Quit Your Parenting Journey

Why trying to maximize everything is making your family miserable

I just read this piece by my dear friend Leslie Bienen and had to share it because, as usual, Leslie makes way too much sense.

Living in New York, I'm constantly surrounded by the exhausting theater of optimization—parents scheduling their toddlers like tiny CEOs, families racing from one "enriching experience" to the next, everyone desperately trying to make everything grander, faster, more. The competitive energy is palpable, and frankly, it's making us all a little crazy.

Leslie's essay hit me like a cool breeze on a sweltering subway platform. Her rejection of the whole "maximize everything" culture feels radical and necessary, especially for those of us watching our kids grow up in this pressure cooker of a city. The reminder that we don't need to turn every single experience into a "journey" that transforms us? Pure gold.

As someone who's sometimes guilty of getting caught up in the frenzy, I needed to hear this: slow down, appreciate the people around you, love your kids exactly as they are in whatever stage they're in right now.

The journey really is the destination—not some optimized, Instagram-worthy version of it.

So here's my challenge to all of us: put your phone down, look up and around, and actually enjoy this fleeting summer and beautiful, long, sunny days. Trust me, your kids will remember the moments you were present way more than they'll remember whether you maximized their potential.

—Natalya

PS: These Lifesavers commercials, really evoke the sweetness of summer and savoring each moment with our children.

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A great deal of attention has been focused recently on why Americans are unhappier than residents of comparatively wealthy peer nations. A variety of reasons have been floated by pundits, politicians, sociologists, internet gurus, and just about anyone with an email address.

We eat alone too often.

Even when we do eat together, we gobble our food, and meals are not long enough to derive social benefit. (This is actually my own pet theory; I just returned from France and a meal there is at least a two-hour affair, an at-times frustrating reality for us American gobblers. Once at a restaurant in Italy one of my family members asked for the check inappropriately early and the daggers coming out of the waiter’s eyes were terrifying).

We move around too much. We don’t live in intergenerational families. We are too competitive. Too greedy. Too online. We use too many medications. We are too fat to exercise. We commute too many minutes. Our cities are hellscapes and our rural areas hollowed out by drugs and unemployment. We have too few children and too many first dates.

It all starts to sound like the Berenstein Bears book, Old Hat, New Hat: The protagonist bear tries on a series of hats that are sequentially “too big, too small, too flat, too tall, too loose, too tight, too heavy, too light. Too fancy, too shiny, too frilly, too silly.” You get the idea.

There is also the camp that says that the Happiness Index is a terrible instrument and is based on self-report surveys that are unreliable and poorly framed; Yascha Mounk did a piece on the flaws of the Happiness Index in Persuasion that was… persuasive. So, maybe we aren’t the unhappiest rich country?

The World Happiness Report Is a Sham

However, even if we agree that the World Happiness Report is a sham, and I do believe this, it is hard to dismiss the curdled-milk feeling that seems to tug, like a destructive undertow, at American life these days. The fact that we keep electing Donald Trump as president—and whether you voted for him, hate him, or do not care about him at all, it is undeniable that he has run two campaigns heavily predicated on the idea that the current iteration of the USA sucks—is proof positive that, as my mother says, “the country is in an ugly mood”.

Why?

By most measures we live longer, have bigger houses, more stuff, have more outlets to communicate, and more of us are better educated than at any other time in human history. Hans Rosling, the Swedish public health professor extraordinaire, wrote a whole book called Factfulness about this misunderstanding of where we are in the advancement timeline, in which he reminded us to embrace what he termed the “secret silent miracle of human progress”. He had a variety of explanations for why our cognitive biases lean toward thinking everything is getting worse, including that the media themselves often are misinformed about how well-off humans are compared to our past incarnations.

Rosling did a series of clever experiments he conducted at media conferences showing that, when asked questions such as “How long do most women in the world go to school?” or “How has the percent of people living in extreme poverty changed in the past twenty years?” “Has the number of people dying in natural disasters gone up or down?” representatives from media outlets performed worse at answering them correctly than a group of chimps selecting answers at random.

Watch the whole Ted Talk - it is brilliant.

I agree with Rosling’s view that a more accurate perspective on human conditions in the past hundred years would help ameliorate some of what he saw as a global negativity bias but I also believe there is a specific aspect of American life that is contributing to our cultural unhappiness in a way that is, well, uniquely American. I am referring to our relentless drive to maximize. The idea that if experiences are not somehow maximized they are—and should be-- unsatisfying seems like a recipe for everyone to be unhappy with everything and everyone in their lives at all times.

The ubiquity of the word ‘journey’ is a good example of this phenomenon. Using the term ‘journey’ to describe experiences places the unbearable weight of the need to maximize on them because ‘journey’ is freighted by the idea that experiences have to take you somewhere new and exciting, that they should leave you forever changed. This subtext is not just unrealistic, it sets up the idea that if your experiences do not constantly reinvent you and lead to Johnny or Jane 2.0 they, and by extension you and everyone else who participated in them, has failed somehow.

I suspect the idea of maximizing was born in advertising and foisted on the rest of us because, after all, maximizing requires new products, so very many new products, but it is probably also just a trap set for us by human nature because when your basic needs, i.e., food and shelter, are taken care of what else is left but to compete with your fellow villagers over who is having the ‘best life’? I loathe the expression ‘living your best life’. We don’t need to live our best lives and being told we should constantly be living some form of a ‘best life’ makes everyone feel like a failure.

Here are a few examples that pop up on my Facebook feed, or elsewhere: Breastmilk jewelry. There are a staggering number of companies selling jewelry filled with breastmilk, surrounded with ad copy about memorializing one’s “breastfeeding journey”. These items are not cheap, either. Is it mean-spirited that I find this weird and a bit gross?

But also, does breastfeeding have to be a journey?

I don’t think breastfeeding my children—while I am sure it accomplished many good things and I enjoyed it—left me forever changed, except that my breasts might be droopier than otherwise (though I am also better protected from breast cancer). Still, I reject the framing of maximizing breastfeeding into a journey.

You can also go on a ‘gender journeys mentorship program’ (Google returns hundreds if not thousands of links for the search term ‘gender journey’) and don’t get me started about websites selling experiences, trainings, and paraphernalia related to parenting journeys. There are also addiction journeys, divorce journeys, psychedelic journeys, polyamory journeys, and the list goes on and on. There are also services to help “maximize your child’s athletic potential”, your time, output, writing, money, sex appeal, and a book that skipped the specifics and went straight to “Maximizing You”.

To all of this, I say No; I do not wish to maximize or be maximized by anyone or anything.

Ok, if there is a site promoting “your child’s journey to loading the dishwasher correctly” I am all in, but that’s it!

Otherwise, I refuse to embark on any personal ‘journeys’, I am not trying to ‘live my best life’, to squeeze the most out of everything I buy, I do not care if my children reached the peak of their athletic ability, I don’t need constant reminders of breastfeeding or of pets that have died (I remember both just fine), to have a spreadsheet of people I am having relations with so I can keep them all straight, or to pay someone else to figure out what gender I am. I’m in Popeye’s camp: I yam what I yam, and that’s all that I am.

Join me- you might just be way happier.