Against white-knuckle parenting

Playing with your kids shouldn't feel like torture

Having fun with your kids means finding activities you both like. (Photo by Sajjad Hussain/AFP)

“The truth is I just don’t like being around kids for very long. Historically, this is not uncommon among fathers, but today it feels almost illegal … The ideal amount of time I would like to spend playing with my kids is … roughly ten minutes each day.”

Writer Justin Murphy became the internet’s main character with this tweet mere days after the new year started. It was perfect bait, and having been so perfectly baited, the entire internet jumped aboard to settle once and for all the question of how much you should play with your kids if you don’t want to be a bad person.

I disagree with all of them.

You should, of course, play with your kids. But it is both morally permissible and actively a good idea to structure your life so that the kinds of play your kids seek out from you are kinds that you don’t hate.

This is a specific instance of an important generalization for parenting and for life: You don’t get extra virtue points for doing things that are hard, and in fact, the most virtuous thing is usually to make an up-front investment in making things easier, so that going forward, you are not making high day-to-day expenditures of your patience, energy or happiness. A lot of people get this wrong when it comes to parenting, and it makes them miserable.

You might question how much my takes on this question generalize. I’m a lesbian, and my wife and I raise our kids as co-parents with another couple in a jointly owned 10-bedroom house in Oakland, California. We have three kids and are expecting our fourth; we ultimately want six.

I often stay out of the parenting wars because I don’t expect my takes on the heterosexual dating market or on how to make time for your marriage with only two parents will be appreciated. But hey, this one I feel strongly about, so have some of my out-of-touch parenting takes.

How to play with your kids for more than 10 minutes a day

Sacrifice is not virtuous. Achieving good results is virtuous, and good results sometimes require sacrifice; people who achieve great things will usually have made significant personal sacrifices to get there. For this reason, a cargo cult has sprung up around sacrifice, especially in the mom-fluencer world. The earlier you wake up, the harder you work, the more difficulty you put up with, the better you are at parenting.