On Keeping Children Alive

I was under no delusions that aliving children through childbirth wouldn’t be the most difficult part of rearing them, even if mine were accompanied by the spine-snapping excruciations of back labor, episiotomies, and a week of existential crisis in the NICU. I fancied myself a decent mother of infants and toddlers; I jived with the tenderness, the clear boundary-setting, the byways of unshackled imagination. But, like, I imagine, most parents, I waited a little in apprehension of the “dreaded teenage years.”

Now, with one at 12 going 13 and one at 15 going 16, I’m at a bit of a loss. Their primary challenges these days seem to be those of surviving other people. Confession: I’m not terribly good at people things generally. It’s why I write fiction about salt and viruses and magic harps. I’m a radical empathizer and a muddler of gray areas when it comes to fathoming social dimensions. I’m also an inveterate introvert. I understand why kids are so mean, but I can’t forgive them for it. “Just kick them in the balls,” is apparently not sound parenting advice if you want to keep your kids in school.

Do I want to keep my kids in school? I’ve never had beef with the public school system; we’ve been fortunate to have decent teachers on the whole and quality curricula in the places we’ve lived, so my kids learn things and don’t seem to be budding psychopaths. But I’m beginning to resent the school system’s thoroughgoing fixation on training good corporate cogs rather than people. Everything points to this about to get much much worse. Is the problem me and my latent anti-social tendencies, or is capitalism hopped up on digital steroids actually eroding humans’ capacity for humanity?

Is it that I don’t know how to parent my teens or that the world they’ve inherited isn’t one I know how to navigate myself and therefore can’t give sound guidelines for? The intensity of square peg, square hole judgement that subsists in the way school is conducted and the way teens tear down their peers so mercilessly can make keeping children alive difficult. I have round children. I can’t just pull down the oxygen hood and pray for their survival the way I could in those first few days of their existence. I can’t just drive safely and feed them vitamins and make them use the buddy system walking in the park. Buying the Drunk Elephant moisturizer and the Air Jordans and the right Stanley doesn’t keep them alive. It keeps the terror at bay for a few days until the trend changes. My validation, my love, isn’t enough in the face of hallways packed with literal haters.

I despair that this thing that’s being built means there is no outside to those hallways. The country is populated by middle schoolers at present. There is no appeal to a higher, a better, a nother authority. My letters to congresspeople, my memes into the void, chaining myself to the steps of the capitol. There is no shit given by those on the receiving end because there is no sense of humanity remaining. (Funny, me, the defender of ethics beyond humanity, the leveling of human ego, to come so thoroughly to the defense of the human). Capitalism and AI are catapulting us into our own obsolescence where empathy, decency, and common sense cease to have meaning, let alone value.

I don’t know how to live in this world. I don’t know how to immunize my children for this world. “Yeah, people are dicks-cowboy up, cupcake,” seems insufficient. That’s survival mode, not living. They should get a chance to live*. As people. People among other people. I spent years contemplating how people should do less peopling. I didn’t mean what I’m seeing in my news feed now. I meant less hubris, not more mechanization. I didn’t mean the silencing of voice or choice, walking back into a dark age before people from all walks were allowed to be fully people in the eyes of their peers. We grew up for a reason. Please let my children grow up, too.

*Militantly pro-choice here. I mean children whose parent(s) made the choice to bring them into the world shouldn’t be made to feel unable to live because others judge them into a square hole in the ground.