on the slipperiness of control
there's something about a toddler with a popsicle
A few weeks ago, in an attempt to relax for 30-35 seconds, Mike and I packed up Nova and Bo and met my parents, my brother and sis-in-law, and their two kids for a low-stakes long weekend in Phoenix. In the lead-up to the trip, I looked forward to easy afternoons spent by the pool at our shared Airbnb, the temptation to obsessively clean my house well out of reach.
But I also looked forward to a more peculiar pleasure, one that is very specific to the state of my life right now: observing my brother and sister-in-law parent their kids. We have children almost exactly the same age, and the difficulty of parenting mine has made me deeply curious about how others in the same situation “do it.” Who better to observe at the task than the very person who, alongside ya girl, put my parents through this same gauntlet1 thirty-plus years ago?
Plus, my brother and sis-in-law are two of the most aggressively capable people I know (he’s a consultant; she’s a doctor … obviously idiots …), and have a way of making all of us laugh even in the most excruciating situations. Both traits are critical to surviving parenting in general, but become truly existential to pulling off the parenting away game (described perfectly by
):“Holidays [post-kids] are something else entirely. No longer a time for rest, at least by the old yardstick. It's a parenting away game: a new location without your home ground advantage; up against formidable opponents out of their regular routine; full-time kid duty, more exhausted than when you were at work, making it up as you go along whilst trying not to scream the entire operation into ruin. It's simultaneously wonderful and terrifying—a microcosm of the parenting experience. It’s a beautiful chaos as you exist atop one another in a tiny hotel room.”
(Lol forever; so painful and so true.)
After watching my siblings full-time parent for three days, my inner monologue running a near-constant comparison analysis (“oh dang that’s a good call! Is that what I would have done?!”), I came to a potentially obvious, but nonetheless interesting, conclusion: differences in parenting mostly come down to when and how much a parent attempts to exercise control.
“choosing” control
On one end of the spectrum, parents can exercise little-to-no control over their children’s behavior, an approach that (according to my panic-googling of parenting advice) might be recognizable as free-range parenting, or one that stems from the philosophy of respectful parenting. On the other end, parents hold as tightly as possible to control, trying their best to dictate their kids’ every move—perhaps more aligned with an approach known as authoritative parenting.
Both ideas, or their spiritual relatives, appear often in the parenting lexicon of 2024; if you’re a parent, you’ve probably heard a flavor of one or both. In an essay exploring the way these themes have persisted in parenting conversations over time,
breaks them down usefully:“The idea behind respectful parenting is that children are full people from the moment they arrive, that their thoughts and feelings are valid, and that good parenting takes their world of thoughts and feelings fully into account without dismissing them as silly or unimportant. This approach emphasizes collaboration between parent and child to come up with solutions to problems. Authoritative parenting is about drawing boundaries and holding them. Authoritative parents listen to and accept the child’s viewpoint, but hold firm boundaries even if they are upsetting. It is the middle ground between being authoritarian and being passive.”
Regardless of the approach we think we’d like to take, the reality is that we have to regularly practice both, choosing our moments to “hold firm” and exercise control (in moments of potential danger, certainly) and our moments to say fuck it and let it go (in moments of, say, potential mess).2
Of course, there is no right answer to the question of when to exercise control versus relinquish it. But I am interested in how we “select” those moments, intentionally or not. The decision to pursue control in a given scenario can be for many reasons, some more obvious than others (creating safety being the most indisputable). But how much is it worth battling it out with our kids in order to make life easier for our future selves? Or, even thornier, to maintain a sense of social decorum, ie in order to follow social rules that matter to us, but obviously not to our toddlers? And often, we only have a split second to decide.
when the stakes feel impossibly high
For our anthropological analysis, see Exhibit A, from aforementioned Phoenix away game: toddler is handed a sweating, deeply-purple grape popsicle in 100-degree heat. Toddler’s ability to bring a fork to her mouth is middling at best; her ability to hold onto a slippery ice-nugget on a stick while also trying zestily to lick it is even more tenuous. Toddler has also just been wiped clean from dinner. And again, it’s 100 degrees outside. This popsicle is melting, y’all. Maybe just imagining this scene is enough to make your heart beat increase, your shoulders tense up, your jaw clench—it certainly is for me.
These physiological signals suggest threat and corrective action: something is wrong! ACT NOW to prevent DASTARDLY CONSEQUENCES! But my brain is playing its classic little trick: the reality, of course, is that there is no imminent danger, no tiger chasing me or anyone in the vicinity. The “threat” my body is reacting to is the threat of mess—purple stains on faces, clothes, the ground. Cleaning up a mess is annoying, for sure—but we’re outside on the front lawn, a bathtub and washing machine steps away.
So what to do? Indulge the animal brain’s control-seeking stress response and wrest the melting popsicle away from the toddler? Or quiet the mind and allow the mess to unfold? In a rational analysis of this scenario, option two seems the obvious choice: let the kid enjoy a popsicle! Avoid embedding in their brain forever the idea that mess is somehow immoral, and that cleanliness is worth prioritizing over joy, corporeal pleasure, and momentary, harmless chaos.
But in the moment, I’m always surprised by how difficult it is to ignore that impulse. Which is how we find ourselves in a constant dance with control while we parent, corralling it toward us while it tries slyly to glide away.
an antidote
wrote recently about the trap of self-analysis, invoking Susan Sontag’s seminal essay “Against Interpretation.” In it, she explores Sontag’s assertion that “incessant decoding impoverishes and depletes art” as a wedge into her own thesis: that constantly analyzing one’s self, behavior, and thoughts has limited returns. Here’s Nahman, on Sontag: “In order to liberate ourselves from this diminishing way of seeing [ie, constant interpretation], [Sontag] suggests valuing transparence instead. “Transparence means experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are,” [Sontag] writes. “What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more.”
I wonder if this same prescription can be applied to the struggle with control while parenting, and might be of service in those moments when our animal brain is trying to win the (often irrational) battle. Can we look at a popsicle, luscious and melting from our toddler’s chin, and experience its “luminousness?” Can we “recover our senses” for that singular moment, before our analysis and “incessant decoding” once again take the wheel?
The mantra “be present” is doled out often in modern parenting advice—but I’ve always found this guidance hard to access. What does presence look or feel like? How can I find it? Sontag’s idea of transparence, or letting things be what they are, feels more accessible to me. It requires a conscious letting go of control, an acknowledgement of a reality or essential way of being that makes us a bit uncomfortable.
In the case of the popsicle, the acknowledgement that its collision with my toddler on a hot day creates an essence of mess, which will require cleaning—but that’s what it IS. If we can accept and allow this, we’ll be rewarded with a luminousness that is lost in a constant battle for control. And that seems pretty worthwhile.
Thanks for reading! Share with me what is making it easy for you to find luminousness these days, or what you’re battling that a prescription for transparence might cure. Back soon with midsommar provisions!
🍇, Becca
My brother and I are seventeen months apart, and both had kids in quick succession with a similar age split. I have a whole theory about how the distance between you and your siblings plays an outsized role in determining the age-split of your own kids … need your thots
It took a lot of self-discipline to let Nova gleefully stomp through every dank-af puddle encountered on our walk yesterday, despite the fact that she was wearing THE CUTEST toddler Nike Air-Max sneakies that I would later have to clean. Footnote to the footnote: we got said toddler Nikes as a hand-me-down (bless you, Cassie) but if you’re in the market, these are spiritually aligned.