I find it impossible to resist the pull of intensive parenting

Plus, thoughts on the Downton Abbey school of fatherhood

Credit: ITV

We’ve got a two parter today. If you like parts — in a blog, in your hair, in the Red Sea — subscribe to this newsletter!

Part 1: I find it impossible to resist the pull of intensive parenting

My 5-year-old daughter has always loved to dance, so when we learned last fall about a kids’ ballet program at the local university, it seemed like a perfect fit. The classes are only one day a week, and the program culminates with a performance in a fancy concert hall — something my daughter is still looking forward to now. It’s going great.

A couple months later, my wife and I were talking about how that same daughter isn’t a strong swimmer yet. We both grew up in places with beaches and an abundance of swimming pools, but our daughter is growing up in a mountain state where opportunities to swim are fewer and further between. Knowing how to swim is a matter of safety, as well as fun, so we signed her up for swim lessons at the local rec center. The lessons happen twice a week, and occasionally my wife will take our daughter over for some free swim time in the afternoon as well so she can get more comfortable being in the water.

Then just last week a friend let us know that the neighborhood t-ball league is about to begin. I’m not a huge sports guy myself, but it seems like everyone should at least have a basic understanding of how baseball works. So now we’re about to start t-ball as well, which includes one practice and one game each week.

I will be honest. I hate the intensive, over-scheduled parenting style that has come to dominate my generation. “This is not how we were raised and we turned out fine!” I have been known to declare to friends and family and pretty much anyone who will listen. I have written multiple jeremiads about my hatred of helicopter parenting.

And yet, here I am, with a 5-year-old who has extracurriculars five days a week. I have become the very thing I loathe¹.

I know this is ultimately a good problem to have. We’re fortunate to live in a place that has very affordable programs for kids, and we’re fortunate that we can afford them. But there’s still a vast gulf between how I’d like to be raising my kid and what I’m actually doing.

In one of my screeds against helicopter parenting, from December, I argued that the reason we parents hover over our kids is because we lack a village to keep us in check. I know other parents, sure, but I lack a real village that’s dense with other children. And so I have limited exposure to other families’ parenting philosophies. There are scheduled playdates rather than impromptu games at the park. Life is not bad, but without a village that might automate things like playtime rendezvous (or, say, childcare), every single thing that happens has to be calculated and scheduled. I suspect many parents feel burned out today because we’re having to think long and hard about activities that even just a generation ago would’ve happened with no parental involvement at all. 

That was my previous thesis. 

But my argument today is that try as you might, you cannot simply choose to buck the trend of intensive, burnout parenting. I’m sure there are individual exceptions, but overall, trying to raise 1980s kids in a 2020s world is like trying to get around in a covered wagon when you live in a world designed for F-150s. Or at least, that is proving to be my experience. The flavor of parenting infrastructure we have today — plenty of formal extracurriculars but very little in the way of traditional or informal support — pushes relentlessly toward hovering and micromanaging. 

Put another way, it doesn’t matter how much I study actual villages or traditional parenting, I just cannot copy and paste that experience into my own world. I’m trying right now, and it’s not working. 

The solution in my mind is to focus less on direct remedies to over-scheduled kids and burned out parents, and more on recreating the environments in which those two things didn’t exist (or at least in which they were rarer).

As common sense as that sounds to me, I almost never hear anyone talking about it. Virtually all of the advice I see about parenting is about how to do things, not about how to create environments where things happen on their own. I suppose that’s because it’s easier to think about, say, how much micromanaging kids need than it is to recreate a village-like environment where micromanaging isn’t necessary in the first place. But the problem, as I’m discovering, is that tips and tricks don’t really get the job done.

Part 2: A message for the dudes

There’s a scene in Downton Abbey in which Lord Grantham explains his life’s work. It has been many years since I watched the show, so I’m paraphrasing, but Grantham is walking around the grounds of his estate and says something like “I didn’t have a normal career or whatever, instead my life’s work was taking care of this” — and in my recollection he gestures toward his ancestral home and its grounds.

The scene stuck with me because it offered what I thought was a novel way for a guy to think about the purpose of life. Lord Grantham wasn’t trying to win professional accolades. He wasn’t seeking individual pleasures. He wasn’t even trying to change the world for the better. His primary purpose in life was his “house,” which I understood to mean both the physical building but also the family for which the house was a metaphor. Teasing this idea out a bit more, Lord Grantham’s philosophy seemed to suggest that the job of a man or a father is to put his family first².

Downton Abbey is just a TV show, and one about wealthy aristocrats at that. But this philosophy that Lord Grantham articulates is actually useful for the real world. In fact, at a time when American men (among others) are struggling in unique and potentially socially destabilizing ways, I think a lot of us dudes could benefit from reframing our worldview to prioritize stewardship over our “houses” rather than more fleeting and superficial markers of male success.

That men are struggling generally has been widely documented, and I would point anyone interested in the topic to the writing of Richard Reeves. Reeves is a senior fellow at Brookings, as well as the author of the 2022 book Of Boys and Men and a Substack by the same name. Other people have written about this as well, but Reeves’ Substack usefully compiles a lot of different data points in one place.

For example, he’s written that the life expectancy gap between men and women is widening, with men falling behind. He’s written that childless men are worse off than childless women. He’s noted that “the biggest risk factor for suicide is being male.” And he’s pointed out that boys are falling behind in education — something other research has shown as well.³

There are people who have pushed back to Reeves’ work and other commentary on the plight of men by noting that there are many other problems to solve in the world. But Reeves is a pragmatist who has pointed out that everyone suffers as men fall behind. For instance, there’s a growing ideological gap between men and women, which has opened the door to demagoguery. Men who are adrift also end up falling into a pit of toxic masculinity epitomized by people like accused human trafficker Andrew Tate, roided out influencers at weirdo conventions, and professional creeps like Dan Bilzerian.

I think we can and should find a better model of masculinity. And I think that Lord Grantham scene I mentioned above offers a neat summary of what that model can be. Family and village first⁴.

Of course, I suspect a lot of guys actually think that’s what they’re doing. Stop 10 dads on the street and ask them what matters most, and I bet all 10 of them will say family. But I wonder how close to Grantham’s view we’re actually getting.

Are we, for instance, telling our sons that the greatest thing they can be in life are fathers? I suspect not. In fact, I think that most of the time, young people generally and guys specifically are told that they can “be whatever you want” or that they should “follow your passions.” I’ve criticized this viewpoint in the past — unless you’re very rich, it’s ineffective life advice — but I think one of the big problems is that it teaches guys to prioritize self over community.

And so you get guys whose main goals are things like fortune and fame. Or, and perhaps more commonly now, you get guys who drift aimlessly because they’re not thinking about their duty to anyone but themselves.

Lord Grantham had power and money and a very big house. His character was the literal embodiment of privilege. But a key part of his worldview was that the good things in life also come with a duty to the rest of one’s family. He was a steward. And I think this duty-first version of masculinity might help a lot of guys regain a sense of purpose.

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1. My daughter’s extracurriculars start and stop at different times, so she won’t be booked up all the time forever. This week, for example, one batch of swim lessons ended and t-ball hasn’t started, so she has a fair amount of free time. But the point I’m making is that she’s generally more booked up than I was as a kid.

2. I don’t remember what ultimately happened in Downton Abbey, and due to our modern interest in complicated heroes I suspect the show explored the grey area between Grantham’s worldview and his actions. My point is not to encourage people to be exactly like Lord Grantham, but rather to simply note that the character articulated, in that one specific scene, a version of masculinity that I find novel and useful in today’s world.

3. Many of these problems are most acute in Gen Z, and are amplified by things like poverty.

4. While proof reading this post, my wife made the astute point that Grantham also feels a sense of duty to the broader village. The estate is an economic engine for a lot of people — a fact Grantham knows and which weighs on him. I think there’s a lesson there as well about duty not just to one’s nuclear family, but also to one’s village.