The idea that you need to save up a certain amount of money before having kids is so common it can feel almost like a moral law.
But it isn’t, and I said as much recently when a reader wrote in to my advice column asking if she’s too poor to have a baby. I argued that we don’t owe our kids a certain level of material wealth.
And then I got a question from another parent: my editor, Katie Courage. She pointed out that what also plagues her as a parent is time poverty. Maybe we don’t have to guarantee kids a certain amount of money, but what about a certain amount of time?
Here’s Katie’s question, and my response below.
Your latest column, responding to the reader who asked if she was too poor to bring another kid into the world, was refreshingly hope-inducing! Money questions around raising kids feel so ubiquitous no matter what circumstance your family is in, so this was really worth reading for a totally flipped framework on the issue.
The resource-scarcity concern that is perpetually circling in my mind, alongside the financial one, is time. As a working parent, I constantly feel time-poor, especially when it comes to quality time with my kids.
So much of the time I get to have with them is consumed with the simple logistics of life. Evenings really only have room for dinner and bedtimes. Mornings are a blur of breakfasts, navigating clothing choices, work meetings, and school dropoffs. And a good portion of weekends go to simply fighting entropy (that is, laundry, cleaning, yardwork). We do pack in plenty of kid activities, time with friends, and weekend camping trips. But it seems like it would be so much better for my kids if I could materialize more undirected hours of puzzle-doing, book-reading, and rambling nature walks by the creek together.
I was raised in the early days of intensive parenting (with so many amazing creek walks!), and I had my first child around the culmination of Instagram parenting influencers pushing this sort of style. If you’ve watched more than two episodes of Bluey, you’ve seen how this era calibrated expectations for parents to be almost constantly available for child-focused, child-directed activities. But if I let dishes pile up in order to play all weekend (as I read as an actual suggestion in a 2010s parenting book) or if I skip out on exercise to pick the kids up early, I know I won’t be showing up for the time together as energized and as minimally stressed as I can be.
So I find myself in a constant inner battle, and the only winner is seemingly constant indistinct guilt. Is there a way of looking at this that feels less zero-sum?
I really sympathize with this feeling of time poverty — and I bet almost every working parent does, too. But I want to share some research that might make you feel better.
First, you’re actually spending a lot of time with your kids, relative to middle-class parents of the not-too-distant past. Moms now spend more time with their kids than they did in 1965, even though the majority of moms weren’t in the paid workforce then. Dads are also doing more than they did back then.
So why does everyone I know still feel like they’re not hanging out with their kids enough?
The problem has to do with that word “enough.” To know what constitutes enough of something, you have to know what goal you’re aiming for. Historically, this was pretty simple: Your goal was to raise kids who could work — typically on your farm, or maybe in a factory, mill, or mine. Sure, you also felt love for your kids, but at the end of the day children were an economic asset. You needed to feed and shelter them so they could produce income for the family.
But in the 1930s, the United States banned oppressive child labor, and kids stopped being wage earners. Now that they were economically worthless, we had to ask ourselves: What role do they play in our lives? Our collective answer was to sentimentalize them more than ever before — to treat them as precious, not financially, but emotionally.
As author Jennifer Senior has documented, our collective script about parenting flipped upside down in the decades between then and now. Kids no longer work for their parents; instead, parents work for their kids. And what’s the ultimate goal of the modern parent? Buttonhole one of them in the street and they’ll tell you: “I just want my kids to be happy!!” (potentially with some soul-rattling desperation in their voice).
Trouble is, happiness is a very elusive goal. Even a single ingredient of it, professional success, is elusive — and getting more so by the day. And so we end up with the intensive parenting culture you described, where parents expect themselves to spend endless hours on stuff that they hope will enrich their kids, boosting their self-esteem, their skills, and ultimately, their success. Music lessons, soccer games, karate, chess, elaborate craft projects, and the long et cetera of child-focused activities.
But pursuing happiness is an unbounded search process. You could spend every waking hour doing child-focused activities with your kid and it still might not be “enough” to make them a happy adult (in fact, it very well may backfire).
An outcome is impossible to guarantee. But a capacity? That’s something you can much more reliably cultivate.
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So, what if you don’t see it as your goal to guarantee your kids’ happiness? What if instead the goal is to show them love and build their capacity to love others?
In that case, quantity of hours will matter much less than — you guessed it — quality. And we all know what “quality time” means. Right?
Honestly, I don’t think we do. Many American parents tend to assume that “quality time” means time explicitly dedicated to Activities For Kids. But as books like Hunt, Gather, Parent and The Importance of Being Little show, there’s reason to believe that much more mundane stuff works wonders, too.
Young children can learn a whole lot from being woven into whatever their parents happen to be doing — cooking, yardwork, errands. They can learn practical life skills, yes, but also things like perseverance, cooperation, and emotional regulation. And they can benefit immensely from exactly the kind of low-key interaction that parents dismiss as “not counting.” I’m talking about all the stuff you called “the simple logistics of life” — dinnertimes, bedtimes, school drop-offs. That’s because any of that stuff can be the site of loving, playful interaction.
I was raised by my dad and grandmother, and the moments that stand out in my mind now aren’t the ones that happened on special outings. They’re banal in the extreme. My very first memory is of my dad tucking me in at bedtime and telling me a story, and me feeling so happy that I said, “I love being 4 — I get all of the fun and none of the responsibilities!” I also remember helping my grandmother make dinner, and how she laughed with extreme delight when I picked up a cucumber and began talking into it like it was a phone. And I remember her walking me to school and how we checked out the neighbors’ amazing gardens on the way, making a game out of noticing the best one and giving it an imaginary award.
Nothing “special” was happening during these moments. There was no “activity.” There was no set-apart “quality time” bucket, or even an explicit goal of hanging out together. We were just life-ing.
But in these brief moments, there was a loving attunement to what I was doing and feeling. There was a wholeness of attention.
Contrast that with “time confetti” — a term, coined by author Brigid Schulte, to describe how our time now often gets fragmented into tiny little pieces that end up feeling unproductive and unfulfilling. We may think we’re “multitasking.” But when you’re trying to do bathtime with your kid while simultaneously attending to intermittent pings on your work Slack or worrying about the half-dozen emails you need to send and the three playdates you need to schedule and all the group texts you need to respond to…well. It’s not just your time but also your attention that gets carved up into little splinters.
If you recognize yourself in this description, it’s not your fault. Both our work culture and our technological culture conspire to shred our time like this.
What I find helpful about the idea of time confetti is that it explains why, even though the objective amount of time that we spend with our kids is actually greater now than it was a few decades ago, the subjective feeling of time poverty is going up, not down. Feeling time-poor is not just about the brute quantity of time we’ve got, but about the kind of attention we can bring to it.
A short moment of bathtime where a parent is truly present is small but whole. And that tends to feel more fulfilling for both adults and children. (Not to brag, but little kids love me, and I’m convinced it’s because the style of loving attention my caregivers gave me really modeled for me how to lovingly attend to others in turn.)
What all this indicates to me is not that we need to spend more time with our kids, or that we need to spend more time doing Activities for Kids, but that we can do a whole lot of good by focusing on the quality of attention we offer while we do literally whatever we happen to be doing when our kids are around.
And this is actually good news, because, while it’s hard to manufacture more time in the day, we can train our attention. My personal favorite ways of doing that are through meditation, birding, reading longform fiction, and observing a tech-free Sabbath, but there are plenty of other ways.
Do I think it’s fair for the burden to fall on the individual to counter the massive societal pressures that push us all toward fractured attention? No, absolutely not. And because this is a structural issue, we’ll all inevitably have moments when we don’t manage to be mentally present. That’s okay.
You can’t control every outcome for your child, and you can’t fully control how you show up for every moment you’re with them, either. The most you can do is try, as much as possible, to infuse focused loving attention into the moments you’ve got.
