Why Even Have Kids If You Let Even One Person Help You With Them?
The scope creep of "outsourcing" parenthood
In case you subscribed recently for sex/relationships content and do not want to read anything remotely adjacent to parenting, never fear—more of that is coming on Monday, and given that I publish almost daily, I have quite literally hundreds of archived articles on those topics, including but not limited to: is sex really like cold pizza for men? Is the Internet giving everyone a cuck fetish? Which male bodies do women rate the highest, and do those preferences change with the woman’s body type? And…much, much more. Today is about parenting, tomorrow will be a personal essay, and I promise to resume the sex stuff on Monday. Until then!
One particular Mom Twitter drama has been seared in my mind for over a year. A remote working mom posted that she wanted to spend time with her young children throughout the day during her lunch hour or other moments of downtime, so instead of putting her children in daycare or hiring a full time nanny, she did something a little different—she hired a nanny to deal with the less meaningful moments of parenthood (such as vacuuming crumbs or preparing snacks) so she could save time on chores and spend more time reading, snuggling and playing with her kids.
She was told, by multiple people, that she “shouldn’t even have had kids.” What was the point, they asked, if she was just going to outsource it all?
And, well, drama like this is circulating now, in part thanks to a classic “rich people rage bait” Wall Street Journal article describing six-figures-worth teams of childcare professionals hired by “CEO parents.” And perhaps people are right to grimace at this extreme approach—it’s certainly not one I would take, even ifI had the money, which I don’t—but the discourse has spun into a variety of innocuous ways of getting help that apparently make having children completely pointless. Invariably, these people will say the same thing they said to the remote working mom: Why even bother having children if you’re going to have someone else do X for you?
The problem is, X can be just about anything. It’s gone so far as to encompass sending your children to school, something done by upwards of 95% of moms.
More importantly, the remote working mom in my initial story spent more time with her kids than basically all full-time working moms (or, ahem, any dads.) Most kids of two working parents, remote or not, are in some form of childcare and do not have lunch with their moms every day. It became obvious, almost immediately, that people weren’t angry at her for not spending enough time with her kids, even though they pretended that was the issue. They were angry at her for being in a privileged position (something she didn’t deny!) to be able to hire people for the less fun parts of parenthood. And despite being a SAHM who spends basically 24/7 with my kids outside the school year (in the summer, I have zero childcare) I couldn’t imagine any good reason to judge this woman.
From the trad crunchies to certain lefties who just hate parents, it’s fun to rag on lazy parents for outsourcing, offloading, or essentially refusing to parent their own children. And while people who have $250,000 teams dedicated to every aspect of childcare are going too far, the amount of people who truly outsource parenthood to that degree is a rounding error and not worth the moral panic. Instead, the label of “outsourcer” has creeped onto basically any parent (always a mom) who hires even one person for occasional help with something.
