My Most Controversial Parenting Move

Newsletter 2022-05-30

[Update: I forgot to attach to the audio version of the newsletter! My bad. There’s no way to upload it here, but I was able to post it separately. You can listen to it here.]

I developed a new parenting tactic that works 100 percent of the time: Leave. I’ll pause here to give you time to be stunned by my brilliance. Maybe I’ll go make a sandwich.

Okay, I’m back. With my kids, when I say that I leave, I don’t mean that I’m gone for good. I’m not going out for milk and never coming back. Not only is that cliché, but it’s flat out unconvincing. If I’m ever going to disappear, I’ll come up with a much better pretext. “Hey kids, I’m going to check out that rickety rope bridge over the bottomless pit. Be back soon.” Right now, I only leave for the day. Although I’ve stayed vague about the issue for years to seem like a bigger deal than I really am, I do, in fact, still have a day job. Some days I work from home, and some days I don’t. It turns out I do my best parenting when I’m not with my kids. If only I’d known that all along.

Photo by Andre Amaral Xavier on Unsplash

On days when I’m out, my twelve-year-old, Betsy, runs the roost. So far, there haven’t been any major mishaps on her watch. When my seven-year-old, Lucy, broke her arm last week, both my wife Lola and I were home, so that’s on us. Maybe Betsy should be in charge of me and Lola, too. When I’m away, I monitor the house through smoke detectors linked to my phone and external cameras at every entrance to the house. How else would I know at exactly what time the delivery guy arrives with new board games every day? I might have a problem. I also do video calls with Betsy every few hours. The live footage makes it harder for her to cover up any ongoing disasters. She can claim everything is fine, but that weird green glow in the background will tell another story. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve told the kids not to flush uranium down the toilet. Betsy and my ten-year-old, Mae, can cook all the same foods I do and handle basic household tasks. If they could work two full time jobs at once like me (Yes, writing is work, even if it pays more like a very self-destructive hobby.), I’d be completely redundant. Fingers crossed that that day comes soon.

Leaving for the day doesn’t just highlight how much of a background character I am in my children’s lives. It also eliminates the most frustrating part of being a parent. When I tell my children to do something, they do it—eventually. The lag between the verbal command on my end and tangible action on theirs can be considerable. We’re talking hours, days, or even weeks of them doing absolutely anything else. Sure, Mae will pick up her socks like I asked her to, but only after she eats an entire container of blueberries, poops, and sings every song from Frozen. I’m truly screwed if they add more sequels. You’d think some of Mae’s activities could be doubled up—maybe pooping and singing or singing and eating blueberries, depending on how worried she is about choking to death or spitting half-chewed fruit everywhere—but that’s never how it works out. Each task has to be drawn out to its full length with no overlap so she can achieve her maximum procrastination potential. Add in the necessary fights with her sisters in between each stage and you have a full day in which nothing gets done. If my kids tried as hard at doing literally anything as they do at doing nothing, they’d be the most productive people on earth.

Normally, my way to counteract their impressive delaying tactics is to alternately threaten and bribe them until they actually get things done. This is both expensive and exhausting. Recently, I took the opposite approach. Now that the kids are off school, they have entire days where they’re home alone with nothing on their schedules. Rather than carefully managing their non-progress, I handled my parenting remotely. I video called my kids from work and gave them their list of chores, making sure to mute their whining. Then I ended the call. The kids could spend the entire day fighting and stalling if they wanted. I would never know. All I cared about was that their assigned tasks were done when I got back, even if they hit the finish line thirty seconds before I walked in the door. The less I know about how they got there, the better.

The biggest job I gave the kids on the first day was folding laundry, which I’d never asked them to do before. When I’m home, I handle it myself while doing several other things (Fun fact: I have six hands.), but when I’m out, it really piles up. Each child wears approximately nineteen outfits per day. There are more clothes in my laundry room than in a fully stocked Old Navy. Upon hearing her assignment, Betsy insisted that she didn’t know how to do it. I assured her she could figure it out, and if not, there was always YouTube. I’m sure some vlogger has released a seventy-five part docuseries on t-shirt origami. With that, I left Betsy and the other girls to their own devices. The ensuing battles were not my problem, even if I fully expected to be able to hear them two counties away.

That evening when I got home, I took a deep breath before I walked in the front door. I expected to be greeted by the sight of a full scale laundry explosion, but in reality, the laundry was just… gone. That morning, the baskets had been full, and now they were empty. What happened between those two states? Unknown. Maybe Betsy folded everything and carefully put it away in the right drawers, or perhaps she took all the unfolded laundry and buried it in the backyard. Only time will tell. The important thing is that, for the moment, a current problem had disappeared, and if that causes a greater one down the road, that’s just a fun surprise for future me. Potential warning signs that I’m nearing that point include if my kids suddenly have only one outfit each, or, when it rains, if the only things that sprout in my backyard are leggings. I hope that Betsy actually took the time to fold it all, but if she didn’t, I hope she at least buried it on someone else’s property.

The ultimate outcome of any chore a child tackles on their own is that it eventually gets done, but suboptimally. I assume my girls really did fold the laundry but just did a bad job. That’s why I only had them fold their own stuff and not mine and Lola’s. It’s possible they crumpled it all up in balls and shoved it in their drawers, which is how I folded my own stuff all through college. As long as I never check any of their dressers, the kids’ abysmal folding job won’t bother me. Sure, their clothes will be wrinkled, but I won’t notice since I apparently never look at my children. I’m utterly incapable of recalling what they’re wearing on any given day. If my kids ever go missing and I have to give a description to the police, I’ll sound like the worst dad in the world. I think they were wearing… clothes? Is that close enough?

The next chore I asked the kids to tackle after I left was doing the dishes. I didn’t have much choice. I’m now home less often and the girls are home more, which means the ratio of washing to dirtying is out of control. My kids go through four cups to get a single drink of water. That’s if I’m lucky and the girls actually use the cups as intended. Friday, my six-year-old, Waffle, used a glass tumbler to soak sour gummy worms in water. Why? Who knows? I’m guessing it was for science, which is the perfect excuse for everything. The result was that the worms partially dissolved and then hardened against the side of the glass. Only a powerful solvent could get them off. My preferred dishwasher detergent is hydrochloric acid.

Sadly, my dishwasher isn’t up to the armageddon-levels of unclean dinner wear in my house. Mine works differently than everybody else’s. There are entire commercial campaigns about how you don’t have to wash the dishes before you wash the dishes, but I definitely do. If I don’t, the dishwasher doesn’t actually remove the grime. It just permanently bakes it onto the plate at sterilizing temperatures. It’s like sending a clay pot through a kiln. It’s not that our dishwasher is outdated. It’s practically brand new. We installed it just a few years ago, and by “we,” I mean my father-in-law, who is the only one allowed to use tools in my house. The rest of the time, they’re trapped behind child safety locks so I don’t get any ideas. If modern dishwashers are designed to clean dishes without rinsing beforehand, and if our modern dishwasher can’t handle ours, it stands to reason that, to start with, our dishes must be dirtier than everybody else’s. My kids are officially the messiest eaters on the planet, capable of leaving behind a trail of food debris even the most cutting-edge tools of food science can’t remove. They should put the Hadron Collider to something useful and smash those atoms against our dinner plates. Maybe then they could get the maple syrup off.

In the absence of a particle accelerator, we do our best to get by with soapy water and child labor. Betsy and Mae have been taking turns doing the dishes for a few years. The results are exactly what you would expect. Somehow, even doing the dishes before doing the dishes isn’t enough. The kids scrub the plates but manage to leave approximately all of the food on them. They are especially prone to miss ketchup on our white ceramic ware, which no form of color blindness could explain. There’s nothing I like less than discovering the kids have once again used the dishwasher’s scalding temperatures to turn forgotten condiments into permanent plate art. We’d all be a lot happier if we gave up and switched to paper plates.

Short of that, making my kids wash the dishes while I’m away from home partially solved that problem. Okay, so it really just hid it from view, which is good enough for me. If the kids run and then empty the dishwasher, I don’t discover until days later that our dishes are now permanently disgusting. Until I actually pull one of those plates out of the cabinet and know for sure that it’s dirty, I choose to live in the improbable fantasy that all of our dinnerware is somewhat clean. With some effort, I might not ever have to face reality. From now on, we’re eating in the dark.

Then there’s generally picking up. I’ve given this instruction to the kids as well when I leave for the day. Putting away toys strewn around the house always leads to the most fighting, so this was the chore I was the most excited about not being home for. Unlike the laundry and the dishes, however, it’s a very hard chore to lie to myself about. Upon entering the house, I can immediately tell if my path is still blocked by a giant pile of rubble. The first two times I asked the kids to clean, they actually did, but then they created new messes in other rooms of the house. I should have expected this since, for every action, there is an equal but opposite reaction. Sir Isaac Newton might not have had any children, but he definitely understood my kids.

My dream is that, while I’m out of the house, my kids will use their unlimited amount of free time to keep up with the chores I’d normally do myself. There’s one of me and four of them, so it should take them a quarter of the effort. In reality, they’re just four times better at procrastinating. At least all the fighting and stalling keeps them busy all day. They might be miserable, but they won’t be bored. I’ve done my part.

Anyway, now it’s time for me to leave you, too. Catch you next time.

James