I see you, parents who have been killing it this school year. You were there for the Halloween parade, the Valentine’s Day craft session, the inexplicable request to come to class for your child’s half-birthday. You made sure said child was dressed up for every school spirit day, somehow managing to continue caring even as you knew the inevitable next school spirit day loomed.
Now it is spring, and while I admire your continued enthusiasm, I, for one, have very little spirit left. I am asking for your support. I am proposing that we all just give up, together.
This may feel extreme, but so was the day last June I spent camping out in the vestibule of my children’s elementary school, attempting to attend four separate, celebratory events between the hours of 11 a.m. and 3 p.m. Each activity (poetry picnic, birthday read-aloud) was of course special in its own way, much like my children, who, for the record, number only two, but that final stretch before summer break nearly broke me.
I can still recall the shame of watching the other, more spirited moms arrive at field day lunch armed with Chick-fil-A for their kids, leaving me to try to pass off a stick of Trident fished from my purse as “special dessert.” Or the shame of assuring my 6-year-old and 7-year-old that their ancestors came from nowhere, so that we could get out of representing a country at the school’s inaugural world fair on a Friday night.
I am just so tired, and so bad at crafts. I dream of the day we can all take it down a notch without shame: skipping an event here, ignoring a made-up holiday there. What I need is a quorum. Without it, my kids will continue to feel neglected — all their friends went to the world fair, and they said the food at Venezuela was incredible — and I will continue to feel guilty, pretty much all the time, but especially when I’m staring at my ceiling at 3 a.m.
So far, support for my phone-it-in approach has been hard to come by on the local level. I sent a polite email to the school principal last year, gently noting that some parents have jobs and/or sanity they’d like to hold on to during the spring season. Honestly, I was mostly hoping that my husband, bcc’d, would take the hint and show up for something called “math morning.” He didn’t, and the P.T.A. continued to plan a staggering number of events.
I have to believe that on a national level, there are dozens of us underachievers.
“It’s a lot, for really no reason,” Penn Holderness, a dad in North Carolina, sings in the music video he made with his wife, Kim, “Welcome to Maycember.” They set the banger to the always catchy groove of Earth, Wind & Fire’s “September.”
“Should we not chill out with the scheduling?” Mr. Holderness croons.
The couple hit all the maddening highlights: the class picnic that’s going to last all day, the dance show where your kid is 41st in the lineup. Ms. Holderness stars in the video as a mom who’s about to lose it.
I can recall my own mother setting foot in my elementary school approximately twice — once to bring in allergen-filled cupcakes for my birthday, and then again to bring in the family dog (also allergen-filled) for show and tell. It was the ’90s, when children roamed free and parents felt less pressure to create endless magic and attend endless events. A fun childhood afternoon for us elder millennials involved Capri Sun, a bike, maybe some light trespassing in a neighbor’s yard and a key to let yourself back into the house when you were done.
It takes so much more to catch and keep this youngest generation’s attention. Some of it is the dopamine-spiking, Vegas-style addictiveness of their screens, with which everything else must compete. And some of it is a self-fulfilling prophecy that adults have created. We are the ones who have set unrealistic expectations around parental organization and involvement. We have acclimated our children to curated play dates and blowout birthday parties, to days like the March Friday when my children enjoyed a spirit day, a wacky hat day and a jungle-themed school dance, all within the span of 10 hours. Once kids have a Friday like that, nothing else will do.
This may help to explain why my family and I spent a recent Saturday afternoon zip-lining across the world’s largest indoor ropes course. I had suggested a walk to a local playground; the children countered with an activity that required me to pay $116 and sign a staggering number of safety waivers. This is what it takes for them to feel alive.
In times like this, I like to imagine that mythical O.G. mom — helicopter parent No. 0 — who kicked off this whole arms race. We’re all entitled to our origin theories, but I believe our current era began with one moment, one terrible mistake of a question. I picture her as a former sorority president with nothing to lose.
“Good morning,” she types in the email to her school principal. “I was just wondering if parents might be allowed to come to field day this year?”
It feels so hard to roll it all back now, but I’m trying to be optimistic. The other day, I witnessed something that gave me a glimmer of hope. One of the moms in my daughter’s first-grade class had an idea. She asked ChatGPT to create a fake flier advertising that jungle-themed dance. She gave the A.I. chatbot some specific instructions.
The resulting flier depicted three parents, in a rainforest, looking pumped. On closer inspection, the parents were all dads. They dance joyfully with their children as a toucan and monkey look on overhead.
“DAD’S BRING THEIR KIDS,” the flier declares in bright, albeit grammatically incorrect, lettering. “DADS & KIDS WELCOME!”
Not a mom is in sight.
Now, this obviously doesn’t get to the root of the problem. The dance will still go on. The children will have unrealistic expectations. My husband will suffer.
Nevertheless, it feels like a good start to me.
Rachel Feintzeig is a journalist at work on a book about staring down 40.
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