Derek Thompson wrote a wonderful essay on what happens when you become a parent:

The baby you bring home from the hospital is not the baby you rock to sleep at two weeks, and the baby at three months is a complete stranger to both. In a phenomenological sense, parenting a newborn is not at all like parenting “a” singular newborn, but rather like parenting hundreds of babies, each one replacing the previous week’s child, yet retaining her basic facial structure. “Parenthood abruptly catapults us into a permanent relationship with a stranger,” Andrew Solomon wrote in Far From the Tree. Almost. Parenthood catapults us into a permanent relationship with strangers, plural to the extreme.

Isabel Woodford has a research-heavy essay in The Atlantic about why dads and daughters crave closeness but struggle to find it. 28% of American women are estranged from their father, and even where relationships are intact, they tend to be thinner—more transactional, less emotionally honest—than daughters want.

At the root of the modern father-daughter divide seems to be a mismatch in expectations. Fathers, generally speaking, have for generations been less involved than mothers in their kids’ (and especially their daughters‘) lives. But lots of children today expect more: more emotional support and more egalitarian treatment. Many fathers, though, appear to have struggled to adjust to their daughters’ expectations. The result isn’t a relationship that has suddenly ruptured so much as one that has failed to fully adapt.

And the psychological explanation that cuts deepest:

“What generates closeness is another person’s vulnerability,” Coleman explained, and dads may not be ready for that.

Daughters aren’t asking for grand gestures or dramatic change—they’re asking for their fathers to show up emotionally. Which turns out to be hard for a lot of men who were raised to see that kind of openness as weakness.

Eli Stark-Elster has a piece that reframes the “kids and screens” debate in a way I haven’t seen before. The usual narrative blames addictive tech design, but he offers an alternative:

Why do our children spend more time in Fortnite than forests? Usually, we blame the change on tech companies. They make their platforms as addicting as possible, and the youth simply can’t resist — once a toddler locks eyes with an iPad, game over.

I want to suggest an alternative: digital space is the only place left where children can grow up without us.

The argument is that kids have always needed spaces away from adult supervision. We’ve just paved over the forests and creeks where they used to find it.

What makes this more than speculation is the research he cites: 72% of 8 to 12-year-olds say they’d rather spend time together in person, without screens. 61% wish they had more time to play with friends without adults around. The kids don’t actually want to be on screens all day. They’re looking for something we’ve taken away.

It seems like what they want is to wander together in a forest. But they can’t. So they boot up Fortnite or TikTok instead.

I’m still sitting with this one. It doesn’t let tech companies off the hook, but it does suggest that “just take away the iPad” isn’t addressing the real problem.

This is a really interesting rebuttal of some modern parenting methods by Marilyn Simon:

The job of the parent is not to prevent any potential “trauma”, it is to love the child even when they are bad, and to punish them, and most importantly to forgive them. A child can’t understand the lightness of forgiveness without understanding first that one needs it.

This is another amazing AHP essay, this time about the critiques of Gen Z employees:

I’ve long argued that the critique of younger generations is a sublimated critique of a generation’s own parenting and child-rearing practices: no one wants to admit that the decisions they made (or tacitly endorsed) are responsible for the type of worker they find objectionable. But that sort of introspection requires, well, work.

It’s well worth reading the whole thing, but I also wanted to highlight the recommendations for what we (Gen X, etc.) can do about this:

So how do we break this cycle? If, upon encountering or even considering the attitude, ambition, or “work ethic” of a younger generation, your impulse begins to drift towards they don’t work like we do, my hope is we consider the following:

• How have we, as a society — and how have I, as a leader — helped foster the conditions that encourage someone to work a certain way, with certain habits, or attitudes, or ambitions?
• How much of my reaction is to the fact that someone is not working exactly the way I did at that point in my life — even though my circumstances were almost certainly wildly different?
• How has our society — or our industry — tacitly agreed on an understanding of excellence that has little room for different ways of navigating the world, of making space to care for others, or collectivism just generally?
• What if working differently is also an attempt to keep people in the industry for longer — and make the industry as a whole more sustainable?
• What can I learn from the way they’re approaching work?

I’ve followed danah boyd’s work for a long time so when she says something I listen. Danah has been researching teens and technology her entire career. In Struggling with a Moral Panic Once Again she weighs in on the “is social media causing the teen mental health crisis?” debate:

I wish there was a panacea to the mental health epidemic we are seeing. I wish I could believe that eliminating tech would make everything hunky dory. Sadly, I know that what young people are facing is ecological. As a researcher, I know that young people’s relationship with tech is so much more complicated than pundits wish to suggest. I also know that the hardest part of being a parent is helping a child develop a range of social, emotional, and cognitive capacities so that they can be independent. And I know that excluding them from public life or telling them that they should be blocked from what adults value because their brains aren’t formed yet is a type of coddling that is outright destructive.

That last point is pretty important I think. Maybe one reason all the arguments about teens and social media resonate with so many parents is that we are the ones with the deeply troubled relationships with it… Anyway, there’s some great advice for parents in the essay as well. Also see The great rewiring: is social media really behind an epidemic of teenage mental illness?

Most data are correlative. When associations over time are found, they suggest not that social-media use predicts or causes depression, but that young people who already have mental-health problems use such platforms more often or in different ways from their healthy peers.

This is an interesting interview with Richard Culatta, author of Digital for Good: Raising Kids to Thrive in an Online World. They discuss how to help kids bridge the gap between physical and digital spaces, how to model good technology behavior, and more. This is such a good point:

By focusing on screen time we miss the far more important concept that we should be teaching our kids; screen value. Some digital activities are just not a good use of a kid’s time (eg. playing a repetitive, luck-based game) while others provide much greater value (eg. editing a movie, creative writing, FaceTiming with a grandparent, etc.) And context is important to consider too. Digital activities that are appropriate on a long car-ride will likely be different than those on a beautiful spring day when friends are around, or the day before a large school project is due.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that is something that not only kids need to learn. We can all benefit from this lesson:

The most important lesson we can teach young kids is to recognize that some digital activities provide more value at some times than others. This means evaluating each digital activity on its own merit based on the circumstances.

We should probably also remember that controlling children’s behavior with screen time leads to more screen time:

Researchers investigated the impact of parenting practices on the amount of time young children spend in front of screens. They found a majority of parents use screen time to control behavior, especially on weekends. This results in children spending an average of 20 minutes more a day on weekends in front of a screen. Researchers say this is likely because using it as a reward or punishment heightens a child’s attraction to the activity.