We've Got To Stop Lying To Kids About Their Future

Beyond The Book: Childhood sucks, school doesn't matter, adulthood isn't all drudgery

Hey y’all - I’m on a very last-minute trip to Paris right now, after having to cancel a work trip to Germany at the last minute. I’ll make a paid subscriber-only post updating y’all on that later this week. It’s been a ride! So be sure to subscribe if you haven’t already or reach out to me if you want a scholarship (paid for by you great founding subscribers) because - in this economy?

Anyways! I wanted to make a quick post about something that’s been bothering me for years, but really came to a head these last few weeks with my kids. Y’all, we have to start being more honest with kids about what’s really important in life and we have to start now. Because the way we talk about childhood and adulthood with children is really fucking with their mental health.

Both of my children, like so many other children, have struggled with depression in their teen years. It has been scary times as a parent, but absolutely terrifying for my children. And while we can never fully predict what will cause depression in anyone - and therefore can’t come up with a foolproof formula for avoiding it - I can tell you that some of the fucked up expectations we put on kids for how they are supposed to be experiencing their childhood (especially their teen years) and what they have to expect in adulthood are really not helping matters.

A lot of what we tell kids are things that were told to us as kids, and we often repeat them without asking, “hey, is this really true? Did this actually help me become a happy and healthy adult?” If we were to truly investigate what we were told and what we are expected to pass on to our kids, we’d find a lot of pro-capitalist nonsense that is likely still making us miserable to this day.

I could go on and on but I said at the beginning that this would be quick so, let me jump into what I’d really like us to stop lying about so that our kids can feel less gaslit, and more hopeful about their futures.

• These are not the best years of your kids lives. They just aren’t. Stop denying your own childhood trauma by romanticizing it. Even a good childhood is pretty traumatic a lot of the time. You can’t drive. You can’t eat what you want. You can’t go where you want. Everyone older than you is the boss of you. Everything is dangerous. You can’t defend yourself. None of the rules make sense and you don’t get to do anything about it. Your hormones are cycling rapidly. Your brain is literally not developed enough to be able to handle how fucked the world is. Your physical and emotional health and safety is literally always at the mercy of other people. I am firm in my belief that some of the worst years in people’s lives are the middle school/junior high years. These are the years where you are facing puberty, everyone is in their “awkward” looking stage, you go from the safety of one friendly teacher all day to 6 teachers of various moods shoving homework down your throat and telling you that if you don’t get an A in 7th grade pre-algebra that you’ll never get into college, all the kids around you are literally practicing being mean to each other like it’s their job, and your brain can’t yet grasp the idea that it won’t be like this forever. And this is when people will tell you the most that these are the “best years of your life.”

  The fuck?

  Yo. When people are shitty to me in a room I can just leave. I get to wear whatever pleases me. I can eat cereal for dinner EVERY NIGHT if I want to. My friends have perfected how to be mean and most have decided that it’s a skill to be wielded only in particular situations and not against absolutely everyone. I know that everyone’s situation is different, but in my experience adulthood is SO MUCH better than childhood. That’s true for me now, and it was true for me when I was a 21 year old single mom who couldn’t afford the electric bill. All of it was still better than so much of my childhood. And that brings me to the next item:

• Stop telling kids that being an adult is all work and pain and drudgery. This is really, truly just a part of how we have been programmed to expect and even embrace the exploitative abuse of capitalism. Any part of our lives can suck. I’m personally coming out of some of the hardest years of my life. But you know what? They are also some of the best years of my life. Because as long as I draw breath I have the ability to explore more facets of myself and my life. And the more I learn about myself, the more opportunities I have for creativity, connection, and joy. The hard times that children experience aren’t less important than the hard times we experience as adults. The problems that children face seem smaller to us now because we have the agency as adults to navigate them that we didn’t have as kids.

  My teen nervously asked me a few weeks back if I enjoyed being an adult or if I wished I could be his age again. I was honest and told him that you couldn’t pay me to relive my teen years again. I told him that I loved being an adult and his eyes were wide with shock. “Everyone keeps telling me that if I don’t enjoy life now I’ll be really missing out because adulthood is all hard work and bills and taxes,” he explained. I began to list everything I loved about being an adult, the growing freedom, the ability to choose my friends and even family, the possibilities of the future - and as I talked I could see a weight lift off of his shoulders.

  If you find yourself thinking of your child’s future in terms of jobs, bills, taxes, and drudgery instead of joy, autonomy, and possibility - please take a look at your own life. Look at how you’ve been separated from your true self and your agency by white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. Understand that your joy has been stolen from you, but it doesn’t mean that you can’t get it back. I know that we have responsibilities as adults. I know that even as we push back against exploitative systems that we have different levels of access and there are varying limits to what many of us we can do - largely conditioned by our race, gender, class and more - and that at the end of the day bills still need to be paid. But if you can’t offer up even a small example of joy and liberation for the children in your life, please seek it for yourself and let your children watch you and join you in your quest. It’s one of the greatest gifts you can give a child. And finally:

• Stop pretending like grades matter. They don’t. Our education system is racist, classist bullshit that is - surprise surprise - just preparing us for the exploitative nonsense that is capitalism. I’m not living in some sort of fantasy land. I don’t want my kid to get straight “F’s” - because I want him to be able to spend his school days with peers in his age group where much of the important work of learning how to be a social creature happens, I don’t want him to find out one day that he really wants to be a physicist but he’s never passed a math class so now he has to be a 30 year old in high school or something, and I want teachers and school administrators to get off his back so he can get back to the important work of sharing memes with his buddies.

  But seriously. When is the last time you were asked about your grades? Do you even remember why you were so stressed in 8th grade about your social studies test? Hell, I can’t even remember the last time I was asked about my grades in college and I’m regularly asked to teach and speak in colleges around the country. Grades only matter because adults (that’s us) have decided they do. Our children should be learning history, they should be learning how our systems work, they should be given a healthy introduction to the arts and sciences. Why? Because we want them to learn how to be kind to each other and responsible to each other. Because we want them to have context for the world they are inheriting. Because we want them to be able to see what’s fucked up and actually have the skillset and empowerment to change it. Because we want them to find what brings them joy and purpose. None of that has to do with what random facts you’ve memorized. None of that has to do with how you score on a test. We literally have kids thinking that a C on their 9th grade bio exam is going to ruin their lives. It’s not. And if it in any way can, that’s on us. We are the ones who that fucked up for them and we’re the ones who have to fix it.

Ok ya’ll. I’m so glad I got that off my chest. I’m going to go enjoy this trip with my lovely partner and lovely (and very brooding) teen.

bonding. In Paris.

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