Saltwater Aquariums, Sanity, and Parenting

how to raise free range kids in a artificial world without losing your mind

The ongoing drumbeat from Jonathan Haidt and others is demonstrating, seven ways to Sunday, that screens are super duper bad for our kids.

After banging the drum that “any girl who went through puberty in the last decade has been developmentally damaged by social media” (esp. Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat), Haidt has expanded his concern to include boys too.

First person shooter games, porn, weed and social media are wrecking our young men, and keeping them in a state of perpetually addled ADD/Main Character Syndrome/Peter Pan infantilization.

And it’s having massive trickle down effects, from academic performance to job market readiness:

(HINT: the cliff that all these charts fall off starting in 2015 coincides with Facebook buying IG and the move from chronological posting of your friends to algorithmic placements of the dreaded “influencer”)

Matt Ygelsias posted a bit that then got picked up by Silicon Valley titans, all agreeing that job candidates have fallen off the cliff in terms of motivation, breadth of curiosity, and willingness to show up and perform outside of narrowly defined, highly compensated tasks. Including for formerly moon-shot inspo jobs like SpaceX and Tesla.

Another recent piece in Fortune noted that GenZ is so fucked in the head that 40% of them experience anxiety going out to eat! Too many choices on the menu. Talking to the waiter is hard/scary. And when the bill comes…whooo boy! I just wanted to take a pic of my avocado toast and triple oat latte, I didn’t want to have to pay (and tip) for it! Living my #bestlife is spendy!

Or how bout #vanlifers posting plaintively that living out of your car isn’t all just beachfront sunsets and sometimes it’s hard and cold and scary and lonely and you can’t always get reception or get in touch with your meds and therapist!

#suckitKerouac

Throw in Twenty-somethings lining up for plastic surgeries, fillers and botox to pursue the Instagram Face their filters have been training them to covet, and we’re fully off the rails with anything resembling a healthy or normal environment to raise our kids and train the next gen of contributing citizens in our democracy.

It’s all totally, utterly batshit.

But we know all that, right?

Frogs in boiling water and all that. But now with icebaths to cool off between sessions, we’ve tricked ourselves into calling this self-deluded hall of mirrors lifestyle a “performance hack.”

The only trouble comes when as a parent, an educator, or a boss, we give in to the learned helplessness of it all.

Typically, the parenting conversation goes something like this:

Agro Parent #1: “that’s it! I’ve had it, we’re taking away our kids’ phones. They’ve become ungrateful narcissistic little zombies and I won’t stand for it. And we’re ripping the router out and going wifi free in our own home!”

Passive Parent #2: “Oh, Dear. I understand what you’re saying and I don’t like it anymore than you do! But what can we do really? It’s not like we can deny our kids a “normal” childhood. If we start making all sorts of rules like that, our kids will be ostracized, they’ll not be able to keep up with their friend groups. Besides, how will they get their homework done without the internet or be able to call us when they need a ride?”

That’s when “going with the flow” parenting ends up squarely in the ditch.

Because the Passive Parent is calibrating off a “Plea for Normalcy” i.e. complying more or less with social norms–in a culture that has become completely, utterly abnormal. Totally unlike anything that any humans in 99.99% of existence have ever experienced.

“Normal”–in the sense of normative, or matching what the majority of other people are doing these days, is suicidal. And criminally negligent.

My wife Julie and I had this experience raising our own kids. All along the way, we busted ass to provide them the most homegrown authentic childhood we could. Minimizing screens, maximizing books. Emphasizing outdoors and nature. Minimizing plastic and sugar. Maximizing wood and whole foods.

And for the first decade or so, reckon we did pretty well. But as they approached high school and faced the choice to go to alternative, private or public school, we came to a crossroads that we agonized over. On one particular dog walk, we passed some neighbors whose kid was the same age as ours.

They’d happily plopped him into the public schools without a backwards glance, while other friends had enrolled their kids at one of the two Austin college-prep day schools.

No one seemed to be all that phased about their choices.

And as we walked past our friends’ house Julie wondered “is something wrong with us? why does this have to be such a drawn out and complicated decision? Why can’t we just do what everyone else is doing and be done with it?”

And that’s when I realized, oh! these days, creating a Free Range, or natural childhood for our kids (to say nothing of a life for ourselves) is an increasingly complicated task.

Living Simply TM, has become the most complex thing of all to pull off.

Here’s the analogy that came to mind:

When you went to the county fair and won a goldfish, you’d get a plastic baggie with your little fish, and happily take him home. An empty flower vase or bowl, filled with tap water and PLOP! In goes Goldy, and for as long as you remembered to change the water and sprinkle pellets your little fish flourished.

#thetidybowltollsforthee

That’s the elegant simplicity of a freshwater aquarium. Fishfood and oxygen and you’re off to the races.

But try creating a saltwater aquarium and you’re suddenly up to your ears in PhD in Marine Biology complexity. That’s because you’re attempting to mimic a natural environment (AKA The Ocean) within a closed, artificial system.

And that’s kind of where we are now.

If you’ve seen those Boomer/GenX memes about how “we used to play outside all day until the streelights came on” or odes to building treeforts, or blowing things up with gasoline, or any other high risk/low supervision/outdoor life, that’s what they’re nostalgically trying to get at.

Goldfish, the lot of ‘em. Life was simpler back then, and it was far easier to experience a Free Range Childhood. In fact, it was the default setting, the Norm.

But today, you’ve got to bend over backwards to simulate that kind of under-structured, exploratory, self-reliant, risk-tolerant play. It’s not remotely the Norm anymore.

So if you occasionally feel like Agro Parent #1, but give up your ranting and raving because you’ve got no backup, consider the paradox of the saltwater aquarium. Giving our kids, and ourselves a “natural” experience actually requires a ton of intentional engineering these days.

You’re going against the flow of default society every step of the way. And that, perversely, can feel unnatural!

And if there’s times you’ve felt like Passive Parent #2 submitting to your kids constant wheedling and pleas of keeping up with the Jones’ kids, of being “normal” etc. give yourself permission to stiffen your spine a bit, and remember that love and trustable boundaries count for far more in the long run than permissiveness and entitlement (and while you’re at it, sign up for Haidt’s excellent Substack, After Babel which is documenting his new book before it comes out).

If all else fails, remember this: the Chinese have not forgotten the Opium Wars of the late nineteenth century.

#thelonggameofempire

That’s when we got upside down on silver and tea trade from India so we militarily enforced opium addiction in China to balance our trade deficits. (and then had the gall to racially stereotype FuManchu Chinamen as opium addicts looking to steal our women into White Slavery. Classic colonial move).

Only today, they’re returning the favor, exporting Fentanyl and TikTok.

Now, if you wouldn’t allow your kid to get hooked on the former, why for the love of God are we shrugging our shoulders when they get hooked on the latter? Haidt et al are relentlessly demonstrating the tolls on physical and mental health. We see the total dysfunction all around us.

But we’re social tribal primates, and as long as we look around and see that everyone else is continuing on with these behaviors we conclude we can/should too.

So let’s not be the frog in the boiling water as our little tadpoles stew!

Let’s take responsibility for recreating “natural” environments for our families, and accept that it’s as complex and fiddly as it would be to tend a salt water aquarium.

This Krishnamurti quote gets beaten into the ground these days, but only because it’s increasingly true: “It’s no sign of health to be well-adjusted to a society that’s sick”

A Few Steps You Can Actually Take Right Now:

Here’s a “dumb” phone that removes all apps while still allowing for wifi, GPS, calls, texts etc. Nullifying your kids tactic of “but I only want to be able to call you if there’s an emergency” plea. Super triple recommend this if that particular toothpaste isn’t already out of the tube.

And here’s a simple Own Your Phone checklist to start reclaiming our analog lives and brain activity even if you keep your old handset…(Step One: uninstall all social apps and only use them on your laptop)

And if you want to go the whole hog into the simplicity on the other side of all the hyped biohacking complexity (and commerce), check out this Do The Obvious cheat sheet.

In this world of ever-increasing scope creep and feature bloat, virtually none of which we asked for, and virtually all of which comes with hidden costs and consequences, regular and ruthless pruning is required to have any chance of living a life of basic, embodied humanity.

For us and our children.

Sometimes, getting a little salty is just what the doctor ordered.