime, nobody’s going to know about it. It’ll be okay.

“Nobody talks about the hell that is misoprostol, the abortion pill. I suspect that, in its politicization, no one wants to mention that the drug in question is a sledgehammer—on its quest to destroy the fetus, it also obliterates the mother,” wrote Romy Holland back in 2024, about her abortion.

She described feeling a primordial instinct to bring the baby’s remains with her after the abortion, and empathizing with a friend who ate her baby after the baby’s remains came out in clumps of blood. She wrote about how she started having borderline psychotic episodes in the weeks that followed, being “consumed with an urgent need to go find my missing baby.”

“Luck is all that separates me from Lindsay Clancy,” Holland wrote, rather honestly. “My delusional thoughts centered on rescuing my baby, but just as easily could have coalesced around harming nurses or loved ones. For reasons unknown to me, I kept one foot firmly in reality, but I can imagine what it might feel like to follow a thread of psychosis so far that I could no longer find anything else to grab onto.”

Holland is right that we can’t always anticipate who will be able to keep a foot planted in reality, and who will succumb to psychosis. There is risk to our mental states involved when we become mothers, risk we must assume with no true assurance that we’ll respond to its numerous demands well—or even stay sane. Some number of women really do have postpartum psychosis. But here’s my specific worry: Those who are playacting at it, wrestling an Overton window of Mom Discourse open and acting like the standards as they currently stand are just too high, that one simply must throw ice and film it to get catharsis.

“Modern suburban SAHM life, while objectively comfortable, is often uniquely isolating,” writes Neeraja Deshpande on X. “Many women’s only outlet for anything resembling community then becomes TikTok brainrot, which rewards them for being mentally ill, whether or not they start off with actual mental illness.” I think this is correct: TikTok as collective effervescence. We used to have church as a means of accessing that collective effervescence; now we have social media validation machines. The cheap thrill of going viral. Half-priced catharsis, with no real improvement of one’s actual material circumstances.

The ice-throwers—perhaps related to the modern-day lotus-eaters, those who scroll endlessly having succumbed to their own apathy, resigned to inaction—still have some fight left in them, I suppose. Better to vent rage at a bathtub and an ice cube than a babbling toddler; better to playact at insanity than…the alternative. One could see it as a protective desire: They understand just how inappropriate it would be to yell at their child and they have the self-regulation to get rage out some other way. But broadcasting one’s rage to a synthetic community of other moms really won’t change much at all about your degree of loneliness once the initial dopamine hit’s worn off.

I have a few tangible suggestions, if they’re willing to take them. I’ve never been on the brink of insanity, but mourning the loss of one child while you deal with a 3-year-old’s cascade of endless emotions and interruptions has been extraordinarily challenging. (People say it’s important to really feel and process the grief, but that’s something only available to those who have round-the-clock childcare, I think.) This won’t be useful to someone dealing with true psychosis, who needs psych care, but maybe for the moms who seek TikTok connection:

You don’t need many mom friends, but you do need one or two really good ones. It won’t happen overnight. Be flexible and open and vulnerable; find a daytime partner to help you get through the days that feel like slogs. There will be many of those days.

Put down the ice. The performance of rage is indulgent. We shouldn’t indulge bad feelings, impulses, or fantasies. No tripod, no ring light, no TikTok posting. You’re broadcasting your worst days and your child’s. Don’t indulge these feelings or let other people validate them. Build circles where people want to actually help you with childcare when you have these feelings, not affirm you online.

Do less. Nobody’s forcing you to breastfeed, or to do “intensive parenting” or to limit screen time. Just because other people appear to be doing it all “better” doesn’t mean they actually are; you really have no idea what goes on behind the scenes, and it doesn’t matter much. Do everything you can within reason to treat your children well, and quit the parenting philosophies that aren’t serving you. The one philosophy worth keeping? You’re agentic, in control of your own behavior. Take responsibility. Catharsis doesn’t come from TikTok.

The cucumbers were not evenly sliced, he was overzealous with the fish sauce, but it worked well enough as a side dish, saving me five minutes of time. It wasn’t busy work; I really needed my time freed up, and I judged him capableish of handling the responsibility. My hope was not that the task would be done perfectly, but that the salad would not be dressed with blood. Success.

We do this with laundry: I sometimes ask him to load the washer. And with clothing: He has a child-sized wardrobe and small hangers and I throw his clean laundry on the bed, asking him to hang it up. It ends up looking less orderly than when I do it, but I don’t mind if it saves me time and teaches him responsibility. He sets the table (poorly!) and uses a small vacuum to attack clumps of dog hair before we host friends for dinner. Amazon packages are his magnum opus––he gets that Opinel knife out and stabs them as soon as they come.

A few hundred years ago, children did a very different form of labor: “In the 18th century, the arrival of a newborn to a rural family was viewed by the parents as a future beneficial laborer and an insurance policy for old age,” reads a 2017 report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, looking back at how work has changed in the U.S. “At an age as young as 5, a child was expected to help with farm work and other household chores. The agrarian lifestyle common in America required large quantities of hard work, whether it was planting crops, feeding chickens, or mending fences. … Most families simply could not afford the costs of raising a child from birth to adulthood without some compensating labor.^”

A son born to a farming family “was worth a thousand dollars” remarked one farmer, according to Chaim Rosenberg’s history of this practice. During the years between the Civil War and the start of World War I, about two-thirds of child labor happened on farms. Though children did not tend to be given jobs operating heavy machinery until they were sufficiently capable, their work was often grueling.

In the cities, conditions often looked much worse, with children expected to operate dangerous machines far from the oversight of their parents. “In 1900, 25,000 of the nearly 100,000 textile workers in the South were children under 16,” reads the same BLS report. “By 1904, overall employment of children had increased to 50,000, with 20,000 children under 12 employed.” Cotton mills were where children in the semi-urban south could find work; little boys entered the glasswork industry in cities like St. Louis and Pittsburgh and Muncie, their small hands coming in handy; young girls were given work in the garment industry in New York City, sometimes working alongside seamstresses in factory settings, other times sewing in home workshops where they could be more closely supervised by their mothers. We don’t have reliable statistics on child injuries and deaths from factory work around the turn of the century, nor on the long tail effects, like the chronic lung disease that could spring up later in life from exposure to toxins.

By 1900, approximately 20 percent of children between the ages of 10 and 15 had legitimate jobs. But many children well below the age of 10 performed labor for their families in more informal capacities: children aged 3 and 4 would be put to work hulling berries on farms. Slightly older kids could harvest shrimp and shuck oysters.

This was a very dark era for children, and I’m not advocating for a return to that. They’ll revoke my libertarian card for saying this, but FDR signed valuable laws forcing children out of the workforce, and our cultural norms shifted, as the law began to punish workplaces for their child labor practices and society became more prosperous: We got kids out of the factory, we made schooling compulsory, and we came to agree upon a different set of beliefs about childhood. When most families were struggling to make ends meet––either farming and homesteading out west, or living in cramped and crowded tenements out east––they didn’t have real ability to protect their children from the harshness of adult life; as we became richer, our beliefs about child labor shifted.

Nowadays, you’ll occasionally see a teenager helping out their family business: bussing tables or serving as a dishwasher in the restaurant, checking customers out at the bodega, helping their mom run an at-home daycare after school. But nowadays we’ve moved toward the belief that children not only shouldn’t do meaningful work, but also can’t. This belief appears to be less pervasive among immigrant and small-business-owning families, but extremely pervasive among the upper-middle-class, highly-educated, highly-agentic elites.

Enter Montessori.

Maria Montessori spent many years studying children with cognitive delays and learning difficulties. In 1900, she was made a director of the Scuola Magistrale Ortofrenica, a "medico-pedagogical institute" that trained teachers in how to help children with learning difficulties. It was here that she developed pedagogy that would then be used for normal children. In 1907, she opened up Casa dei Bambini, for the poor children of Rome, where she studied her charges, noticing that the children were sensitive to their environments, capable of deep focus and concentration, and interested in repetitive, often highly practical activity. She began to develop theories about children having “absorbent minds” and needing the correct conditions to develop discipline, focus, and a love for learning. A well-prepared environment could allow children to make and correct their own mistakes; work at a pace that felt right to them; and explore their innate curiosities. "Help me to do it myself" became the guiding principle.

Those beliefs haven’t caught on to nearly the degree that the Montessori branding and aesthetic have. Among upper-middle-class mom circles, the Pikler Triangle rules. Lovevery toys can be found in every playroom (at the price of $120 per play kit). High-contrast mobiles adorn the nurseries. “Sad beige playrooms” for “sad beige children” have become a meme, but the aesthetic is a somewhat Montessori one: More wood, less plastic. More pastels, muted colors, and colors found in nature. Less lurid. No battery-operated nonsense. Fewer moving parts.

Montessori, more broadly, has grown into a big culture force: Lovevery, founded in 2017, logged $226 million in revenue in 2024. Chains like Wildflower Montessori Schools, Bezos Academy (a "Montessori-inspired" program), and Guidepost Montessori have all exploded. The American Montessori Society estimates there are now roughly 5,000 Montessori schools in the country, with 2017 serving as an all-time high for public school membership in AMS. Many other daycare programs and preschools use the “Montessori-inspired” designation to appeal to eager parents.

Purists would say that people are ignoring the actual principles Montessori championed in favor of an aesthetic: Toys ought to provide isolated difficulty (a child practices a single skill or concept until ready to move forward) and control of error (a way for children to notice if they’ve made a mistake without an adult intervening). But that’s a little in-the-weeds. My concern is less pedantic, and much bigger.

My theory, which I hope gives parents sufficient benefit of the doubt, is that the parents adopting half-assed Montessori-ism understand on some intuitive level that children yearn for meaningful work. Taking things apart and putting them back together. Glimpsing the adult world, grabbing some component of it, turning it over in their hands, seeing how it’s made. Being gifted some responsibility for the stuff of daily life––the meals, the clothing we wear, the keeping of our spaces––and being able to playact as adults in order to better understand what the world around them is made of. Children don’t need the weight of the world placed on their shoulders, but thoughtfully meting out little pieces of the adult world can be a real joy for them––especially if their “teachers” (parents) can help them make sense of it all, setting appropriate expectations, and onboarding them to the tasks in an age-appropriate way.

Consider the 4-year-old’s excitement at helping diaper the baby, or the 3-year-old’s interest in checking out at the grocery store. Our Montessori revival is good evidence of the fact that the philosophy intuitively makes sense to many parents.

But Montessori-ism requires taking risk. Consider my son using the knife to chop the cucumber: there was a non-zero chance that it would end in bleeding. There was a low chance, but not nonexistent, that it would result in an E.R. visit. I assumed that risk because I saw the benefits to him and to me as worth it. Many parents make a different calculation, which could be perfectly rational behavior. Maybe they had a bad experience with a knife as a child. Maybe the nearest E.R. is 45 minutes away. Maybe their kid is too wild, struggling to heed any advice, that they don’t feel like they can trust them at this juncture. (Haven’t we all been there, where someone is going through a developmental phase or a multi-day mood that just renders them…kind of nuts?)

But I’ll posit something a little different: Just as many a mom has told me that they read Emily Oster’s Expecting Better but can’t totally bring themselves to actually sip a glass of wine in pregnancy, embracing the freedom her new data provides, I wonder if parents buy the Lovevery Montessori toys because the philosophy makes sense to them, but they can’t bring themselves to hand their toddler a real knife.

If these parents were en masse saying they have a great experience of parenthood, I wouldn’t feel compelled to offer a suggestion. But headlines abound of “depleted mother syndrome” and “how working parents can spot signs of burnout” and how parents today feel “exhausted, burned out and perpetually behind.” I wonder if the sorry state of parenthood in our biggest cities leads to people having fewer kids, and enjoying it all less. Handing your child a knife and some cucumbers, or some laundry and hangers, won’t be the thing that makes juggling a 50-hour-a-week job and middle-of-the-night wakeups suddenly doable. But we can do small things to build a habit of stretching our risk tolerances––and letting children contribute to the household in ways that are meaningful to them and to us.

Many of you followed along as my second son was born, stayed in the NICU for 61 days, came home for 9, and sadly passed away. It feels a bit like the cruelest possible joke to have one son who skateboards, who can drop in on a 6-foot quarter pipe at the age of 3, and another born fragile and sickly, made whole only by God in heaven, but not by doctors here on Earth.

As if my son dying wasn’t bad enough, we also happen to live in New York City. This is the land where many people get started having kids at age 40, where the median household income is high, where the mayor hopes to help parents outsource childrearing from 6 weeks and on (with little thought given to stay-at-home parents or families who hope to make different choices). It’s a place I’ve repeatedly encountered padlocked playgrounds in 60-degree weather; where restaurants have age minimums and anti-stroller policies; where schools hemorrhage enrollment. The culture feels topsy turvy, and people are either having fewer kids, or choosing not to have them at all.

I’m writing a book––CITY WITHOUT CHILDREN––to construct a wide-angle view of how different forces work in convergence to shape citydwelling American parents’ risk appetites. This book will be part culture, part policy, and part grief memoir, shaped by my experience with my two boys and the fact that I’ve lived through every parent’s worst fear: burying one’s own child.

The world has gotten safer, but we’ve gotten broadly more paranoid, bubble-wrapping our kids’ childhoods. It’s liability fears leading to schools and playground designers removing risk from our play spaces; it’s people having fewer kids, having them later, and having them richer that leads to the “trimester Zero” mentality where women increasingly go to pre-conception consultations, oriented toward optimization culture from the get-go; it’s the public-health authorities’ guidance that (in some cases, rightfully!) instills new fears in parents; it’s the way this cohort of parents has so many stakeholders––daycares! nannies! schools!––but no real village, leading them to import other people’s risk tolerances. And, yes, it’s the heightened fear of investigations from child protective services if you let an 8-year-old walk home from the park solo. We’re far from the days of Etan Patz disappearing from the streets of Soho, and such incidents have become blessedly rare in this city. But why does big-city parenthood feel so damn hard?!

When I had Zev at 26, I didn’t understand other parents’ risk aversion. My amygdala just didn’t quite work properly and I couldn’t quite figure out what everyone else was so worried about all the time. Now, at 30, after Sol’s death, I find myself pulling Zev seven feet back from the subway tracks, waking up in the middle of the night to check that he’s still breathing, refusing to let him near pools. But I’m not correct to do so. We have a mandate from God to protect and steward the lives with which we’re entrusted; living in fear dishonors that. This book is about choosing to live a full life after tragedy––and how other parents can embrace their fears and change the culture.

Follow me on Substack for updates about CITY WITHOUT CHILDREN. (And thank you to The Fund for American Studies for providing me with a wonderful fellowship to write this book that’s so dear to my heart.)