This summer, those two facts collided when her three oldest siblings left for sleepaway camp, temporarily promoting her to oldest child. She is not, temperamentally, an oldest child. She thrives under the wing of her older brothers and sister, happily tagging along behind them, and I knew their absence would leave an enormous hole in her summer.

So six months ago, I began planning a consolation prize.

We would go to Assateague Island, the barrier island off the Maryland coast where wild horses have lived for hundreds of years. We would camp right on the beach, with the Atlantic Ocean on one side and horses wandering through the dunes on the other. It was the sort of thing that sounds absolutely magical when you are booking a campsite in February from the climate-controlled comfort of your house.

To prepare, we read Marguerite Henry’s classic Misty of Chincoteague, the story that has been turning generations of little girls into horse obsessives since 1947, and learned about the wild ponies of Assateague. My daughter counted down the months, then the weeks, then the days.

There was only one problem with my otherwise excellent plan: I do not camp.

I had never pitched a tent. I had never cooked dinner over a fire. I have spent most of my adult life operating under the strong conviction that Jews should have stopped camping the moment Moses successfully got us out of the Sinai Desert. We did forty years. We served our time, and we didn’t handle it particularly well. God led us to permanent structures. Why would anyone voluntarily go back?

“Jews don’t camp” has been one of my most enduring personal mantras. Stereotypes exist for a reason, and this one has always seemed particularly sensible to me.

But my girl was sad. And my younger kids, unlike their mother, have been asking to go camping for essentially their entire lives.

So I bought an eight-person tent. I bought sleeping bags, flashlights, and a portable one-time-use grill from Walmart. I packed enough bug spray to violate several international environmental treaties. I loaded the car, threw my younger kids in, and headed for the Eastern Shore.

And I knew going in that it would be a disaster.

In fact, I leaned so completely into the certainty of disaster that I spent much of the drive to Assateague making arrangements for our escape. I knew which hotels in Ocean City had rooms available that night. I knew how long it would take us to get there. I knew approximately how quickly I could throw three children and our essential belongings back into the car if conditions became intolerable.

By the time we shifted into park at the campsite, I had my finger resting comfortably on the eject button.

The first indication that I had assessed the situation correctly came the moment I opened the car door.

It was 94 degrees, and mosquitoes immediately swarmed me. If you’ve ever seen a box of paper clips opened near a magnet, that’s what it looks like when a human being walks onto Assateague.

Our campsite was on sand, which meant I was attempting to erect an eight-person tent for the first time in my life under a blazing August sun, standing on a surface about the temperature of the interior of a pizza oven. There was no shade. There was no breeze worth mentioning. And I spent the entire time being eaten alive by so, so many mosquitoes.

Every fifteen minutes, I lined the children up and sprayed them again. They cheerfully presented their arms and legs for another coating and then ran back to whatever they were doing. I had read the reviews on the experience at the campsite and bought real repellent, with more DEET than I had ever used in my life, and yet we were constantly reapplying.

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The other day, I came across a tweet that perfectly captured one of the stranger realities of being a mother in 2026. It was criticizing mothers who bring their six-week-old babies to the gym daycare, the implication being that if you truly loved your newborn, you would never voluntarily leave them with someone else simply so you could exercise.

Before I get into why I think that’s nonsense, let me make an important disclaimer. Motherhood today is not harder than it was for our grandmothers. We have antibiotics. We have vaccines for measles and polio and whooping cough. We have grocery delivery, disposable diapers, washing machines, and Amazon Prime. Women in previous generations buried children from diseases we’ve largely forgotten about. They did laundry by hand and cooked every meal from scratch. I’m not interested in pretending we’ve somehow inherited the hardest version of motherhood.

But motherhood is different today, and one of those differences is that because fewer people are choosing to have children, the expectations placed on those of us who do seem to have become almost impossibly high.

I wrote recently about what anti-natalism looks like on the political Right, and one of the things I’ve been thinking about ever since is how much our culture has quietly shifted its expectations of parents. When children were simply an ordinary part of adult life, parenting was understood to be messy. Babies cried in church. Toddlers melted down in grocery stores. Mothers looked tired because, of course they did—they were raising children.

Today, children are increasingly viewed as lifestyle accessories or carefully managed projects, and mothers are expected to optimize every conceivable decision. Every parenting choice has become moralized. If you breastfeed, you’re doing it wrong. If you formula feed, you’re doing it wrong. If you sleep train, you’re cold. If you don’t sleep train, you’re creating bad habits. If you return to work, you’re neglecting your children. If you stay home, you’re wasting your education. The acceptable margin for ordinary human imperfection has gotten narrower and narrower, until it sometimes feels as though every decision a mother makes is open to public review.

The irony, of course, is that most of the people offering these opinions know almost nothing about the families they’re judging.

Take the gym example.

My very first essay on this Substack was about joining my local gym, and the funny thing is that it had very little to do with exercise. The gym offered childcare, and as the mother of several young children, that hour of childcare became one of the most important parts of my week.

I didn’t sign up when my oldest was six weeks old, although in hindsight I wish I had.

Those first months after having a baby are wonderful, but they’re also exhausting in a way that’s difficult to explain until you’ve lived it. Whether it’s your first child or your sixth, you’re almost never truly off duty. There is always another diaper to change, another feeding around the corner, another child who needs help opening a yogurt pouch, another sibling argument to mediate, another load of laundry waiting in the dryer. Even when the baby is sleeping, your brain isn’t. You’re mentally calculating how long until the next feeding, whether everyone has clean clothes for tomorrow, and if this might finally be the moment you can sneak in a shower before someone starts crying again.

People often compare motherhood to a full-time job, but I don’t think that’s quite right. Even demanding jobs come with coffee breaks, uninterrupted conversations, and lunch hours. Motherhood—particularly in those early years—is more like being permanently on call. There is always someone who needs something from you, and because you love them, you happily give it.

The problem is that eventually your reserves begin to run low.

The gym wasn’t really about exercise at all. Yes, I appreciated getting stronger and losing weight after pregnancy, but the real gift was the childcare. For an hour, I could walk on a treadmill while listening to a podcast from beginning to end. I could answer my emails with my fingers instead of with talk-to-type. I could exist without someone asking me to cut strawberries into smaller pieces or find the missing stuffed giraffe.

And then I would come home.

Here’s the remarkable part: my children didn’t get a mother who loved them less because she’d spent an hour away from them. They got a mother who was more patient, more relaxed, and much more emotionally available than the one who had walked into the gym sixty minutes earlier.

I’ve always thought of it like charging a laptop battery. Your computer charges much faster when you’re not actively using it. Mothers aren’t machines, but we’re not all that different. One uninterrupted hour of a genuine break often replenishes you far more effectively than twelve five-minute breaks spent hiding in the bathroom while someone pounds on the door asking where the wipes are.

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Somehow we’ve convinced ourselves that a good mother should never need that kind of replenishment. The more devoted you are, the thinking goes, the more completely you should erase yourself. Every moment not directly spent with your children is viewed with suspicion, as though taking care of yourself necessarily comes at their expense.

It’s such a strange standard, because we wouldn’t apply it anywhere else. We understand that surgeons need sleep before operating. Teachers need planning periods. Pilots are required to rest before flying. We recognize that people perform better when they’re rested, healthy, and emotionally regulated.

Only mothers are expected to operate indefinitely on empty.

The longer I’ve been a parent, though, the more I’ve realized that there’s another skill that’s almost as important as learning how to change a diaper or survive sleep deprivation.

You have to learn not to care so much what strangers think.

That sounds easier than it is, especially when you’re a first-time mom. I remember desperately wanting reassurance that I was doing everything correctly. Every criticism stung because I was still trying to figure out what kind of mother I wanted to be.

Then the years passed.

I’ve now been judged for breastfeeding in public. I’ve been judged for giving a baby formula. I’ve been judged because babies and toddlers cried in a supermarket. I’ve been judged for flying alone with five children. I’ve been judged because one of my kids took too long in a public restroom. I’m sure I’ve been judged for babywearing, for not babywearing, for homeschooling, for having “too many” children, for letting them climb trees, for not making them wear matching outfits, and probably for fifty other things I’ve either forgotten or never even noticed.

Here’s the thing: These judgments aren’t actually about me.

The woman glaring because your toddler is crying isn’t evaluating your parenting after conducting a careful review of the evidence. The anonymous person on X declaring that no loving mother would ever use a gym daycare hasn’t spent five minutes in your home. The stranger who thinks your family is too big, too loud, too messy, or too unconventional has almost no information about your life.

They’re not really responding to you. They’re responding to their own anxieties, their own experiences, their own assumptions about what motherhood ought to look like.

Once you understand that, their opinions lose their power.

These days, unless you’re my children’s other parent—also known as my husband—I don’t spend any time worrying about what you think of my parenting. That doesn’t mean I think I know everything. I ask for advice all the time. I have older mothers I deeply respect and close friends whose judgment I trust. My husband and I regularly debate the best course of action on decisions large and small.

Those people have earned the right to speak into my life because they know me. They know my children. They understand our family, our values, our strengths, and our blind spots. When they offer criticism, it comes from a place of love and a genuine desire to help us flourish.

The stranger behind me in line at Trader Joe’s has not earned that right.

Neither has the anonymous commenter who sees a ten-second clip of my life and suddenly feels qualified to explain everything I’m doing wrong.

There’s a quote that’s often attributed to Dr. Seuss that I put in my high school yearbook: “Those who mind don’t matter, and those who matter don’t mind.”

I still live by it.

One of the greatest gifts I’ve given myself over the past thirteen years of motherhood has had nothing to do with breastfeeding, homeschooling, discipline, sleep schedules, or screen time. It has been learning that I don’t need to win the approval of strangers.

There is an extraordinary freedom that comes from realizing you’re no longer auditioning for the role of “good mother” in the eyes of people you’ll never see again. Your job isn’t to satisfy the woman rolling her eyes because your toddler is having a bad day, or the internet pundit who has decided one parenting decision tells them everything about your character. Your job is to love your children well, to raise them with wisdom and common sense, and to build a family culture you can be proud of.

Everything else is just background noise.

And the older I get, the more convinced I become that one of the healthiest things a mother can do—for herself and for her children—is to become almost impossibly difficult to shame.

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Conservatives tend to tell stories rooted in gratitude. Progressives tend to tell stories rooted in grievance. You see it everywhere. One side instinctively counts blessings, while the other catalogs complaints. One side looks first for reasons to be thankful, while the other looks first for reasons to be aggrieved. Obviously there are exceptions, but as a broad cultural tendency it’s difficult to miss.

The divide becomes even more striking once you enter the world of parenting.

Scroll through social media long enough, and you’ll notice that conservative mothers and fathers generally describe their children as blessings. Their feeds aren’t sanitized fairy tales—there are tantrums, sleepless nights, endless laundry, sibling fights, and toddlers determined to redecorate the house with a Sharpie. But those frustrations exist within a much larger story about the privilege of raising children. The difficult moments are acknowledged without becoming the defining feature of parenthood.

Progressive parenting content often feels like the inverse. Parenting is framed as an endless exercise in drudgery. Every inconvenience becomes evidence of the crushing “mental load.” Every ordinary sacrifice becomes proof that motherhood is fundamentally exhausting, monotonous, and underappreciated.

Those are profoundly different ways of looking at exactly the same reality.

Anyone who has raised children knows both stories contain elements of truth. I’ve had colicky babies who only slept while being held as I sat up in a rocking chair in their bedroom for months on end. I’ve folded enough laundry to clothe a small nation, cleaned up stomach bugs at two in the morning, and repeated the phrase “please stop hitting your brother” more times than I could ever count. None of that is to romanticize parenting. The difficult moments are real, and every parent experiences them. The difference is whether those moments become the defining story you tell about your family, or simply one chapter in a much larger and happier one.

I often think about one of Jordan Peterson’s simplest pieces of parenting advice: raise children you and others actually enjoy being around. It sounds almost offensively obvious, yet it captures something we’ve forgotten. Children are not static creatures who simply happen to us. They are shaped, profoundly and continually, by the adults raising them. The more time you spend with your children, the more they begin to resemble you. They absorb your habits, your sense of humor, your emotional responses, your values, and your view of the world. Which is why it is always so striking when parents publicly describe their children with open contempt. More often than not, they’re telling us far more about themselves than about their kids.

That dynamic was on full display recently during an episode of the podcast I’ve Had It, hosted by Jennifer Welch and Angie “Pumps” Sullivan (pulled by my friend Curtis Houck from NewsBusters). Discussing homeschooling, Sullivan declared, “I don’t trust somebody that wants to be with their kids 24/7. I think a lot of dumb people do it because it’s just easier.”

What fascinated me wasn’t even her opinion about homeschooling, which was absolutely ludicrous on its face. It was the assumption underneath it. She simply could not imagine wanting to spend that much time with your own children unless there were some selfish or pathological explanation. To her, the very desire to be around your kids required an ulterior motive.

It’s tempting to write it off as an extreme voice out for attention, but as a homeschool mother, it’s a sentiment I hear shockingly frequently. I’ll tell people that I homeschool and they reply, “Oh, I could never spend all day with my children.” I never know quite how to respond, because that’s weird and that’s shameful and it should be common sense to say so.

It apparently never occurred to her that some parents genuinely enjoy their children’s company, or that spending more time together might itself be part of what produces close families and delightful children in the first place. Imagine hearing your own mother say something like that publicly. Imagine realizing that she regards time spent with you not as one of life’s greatest joys, but as something only a fool would voluntarily choose. As painful as that would be for any child to hear, it also reveals something much larger about the way many progressives have come to think about parenthood.

This strikes me as one of the least discussed ways our culture is bifurcating. We spend enormous amounts of time talking about political polarization, but almost no time talking about the radically different emotional narratives Americans are telling about family life itself. One worldview treats children as the central joy around which adult life is organized. The other increasingly treats them as a series of obligations competing with personal fulfillment. Neither side denies that parenting is difficult. They simply disagree about what deserves the headline.

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Part of the problem is that social media creates a profoundly distorted picture of modern parenthood. Influencing is a business, and outrage, resentment, and commiseration drive engagement far more reliably than gratitude ever will. Layer on top of that the reality that many conservative mothers have learned to avoid saying much of anything political online for fear of coordinated harassment or threats to their livelihoods, and you end up with a parenting conversation that is overwhelmingly shaped by progressive voices. The result is that many young adults scrolling Instagram or TikTok encounter an endless stream of mothers telling them how miserable parenthood is, while many of the parents who are quietly enjoying family life simply aren’t participating in the conversation.

I keep coming back to something I wrote five years ago in Deseret about what I called the public relations campaign against motherhood. The campaign has only accelerated. We have become so accustomed to hearing mothers publicly describe parenting as exhausting, limiting, and joyless that genuine gratitude is now viewed with suspicion. Spend enough time online and you’ll find people accusing mothers who genuinely enjoy their children of promoting “toxic positivity,” as though speaking warmly about your own family is somehow dishonest.

But gratitude isn’t toxic. It’s truthful.

It doesn’t require pretending that parenting is easy or that every stage is delightful. It simply refuses to let the hardest moments become the defining ones. Every parent has days they would rather forget. Every parent occasionally loses patience, longs for a quiet afternoon, or wonders if the laundry basket somehow reproduces overnight. But those moments aren’t the story. They’re interruptions in a story that, for most of us, is defined by laughter around the dinner table, bedtime conversations that go on far longer than they should, family vacations, inside jokes, and the quiet privilege of watching children slowly become adults.

Culture is, in many ways, simply the accumulation of the stories we tell one another. If the loudest voices in our culture insist that children are primarily burdens, inconveniences, and obstacles to self-actualization, we shouldn’t be surprised when young adults begin delaying parenthood—or deciding against it altogether. Children hear those messages. Teenagers hear those messages. Young couples hear those messages. If we want a society that welcomes children, values families, and encourages the next generation to become parents themselves, then perhaps the most important place to begin is by speaking about our own children with the affection, delight, and gratitude they deserve.

It was 2021, and the number of parents refusing the vitamin K shot had begun to increase, quietly enough that encountering a baby who hadn’t received it still shocked Dr. Kirk. Now, many doctors say they see that regularly, and bleeding cases are accumulating.

A study of electronic medical records found that 5.2 percent of babies in the U.S. went without the shot in 2024, up from 2.9 percent in 2017, meaning tens of thousands more unprotected babies. And more than 15 doctors told The New York Times they had observed a further increase in the past two years.

The vitamin K shot protects babies from vitamin K deficiency bleeding (VKDB), a rare but devastating condition. Babies are born with very little vitamin K because only small amounts cross the placenta, and breast milk contains very little of it as well. Without enough vitamin K, newborns cannot produce the clotting factors necessary to stop bleeding. In the most severe cases, babies suffer spontaneous bleeding into the brain, resulting in permanent disability or death. A single injection at birth reduces that risk by more than 95 percent and has an excellent safety record after decades of use.

As I read the Times coverage, I thought back to my two most recent births, both at home with a certified nurse midwife. Over the course of six pregnancies spanning a decade and three states, I had interacted with countless obstetricians, pediatricians, nurses, and midwives. Yet she was the only provider ever to sit down with me for an honest conversation about the risks and benefits of the interventions routinely offered in the hours after birth.

Because my babies were born at home, she explained that she could not administer the two injections typically given in the hospital: vitamin K and the hepatitis B vaccine. Those would have to wait until our pediatrician visit the following day. The third common intervention, an antibiotic eye ointment routinely applied to newborns in hospitals, was different. She told me I could obtain it myself from a pharmacy if I wanted it.

Then she did something that, remarkably, no other medical provider had ever done. She discussed each intervention on its own merits.

When it came to the antibiotic eye ointment, she explained that she probably used it only a couple of times each year. Unless parents believed there was a meaningful risk of exposure to gonorrhea or chlamydia during delivery—both of which can cause blindness in newborns—she generally did not recommend it.

We then discussed the hepatitis B vaccine. We talked through why public health authorities recommend administering it at birth and whether, given my own circumstances—a monogamous marriage and no history of intravenous drug use—that recommendation made sense for my family. I ultimately decided to delay it. She respected that decision without judgment.

But when we reached vitamin K, the conversation changed entirely.

She became unequivocal. In her view, every baby should receive it. The risks were extraordinarily small, the benefits enormous, and unlike the other interventions we had discussed, there simply wasn’t much of a gray area. The risk-benefit calculation overwhelmingly favored the shot.

Ironically, that conversation made me more likely to follow her recommendation, not less.

She treated me like an adult capable of evaluating evidence instead of assuming I needed every recommendation delivered with the same level of urgency. She recognized something that too much of public health has forgotten: not every intervention carries the same purpose, the same evidence, or the same level of necessity.

That’s part of how we’ve arrived here.

When every recommendation is presented as equally essential, parents eventually notice that some clearly are not. Hepatitis B at birth and antibiotic eye ointment are not the same intervention. They exist for different reasons, address different risks, and depend on different individual circumstances. Vitamin K belongs in an entirely different category. But when public health authorities refuse to acknowledge those distinctions, they inadvertently encourage parents to conclude that none of the recommendations deserve special trust.

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As officials grapple with rising vitamin K refusal—and declining confidence in childhood vaccines more broadly—they have two options. They can continue blaming social media, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., or “misinformation,” or they can honestly examine how trust was lost in the first place.

Trust is not rebuilt by insisting that every recommendation is equally non-negotiable. It is rebuilt the way my midwife approached it: by treating adults like adults, explaining the evidence honestly, distinguishing among interventions rather than lumping them together, and allowing parents to give truly informed consent. Americans have not lost faith because every intervention is unnecessary. They’ve lost faith because public health has too often insisted that every intervention carries the same weight. It doesn’t. And until health authorities are willing to acknowledge that reality, they shouldn’t be surprised when parents decide to opt out of all of it.

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The percentage of children who read for fun is steadily dropping. For nine-year-olds, the number hovered around 55 percent for decades before 2020, when it suddenly began to decline dramatically. Today, just 37 percent of children in roughly second or third grade say they read for pleasure.

Among thirteen-year-olds, the numbers are even more troubling. For most of the past several decades, the percentage of people who said they enjoyed reading for fun has lingered in the low 30s. The decline began gradually around 2008, but eventually accelerated into a free fall. Today, only about 14 percent of America’s early teenagers report reading for pleasure, roughly half the rate of previous generations.

I saw this new data come across my phone while I was sitting with my daughter and a few of her friends, all of whom are readers. Curious what they would say, I asked them a simple question: Why do you read for fun?

“Why do you ask?” one of her friends replied.

Before I could answer, my daughter jumped in.

“She’s using us for an article.”

Guilty.

But their answers were surprisingly insightful.

The number one thing they said that does it is that they spend a lot of time being bored.

They aren’t enrolled in a dizzying array of extracurricular activities. They aren’t constantly being driven from one organized event to the next. They often find themselves lounging around the house, looking for something to do, without the option of reaching for a screen whenever they feel the slightest twinge of boredom. Eventually, and often quite naturally, they pick up a book.

One of my favorite sayings is that boredom is the mother of creativity. It’s a state of being that modern parents seem increasingly unwilling to let their children experience, even though so many of the qualities we say we want our children to develop emerge from precisely those unstructured moments when nobody is directing their time or attention.

Instead, childhood increasingly looks like a relay race. Kids move from school to soccer practice to dance class to homework to a hurried dinner before collapsing into bed, only to wake up the next morning and do it all over again. Looking at many family schedules, it’s hard not to wonder what the purpose of all this running around actually is; are they running to something or running from something?

I suspect it’s a little bit of both.

Parents understandably want to provide opportunities for their children, especially in a world that feels increasingly competitive and uncertain. At the same time, I think many parents of my generation have become deeply uncomfortable with stillness. An empty afternoon feels wasteful. A child sprawled on the couch with nothing to do feels like a problem to solve. We have absorbed the idea that every moment must be optimized, every interest cultivated, every potential talent discovered and developed before some invisible window closes forever.

In the process, though, we may be depriving children of one of the greatest advantages they possess: the freedom to discover interests for themselves rather than having every interest curated for them.

The truth is that we have no idea what the world will look like by the time today’s children reach adulthood. We don’t know which skills will prove valuable, which careers will exist, or which industries will emerge. We don’t know whether all of those sports leagues, coding camps, enrichment programs, and specialized lessons will ultimately provide a meaningful advantage. What we do know is that people who can think independently, entertain themselves, solve problems, and sustain their attention without constant external stimulation will always be valuable, no matter what the future looks like.

I saw this principle at work recently when I left my eleven-year-old son, who is probably the least voracious reader among my children, home for the day with very little to do and firm limits on screen time. When I left the house around 10 a.m., he was sitting in a chair in our home library, reading graphic-novel adaptations of classic works like Hamlet and Frankenstein. When I returned four hours later, he was still sitting in that same chair, having worked his way through the entire stack.

Another important piece of this puzzle, and one my husband is infinitely better at than I am, is modeling the behavior you hope to see.

That means reading to your children, certainly, but it also means allowing them to see you reading for your own enjoyment. Adults are just as vulnerable to the pull of screens as children are. We carry our phones everywhere. We fill waiting rooms, checkout lines, and quiet moments with scrolling. We complain that children don’t read enough while allowing them to watch us spend every spare second staring into glowing rectangles.

My husband spends hours every weekend reading, especially on Shabbat, and often spends an hour reading before bed as well. He is one of the most widely read people I know, because he has made reading a normal and valued part of his life. Our children see that, and whether they realize it or not, they absorb the lesson.

I also want to circle back to that home library for a moment. We have an absurd number of books. Part of the reason is my own impulsivity; I’ll see a recommendation online and immediately order a used copy for four dollars. Another reason is that for a year and a half, our local library system was effectively closed as part of my county’s COVID response, which forced us to build a much larger collection at home than we otherwise would have.

And that brings us back to those NAEP charts.

The steepest decline in the percentage of children who say they enjoy reading for fun began in 2020.

That is not a coincidence.

The pandemic was not simply the year schools closed. It was also the year many American families quietly abandoned whatever screen-time boundaries they had previously maintained. Tablets became educational tools, social lifelines, babysitters, and entertainment devices all at once. Parents who were trying to work, manage households, and survive an unprecedented disruption understandably loosened restrictions that once felt important.

I’m not an anti-screen parent. I think television shows and movies can create meaningful family experiences, and I think video games can provide a level of immersion and enjoyment that is genuinely valuable for many children, especially my boys. But screens and books are not competing on equal terms. One is engineered by some of the most sophisticated minds in the world to capture and hold attention for as long as possible. The other requires effort, patience, and concentration before it delivers its rewards.

When people look at these NAEP scores, they often search for a policy solution. They want a new literacy initiative, a curriculum reform, a federal grant program, or a school-based intervention. Some of those things may help at the margins. But the deeper problem isn’t happening primarily inside schools.

The collapse in reading-for-fun is a reflection of what has happened to childhood itself.

Children become readers when books are readily available, when adults model reading, when boredom is allowed to exist, and when there is enough quiet space in their lives for curiosity to flourish. Reading isn’t merely another academic skill. It is a habit of attention, and attention is becoming one of the scarcest resources in modern life.

The chart showing fewer children reading for pleasure isn’t really a chart about reading at all. It’s a chart about what happens when every idle moment is filled, every silence interrupted, and every flicker of boredom immediately extinguished. If we want to raise children who read, think, imagine, and create, we may need to stop asking how to make books more entertaining and start asking why we’ve become so afraid to let our children be bored.

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Every generation of new parents thinks they are discovering parenting for the first time, but social media has turned that normal phenomenon into a kind of performance art. Women with babies still in footie pajamas speak with the certainty of seasoned experts, dispensing advice in soft beige kitchens about sleep, feeding, discipline, emotional regulation, sensory play, attachment, screen time, and educational philosophy as though they are unveiling truths no mother before them has ever encountered.

The result is a strange culture of perpetual reinvention, where old ideas are constantly repackaged as revolutionary discoveries by people with almost no long-term perspective on whether any of it actually works.

Take this somewhat recent The Atlantic piece on baby-led weaning, which treats the practice as though it has suddenly emerged as a major parenting phenomenon worthy of anthropological examination. I read it with a kind of amused exhaustion because I did baby-led weaning more than a decade ago. At the time, it was already firmly established as the “it” parenting trend among educated, online mothers. And I thought I, too, was reinventing the wheel.

Entire Instagram ecosystems and parenting forums revolved around it. Women were steaming sweet potatoes into stick shapes and handing six-month-olds avocado spears while passionately debating purées versus self-feeding long before many of today’s mommy influencers had children at all.

Everything old is new again.

And that, in itself, is fine. Parenting trends cycle. One generation rediscovers cloth diapers, another sourdough starter, another wooden toys, and outdoor play. None of this is especially new, and most of it is fairly harmless.

What concerns me more is the arrogance that increasingly accompanies these conversations, the assumption that expertise belongs primarily to whoever is newest, loudest, and most aesthetically fluent online rather than to the women who have actually done this over the long haul.

There is a peculiar kind of self-regard that develops in early motherhood now, encouraged and amplified by social media. New mothers immerse themselves in content created almost entirely by other new mothers, all speaking with immense confidence about choices whose outcomes they cannot yet possibly evaluate. A woman with a nine-month-old will explain how to raise adventurous eaters. A mother of a toddler will speak authoritatively about emotional resilience. Someone whose oldest child is four becomes a parenting “coach.”

And because social media rewards certainty over humility, the loudest voices are rarely the wisest ones. The algorithm does not favor perspective. It favors confidence, novelty, and aesthetics.

The irony is that motherhood is one of the few human experiences where time matters enormously. There are things you simply cannot know when you are still at the beginning.

You do not know whether your brilliant sleep strategy will work on your next child. You do not yet know which battles mattered and which ones didn’t. You do not know whether the parenting philosophy you currently evangelize will hold up once your child becomes a teenager, or whether you will quietly abandon half of it after your third kid.

And that is normal. It is not a moral failing to be inexperienced when you are inexperienced. The problem arises when an entire culture loses the ability to recognize the difference between experience and enthusiasm.

One of the healthiest things a young mother can do is spend time around women who are further down the road. Not because older mothers are always right, or because parenting wisdom only travels in one direction, but because perspective matters. There is something deeply grounding about hearing from women who have already survived the stage you are currently drowning in, women who can reassure you that some things matter less than you think and other things matter more.

That does not mean young mothers should not build close communities with one another. Quite the opposite. Having a crew of women going through the trenches alongside you is one of the great gifts of early motherhood. Those friendships sustain people.

But peers should not become your sole source of wisdom.

Increasingly, though, motherhood online resembles the blind leading the blind, with exhausted women taking advice almost exclusively from other exhausted women who are only six months ahead of them.

Meanwhile, the mothers who actually possess a long-term perspective often disappear from the conversation entirely. Once women have teenagers, once they are no longer posting nursery reveals, stroller reviews, and aesthetically pleasing lunch trays, the internet tends to lose interest in them.

Which is unfortunate, because those are often the women most worth listening to.

Motherhood is humbling precisely because every stage convinces you that you have finally figured it out, right before the next stage arrives to expose how little you actually knew. The mothers who understand that best are usually the ones who have lived long enough to see the cycle repeat several times over.

If you want companionship in motherhood, look to the women beside you.

If you want wisdom, look to the women ahead of you.

What continues to surprise me, though, is not the interest—it’s how little people understand what they’re asking about.

There’s a persistent belief that homeschooling must come with a script, that somewhere there exists a sanctioned program, ideally one endorsed by the same system families are trying to step away from. People imagine that once they opt out, someone hands them a curriculum and a daily schedule, a tidy set of instructions that ensures they’re doing everything “correctly.” The entire framing suggests that what they’re really looking for is not freedom, but structure—preferably structure that comes with institutional approval.

The reality is far less comforting, and for some, far more difficult to accept.

The law requires that homeschooled children receive “regular, thorough instruction” in the subjects typically taught in public school—math, English language arts, history, and health. But that language leaves enormous room for interpretation. There is no mandated curriculum, no official sequence of lessons, no single authority dictating how your day should unfold. What “regular” and “thorough” look like in your home is, quite intentionally, left up to you.

Which means that instead of a program, you are handed responsibility.

There are countless curricula available, spanning every imaginable philosophy and approach, and families are free to choose, combine, abandon, and adapt them as needed. For some people, that level of autonomy is the entire appeal. For others, it triggers a kind of panic that reveals how deeply we’ve been conditioned to expect someone else to set the rules.

“I just want the program,” people tell me, emphasizing the word as though the problem is simply that I haven’t pointed them to the right one yet. But what they are asking for does not exist. There is no singular, correct way to homeschool, no guaranteed path that removes the need to make decisions.

“What do the schools use?” comes next, as if the answer might offer a shortcut back to something familiar. But schools don’t make their full curricula public (isn’t that interesting?), and more importantly, that isn’t the point. If the system were working well enough to replicate, they wouldn’t be calling me in the first place.

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And then, almost inevitably, the question that reveals the real tension: “Is there somewhere I can send my child so they can be homeschooled?”

At that point, it becomes clear that many of these families are not actually looking to homeschool. They are looking for a different school—something that exists within the same framework, but feels safer, better, more aligned. They want out of their school and are simply looking for another, because they’re uninterested in relinquishing the structure they’ve been taught to rely on.

But if the system isn’t working, it’s worth asking why the instinct is to stay within it at all. Why look for a different school within the same model, instead of questioning the model itself?

Homeschooling is not simply a different location for education; it is a fundamentally different approach. It requires you to accept that there is no central authority quietly ensuring that you are doing everything “the right way,” because there is no universally agreed-upon “right way” to begin with.

That idea is uncomfortable, and not just in education.

When I was a teenager, one of my favorite songs was No Such Thing by John Mayer. There’s a line that always stuck with me: “I just found out there’s no such thing as the real world… just a lie you’ve got to rise above.” At the time, I understood it as a kind of rebellion against the rigid, linear path we were all expected to follow—school, college, career, stability, all neatly laid out in advance.

What appealed to me then, and what resonates even more now, is the idea that much of what we treat as fixed and inevitable is actually constructed. The “rules” we think we have to follow are often just conventions we’ve inherited, rarely examined, and even more rarely challenged.

Homeschooling forces that realization in a very concrete way. It strips away the illusion of a default setting you can fall back on and replaces it with something both more demanding and more honest: the understanding that you are responsible for building the structure yourself.

The families who succeed in this space are not the ones who find the perfect curriculum or the most authoritative program. They are the ones who are willing to sit with uncertainty, make decisions without guarantees, and adjust when something isn’t working. They recognize that the goal isn’t to recreate school at home, but to create something better suited to their children and their values.

Breaking out of the mold isn’t just about rejecting a system; it’s about accepting the responsibility that comes with that rejection. It means acknowledging that there is no master plan waiting to be handed to you, no single correct path that will ensure everything turns out exactly as you hope.

There is no “the program.”

There is only the willingness to step outside of what is familiar, to question assumptions that have gone unchallenged, and to build something of your own—even if it means doing so without a map.

We’ve been seeing the headlines for weeks screaming that it costs $400k to raise a child. The message is clear: You can’t afford this.

But underneath this campaign against children there is a much simpler explanation: that for many people, the way they live now is nonnegotiable, and children must fit neatly into it or not at all.

Consider this passage from the Times, offered without a hint of self-awareness:

“Rilee Stewart and Brock Goodwin always imagined having several children…
But that vision shifted once they settled into their 2,000-sq-foot house with a $3,200 mortgage…
They realized that even with one child, they would most likely need more space.”

More space. For one child.

I read that sitting in my own house, roughly the same size, with eight people living in it—my husband and our six children. Shoes pile up by the door, someone is always asking for a snack, and it is loud as hell. It’s full, yes, but it’s also big enough.

Costs have gone up, I do the grocery shopping, I’ve noticed. But expectations have gone up even faster. A 2,000-square-foot home used to be a marker of stability, even comfort. Now it’s framed as a constraint so severe that it justifies rethinking whether to have children at all.

At some point, “enough” quietly became “not nearly enough,” and once that shift happens, everything downstream starts to look impossible.

We are living in a time of extraordinary convenience, even if we’ve trained ourselves not to see it that way. Groceries can show up at your door within hours. You can replace a broken appliance, order school supplies, and restock your pantry without leaving your couch. In our family, we get fresh berries delivered daily through Walmart+. What a time to be alive. Previous generations managed larger families with fewer resources, fewer services, and far less margin for error, and they did it without framing their lives as unworkable.

That perspective is almost entirely missing from the current narrative. Instead, we get a steady stream of stories suggesting that unless you can provide a certain level of space, comfort, and predictability, having children is irresponsible. The baseline has shifted so dramatically that ordinary, historically normal ways of living are now treated as deprivation.

If you think this is a uniquely difficult time to have children instead of the easiest period in human history, you need to acquaint yourself with some books. Or at the very least, with your own family history. Talk to grandparents, great-grandparents, anyone who remembers a time before overnight shipping and climate control were givens. Ask them what they considered necessary, what they went without, and how they made it work.

What you’ll find is not a story of perfect conditions, but of constant adjustment. Families shared rooms. They made trade-offs. They understood, implicitly, that children weren’t something you slotted into a fully optimized life—they were the framing around which life was built.

That’s the part we’ve lost.

Now the expectation runs in the opposite direction: establish the ideal lifestyle first, secure the right amount of space, the right schools, the right balance of work and leisure, and then, maybe, consider adding a child—if there’s still room and enough money to maintain your previous life. And if there isn’t, the conclusion isn’t that the lifestyle might need to change. It’s that the child is out of reach.

This is how a perfectly reasonable house becomes “too small,” how a manageable life becomes “impossible,” and how a generation talks itself out of something it actually wants.

None of this is to deny that money matters. It does. Housing costs are real, childcare can be brutal, and financial stress is not something to wave away with platitudes. But there is a difference between acknowledging constraints and turning them into absolutes. The former invites creativity and adjustment; the latter shuts the conversation down entirely.

The truth is that scaling back doesn’t just make children possible—it often makes life better. If a smaller house means you can afford kids, the smaller house wins.

You will be happier in a smaller house with kids than alone in a big, empty one. Not because smaller is inherently better, but because full is.

The tragedy of the current narrative isn’t that it highlights real costs. It’s that it presents those costs as the whole story, crowding out any sense of proportion or possibility. Once you lose that perspective, everything starts to feel harder than it actually is, and the simplest, most human decisions begin to look like logistical puzzles with no solution.

But there is a solution, and it’s the one families have been choosing, in one form or another, for as long as there have been families: you adjust, you make room, and you build a life that is defined less by square footage than by the people inside it.

We’re facing dual realities about the map above about literacy. It’s not just about how many people can read, but how many people can read English. There’s a reason why the darker red portions are concentrated along the southern border, in Texas, New Mexico, and California. America has an illegal immigration problem, and the tendrils of that problem impact every area, from crime to welfare spending to education.

This map clearly indicates that this immigration problem has now exacerbated an existing rot in public education, accelerating a decline that was already naturally in overdrive.

I was a classroom teacher for twenty-five children in rural Cambodia over fifteen years ago. The reality is a classroom setting is unfair to about half the children in it. I had five children at the bottom who were hopelessly lost, and required one-on-one instruction to remediate basic skills, but I didn’t have the time to provide it. There were about seven children at the top who were bored; they deserved to move on from the material we were working on and be challenged. I did the best I could to assign them more challenging materials, but I could only bifurcate lesson planning so much. That’s twelve children who, for various reasons, who weren’t having their needs met. The thirteen other children were the main focus of my instruction time and planning.

In classrooms across the world, teachers are making that same calculation. In American classrooms where the majority of kids can’t read English, they become the middle being taught to. The result is we see classes where the pace never picks up and everything stays on a remedial level. Teachers are stuck trying to manage an increasingly wide range of ability, from kids who are ready to move quickly to a large number of kids who are still struggling with basics that should have been locked in years earlier.

And it’s not getting better. Literacy is down, numeracy is down, and at the same time public school enrollment is dropping in an alarming way. In some states, those declines are projected to hit double digits over the next several years. That’s not just a demographic blip because of falling birth rates. Parents are making decisions based on the realities in their kids classrooms.

But it’s not just academics driving the public school exodus. Talk to parents, teachers and administrators privately and you’ll hear something else come up just as quickly: behavior. Classrooms feel far more chaotic, and the consequences that once existed for being disruptive have evaporated. Discipline that looks different, or in some cases it’s barely there at all. A shift toward “restorative justice” approaches sounds compassionate in theory but leaves teachers trying to manage disruptions without real backing, and other students are forced to sit through it.

Put those things together—lower academic floors, wider gaps between students, more classroom disruption—and it shouldn’t be surprising that families who have options are starting to take them. That’s part of what you’re seeing in the enrollment numbers. It’s not just fewer kids overall; it’s a sorting process. Families who can leave, do. Families who can’t, don’t. And that changes the environment further.

People often ask me about socialization when it comes to our decision to homeschool. And I say: it’s a feature, not a bug. The fact that I can curate my kids’ social circles is a benefit of our decision to homeschool. I’m not alone; parents sending to school are also thinking about who their kids are sitting next to. They think about the level of the class, the expectations, the peer group. They think about whether their child is being challenged or whether the entire environment is slowly drifting toward the lowest common denominator.

At the same time, there’s a lot of pressure—especially in media and education circles—for parents to treat school choice as a kind of moral question. Vox asked recently: is it wrong to send your kid to private school? How should you balance what’s best for your child with what’s best for everyone else?

That framing only works if you accept the premise that your primary responsibility is to the system.

It isn’t. It’s to your child and your child alone.

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Parents truly need to internalize that fact. Your kids are your responsibility, and parents need to start taking that more seriously. Schools deserve a lot of the blame when it comes to student outcomes, but what happens before kids ever step foot in a classroom, and what they do outside of school hours matters a great deal.

If I could hand every new parent one book, it would be Jim Trelease’s Read-Aloud Handbook to explain why reading to your kids every day. Trelease lays out very clearly what works and why it matters.

A lot of families aren’t doing the work of reading with their children consistently, and it shows in the numbers we’re seeing. They think that because their kids are enrolled in a school, they are absolved of responsibility for education at home.

It’s deeply unfair to put future citizens at such a disadvantage.

Last year, Robert Pondiscio wrote something that has stuck with me: “Reading at only a Basic level leaves you unable to parse complex evidence, weigh competing arguments or judge credibility. You live instead in a state of intellectual second-class citizenship.”

Literacy is not just about books. It is about independence of thought. It is about whether you can evaluate a claim without outsourcing your judgment to someone else. It is about whether you can navigate a world saturated with competing narratives and decide, on your own, what is true.

If you cannot do that, someone else will do it for you.

If you look at the failure of schools run by radical teachers unions, one has to wonder if teachers want to produce students who, at the end of their schooling, have to outsource their thinking.

Parents have it within their control to ensure that doesn’t happen.

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When I was five years old, I had my tonsils out. It’s one of the clearest memories I have from that age, which doesn’t make much sense given how much of it I spent under anesthesia. But what I remember isn’t really the surgery, it was everything around it.

By that point my parents’ divorce had already deteriorated their relationship to such a degree that they were unable to co-parent. They couldn’t be in the same room, which meant that anything logistical became, by definition, a one-parent job. I lived with my mother full-time, and she took me to the hospital alone. Not just once, but three separate times. Twice she woke me before dawn, got me dressed, got herself ready, drove me in, checked me in, and then was told we had to go home because I was too sick for surgery—the surgery meant to fix the thing making me sick in the first place. As a child, it registered as confusion and disappointment. As a parent, I now realize it felt very different. It was a logistical and emotional grind, repeated, without backup.

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I thought about that sequence last week while preparing for my own son’s tonsillectomy. The day before was exactly what you’d expect in a house with multiple kids: dinner, cleanup, refereeing, trying to keep track of instructions from the doctor because the location of the procedure had been changed last minute by the office.

By the time I got upstairs to pack a hospital bag, I was running on empty and running through a mental checklist—snacks, changes of clothes, something for him to do, something for me to do, chargers, paperwork.

Except when I got upstairs, I discovered the bag was already packed.

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That line, pulled from an Instagram reel that has been making the rounds in homeschooling circles and showed up in my “for you” feed, landed with more weight than most posts that come across my radar—not because it was provocative, but because it articulated something I have been feeling for a while now. The caption sharpened the point: “There was a time when homeschool families were known for something very specific. Strong academics. Clear writing. Confident speech. Children who could hold their own in any room… Then something changed.”

I have been homeschooling long enough to recognize that shift, not as an abstract trend but as something that has unfolded in real time alongside my own family. I saw the shift happen during COVID when homeschooling exploded, and the way homeschooling was talked about changed on social media. Social media itself changed during that time as well, much more focused on aesthetics and visuals. Popular accounts leading into that visual representation, launching their influence on how homeschooling looks pretty.

I am finishing up our seventh year now, with my oldest in sixth grade, followed by a fifth grader, a third grader, a first grader, and one still in pre-K (and a toddler, along for the ride). When I began, my motivations were grounded in a deep conviction about childhood itself. I believed, and still do, that we have stripped childhood of something essential—that we rush children too quickly into structured environments, that we crowd out boredom, exploration, and the kind of unstructured time that allows curiosity to take root. Homeschooling, for me, was a way to give that back.

And yet, as my children have grown, so too has the complexity of that original vision. It is one thing to defend a childhood of freedom and play when your children are young, when the stakes feel low and the rhythms of the day can be guided gently without obvious consequence. It is quite another thing to stand at the edge of middle school and realize that the habits being formed now—about work, about persistence, about intellectual effort—are no longer theoretical. They will shape not just the next year, but the trajectory of their education.

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The flashpoint was Isabel Brown, who had encouraged people not to delay having children indefinitely, pushing back on the increasingly dominant cultural script that treats family formation as something to be postponed until every financial and professional box has been checked. What followed was a familiar kind of cultural collision: optimism about family life running headlong into a form of elite pessimism that presents itself as pragmatism, with motherhood and fatherhood reframed not as normal stages of adulthood but as luxuries available only to the exceptionally resourced.

But it wasn’t just the tone and context of the exchange that stood out. It was the numbers being used to justify it, numbers that were delivered with the authority of data but without much scrutiny as to their origin or meaning. One host, Sunny Hostin, cited a claim that families now need to earn $400,000 a year to afford two children and childcare, a figure so striking that it immediately shaped the conversation. For many Americans—especially those who have actually been raising children over the past decade—that number didn’t just feel high, it felt detached from reality. Families across the country are making it work on far less, often with tradeoffs, creativity, and a mix of formal and informal childcare arrangements that never show up neatly in a national estimate. So the obvious question becomes: where does a number like that come from, and why is it being presented authoritatively as representative?

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The answer reveals something important about how modern media narratives are constructed, and why they so often feel disconnected from lived experience. The $400,000 claim traces back to a study promoted by LendingTree, a company that operates as an online marketplace connecting consumers with loans, credit products, and other financial services. That business model depends, at least in part, on convincing Americans that their financial situation is strained enough to require outside help, whether in the form of refinancing, personal loans, or new lines of credit. This doesn’t mean the company is inventing data out of thin air, but it does mean that it has a built-in incentive to frame financial realities in the most stressful and attention-grabbing way possible, emphasizing ceilings rather than medians, and worst-case scenarios rather than typical ones.

When you dig one layer deeper into the methodology, you find that LendingTree’s analysis relies heavily on data from Child Care Aware of America, an advocacy organization whose mission is to expand access to childcare and increase public funding for it. That mission is not inherently suspect, but it does come with its own set of incentives that shape how information is gathered and presented. In its own annual report, the organization celebrates its role in increasing public funding; writing, “The 2023 annual report demonstrates the essential role CCAoA plays in making America child care strong. Together with our national partners and network across the country, we increased public funding for child care so more families could afford quality child care, recruited more advocates to take action, helped military families find and afford child care, provided actionable research that positioned us as a go-to source for media and policymakers, strengthened child care programs and supported teachers in building their skills, and grew our network.”

Research produced in that context is designed not only to inform but to persuade, to demonstrate need, and to justify expanded investment.

Once you understand those overlapping incentives, the $400,000 figure begins to look less like a neutral assessment of what families actually spend and more like the product of a feedback loop between institutions that benefit from a particular narrative. A financial services company amplifies a high-end estimate that underscores financial pressure, that estimate is built on data from an advocacy group that benefits from highlighting the costliness of childcare, and the media—drawn to large, alarming numbers that generate clicks and segments—elevates the claim without interrogating its assumptions. By the time it reaches a show like The View, the number has shed its context entirely and is presented as reality, something responsible adults are supposed to internalize as they make decisions about their lives.

This is how you end up with coverage that feels, to ordinary people, unmoored from reality, not because it is entirely false but because it is selectively constructed. Real costs are taken from the highest end of the spectrum, combined with advocacy-driven framing, and then broadcast as if they describe the norm, flattening the wide range of ways families actually live, adapt, and make tradeoffs. Missing from that conversation are the millions of households that rely on one parent staying home, on grandparents, on flexible work, on part-time arrangements, or on simply choosing to live within different financial parameters than the ones assumed by a study designed to capture maximum expense.

The broader lesson here isn’t just about childcare or one overheated statistic, but about how to read media claims more generally in an environment where research, advocacy, and commerce are often intertwined. When a number seems shocking, it is worth pausing not just to fact-check it, but to contextualize it by asking who produced it, what their incentives are, and how it is being used. In many cases, the most influential statistics are not lies but strategic selections, drawn from a range of possible interpretations and elevated because they serve the interests of the institutions promoting them. One of my favorite examples of this was a headline about how most people don’t bathe before getting into a public pool, a “study” paid for by chlorine companies.

And when those statistics begin to shape cultural expectations—when young people are told, implicitly or explicitly, that family life requires an income that places it out of reach for the vast majority—the consequences extend beyond economics into something more profound. They shape how people imagine their futures, how they assess risk, and whether they see children as a normal part of adult life or as an extravagance to be deferred indefinitely. That shift may not be the stated goal of any one organization involved in producing or promoting the data, but it is entirely consistent with the incentives that drive the narrative.

Which is why the simplest and most reliable tool for making sense of confusing or counterintuitive coverage remains the oldest one: follow the money, and the logic behind the story almost always comes into clearer focus.

That is a striking position, not just because of what it says about how Sandberg views the current moment, but because of what it assumes about the women making these choices. The underlying premise is that a turn toward home is inherently suspect, that it represents either a misunderstanding of what constitutes fulfillment or a kind of cultural backsliding that must be corrected before it spreads further.

Only once you lay that out clearly does the rest of her argument come into focus. And only then does it become possible to see why so many women are tuning it out.

Because what Sandberg is confronting now is not a mystery trend in need of explanation, but the long tail consequences of her own ideas. The tradwife moment did not emerge in a vacuum. It developed in the wake of a decade of being told—explicitly and implicitly—that fulfillment would be found in maximizing professional ambition, that time spent climbing the ladder was inherently more valuable than time spent raising children, and that any discomfort women felt trying to do both simultaneously was a failure of execution rather than a flaw in the premise.

“Leaning in,” as Sandberg framed it, was presented as empowerment. It elevated one domain of life above all others and encouraged women to organize themselves accordingly, even when doing so required a constant state of strain. For a time, many women accepted that bargain, stretching themselves across incompatible demands, attempting to prove that nothing had to give.

But something did give. What followed was not a sudden ideological revolt so much as a quiet recalibration—a willingness to admit that the model had not delivered what it claimed.

Women realized they could do it all, but not all at the same time.

This is the context Sandberg now seems unable to fully grapple with as she positions her nonprofit to combat the tradwife trend. She is focusing on the visible expression—the aesthetic, the language, the curated domesticity—while overlooking the underlying dissatisfaction that made it resonate in the first place. And if you misdiagnose the cause, you inevitably misdiagnose the solution.

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Because beneath the aesthetic is something far more basic and far more enduring: many women want to raise their own children, and they want to do so without being told that this desire is a failure of ambition. That instinct is not a trend, and it is not new. It is as old as time, and it has survived every attempt to reframe or suppress it.

The data, inconveniently, reflects this. Research summarized by the Institute for Family Studies consistently shows that most mothers prefer a balance that allows them to be present with their children while still contributing financially in some way. Not total domestic isolation, but not career maximalism either. Something more grounded, more human, and far less ideological than either side tends to allow.

Seen clearly, what we are watching is not regression but correction. A pendulum that was pushed too far is swinging back.

But that does not mean everything attached to this correction is healthy. And this is the part Sandberg completely misses—not because there isn’t a problem, but because she is too threatened by the choices women are making to identify the real one.

Because there are issues within the tradwife discourse, and they are not minor. They are serious, corrosive, and coming almost entirely from one direction: a strain of misogyny that has infected parts of the online right and is now masquerading as “tradition.”

There is a growing cohort of men—especially in red-pill spaces—who insist that a “traditional” woman must be meek, submissive, obedient, pliable, whatever euphemism they happen to prefer. They talk about leadership, but what they mean is control. They talk about masculinity, but what they are describing is domination. And they dress all of it up in the language of tradition as though that makes it legitimate.

It doesn’t.

Because what they are actually describing is not a coherent philosophy of family life at all. It is, far more often, a sexualized power fantasy dressed up as cultural commentary—a desire for a woman who is submissive not just in the abstract, but in every domain of life, from the bedroom to the kitchen. It is less about building a stable household and more about securing a dynamic in which one person is always in control and the other is always yielding.

That is not tradition. That is not even particularly serious. It is a kink masquerading as a worldview.

And it collapses immediately under the weight of real life.

Because the question it cannot answer—indeed, the question it avoids entirely—is a simple one: why would you want your partner to be weak?

Why would you deliberately choose a woman who bends at every gust of wind, who cannot stand on her own two feet, who is so easily swayed that she would absorb whatever cultural messaging reaches her without resistance and pass it directly on to your children? Why would you want the person primarily responsible for raising your family to be intellectually passive, emotionally stunted, or incapable of independent judgment?

While you are out working, she is raising your future. And you want her to be stupid? Easily manipulated? Programmable?

There is nothing traditional about that. It is not strength. It is not wisdom. It is insecurity, dressed up as principle.

Because the reality is that the woman who carries and raises your children needs to be intelligent, discerning, emotionally mature, and firmly rooted in reality. She needs to be capable of filtering the world, not absorbing it uncritically. She needs to be strong enough to stand up to you when you are wrong, and strong enough to stand up to the culture when it is worse.

If your masculinity only functions in the presence of someone weaker, that is not masculinity. It is fragility.

And the truth—uncomfortable though it may be—is that men who insist on weak women tend to do so because they themselves are weak. They lack inner authority, so they attempt to manufacture it through control. They cannot command respect, so they attempt to enforce submission. It is not impressive. It is not admirable. It is, quite simply, pathetic.

You do not raise strong children from a place of insecurity. You raise them through partnership—through a marriage in which both parents are fully formed, intellectually engaged, and capable of strengthening one another. You raise them with a woman who challenges you, sharpens you, and stands alongside you, not beneath you.

Anything else is a brittle structure, a performance that will not survive real pressure. It is a blueprint for dysfunction, not stability.

And this is where the entire debate collapses into absurdity. Sandberg sees women moving toward family life and treats it as a problem to be solved, something her nonprofit must now organize against. At the same time, a subset of the right has responded by attaching that same impulse to a degraded, unserious vision of womanhood that strips women of agency in the name of restoring it.

Both are wrong, and in different ways, both make the same mistake: they refuse to take women seriously as full human beings capable of making rational, meaningful choices about their lives.

There is a problem here. But Sandberg cannot identify it, because she is too busy reacting to outcomes she dislikes. And her solutions will only deepen the very dissatisfaction that produced this moment in the first place.

The answer is not to shame women back into the workforce, nor is itto reduce them to submissive caricatures in the home. The answer is to build something far less ideological and far more demanding: marriages rooted in mutual respect, families grounded in reality, and a culture that does not require women to choose between being fully human and being considered successful.

We should stop glorifying stupidity in the name of tradition. We should stop pretending that domination is strength or that careerism is fulfillment.

And we should start building relationships that can actually survive a storm.

This is what right-wing antinatalism looks like in practice. It is dressed as virtue, as devotion, as a kind of moral seriousness about parenting that is portrayed as admirable but is actually extraordinarily corrosive.

The tweet making the rounds—insisting that while the kids are awake, you come last, that your hobbies must be squeezed into the margins of exhaustion, that your life should be deferred until some distant future when the children are gone—is a perfect distillation of this mindset. It’s not anti-child in the way we typically think of antinatalism, but it produces the same end result. It makes family life look so all-consuming, so self-erasing, that anyone observing it from the outside would reasonably conclude: I don’t want that. Or at the very least, I can only handle that once. Maybe twice.

And for those living it, they decide, I can’t do this again. I need my life back. But the problem is, they were the ones who gave it away in the first place. Parenting is misery because they chose for it to be.

This is how a movement that claims to be pro-family ends up reinforcing the same constraints that lead to smaller families. If the model of “good parenting” requires the total obliteration of the self for nearly two decades, then of course people will opt out of having more children. Nobody can—or should—live that way for long. It is not a sustainable vision of family life, and it is certainly not an attractive one.

What’s striking is how often this message is amplified by family influencers, people ostensibly committed to celebrating children and domestic life. Yet the version they present is one in which the parent disappears, the marriage recedes, and the entire household orbits the preferences and schedules of the child. It is a vision of parenthood that is not only exhausting but oddly joyless, stripped of the very things that make a full life feel rich and worth sharing.

Children do not benefit from being the sole focal point of a home. They benefit from being part of a home that has a center outside of them—where parents have interests, friendships, ambitions, and pleasures that exist alongside their role as mother or father. A child who sees her mother read for pleasure, who watches her parents go out to dinner together, who grows up in a home where adults pursue meaningful hobbies and relationships, is learning something essential about adulthood. She is learning that life does not end when you become a parent. She is learning what it looks like to be a whole person. And this is how you have kids who grow up to want kids themselves. Do it for the grandkids, people!

And just as importantly, she is learning that she is not the center of the universe.

The parenting philosophy embedded in that tweet does the opposite. It teaches children that their desires are paramount, that their presence should reorder the entire household, that the adults around them exist primarily in service to their needs and whims. That is not a recipe for raising resilient, capable human beings. It is a blueprint for raising small tyrants—children who expect the world to bend around them because it always has.

There is a better model, and it is not new. The parents of the 1970s and 1980s, for all their flaws, understood something that we seem to have forgotten. They had lives. They had hobbies. They had friends. And their children were expected to adapt to that reality. As a result, Gen X grew up with a level of independence that now feels almost mythological. They learned how to solve problems, navigate conflict, entertain themselves, and operate in a world that did not revolve around them.

That balance—between attention and independence, between family life and individual identity—is not just good for parents. It is good for children.

Speaking as a homeschooling mother of six, a role that by its nature blurs the boundary between “parent” and “everything else,” I have found that maintaining that balance is not only possible but necessary. My life does not begin and end with my children, even though they are with me for most of the day. When we go to the playground, I am not hovering over every interaction or orchestrating their play. I am often sitting with a book, talking to another adult, or answering emails. They are free to navigate their own social world, to take small risks, to figure things out without constant intervention.

I joined a gym not just for fitness but because it offers childcare, and my kids genuinely enjoy going. It gives me time to move, to think, to exist in my own body without interruption, and it gives them a space that is not mediated entirely by me. That is not selfish; it is healthy.

The same principle applies when we travel. We do things they love, of course, but we also do things I love. When we were in London, that meant a trip to the Transit Museum and an afternoon at the National Gallery. Some of the children were captivated by the art. Others were bored. And that was fine. They learned, in a small but meaningful way, that not every experience is curated to their preferences. They learned to tolerate boredom, to engage when they could, and to move through the world as participants rather than directors.

The trip itself happened because I wanted to go to London. I wanted to see it, to experience it, and to share that experience with them. That is what family life should look like: not a relentless catering to children, but a shared life in which everyone sometimes leads and sometimes follows.

The irony of right-wing antinatalism is that it undermines the very thing it claims to protect. By making parenthood synonymous with self-erasure, it makes the prospect of a large, vibrant family feel untenable. By centering children to the exclusion of everything else, it produces both exhausted parents and ill-prepared kids.

A healthy family is not one in which the parents disappear. It is one in which the parents are fully present—not just as caregivers, but as people. People who read, who travel, who cultivate friendships, who pursue interests, who maintain a marriage that is not an afterthought. People whose lives are rich enough that their children grow up wanting to emulate them.

If we want to make family life appealing again, if we want to push back against the cultural forces driving people away from having children, we need to stop presenting parenthood as a kind of slow martyrdom. We need to show, and live, a version of it that is expansive rather than constricting.

Live your life. Bring your children into it. Let them adapt. They will be better for it—and so will you.

The message is meant to be heartwarming. And in many ways, it is.

Anyone who has spent time in modern public life knows there is a real hostility toward children. The complaints about babies on airplanes. The glares in restaurants. The assumption that children are an inconvenience rather than a normal part of human life. Beneath that hostility often sits something darker than simple annoyance: a strain of anti-natalism that regards children not as blessings but as burdens.

You can feel it in the way some people talk about families, especially large ones. Kids are framed as environmental liabilities, career obstacles, or lifestyle inconveniences. In many circles, children are treated less like the natural continuation of human life and more like a lifestyle choice that other people should politely keep out of sight.

And if we’re being honest, some of the most openly hostile reactions come from older women. That observation will irritate people, but it is also something many parents quietly notice. The most cutting comments about noisy children in public spaces rarely come from young professionals or college students. They come from women who have already lived their lives and who seem personally offended by the presence of children in shared spaces. Often it feels less like a preference for quiet and more like resentment. When you reach a certain age and realize the life you imagined didn’t quite materialize—no family, strained relationships with children, or simply a sense that the future is behind you—the laughter and chaos of young families can feel like a cruel reminder of roads not taken. Bitterness has a way of looking for targets, and children, inconveniently joyful and hopeful, make an easy one.

So there is something admirable about a church that pushes back against that impulse. A congregation that says, explicitly, that children belong. That their noise is not a nuisance but a sign of vitality. That the next generation should be present, not hidden away in a separate wing.

As a mother of six, I feel that instinct deeply. I have lived the experience of walking into spaces where you can feel the temperature drop the moment people notice how many children are trailing behind you. The assumption that chaos will follow is immediate.

But here is where my own reaction to that church policy is conflicted.

There is a difference between welcoming children and abandoning expectations. There is a difference between patience and permissiveness, and sometimes, in our eagerness to push back against hostility toward children, we swing too far in the opposite direction and stop expecting parents to actually parent.

Most families who bring children into public spaces are trying. They pack snacks, whisper reminders, take a child outside when the noise level rises. They understand that part of raising children is teaching them how to exist in a world that includes other people.

But anyone who spends time in public knows that this isn’t universal anymore.

You see it in restaurants where children sit silently hypnotized by glowing iPads while their parents scroll their own phones. Or you see the opposite: children running wild while adults shrug as if chaos is simply the inevitable expression of childhood. The cultural message parents have absorbed is that correcting children is somehow oppressive, that discipline is stifling, that expectations are unfair.

None of that is true.

Children are perfectly capable of learning boundaries when those boundaries are actually taught. They can learn that some spaces require quieter voices. They can learn to sit through a meal. They can learn that movies, restaurants, and church services are shared environments where other people matter too.

In fact, learning those norms is one of the central tasks of childhood.

I think about this often when we take our kids out to eat. Almost without fail, a waiter will lean over at the end of the meal and say something like, “Your kids are the best behaved we’ve had all night.”

It’s meant as a compliment, but it always lands strangely. Not because I doubt the sincerity—if anything, the tone suggests genuine relief—but because it reveals how low the bar has fallen.

Our kids are not unusually obedient. They are simply expected to behave.

They sit at the table. They talk to each other. They occasionally need reminders, because they are children and children are imperfect. The floor isn’t perfectly clean under our table and we tip nicely. But the expectation is clear: when you’re in a restaurant, you act like someone who understands that other people are there.

And yes, sometimes babies cry. Sometimes toddlers melt down. That’s life. No one expects children to behave like miniature adults all the time.

But there is a difference between tolerating the occasional disruption that comes with childhood and embracing constant disruption as a virtue.

That is where the church policy makes me uneasy. Its intention is admirable—welcoming families, rejecting the cultural hostility toward children—but it risks replacing one mistake with another. The goal of a healthy community is not silence, but neither is it chaos. Children belong in shared spaces, but part of belonging is learning how to participate in them.

For centuries, church was one of the places children learned that skill. Sitting still. Watching adults. Absorbing rituals. Gradually discovering that community life requires a little self-control.

That process doesn’t happen automatically. It happens because parents guide it.

Children should absolutely be welcomed in church, restaurants, airplanes, and everywhere else human beings gather. But welcoming children does not mean pretending behavior doesn’t matter. It means recognizing that raising children well requires patience, correction, and the slow work of teaching them how to live among other people.

A crying baby is part of life. A toddler who needs to be taken outside is normal. No one should panic about that.

But if the future belongs to children, it also belongs to the adults responsible for raising them. And that responsibility includes something our culture has grown oddly uncomfortable saying out loud:

Parents are supposed to be in charge.

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