Hi everyone! To my loyal Substack readers: I realize I haven’t been active in a while. I was on vacation last week, but rest assured, I have several pregnancy and birth-related essays in the pipeline. The problem is that those topics require careful review of the evidence, footnotes and/or citations, and thoughtful reflection. But when it comes to parenting, anyone can publish sweeping conclusions based on their existing beliefs and personal experiences. So here I go.
Field Notes From A Family Cruise
What follows are several parenting reflections inspired by a week of observing children of all ages (some related to me, some not) on a family cruise. That’s right—last week, in celebration of her upcoming 80th birthday, my mom took us all on a cruise out of Boston headed first to Nova Scotia, then Bermuda. For seven days my siblings and our families had the run of this amazing ship, which is basically a floating city where you have no responsibilities, tons of entertainment, and access to an all-you-can-eat buffet from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m.
And if you’re the kind of person who loves to observe parents of young children having a hard time and judge them for their parenting failures, you have come to the right place. That’s right—whatever “Kids, these days!” assumptions you’d like to make, there will be ample evidence for them on a cruise. It is an excellent place to observe children at their absolute limits: overstimulated, overtired, over-sugared, and occasionally melting down because the pool closed early or someone else got to the ping-pong table first.
Seventeen people from my family attended—a motley crew ranging in age from 6 to 79. Miraculously, this ship managed to meet all our needs. Handicap accessible! Kid-friendly! Everyone can find food they’re excited to eat! Grandma and Auntie can sit and play cards (with kids being dealt in at various times) while the tween boys check out the high-ropes course. Grumpy teenagers can hide in their cabins and watch the World Cup. Parents can sneak away to the gym, or better yet, the bar for an espresso martini. So yes—fun times had by all. But there was something else I noticed on this particular vacation that felt very different from vacations of years past.
It was waaaaaay easier.
It was easier in comparison to trips we did years ago when my kids were younger. Watching my siblings and other parents navigate meals, activities, and logistics with younger kids reminded me just how much work those years required. Meanwhile, my own kids were largely entertaining themselves, making their own decisions, and generally acting like people I could trust in public. None of this is because I’ve unlocked some secret parenting strategy. It’s because they’re older.
You see, they don’t wear diapers. They don’t take naps. They don’t have tantrums. They don’t run away in a crowd at top speed. They can stay up late or get up early for a flight and not act like little jerks the next day. They refrain from hitting every button in an elevator. They dress appropriately for the obligatory family dinner and, if asked an annoying question by an adult relative, will usually respond politely. When we go on a hike, I am now the person most likely to whine (wet socks are the worst).
Now that my kids are all 11 and up, they don’t need a babysitter. In fact, on this trip they could pretty much wander the ship at their leisure. My 11-year-old was technically eligible for the “Splash Academy Kids Club,” but he and his same-aged cousin thought it was kind of lame, so they checked themselves out early. At that age, no parental pick-up is required. My 13-year-old met some fellow recent eighth-grade graduates from Maine. They became fast friends and spent much of the week hanging out in the hot tub together. My husband and I amused ourselves by walking by frequently, waving and calling his name while he pretended not to know us.
Another way this vacation was easier is that my kids mostly got along with each other. That doesn’t mean there are never incidents….
A Story About When Siblings Stop Trying To Kill Each Other
Because I have very active (and older) kids, we booked a tour in Bermuda that included some pretty adventurous activities: cave exploration, cliff diving, and snorkeling. Grandma and the younger cousins couldn't have participated, and honestly, these activities would have been a stretch for our kids just a few years ago. At the beginning of the tour, the five of us piled into a small van with two other unrelated families, and we squeezed into the back two rows. Being crammed into the back of a van with no leg room would have been a recipe for disaster a few years ago.
In fact, before we even left the parking lot, my older son said something vaguely insulting to my younger son, who is quite sensitive to his brother’s opinion of him. So naturally, he slapped him. But what happened next surprised me.
First, my younger son instantly realized he’d made a mistake, felt remorse, and started apologizing.
Second, my older son—get this—DID NOT HIT HIM BACK.
He accepted the apology, stopped insulting him, and the incident was over. A little while later I said to the boys, “You know, I’m kind of impressed. I think just a couple of years ago that would have turned into an all-out brawl in the back of a tour bus.”
My older son rolled his eyes and responded: “Of course I’m not going to get in a fight on this bus. There are other people here. That would be so embarrassing.”
Then it hit me: Wow. The boy cares what other people think.
For years, I had tried to teach concepts like self-control, conflict resolution, and considering the consequences of your actions. Apparently what finally worked was a few years time and the possibility that complete strangers might witness him behaving like an idiot.
In fact, he now cares more about avoiding public embarrassment than getting revenge on his little brother. Somewhere along the way, he developed a sense of shame—the very quality I had spent the previous five to seven years trying unsuccessfully to instill.
And when it comes to my younger son, of course I’m not proud of the fact that he hit his brother. But after years of trying to force apologies that my kids did not genuinely feel, it was refreshing to see him actually acknowledge he’d made a mistake without being prompted.
My Kids Are Basically Civilized Now (But Didn’t Used To Be)
As a fairly self-conscious person, I used to find it extremely stressful to take my children out in public.I've detailed this in other posts, but they were genuinely difficult to keep safe and contained. For years, leaving the house felt like a calculated risk. Staying home all day with energetic kids was its own challenge, but going out meant facing the possibility of chaos, public scrutiny, and some new disaster I hadn't anticipated.
One child might run away in a parking lot. Another might decide to climb something that was clearly not meant to be climbed. Someone would refuse to wear appropriate shoes. Someone else would refuse a coat despite sub-freezing temperatures. As I’ve argued before ⬇️⬇️⬇️
There was one particularly infamous incident in my hometown when I took the kids to visit the cemetery where my father is buried. While I stood at his gravesite trying to have a moment of reflection, my younger son managed to slip away and began climbing a centuries-old stone cross. Unfortunately, the cross was less sturdy than it appeared and it toppled over on him. No one was seriously hurt, and the cemetery keepers were very understanding when I wrote to explain the incident and offered to pay for the cost of fixing the cross. But obviously, it was horrifying. Some families bring flowers to the cemetery. My family brings a wrecking crew.
And YES, I know I should have been watching him more closely. I am aware. In my defense, I was trying to have a peaceful moment at my father’s grave—but I guess my six-year-old wasn’t feeling particularly reverent or sympathetic to my goal that day. Apparently I overestimated his ability to refrain from scaling historical monuments for approximately ninety seconds. You’ll be happy to learn that the same child can now walk through an entire cemetery without toppling a single religious monument.
A Lot of Parenting Problems Are Solved if You Just Wait Longer
One evening on the cruise, I was getting ready to have dinner in one of the ship’s fancy dining rooms—you know, the kind where the waiter unfolds your napkin and places it in your lap if you don’t do it quickly enough yourself. Getting to go to a fancy dinner was a nice perk. My siblings with younger kids mostly ate at the buffet, wisely avoiding the challenge of asking small children to sit patiently through a multi-course meal.
But my kids no longer need to order chicken fingers off a kid’s menu or toddle around the room. They could join us for a real dinner, sitting still for a whole 90 minutes! And even though I know my 17-year-old is tired of answering questions about where she'd like to go to college and what she'd like to study, she politely recites her stock answer whenever an adult relative asks.
As I stood in front of the closet deciding what to wear to dinner, I reached for a pair of white linen pants. This may not seem like a momentous occasion to anyone else, but to me, it was huge, because for most of the past seventeen years—basically, since I became a parent—I have been unable to wear white clothing.
Parents of young children understand this instinctively. Wearing white around babies and toddlers is pointless. It won’t stay white for long, and I only needed one glass of chocolate milk spilled in my lap to learn this lesson. Over the years, I gradually stopped buying white altogether. As the person who does most of the laundry in our house, I knew exactly how this story ended. Someone was going to vomit breastmilk on my shirt or wipe their sticky hands on me.
But on this vacation, during seven days on a cruise ship, my children managed to spill exactly zero beverages on me. This may not sound like a major milestone, but I assure you: it is.
In fact, there is a long list of annoying behaviors my kids eventually outgrew, all of which I observed parents of younger children dealing with on this cruise. Here are a few:
running away in crowded places
dressing inappropriately for the occasion or the weather
having embarrassing public meltdowns
beating up and/or fighting with siblings in front of strangers
climbing everything in sight
I don’t want to give the impression that all problems disappear. My 11-year-old still rocks backward in chairs like he’s conducting a physics experiment which, as you may guess, frequently ends badly. My 13-year-old has an expensive habit of losing cash, headphones, and clothing. My 17-year-old loves to give her opinions on my fashion choices (spoiler alert: she doesn’t like them). But overall, I can live with these small inconveniences. No one’s perfect—including me, and my current parenting problems are far less stressful, time-consuming and embarrassing than they used to be.
My point is, parenting influencers often imply that every bad behavior displayed by young children is a referendum on your parenting choices, but my experience is that many behaviors are simply developmental stages with natural expiration dates. Sometimes a bad behavior is just a referendum on the child being four, not eleven.
But I’m Not Saying That Parenting Doesn’t Matter!
I have dabbled in parenting posts mostly just trying to be funny, and unfortunately, have provoked backlash from people who are pretty sure I did everything wrong. The argument usually goes something like this: I let my kids “get away with” bad behavior. I wasn’t strict, regimented or consistent enough, and I just happened to get lucky by having kids who turned out fine. Most of my hard days and nights as a parent of young children were hard because I made them that way, and could have been prevented through better parenting…⬇️⬇️⬇️
Of course, we’ll never know for sure who was right and who was wrong. Parenting is frustratingly hard to evaluate because we only get one version of our kids, and we never get to run the experiment again with a different approach.
But I don’t regret choosing to prioritize having a good relationship with my children over “winning” battles like who is going to pick up the carrot they annoyingly dropped on the floor. And I believe there is a lot of wisdom in reminding yourself “this too shall pass” during life’s most difficult moments, both inside and out of parenting.
Recently, I’ve loved reading takes from .1 She has real credentials as a neuroscientist and physician, so if you’re going to take parenting advice from someone, take it from her, not from me!
But—just sayin’—she seems to agree with me that sometimes, She’s Not A Better Parent. Her Child Is Easier.
One of Manuela’s recent posts discussed evidence for what researchers call differential susceptibility—the idea that some children are simply “harder” and also more affected by parenting that others. In other words, parenting mattered most for the hardest kids.
Kids with more difficult temperaments were hurt more by harsh parenting than easy kids were, and they also gained more from warm, supportive parenting. It showed up across aggression, across anxiety, across social and cognitive skills, and it was clearest when the difficult temperament was measured early, in infancy.
The long-term studies that follow the same kids over years say the same thing. Stright and colleagues tracked babies into first grade. The ones rated temperamentally difficult as infants became the most capable kids in the classroom (schoolwork, friendships, relationships with teachers) when they’d had high-quality parenting, and among the least capable when they hadn’t. For the easier babies, parenting quality seemed to matter less.
Parting Thoughts
Obviously, I can’t promise that your kids will be easier when they’re older. There is always the possibility of hard seasons ahead. Many teenagers and young adults genuinely struggle with depression, anxiety, risk-taking behaviors, difficult relationships, and other challenges.
And if you’re the parent of really young kids, perhaps you find my conclusion a little annoying—or maybe just not very helpful—because your 3-year-old is currently having two-hour tantrums every day. I realize those phases are hard. My kids went through a lot of hard phases.
But I think the parents of hard kids are the ones who most need this reminder: a hard season does not mean your child is destined for a hard life. And sometimes, what you need isn’t necessarily a different parenting strategy, just more time!
In my opinion, the best thing you can do while you wait is keep your sense of humor. You will know things have gotten better when you can finally wear white pants again.
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