Liz Wolfe

I think people probably aren't yearning for the '50s, they're yearning for the '80s or '90s

FT GREENE AND CLINTON HILL ARE OVERRATED, I won't be silenced on this one !!

Never forget

“Once we had that tool,” a mom of four tells @sarahzhang (the writer of this excellent piece in The Atlantic) “it felt like we were irresponsible if we didn’t use it.”

This is my worry with so much parenting tech (and a major theme of CITY WITHOUT CHILDREN): Are you irresponsible if you choose not to use the Owlet or the Nanit to monitor your newborn's breathing? (There's SIDS risk, you know!) What about if you don't use Orchid to assess your embryo's health prior to implantation––are you abdicating your responsibility as parent? What about the livestreams provided by so many daycares––shouldn't you be spot-checking to ensure the workers are treating your child well, that they aren't in distress? Consider the possibility of the shame and guilt that would haunt you forever, the thinking goes, if you were insufficiently vigilant, since you *had the technology and therefore the ability* to monitor in a way that prior generations didn't.

But the problem is that we're moving the parenting goalposts from constant vigilance & supervision to something even less doable: Constant surveillance. People will have a worse experience of parenthood, depriving their children of substantial, yet hard-to-measure developmental milestones. They might have fewer children as the standards creep upward.

We're well past the point of diminishing returns, and it's all curdling into a spiritual crisis.

I cannot tell you how hard it is to write a book while someone is jumping up and down beside you, asking you dozens of highly specific questions about ogres.