"Braxton, Get The iPad, Honey."

We might be nearing more of a "reckoning" moment here, kinda, but I worry parental entitlement could get in the way. Or exhaustion.

A few days ago, I guess Chappell Roan did a hit on Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy, and the one clip that got re-shared over and over was her saying that all her friends with kids are miserable. Oh God, it’s the decline of society! Birth rates are plummeting! Uh, OK, here’s the thing. Chappell Roan is 27. Most of her friends with kids probably are miserable in the minute-to-minute, but likely very fulfilled in the aggregate. That’s also true of 37 year-olds with newborns, ya know? And, to wit, who is basing their decision to reproduce on the singer of “Casual” on a podcast? We love ourselves a moral panic, however.

And parenting is perhaps the greatest source of moral panics out there. It’s such a weird ecosystem because so many parents I know have massive internal self-doubt about what they’re doing and whether it’s right, but they try to project this external concept that they have it together and they’re doing just fine. It’s a tricky balance and I think it breaks many people in the process (and many sex lives and, frankly, relationships). Plus: currently, if you’re a new parent, there’s a good chance your parents (or your grandparents) are Boomers, and they’re going to be dishing out completely unironic advice that doesn’t fit with Modernity, but you still need to follow it because of our belief that parenting Advice has to flow vertically downward.

Anyway, point is: parenting is confusing, everyone has a point of view on it, everyone secretly thinks they’re wrong but wants to project how right they are, and then, DRUM ROLL PLEASE, we added phones and other devices into the mix and SECOND DRUM ROLL PLEASE, seemingly everything got more expensive, so that two-income households became the norm and not the exception. Now things are even more confusing.

One of the “thought leaders” that has emerged here is — you think I’m gonna say Emily Oster, don’t you? DON’T YOU? Well, her to an extent, but also Jonathan Haidt, who first co-wrote a book about how we over-baby our kids and their intellect, and then later wrote a book about phones and the issues therein. Now a couple of school districts are banning phones, and he’s continuing his media awareness/victory lap situation, so he went on Ezra Klein’s show. Some interesting stuff in there. Let’s set it up.

Here is a transcript link. And here lies the YouTube: