Should We Have Kids, Even Though the Internet Makes Raising Them Seem Awful?

Care and Feeding is Slate’s parenting advice column. Have a question for Care and Feeding? Submit it here.

Dear Care and Feeding,

My husband (30M) and I (29F) both want kids, and we are in a great position to start a family—we both make over six figures in a large city, we own our condo, and we are near amazing public schools. However, from what we’ve seen online, parenting today seems … overwhelming. In everything from op-eds to TikToks, I keep getting the message that every single thing you do has the potential to permanently traumatize your child. For example, my partner is Hispanic, and apparently, the decision to pierce or not pierce a future daughter’s ears as a baby will make her later resent us, either for taking away a cultural connection or for infringing upon her autonomy. If we have two or more kids, we need to make sure that we don’t accidentally create a “glass child” while at the same time giving a “deeply feeling kid” the attention they need, plus we need to decide in advance if we want to be “gentle” or “authoritative” parents, which either are basically the same thing or polar opposites. It seems impossible to keep up!

We both come from upper-middle-class families with supportive and kind parents who were still strict at times, are very close with our families, and both feel like we had generally happy childhoods, so I feel as though a lot of the experiences people are sharing online that shape how they parent are foreign to me. I just don’t know if we’re cut out for parenting today, when every decision is framed as being make-or-break. I feel like it would make me anxious 24/7, and then that would be bad for my kids as well. Is there some sort of guide everyone is using that we’re missing? Or is it as constantly stressful as it seems? Please help!

—Panicked Possible Parents in Pennsylvania

Dear PPPP,

Congratulations on getting a head start on feeling nervous about parenting in the 21^st century! You’re well ahead of the game—you haven’t even started trying to have a baby, but nonetheless, you already feel inadequate as a parent. Such is the power of online parenting culture, a firehose of anecdote interpreted as data, opinion delivered as fact, pseudoscience masked as actual science, and actual science that’s extremely alarming. And it all arrives so breathlessly, feeding the natural uncertainty parents feel and convincing them that the stakes are impossibly high at every moment—that this decision will be the one that determines whether their parenting will be “successful.” In this context, of course, parents fear that “failure” means forever harming the small, helpless human being you have brought into the world.

How did we get here? About two decades ago, parenting discourse began a notable shift in tone. Once upon a time, it seemed, to many of us, that when people wrote about parenting, they wrote from an expert’s perspective, with expert advice. When someone talked about parenting in public, face-to-face (because there was no internet), propriety or discretion caused them to focus mostly on the positive, unless, possibly, when speaking with a very close friend or family member. The result was a culture that told us that most parenting problems were solvable with expert advice, and that to raise a child is the most rewarding, important thing a person can do. The children you raise might cause trouble from time to time, but parenting will bring you joy and fulfillment. This was great for inspiring people to have kids but not so great in helping those parents who, upon having children, found that the joy and fulfillment went hand in hand with frustration and misery.

Then in the 2000s, a wave of “mommy bloggers,” like the late Heather Armstrong, aka “Dooce,” brought a different way of talking about parenting into the mainstream. By 2014, the title of Jennifer Senior’s (very good!) book All Joy and No Fun crystallized the way contemporary commentators were characterizing parenting on such blogs, in magazine articles, and on wildly successful podcasts. These parenting voices weren’t experts—far from it. We were parents, and we wanted to give it to you straight: We freely dished about the emotional, philosophical, and structural challenges of raising kids in the modern era. We complained! We told you all the things about sleep training and spousal division of labor and grandparent management that we wished we’d been told before we had kids.

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We weren’t, of course, breaking new ground. Twentieth-century essayists like Shirley Jackson and Erma Bombeck had written with flair and humor about the travails of domestic life, though they treated their own despair with a light touch. Here’s Bombeck in a column collected in her perfectly-titled 1983 book, Motherhood: The Second Oldest Profession:

Decades later, a new generation of parents found themselves inundated by social media that delivered, straight to their phones, images of other people’s perfect family lives. One antidote: parenting straight talk. Readers and listeners—particularly fellow parents—found this conversation liberating and validating. Finally, someone pointed out the flaws in the American system that made child care impossible to find, that made schools unresponsive and cruel, that made parenting more isolating, it seemed, than ever before. Finally, someone acknowledged the way that raising children every day could be exhausting, overwhelming, and frightening.

Look, obviously we loved our children. That went without saying. Sometimes it went without saying for so long that people would email me, asking, “Why did you even have kids?”

Now it’s 2024 and I would argue that online parenting discourse is even more schizophrenic than before. While momfluencers make bank posting their perfect lives on Instagram, serious magazines run sharp, heartfelt essays by great writers who dishearteningly X-ray our broken culture and the ways it makes parenting impossible. As one longtime parenting writer pointed out recently in Slate, it feels nearly impossible to write seriously about the other “side”—the beauty and wonder of parenting—without being dismissed as a tradwife. “There’s just nothing clickbait,” she noted, “about loving motherhood.”

Meanwhile, a new species of parenting content provider has arisen in recent years, one you’ve identified perfectly in your letter: the quasi-scientific parenting expert, whose writing about parenting is not necessarily personal but is driven by a well-packaged, coherent philosophy. This isn’t new, either. In the 1920s followers of behaviorist John Watson’s advice raised their children according to the precepts of “scientific parenting.” “Attachment parenting” dates to the 1980s. But content that pushes a specific parenting philosophy has exploded in recent years, in large part thanks—I believe—to the success of economics professor Emily Oster, the author of Expecting Better and several follow-up books that strive to help parents make decisions about what’s important based on real data. Encouraged, perhaps, by Oster’s fame, other parenting content creators now clothe their advice in the garments of expertise, or even diagnosis.

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Hence the popularity of “conscious parenting,” or “gentle parenting,” or “authoritative parenting.” Hence the sudden ubiquity of “deeply feeling kids,” a term popularized by Dr. Becky Kennedy, clinical psychologist and Instagram “parent whisperer,” who describes such children as preternaturally emotional: “Some kids feel things deeper, more intensely, and for longer than other kids.” There may well be some actual science behind this very fuzzy concept, but I can’t help but notice how grateful I would have been at the times of our family’s greatest struggles to seize upon the idea that it’s not that everything is going wrong—it’s that my child feels more deeply than other children. (It’s also appealing, then, to identify such depth of feeling in oneself, and to valorize your struggle with being, well, so deep—as one mom did in a recent blog post about her son titled “Parenting a Deeply Feeling Kid Is Complicated”: “Being deeply feeling is a superpower that he and I share,” she concluded.) I have no doubt that framing one’s child-raising struggles in this way is legitimately powerful and helpful for many parents. I also have no doubt that if you wish to learn more about Deeply Feeling Kids (®, natch), you can access a Dr. Becky workshop about them by purchasing a membership to Dr. Becky’s platform, Good Inside, for just $23 a month.

So where does this leave you, letter-writer, and your husband? At ages 29 and 30, thanks to both your own interest and the pernicious algorithms that punish even a passing interest with more content, you are suddenly drowning in this terrible online parenting environment. Everywhere you look, someone is either showing off their impossibly perfect parenting, explaining why parenting in the 2020s is a hellscape of climate fear, or explicating a philosophy that, if you don’t follow, you’re probably dooming your child. I totally understand how off-putting it is. As Slate’s Ruth Graham wrote way back in 2014, “For overwhelmed parents, I imagine the relentless stream of realtalk is comforting. As a possible future parent, it’s utterly terrifying.”

But I’ve got a secret for you. You can just straight-up ignore all that shit.

As a general rule of thumb, the more Online you get about something, the more miserable that thing will make you. Do you enjoy watching sports? Great, you’re probably happy. Do you spend hours in the comments of YouTube soccer highlight videos arguing with idiots who say Ronaldo is better than Messi? Congratulations, you’re probably unhappy. I wish I was one of those people who pay attention to politics only to the extent that, before voting, they research the candidate whose positions most closely align with theirs. They are definitely happier than I am.

This rule holds true, above all, for parenting. Online parenting content has its uses—commiseration, laughs, research in a crisis—but the less of it you consume, the happier a parent you will be. The less you expose yourself to the flood, the less likely you are to be washed away. Click away from the gurus; click away from the diagnoses; click away, even, from the beautiful essays about the doomed world. (Feel free to keep reading advice columns—surely those are fine.)

But what about all that science, you might ask. What about a parenting philosophy? Look, if it’s helpful to build a framework for yourself as you go through the years of your child’s development, that’s great. A philosophy of parenting can serve as a guide to navigate unexpected situations, and can assist in building the rituals and rules that keep family life moving along day to day. But you don’t need to have a philosophy. Your parents didn’t. Generations of parents of tantrum-prone children have treated them kindly and lovingly without labeling them “deeply feeling.” I had to look up the definition of a “glass child,” and I am here to tell you that generations of parents of children with disabilities have raised those children, and their other children, with attention and care, whether they knew that term or not.

Do you want to know the most important, and reassuring, scientific fact about how your parenting will affect your child? Here you go: It probably doesn’t matter.

You’re going to give your future child every educational and material advantage they could hope for. But even if you weren’t, you would remain kind people with the wonderful gift of close, loving extended families. You’ll figure it out as you go along, following your instincts, fighting about it sometimes, surprising yourself with the decisions you make along the way. There is no philosophy you must follow. There is no label you must apply. Make-or-break decisions don’t exist. Take what is useful from the world, including the internet, and bring it back to your little family, and ignore the rest. You will love your child more than you could ever imagine. You will be happy.

—Dan

I’ve read a number of advice columns on school birthday celebrations that recommend bringing, say, cupcakes for the whole class. However, I feel that we as a culture are now more aware of the significant number of kids living with celiac disease as well as those with life-threatening food allergies, and that the time for shared food is past. Can you help me help all of us into rethinking celebratory events so that they aren’t solely about foods?