The Nanny and Pool of Buoyant Attention
I saw a nanny get in the pool with a toddler during swim lessons while the able-bodied mother watched from the bench. It seemed like a peculiar setup to me, but I didn’t judge much because the mom was engaged. Had she been scrolling on her phone, I would have judged.
Not passing judgment on others is overblown as a virtue. It’s possible to get enough information to draw reasonable conclusions about people and their performance. If someone cuts me off in traffic, maybe I shouldn’t judge them to be a bad person. If they cut me off and throw a puppy out the window and run over it, assumptions are valid.
Mom-shaming has become such a touchy thing, I feel like it clouds improvement and optimization. Parenting is impossible; everyone’s trying their best and every situation is different. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t objective ways to do better.
Not being open to feedback is an example in and of itself. Choosing to take it personally rather than try to determine whether the idea can be beneficial is putting ego ahead of child. I am always asking for tips and perspectives and admit my shortcomings.
The No. 1 thing I lack as a father is the stamina to spend undistracted time with my kids. I do well in spurts. If only parenting were a montage, I would be Brady Bunch level: long narrative conversations about dinosaurs with the 4-year-old to stoke his burgeoning imagination, infiltrating construction sites and climbing into tractors with the 2-year-old before anyone’s awake, dance parties during song parts of Disney movies (“Zootopia” has a Shakira banger), chasing garbage trucks on foot/bike/scooter, reading books like I’m auditioning for a melodrama.
We created an impromptu game the other night tentatively named “Chase the Fedora,” which entailed tumbling my 39.9-year-old body all over the house in pursuit of my stolen hat that my wife vehemently hates even though I was wearing it the day we met.
I don’t feel particularly old or times have changed that much, but consider a version of this game in my playground days was called “Smear the Queer.” If it was meant to be an epithet then, I missed the memo. Today the verbiage likely would need adjustment, let alone during Pride Month.
Anyway, my boy was in heaven with his squealing laughter during our boisterous game, and I was in heaven hearing it. I can be a great dad when I dial into their worlds and don’t think about anything else. But I can’t do it for long. Sometimes I don’t even make it 10 minutes.
I could blame the perpetual list of work and life tasks, many of which are created in service of the children. On a Saturday after a long week, between taking them to an event at a fire station in the morning and a pool party that stretched from afternoon into evening, I thought we’d earned peaceful independent playtime.
But the kids started fighting with each other and demanding attention while I was so desperate for just a few minutes to… wait for it… make a deposit into their 529 college savings plans. They monopolize resources so comprehensively they have to take some away to reinvest in themselves.
(By the way, I researched 529s rather than lazily picking Utah just because a reputable source told me it was the best. California offers similar investment options at half the fees. It’s the best one in my opinion, excluding any state income tax breaks.
That reputable source only recommended Utah because another reputable source chose it. And that reputable source only chose it because someone else told him. My visible supply chain of repute ends there. This is how misinformation works. Effort is the antidote.)
I can’t solely blame the treadmill to-do list. I’m rational enough to concede these tasks, however necessary, don’t mean much in the long run.
20 years from now, the only people who will remember that you worked late are your kids.
— David Clarke, as seen in James Clear’s newsletter
The gist of this quote rings true. It’s an inspiring thought, but not sustaining because the other reason for my short attention span with my kids is the precious time with them can be quite boring. This tedium erodes my Brady Bunch powers. I get annoyed quickly and unfairly given they’re tiny undeveloped humans just figuring out how to live. I use bribery, punishment and television out of indolence and impatience.
Judging me is fair. I should do it the right way, teaching and modeling and nurturing. I don’t know how I can be so patient catering to my O.C.D. loading the dishwasher and reviewing bills, yet so restless when all my kids really need out of me is to be present in the moment.
One thing I’ve heard from a variety of sources is this responsibility and associated guilt are pretty recent on the anthropology timeline. With apologies to the Brady Bunch, parents typically didn’t spend as much time with their kids a generation ago. Mine certainly didn’t.
This paradigm of two employed parents who read Emily Oster books, leave work at 3:45 on Wednesdays and 3:25 on Thursdays to take the kids to swimming and art classes, and make time to play with them morning and night is new and possibly unnatural.
Some believe we’re built to raise children in villages. Dropping them off at Montessori school for eight hours a day indeed feels quite right. I wonder how much more team support is optimal.
We’re lucky to have four grandparents, but it’s tough to get a read on how much we should be asking of them. One set will say they’re happy to watch the kids even if they’re not. The other will say they don’t want to watch them, even if they do, which they might not. Both sets have health challenges. And our siblings are astoundingly worthless when it comes to childcare help, not that I blame them.
So back to the nanny and the pool. The peculiarity of that setup might be offset by its efficiency. Conserving the mom’s energy for the home stretch in the evening makes sense. The village can be outsourced, as is the case with school.
The concept of a nanny always felt foreign to me, something far off in the rich white country club category. That’s probably another subtle sign of my age. Nannies seem pretty common at our kids’ school in 2024, although the high tuition is unlikely to draw socioeconomic diversity.
Our Asian friend said their Brazilian nanny was a game-changer. I can see that. The difference between being in a doting father mindset and wanting to hide from the family in a witness protection program can be small, sometimes just like 45 quiet minutes to myself to regroup.
For example, picking up the kids from school depletes my dad tank. I’m compelled to talk to numerous adults and children because my people-pleasing complex overrides my introversion. I somehow have to carry eight things even though they have backpacks. Last week I mixed up my toddler’s dirty clothes bag with someone else’s and saw underwear almost the size of mine with a tennis-ball-sized aurora where a turd had dropped. I almost vomited into it.
My kids run around the halls and lobby like it’s a circus, and I’m the bumbling clown trying to corral them. Yes, the judgment here falls on my bad parenting and not them.
Teachers leaving for the day 20 minutes after we said goodbye to them laugh when they see me still out front waiting for my sons to tire of playing with sticks. Then I bake in the Texas sun while trying to coax them into their car seats and endure a mild heart attack making a left turn at an intersection that badly needs a traffic light during rush hour.
When I get home, sometimes after taking them to the grocery store which is another blood pressure-spiking event, I am not eager to play with the kids. I need a breather.
Now if a nanny handled pickup, I would be eager to stop working and wait for them by the garage door with fedora in hand. The same goes for bathtime or getting them ready to go somewhere. Even just being able to sleep in for a morning significantly improves my ability to be wholly focused on my kids for longer.
The idea is to get breaks between sprints rather than sprinting a marathon and faltering. I don’t understand how single parents do it, how the math adds up. I wish they all had nannies. Whereas before I had some preconceived notions about rich folks offloading parenting duties, I’ve learned somewhat counterintuitively enlisting more caretakers can increase net quality time.