Some parents are paying to avoid the hard parts of raising kids, and they don’t know what they’re missing. A viral Wall Street Journal article recently sparked controversy over wealthy parents who have outsourced as much as possible of their children’s lives to experts. Titled “When One Nanny Isn’t Enough, ‘CEO Parents’ Hire a Whole Team,” the article described parents who have hired nannies not only for the daytime hours, but also for the evenings and weekends.
Some of these parents have retained experts to potty-train their children or teach them to ride bikes. According to Jordi Lippe-McGraw, who researched and wrote the piece, one mother said that she had never clipped her own children’s toenails because it made her too anxious. That same mother also usually delegates bath time to the nanny. Another mother said she was a “max-three-hour mum,” preferring to spend only weekend mornings with her children before moving on to other things. This mother believed she could outsource much of the drudgery of parenting, and, per Lippe-McGraw, rely “on a household team of nannies, cleaners, a chef and a chief of staff, which helps afford time for ‘high-impact, core memories’ like vacations with her children.”
The author also reached out to me for insight, reporting my concerns over the this trend. She wrote that I worry “about what children might absorb from arrangements with hired help, whose presence they register and whose they miss.”
In a fascinating coincidence, this reporting hit the headlines at the same time that Ben Sasse, a former Republican senator who is facing a terminal cancer diagnosis, was providing some hard lessons to the public. Sasse recently told CNN that his biggest regret was not spending more time with his kids. Reflecting on how much he traveled for work, Sasse said at the end of his many trips he would take all his hotel keys and throw them on the floor of his home office closet. “All of a sudden,” he said, “it became thousands and thousands of keys.” These boxes of keys in his office, according to Sasse, represented “a hell of a lot of missed dinners.” In thinking about his kids, Sasse regretfully concluded: “What the hell was I doing instead of being with you?”
Without weighing in on the ideal work/life balance ratio for other families, I think Sasse’s words of wisdom should cause us all to think hard about what we are prioritizing over family life. It might seem attractive to outsource the difficult or annoying parts of parenting, and skim off only the joyful memories. But ultimately, this parenting approach fails to grapple with the fact that the hard parts of parenting are sometimes the most important and meaningful.
I’m currently teaching my third child, a little girl, to read. I homeschool my three of my four children (the youngest is a toddler). I know from experience that literacy is a very long process. It begins with a child sitting on your lap as you read story after story. We started with board books, and now we’ve moved onto fairy tales, Doctor Seuss, and “Angelina Ballerina.” Until she learns to read for herself, my husband and I will read aloud hundreds of books to her, answering her many questions along the way: Do bears eat people? How does the baby kangaroo pop out of his mommy’s tummy? Why did the Little Ren Hen not share her cake?
We are also working on letters now, slowly identifying all the capital letters (which she calls “Mommy” letters) and the lower case letters (which she calls “Baby” letters). She’s learned how to write the first letter of her name, which she does with significant pride. Eventually, we’ll start on blending sounds together, and eventually — probably in two or three years, if she follows the pattern of her older brothers — she’ll be reading her first books.
This multi-year process is a lot of work for me. It’s not always delightful either. I know from my older sons that sometimes there are tears of frustration as we struggle through the difficulties of literacy in the complex English language. And don’t even get me started on teaching kids to spell. Once, when one of my older children and I were mutually at the end of our ropes over a spelling lesson, I printed out and read him “Our Strange Lingo,” a 1902 poem by Lord Cramer. The first stanza of the poem reads:
When the English tongue we speak
Why is break not rhymed with freak?
Will you tell me why it’s true
We say sew but likewise few?
It would certainly be much easier to send the kids to school and let professional teachers handle the annoying job of correcting handwriting, making a child write comprehensible paragraphs, and insisting, yes, really, you must memorize your multiplication tables. Even the “eight times” tables.
And yet, there is something really special about all the hours I’ve logged teaching my kids. I’ve learned about my own characters, including my own need to develop more patience, more empathy, and also, sometimes, more firmness. I’ve learned a ton about our children as well. I’ve become deeply acquainted with all the areas in which they need more help, and those in which they naturally excel. I’ve had a front row seat to the explosion of this child’s incredible creativity, and witnessed the slow development of maternity and responsibility in that child.
To be sure, I’ve sacrificed a lot as well. In particular, we would be much wealthier if I had kept my job as a corporate lawyer, rather than becoming a homeschooling mom with four kids. But I don’t regret it! The trade-offs have been well worth it.
I’m certainly not trying to say that every parent needs to homeschool her child. Every family is different, and parents have different needs and gifts to offer. However, I can testify first-hand to the joys of thinking hard about “in-sourcing” when it comes to family life. To give another example: I’ve seen numerous hard-working fathers who dedicate many hours each week to coaching their children’s baseball or basketball teams, giving up relaxing time at home in order to instill the values of hard work, being a team player, and being a gracious loser. These dads could certainly have outsourced that job to another parent, or even to a professional (in the case of travel teams), but they find working hands-on with their children to be worth it.
In my neighborhood, there are also several families that take a lot of pride in having the kids work (at least a little) in the family business, learning how to paint houses, do landscaping, or handle a business budget. Will all these kids end up working in construction or lawn care? Probably not, but the lessons learned from hands-on from their parents are invaluable anyway.
What these parents know, and what my husband and I know, is this: The most meaningful times with kids are usually not the Disney World trip or picking out the Instagram-worthy nursery decor (although those things can be very fun!). Instead, they are being the person who will get up with a puking child at 3 a.m. and make her feel loved even though she’s violently ill.
Sasse is extremely gracious to provide us all with the lessons he has learned through facing a terminal cancer diagnosis. I’m grateful for the reminder that at the end of my life, I probably won’t be counting up the money in our bank accounts or my professional accolades, but rather asking deeper questions. I personally know I still have more to do to get the balance closer to right, including reassessing how much time I spend on social media and how often I am short-tempered with the kids. But I deeply appreciate his assessment of the importance of thinking hard about these questions; when given by someone looking hard at his own mortality, it’s a lesson worth heeding.
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Ivana Greco has several jobs, but her favorite is being a homeschooling mom of four.
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