The Free Press
Bari and Olly here. It’s been a helluva week. Again. We suspect you might feel the same way. Perhaps especially if you are parents.
We’re both parents of young daughters. It’s hard not to look at the state of things and wonder what kind of world we are building for our children. For those of you with older kids—and we’ve heard from so many of you—you face different questions: how to talk to them about hard things, like war and their safety; or, with even older kids, how to navigate a culture that feels increasingly upside-down.
So for today: parenting. Four stories that are each, in their own way, fortifying, affirming, reassuring. Or at least they were for us, and we hope they are for you too.
Outdoorsman Steve Rinella, who likes to take his kids caribou hunting, explains why it’s important to raise adventurous kids (though we think our definition of adventurous might be a little different to Steve’s):
In August of 2020, I was hunting with my 10-year-old son south of the Yukon River in eastern Alaska. We were camped along the crest of a low gravel ridge rising above an expanse of tundra that was mostly covered in ankle-deep water. That morning my boy had killed a caribou about a mile from our camp and we had carried half the meat back on our backs.
We’d already seen two different grizzlies in our immediate area and I was worried about one of them claiming the caribou carcass before we could fetch the remaining meat. I wanted us to hustle back, but the gnats and mosquitos were so horrible when we skinned the animal that my boy’s eyelids and knuckles were visibly swollen from the bites. On top of that, he’d been crying after wading through the muck and tussocks while trying to keep up with me.
I was torn about what to do: make him walk another two miles through the wet tundra, or leave him at the camp, alone on the ridge with a pile of butchered caribou meat and two grizzlies nearby? We reviewed, for the umpteenth time, the mechanics of a pump shotgun as well as using physical cues to determine a grizzly bear’s mood and intentions. Then I told him I’d be back soon with the second load of meat.
Liz Wolfe makes the case for having kids young and eschewing parental perfectionism:
In February last year, while hiking in California’s Yucca Valley, I realized I was probably pregnant.
I was 25 years old and had hoped to have more time to travel and write and get lost in the desert among the agaves, far away from my home in New York City, before having a baby. But the plus sign on my pregnancy test indicated that those plans would be cut short—and I’d need to craft new ones fast.
My husband and I had been married for three years, and we would have preferred to save more money before starting a family. But there was no question we were going ahead. I am staunchly pro-life, and though our child was unplanned, he was definitely wanted.
Martin Gurri—a prophetic thinker and early Honestly guest—has strict instructions for everyone: go forth and multiply! It’s only the future of humankind that depends on it:
When future historians look back on the last half century, I suspect they will pass over war, terror, and populism to settle on infertility as the decisive event of the age. For the first time since the bubonic plague in the fourteenth century, the world’s human population is about to shrink—a process that has already begun in many countries.
The correlates to the decline are well known: affluence, urbanization, women’s education, abortion, and easy access to contraceptives. But identifying hard causes is difficult. Gigantic trends touching on the survival of ancient cultures—and even of our species—get entangled with social pressures and moral ideals. At the same time, one must reckon with the secret dreams and expectations of solitary individuals of every class. The result is uncertainty.
Nani Beraha reflects on being a Jewish mother at a time like this, and seeing the refugees in her own children’s faces:
In the morning, my children appear in the kitchen, one by one by one, wiping sleep from their eyes. I embrace them, my beloved children, my Jewish children, my children of Israel, and wonder if they feel the prickling fear emanating from the pores in my skin, the seething, hot rage coursing through my blood, the sorrow radiating from my very being. What would you like, I ask them, and I pour cereal from a box, stir water into flavored oatmeal, slice fruit.
I make my children breakfast.
Hug your loved ones tightly and have a great weekend.
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The couple were unprepared for parenthood when the mother to be was only 26? Her career was in jeopardy? Ugh! After decades of feminist activism, it still her career that takes the hit? Raising children is damned hard and expensive and wonderful and a blessing. And it still mostly takes two to tango. Where was the father in all this? Why wasn’t his career jeopardized in any way?
My kids were born in Seattle in 1976 and '79. I took them hiking often. I taught them self-reliance and the importance of diet and exercise. I worked hard at stopping their whining.
Now they are in their forties and both have had plenty of adventures. Neither is married or has children or a house. Too expensive. My daughter does have a car.
The economy and society in the USA today are very tough for younger generations.
The human race is always only 45 years from extinction.
I'm not sure I give a shit either way anymore.