Olga Khazan | The Atlantic

Everyone Thinks They Need a NeeDoh

2026-04-03T07:30:00-04:00

When I heard there was a shortage of NeeDohs—the squishy, stress-relieving toys—I called the toy store in my town in northern Florida and asked if I could buy some. Unfortunately not, the nice woman who answered the phone told me. They were completely out. They’d last had a large shipment of 180 NeeDi two weeks prior, but those were gone within an hour, even with the store limit of three per person. Apparently, she added, some kids skipped the first hour of school to nab theirs.

NeeDohs—for the uninitiated—can take the form of a palm-size cube, sphere, heart, or other glob, all of which are satisfyingly squeezable. Since the product launched in 2017, NeeDohs have become popular among adults and children with autism and anxiety, stressed-out teens, and really all school-age kids. Maybe too popular. At some point recently, NeeDohs went viral on Instagram and TikTok, and kids quickly seemed to conclude that they’d better not show their face in homeroom without one.

Tweens can be especially susceptible to the temptations of trendy toys—think Tamagotchis, Beanie Babies, Pokémon cards. Psychologists have found that tweens and young teens are uniquely sensitive to their peers’ influence and judgment; in children ages 10 to 12, hormone receptors in the brain regions linked to pleasure and motivation multiply rapidly, reorienting kids toward social rewards. What might appear to be a basic translucent cube can, in the hands of the school’s Popular Kid, turn into a must-have possession—and many parents are happy to buy their tweens’ good graces for a mere $5.99.

[Read: The highly exclusive way that everybody shops now]

Now all types of NeeDohs are sold out nearly everywhere. “In the first three months of this year, we went through about three times the inventory that we sold in 2025,” Paul Weingard, the CEO of NeeDoh’s maker, Schylling, told me. Schylling’s Chinese supplier couldn’t keep up. “No company could possibly plan for or anticipate—we’ll call it a 10-times surge in demand.” On its website, Schylling has posted a message that it is “taking a short pause” on NeeDoh orders. Weingard said the shortage should be resolved by summer or fall.

Toy stores, in the bargaining phase of grief, have taken to social media to remind customers that they carry many products that are a lot like NeeDohs. One store posted a reel of other squishy toys—memory-foam butter! mini fruits!—that you can buy instead. “If you’re holding out for NeeDohs,” a store employee says in the video, “the orders placed now will ship in June or maybe even September.” Another store posted that although they are sold out of NeeDohs, they do have other fidget toys, such as Gumps and Squish Goldfish, “both of which have a very similar texture to a Nee-Doh Nice Cube!” Yet another lamented the “Great NeeDoh Shortage of 2026” while depicting a pair of hands mashing a variety of other, widely available squishies.

These other squishies do not seem to suffice, however. Parents and kids alike are hunting for the real thing. On TikTok, one mom bragged about buying several NeeDohs and shipping them to her child’s friends around the country. A writer on Substack told of his travels to multiple stores and, ultimately, to a Facebook Marketplace rendezvous, where he secured a blue Nice Cube. Parents post on Reddit that they have looked “EVERYWHERE” for NeeDohs and are wondering if there is somewhere—other than everywhere—that they could be.

With the disclaimer that my child is not yet of NeeDoh age, I would urge parents not to drive themselves too crazy over this. One of the many jobs I had in high school was at a local toy store, and that experience, though soul-crushing, did impart to me a philosophy I like to call Meat Loaf parenting: I will do anything for my kid, but I won’t do that. Specifically, I won’t go to great lengths to buy him faddish toys.

[Read: Babies don’t need fancy things]

My rationale is that I, his mom, never had faddish toys. His grandma didn’t have any toys at all. His great-grandma was in a concentration camp. His ancestors on the other side were nomadic reindeer herders. The point being that his people have been surviving for many centuries without NeeDohs, Labubus, or anything else that compels parents to shoestring-tackle their fellow man on Black Friday.

Not to get all dictatorship-of-the-proletariat on you, but just because capitalism has convinced kids that they must have these things does not mean that they actually must. There are a lot of other squishies. There will probably be a new toy that goes viral next month. NeeDohs are probably not the key to these kids’ effortless and everlasting popularity. Maybe a shortage of a toy like this is an opportunity to notice what we don’t actually need-oh.

How the Midwest Became the Place to Move

2026-03-23T07:00:00-04:00

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One of the first known uses of the term flyover country in print came from a midwesterner: In a 1980 issue of Esquire magazine, Thomas McGuane—a native of Michigan—quipped, “Because we live in flyover country, we try to figure out what is going on elsewhere by subscribing to magazines.”

For years, much of the Midwest has been dismissed as boring, forgettable, nice but way too cold. Since practically the invention of air-conditioning, Americans have been leaving snowy northern states for warm places such as Florida, Texas, and Arizona—a trend that accelerated rapidly during the coronavirus pandemic.

But these days, people are no longer flying over the Midwest. In growing numbers, they’re flying to the Midwest, to find a place to live. In the past couple of years, the region has become a popular place to relocate; three of the country’s five fastest-growing metro areas are there. Population growth in the Sun Belt, meanwhile, is slowing. The forces driving these changes go two ways: People are being drawn to more northerly cities for job opportunities and affordable housing, and they are being pushed out of the Sun Belt by the rising cost of living there.

According to migration data, the cool thing to do now is put on your parka and move to the Midwest. Rockford, Illinois, a 150,000-person town an hour and 30 minutes from Chicago, was the most popular city for home shoppers last year, according to a Zillow algorithm that tracks home-value growth, how quickly houses sell, how many people from outside a given city are searching for homes there, and other factors. Dearborn, Michigan, and Toledo, Ohio, made Zillow’s top five. According to United Van Lines, one of the most popular states for inbound movers in 2025 was Minnesota; the state gained more people than it lost that year for the first time since 2017. Last year, a researcher at Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies found that several midwestern states, including Missouri, Indiana, and Wisconsin, switched from losing residents before the pandemic to gaining residents after it.

[Read: The whole country is starting to look like California]

Daryl Fairweather, the chief economist at Redfin, told me that according to company data, searches have increased for homes in several cities in the Midwest and upstate New York. These are the kinds of places, she said, that “people didn’t move into pre-pandemic or during the pandemic.” The company’s data also show that, compared with 2022, more people now are moving to Milwaukee, Cincinnati, Grand Rapids, Albany, and South Bend, Indiana. (Fairweather herself moved to Wisconsin from Seattle a few years ago.) Edward Glaeser, an economist at Harvard, told me that Columbus and Indianapolis are also popping up as affordable cities attracting newcomers.

Meanwhile, record numbers of people are leaving cities in the Sun Belt—a region that includes much of the southern United States. Austin, Fort Lauderdale, San Antonio, and Miami are now the slowest housing markets in the U.S., and a recent Redfin analysis found that Tampa, Dallas, Atlanta, Houston, and Miami had the nation’s greatest slowdowns in domestic migration in 2024. Previously in-demand cities such as Miami, Austin, Orlando, Jacksonville, and Tampa were all “buyer’s markets” as of last summer—meaning the supply of homes for sale outpaced demand. A February analysis by the Brookings Institution demographer William Frey found that domestic migration to the South peaked in 2021–22 and then declined sharply.

The primary force compelling people to choose hot dish and snow over tacos and sunshine is the housing market. Because of high interest rates and high prices, houses in the United States are less affordable than at almost any time in recent memory. The pandemic’s influx of Sun Belt newcomers drove up real-estate prices. Home building in supposedly “easy-to-build” places such as Dallas and Phoenix has slowed in recent years, making inexpensive homes even scarcer, according to a recent report co-authored by Glaes er. Riordan Frost, a senior research analyst at Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, told me that “the promise of the Sun Belt has often been more affordability and economic opportunity. But as that wanes, that could discourage people.”

The Midwest, however, contains some of the last places in the U.S. where a three-bedroom house can be purchased for about $300,000, Fairweather said. Or, as Mark Partridge, a regional economist at Ohio State University, told me, maybe even less: “In a place like Toledo or Akron or Cleveland, you can get a really nice house for $200,000.”

Particularly attractive are towns that are near a big city but have much smaller price tags. Take Rockford, the most popular housing market from the Zillow report. Although it’s within easy driving distance of Chicago, the average home value is about $170,000, to Chicago’s $300,000. A hybrid worker could conceivably work from Chicago a day or two a week while paying much less for a house than if they lived in the city. The same goes for Milwaukee, which is also an hour and a half from Chicago. As more people have moved there, midwestern home values have also risen: Rockford’s home prices are up nearly 10 percent year over year, compared with 3.9 percent in 2020, for example. But because they started at a much lower price point, these homes still seem affordable compared with houses in, say, Miami or Austin.

In addition to proximity to a large city, what distinguishes bright spots such as Columbus and Indianapolis from less desirable midwestern cities is the availability of good-paying jobs. After all, few people can buy a house, even for $300,000, if they can’t find work nearby. According to OSU’s Partridge, the midwestern cities that were less reliant on manufacturing in the 1950s are the ones doing well now. These places were never dependent on factory jobs, so they were better able to weather the steep decline in U.S. manufacturing that began decades ago. “Because they had a more service-oriented composition of businesses, they did much better,” Partridge said. Today, these cities offer plentiful finance, tech, and health-care jobs. JPMorganChase employs 18,000 people in Columbus, for example; the pharmaceutical company Lilly is headquartered in Indianapolis.

[Read: The disappearing American mortgage]

These cities do lack one thing that the Sun Belt has in spades: sun. Perusing Redfin recently, I clicked on a house in Milwaukee, scrolled down to a feature on the site that measures sunlight, and saw that it gets all of 3.3 hours of daily “solar exposure” in December. “We still have crappy weather,” Partridge acknowledged, but “for certain kinds of people, it’s a great lifestyle.”

That lifestyle includes sledding and snow pants and, yes, maybe some vitamin-D gummies. But perhaps this historically terrible housing market is enough to make people come to peace with being cold for a little while.

American Kids Used to Eat Everything

2026-02-17T07:00:00-05:00

The most striking passages in Picky, a forthcoming book by the historian Helen Zoe Veit, describe the way famous 19th-century American figures ate as children. I found myself gripped with envy as I read—not because the foods were particularly appetizing, but because I would kill for my kid to eat like that.

To wit: As a girl, Edith Wharton adored oyster sauce, turtle, stewed celery, cooked tomatoes, and lima beans in cream. Mark Twain fondly remembered eating succotash, string beans, squirrels, and rabbits on his uncle’s farm. And during her childhood, Veit writes, Elizabeth Cady Stanton “happily ate vegetables, hickory nuts, and cold jellied brain.”

If these don’t sound like typical “kid foods,” that’s because they aren’t, and weren’t. “Kid food,” as a category, is a recent invention. According to Veit, American kids weren’t picky until the early 20th century. (Indeed, the word picky came into widespread usage around then.) Before that, Veit writes, children in the United States ate “spicy relishes, vinegary pickles, wild plants, and a huge variety of animal species and organ meats. They slurped up raw oysters and looked forward to their daily coffee.” Fennel seeds and tomatoes were considered treats.

According to Veit, the idea that kids are naturally neophobic, or wary of new tastes, is a myth. Eating like a child, Veit explains, was once understood to mean being overly excited and undiscriminating about food, not being picky. In the 1860s, a doctor wrote that children generally ate “anything and everything.”

[Read: How baby-led weaning almost ruined my life]

Veit’s book recounts how kids went from eating jellied brain to consuming, like my toddler, little but macaroni and cheese. A big part of the story, as she tells it, is that American kids used to be hungrier at mealtimes—which meant that they were more eager to eat anything. Before the 20th century, many children did hours of chores both before and after school, so they worked up a good appetite. (Maybe Twain was hungry for those string beans because he spent so much time hunting wild turkeys and clubbing pigeons to death.) Few kids snacked between meals, because processed foods weren’t widely available. In addition, parents tended to be confident that children could learn to like most adult foods. If a child didn’t like a given meal, they generally wouldn’t be offered an alternative, because, due to a lack of refrigeration, no other food was on hand. But after a series of societal changes in the 20th century, Veit writes, “the children were less hungry. The food was less delicious.” And pickiness was born.

First, children’s appetites waned because they became less active. As more Americans moved into cities and more families bought cars, fewer kids walked miles to school or performed farm chores. This coincided with a major shift in the American diet. Thanks to pasteurization and stepped-up government regulations, milk became much safer to drink in the 20th century, and food experts began to see it as essential. The standard recommendation for children in the 1930s and ’40s was a quart of milk a day—or roughly 600 calories of it. All that milk made kids less hungry for solid foods. Doctors eventually lowered their recommendation to two to three servings of dairy a day, but by then, snacking had emerged as another hunger dampener: Food companies began manufacturing snack cakes, cereals, and cookies, and suggesting that parents buy special foods for their kids.

Meanwhile, a misguided, Progressive-era public-health campaign encouraged parents to serve their children “easily digested” food such as eggs, broths, and gruel. Because child-nutrition experts at the time had little knowledge of germ theory, they claimed that rich and flavorful foods were the culprits for children constantly getting sick, and thus advised that kids should be given only bland foods with few condiments. Children’s foods, they said, should be seasoned with just salt, onion juice, or a “splash of milk”—even butter was considered too rich by some. Nutritionists no longer recommend giving kids bland food, but the idea that children should eat different foods than adults nevertheless stuck.

Advice to parents on how to address pickiness in their children also shifted over time. Prior to the ’40s and ’50s, Veit writes, the standard guidance was to just let food-refusing children go hungry until the next meal. But mid-century experts such as Clara Davis and Benjamin Spock suggested that children instinctively choose a healthy diet on their own, without their parents’ prodding. In fact, they argued without evidence, parents who urge children to try a bite of fish, say, might make them hate fish and turn them into picky eaters. All of this gave the impression that a good mother is one who presents a plate of food and sits silently by as her child pokes at it half-heartedly; if he refuses the meal, she offers something else.

[Read: How Sweetgreen became Millennial cringe]

This is still a common way of thinking—at least on social media. In my feeds, parenting influencers warn against putting “pressure” on kids to eat things they’re reluctant to try. They say that you shouldn’t let a child who has rejected a food go hungry until the next meal or use dessert as a reward for eating dinner. Instead, as one influencer puts it, you should enthusiastically comment on the food yourself—this is crunchy; this is green—a performance that, when observed by your child, might “invite them to their plate and their food.” Laura Ingalls’s Ma would never.

These changes in food options and advice have created a country in which the majority of kids’ daily calories come from ultra-processed foods. American kids today eat so poorly, Veit writes, that they are actually getting shorter. At the same time, she notes, “parents are exhausted by the struggle” of getting picky eaters to eat. (And some parents, of course, can’t afford to buy their kids food that they won’t eat.) She reassures parents that pickiness is not their fault. But it often feels like it is.

My son, Evan, became picky the way people go bankrupt: gradually, then suddenly. I distinctly remember him eating peas and coleslaw as a baby, but over time he grew less and less adventurous. Now, at nearly 2, pretty much all he eats is pasta.

My husband and I tried many of the tricks suggested to me by friends and by the internet. We’ve tried telling him that beans are pasta. (He begs to differ.) We’ve tried blending vegetables into his pasta sauce. (Tolerated up to a point.) We’ve tried giving him a small amount of his “safe food” (pasta) along with some new foods to try. (He eats only the pasta and then screams “more papa!” until we relent.)

Veit’s recommendations to reduce pickiness differ from these solutions, and some of them seem, well, more hard-core. She suggests restoring that appropriate feeling of hunger at mealtime by limiting the amount of snacks and milk that children have between meals. She recommends “affectionately and persistently” encouraging the child to try a rejected food at the same meal, including, perhaps, by “popping a small amount of food into her mouth when she’s distracted.” Crucially, she argues, parents should not offer alternative foods if a child won’t eat a meal.

Even reading that last one felt shocking. Forcing Evan to eat what I make, or else to go hungry, seems so wrong. I was a kid once, after all, and I hated it when adults pressured me to eat things I didn’t like. Sure, every day I slather him in sunscreen as he screams, and I shove a toothbrush between his locked little jaws, but I can’t bring myself to have a standoff over spinach.

When I called Nancy Zucker, a Duke psychiatrist who works with extremely picky kids, she told me that she agreed with some of Veit’s techniques but not others. She endorsed having set snack times that don’t interfere with meals—kids thrive on knowing, “This is when we eat, this is when we don’t eat,” she said. And she acknowledged that children probably have more sophisticated palates than adults may think; many of her patients, she said, are actually craving flavor.

[Read: The drink that Americans won’t give up without a fight]

But she cautioned against Veit’s other recommendations. Goading a child to eat more of something they don’t like may make them feel frustrated and recalcitrant, not excited to eat, she said—as can popping something into their mouth unexpectedly. And some kids can’t be starved into eating a rejected meal just because there’s no alternative. For some kids, “the hungrier they get, the more irritable they get, the more anxious they get, and the more rigid they get,” Zucker said. She’s known parents whose kids refused to eat for so long that they wound up in the emergency room for dehydration.

Zucker’s guidance to her patients depends on the specifics of the family she’s working with. But for many of them, her first step is to encourage families to restore positive associations with food and eating: having fun grocery shopping or cooking together, without expecting that the kid will become an instant cauliflower convert. She also thinks parents should reconsider how they engage with their kids at the dinner table. For many families, she said, mealtime is “like a sports commentary, where parents are constantly, ‘Take a bite of this!’” She asked, “Would you be having fun if you were the kid?” Instead, she suggests “letting the kid just kind of eat and experiment with the food.”

Since reading Veit’s book, I’ve tried some of her strategies and have been pleasantly surprised. One day, I withheld a snack after day care even as Evan hopped around the kitchen yelling “Mama, cookie!” He ate a bit of salmon that night and sampled some broccoli before spitting it out. Another night, pushing dinner a half hour later made him proclaim that a homemade soup—with visible chicken pieces—was “tasty.” But when he completely rejects an entire dinner, I still heat up something I know he’ll like. Eventually, I want him to eat oysters, but for now, I just want him to be full.

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Most People Don’t Have a ‘Type’

2026-02-13T09:00:00-05:00

By the time I met Rich, I had whittled my list of must-haves for a romantic partner down to two: He must be Jewish, and he must have a permanent address.

He didn’t clear even this low bar. I’m not sure what made me fall for the Gentile giant who was crashing, as a “stopgap measure between things,” on the couch of my group house. But, reader, I married him.

This is not an uncommon trajectory. Many people think that they have a set type, and that all they need for eternal bliss is to find someone who matches it. When people peruse dating profiles, they’re often looking for someone who has specific interests, qualities, or hobbies. But according to a growing body of relationship research, many people end up marrying someone with few of their must-haves and a lot of “haves” they didn’t think they desired. A person might say that they’re looking for a partner who’s funny and conscientious, but then end up in a happy relationship with someone who is neither of those things. “People don’t know what they want,” Samantha Joel, a psychologist at Western University in Ontario who studies relationships, told me, “and people don’t know what they’re going to like until they meet someone.”

Across many studies, people’s stated preferences don’t align well with the traits that incite their fondness for someone in real life. In a 2020 study, the UC Davis psychologist Paul Eastwick and his colleagues asked participants to list some ideal characteristics they wanted in a partner, and then sent them on a blind date. The researchers later asked the participants how closely the person they went out with had reflected both their own ideals and a list of someone else’s. People turned out to be just as romantically interested in a date who met the other person’s must-haves as they were in a date who met all of their own. “You are happy with somebody who fits your ideals,” Eastwick told me, “but you would have been just as happy with what your friend ordered off the menu.” This is where apps can fall short in terms of quality matchmaking. As Eastwick writes in his new book, Bonded by Evolution, compatibility can’t be determined by a dating profile; it has to be “curated, cultivated, and constructed”—usually as the relationship unfolds.

[Read: The doomed dream of an AI matchmaker]

Even some “deal-breakers” may not end up breaking the deal. In one study by Joel, researchers told subjects that a hypothetical romantic partner had a trait that they said they wanted to avoid—poor hygiene, say, or anger issues—and many people said that they would continue to date the prospect anyway. Joel said that this inclination would likely be even stronger “in the context of a real relationship, where there’s feelings involved.”

That said, shared values do seem to matter to people: A 2020 report found that only 3 percent of American adults were married to someone from the opposite political party, for instance. Eastwick says that this happens because so many people either immediately screen out or simply never interact with a potential date who has opposing values—a hard-core Democrat might live in a neighborhood populated mostly with other Democrats, for example, or swipe left on all Republicans on Tinder. But if two people get together not knowing that they’re political opposites and the relationship takes off for other reasons, they might compartmentalize their differences or move closer to each other’s ideology. (“He’s probably going to become a libertarian,” Eastwick said, referring to the hypothetical Republican.)

Physical attraction matters, too—far more than most people realize, according to the researchers I spoke with. (Taylor Swift has it right when she sings, “Please, God, bring me a best friend who I think is hot.”) If two people in a relationship are lucky, infatuation will set in: an obsessionlike mental state in which you find yourself thinking about the person a lot, noticing them, and wanting to be physically close to them. Once that initial spark ignites, motivated reasoning—essentially, seeing what you want to see—takes over. Joel theorized that people are prone to a “progression bias” in relationships: They are more inclined to encourage a relationship to continue than they are to dissolve it. Merely spending time together makes people become more invested in making a relationship work. “Once you like someone,” Joel said, “you want to see the best in them.” After Rich and I started dating, I began to notice his sharp and twisted sense of humor. Once while impersonating an old person trying to use Twitter, he called tweets “a telegram about yourself.” Is this the funniest thing ever? Not really. But in my eyes, at that moment, it was.

This kind of self-delusion is a good thing. Everyone, to some extent, grades their romantic partner on a curve, and relationships in which partners are especially inclined to do this may be particularly strong. In one study that Eastwick cites in his book, the longest-lasting relationships were the ones in which people justified their partner’s faults with “yes, but” statements such as “She is messy, but I wouldn’t ask her to give up her free-spirited ways for anything.”

The problem is: The way people actually become attracted to each other can be hard to predict, Joel said. Not even scientists who have dedicated their life to studying chemistry can totally pin down its essence. Do you like the guy from Tinder and the joke he cracked about The Big Lebowski just because you were in an unusually good mood on the day you met up with him? If you’d been in a rotten mood, would you have liked him (and his stupid joke) less? I’m not sure I would have given Rich a second glance if he had not walked by my room in the group house one day while I was listening to “Portions for Foxes,” by Rilo Kiley, and exclaimed, “This is one of my favorite songs ever.” No man had ever complimented my taste in music before. It felt so refreshing—and well, kinda hot.

[Read: The growing belief in ‘love at first sight’]

All of this might help explain why many people who use dating apps struggle to find a long-term partner. With their emphasis on photos and profiles, Eastwick writes, “apps cater to our ideas about what we like much better than they cater to what we actually like.” Chemistry grows, and love is built on shared experiences and memories, but the apps tend to keep people trapped in small talk. Many users find themselves swiping endlessly without ever meeting up with someone. What’s more, Eastwick told me, apps can encourage people to judge their dates too quickly—and perhaps move on prematurely. “You might have a middling first impression of somebody,” he said, “but then you meet them again, and you end up really liking them.” The apps, however, present so many options that if a date is “anywhere south of great,” people may be inclined to hastily decide “I’m not gonna do the second date.”

The better way to find love, Eastwick suggested, is to get to know romantic prospects in person, over time. “Compatibility,” he said, “is about what you’re able to create together.” He recommended building deep friendship networks—both because those friends can introduce you to singles they know and because some of them might become romantic partners. But regardless of how you meet people, the crucial pieces are: Find someone you think is reasonably attractive and then hang out with them at least three times, doing things together that will inspire deep, connection-building interactions (such as playing a conversation card game and maybe answering the “36 Questions That Lead to Love” from that old New York Times essay). The person you spark with might be too tall or too short, or be a dog person to your cat person, or have an extremely boring job. Even so: They might be just your type.

He Was Homeschooled for Years, and Fell So Far Behind

2026-01-14T07:00:00-05:00

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In the early 1990s, when Stefan Merrill Block was in fourth grade, he began complaining to his mom about his new school, with its pointless rules and mean teachers. He, his parents, and his brother had recently moved to the Dallas suburb of Plano from Indianapolis, and Block, a perceptive and sensitive child, could tell that his mother was unhappy in their new home, too. Together, they made a “lovely picnic” of their anger, as he describes it in his new memoir, Homeschooled. His mother pulled him out of the classroom and into a life of shapeless days, setting Block on a strange, yearslong journey as her only pupil, only friend, and at times, it seems, only hope.

Block’s memoir is timely; homeschooling has grown rapidly in recent years. Although people regarded Block as an oddity in his youth—“The boy should be in school!” his visiting grandma exclaimed at one point—now more than 3 percent of school-age kids in the United States, or about 2 million children, are homeschooled.

Under his mother’s warped version of homeschooling, Block was largely left to pursue his own “interests,” which included reading novels, drawing comics, and watching Oprah. In Block’s telling, his father, a busy psychologist, mostly turned a blind eye to these aimless afternoons. As days of unstructured exploration stretched out before him, Block writes, he realized that “the longer I stay here, the further I will fall behind, and the harder it will be ever to go back.”

[Read: ]Educated is a brutal, one-of-a-kind memoir

He was right to be concerned. When Block finally returned to school for ninth grade, he earned grades in the C to F range. He recalls thinking that “the Civil War was thus named because, despite all the bloodshed, Americans exhibited remarkably good etiquette.” It took him cutting down to four or five hours of sleep a night and going, as he puts it, “sporadically psychotic” to catch up on his studies.

Block’s experience sounds extreme and readers of the book may wonder how this was allowed to happen to him. In the years that Block was homeschooled, why was he never assessed, or even checked on? The answer is that homeschooling was wildly under-regulated when Block was a boy—a situation that has not changed much since then. About half of states, Texas among them, do not require homeschoolers to be evaluated, and not all states require an intervention if a student is found to be failing, according to Jonah Stewart, the director of programs at the Coalition for Responsible Home Education (CRHE), which advocates for stricter homeschooling regulations. In some of the states with testing mandates, parents can circumvent the rule by registering with an “umbrella school,” many of which offer real support for homeschoolers, and others of which exist largely as shells to help parents evade requirements. Or students can take their exams at home—which raises the question of how reliable the scores are. Only two states, New York and Pennsylvania, require the homeschooler to take a test with a qualified proctor, Stewart told me. Tess Ulrey, CRHE’s executive director, told me, “For a lot of homeschooled students, the first time they’re going to take a standardized test is maybe the SAT, the ACT.”

Because not every homeschool student takes reliable tests, knowing how well they are doing academically is difficult. Some research, much of it conducted by homeschooling advocates, has found that homeschool students tend to perform well. But other homeschooling researchers have argued that these studies mask substantial variation in the quality of homeschooling because they don’t rely on representative samples.

And some research provides cause for concern: One series of large surveys found that homeschoolers earned worse SAT scores and ended up in lower-paying jobs than traditionally schooled kids. When controlling for demographics, one study found that homeschoolers were two to three times more likely to be behind their expected grade level than their traditionally schooled peers. A 2020 review of many studies found that homeschoolers generally excel in reading but lag in mat h, perhaps because, as some researchers theorize, homeschooling families tend to emphasize reading over math. For the student population at large, the average SAT math score is also lower than the average reading score, though only slightly.

Beyond the academic considerations, under-regulated homeschooling can also make some kids vulnerable to abuse. Though most homeschool parents are responsible and well-intentioned, some child-abuse experts say that a small percentage mistreat their children. Multiple stories of children who were abused in supposed homeschooling environments have surfaced in recent years. (Some of the parents have pleaded not guilty.) A 2014 paper examining the cases of 28 severely abused children from various states found that eight of the 17 school-age victims had been withdrawn from traditional school for homeschooling. A report from Connecticut found that from 2013 to 2016, 36 percent of families in the state who began homeschooling had been the subject of at least one prior abuse or neglect report. Nationally, the CRHE has documented nearly 200 deaths of homeschooled kids from abuse or neglect since 2000. Although traditionally schooled kids are also abused and neglected, they at least regularly see adults outside their immediate family, which opens up the possibility of their reaching out for help. With homeschoolers, however, a lack of contact between families and the authorities can cause abuse to go unnoticed: About a dozen states do not require parents to notify the state that they are homeschooling their children, according to Stewart.

Robert Kunzman, an education professor at Indiana University Bloomington who has studied homeschooling, recommends three regulatory reforms that he believes would limit much of the abuse and educational neglect within homeschooling while preserving parents’ rights to educate their own children: Parents should notify the state that they are homeschooling, adults convicted of child abuse should not be allowed to homeschool, and homeschooled children should take an annual basic-skills test.

The Home School Legal Defense Association, a prominent pro-homeschooling advocacy group, opposes these ideas. The group’s president, Jim Mason, told me that “parents who homeschool are fully subject to the same criminal, child-protection, and neglect laws as every other parent.” He pointed to a study in the Journal of School Choice, co-authored by a researcher whose organization has received support from homeschooling groups, that found “a lack of evidence for disproportionately associating homeschooling with child abuse and neglect.”

[Read: The elite college students who can’t read books]

The association and other groups like it have significant political power and tend to rally to defeat state bills that would require inspections or other forms of oversight. Even high-profile reports of abused homeschooled children rarely result in stronger regulations. In 2018, after news broke that the California couple David and Louise Turpin had imprisoned and tortured their 13 “homeschooled” children for decades, California Assemblymember Jose Medina introduced legislation that would have directed the fire marshal to inspect all homeschools in the state. After an outcry from hundreds of homeschool parents, the bill died in committee. The story is much the same in Texas: The Texas Home School Coalition employs lobbyists it calls “watchmen,” after a Bible verse that says, “I have posted watchmen on your walls, Jerusalem; they will never be silent day or night.” With the coalition’s backing, Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed three new bills supporting homeschool rights just this past summer.

As for Block: Despite his challenging childhood, he has built an impressive life for himself. He graduated from a top-tier college and now has a family, has written several books, and co-owns a skating rink. Still, in his author’s note, Block writes that although he does not oppose homeschooling in general, he does think that “the lack of proper homeschooling oversight has become a crisis.”

In a time of school shootings, classroom bullying, culture wars over curricula, and faltering test scores, the impulse of some parents to take over their child’s education is understandable. But as Block’s story illustrates, allowing parents to isolate their kids at home with little accountability can be incredibly harmful. If homeschool parents are so certain that they are giving their kids a good education in a safe environment, they could reasonably be expected to show it.

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The Truth About Immigration That MAGA Doesn’t Acknowledge

2025-12-19T09:40:00-05:00

President Donald Trump, and the MAGA movement more broadly, has made two priorities very clear: They want fewer immigrants in America and more babies born to American mothers.

Those goals, however, are at odds. Millions of parents in the United States, native- and foreign-born alike, rely on immigrants to take care of their kids. (My toddler son has only ever been cared for by immigrant women, myself among them.) Immigrants make up at least 21 percent of the child-care workforce—and this may be an undercount. When fewer immigrants are in the American workforce, economic research suggests, women may work less or have fewer babies—possibly both.

In the first half of this year, Trump’s ICE agency made twice as many arrests as it did under the Biden administration during the same period last year. These efforts seem to have created a chilling effect, making many female immigrants scared to show up for work. According to a report from the New America Foundation published earlier this month, the arrests were associated with a loss of about 39,000 foreign-born child-care workers. Meanwhile, 77,000 U.S.-born mothers of kids under 5 dropped out of the workforce.

The study’s conclusion echoes past research by other scholars. A 2024 study found that Secure Communities, an Obama-administration program that led to hundreds of thousands of deportations, reduced the total number of day-care employees, in part by sparking fear among even documented immigrant workers. “Even if they are a legal immigrant,” Jessica Brown, an economics professor at the University of South Carolina’s business school and an author of the study, told me, “they may have family members who are not.” Brown estimates that during the Secure Communities era, 16,000 fewer people were working in child care and 1,700 fewer day cares were open than would have been otherwise. Brown theorized that lower-paid immigrant workers leaving the sector might have required child-care centers to bring in more higher-wage, native-born employees—“but maybe that’s not sustainable,” she said, “and so your center just closes instead.”

[Read: An unexpected argument from the right]

These reductions in the child-care workforce had a big impact on mothers, who are typically the parent to step in when a nanny or day care isn’t available. A study by Chloe East, an economist at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and her co-authors found that Secure Communities was associated with mothers of young children becoming about 1 percent less likely to work—a small-seeming but significant decrease, when considering the 24 million working mothers in the U.S. East said she believes that this was because affordable child care became less available, given that a similar decrease was not seen among women without children or among fathers, who tend not to be the primary caregivers for young children.

Some researchers anticipate that the Trump administration’s ICE operations will affect immigrant child-care workers even more than Secure Communities did. “When we see ICE all over a city for a week, when we see them go to an apartment complex and try to knock on every single door,” East said, “that is a really new phenomenon at the scale that we’re seeing.” The Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank, estimated that if Trump succeeds in his goal of deporting 4 million people, employment in the child-care sector would shrink by about 15 percent, which would almost certainly make continuing to work more difficult for many mothers.

Perhaps this is what the MAGA movement wants: for American women to quit their jobs to stay at home with their kids. Several prominent MAGA figures, including Vice President J. D. Vance, have suggested parents do just that. But setting aside the fact that most mothers say they don’t want to do this, and that many working families cannot get by on only one income, making child care less available might not inspire working women to stay home. It could push them to have fewer kids.

The relationship between affordable child care and fertility is fuzzy; many countries with subsidized day care and other benefits for parents nevertheless have low birth rates. But some data suggest that as child care gets more expensive or less available, women have fewer kids. A recent working paper by Abigail Dow, an economics Ph.D. candidate at Boston University, found that higher child-care costs lead to lower birth rates and delay when mothers have their first child. When the price of child care for children under 3 increased by 10 percent, the birth rate of women ages 20 to 44 decreased by 5.7 percent.

[Read: The loneliness of the conservative pronatalist]

Research has shown that after immigration restrictions loosened in the 1960s and the immigrant population grew, the price of child care decreased relative to what it likely would have cost otherwise. That seems to have led to more educated women having kids: A one percentage-point increase in immigrants to a given metro area was associated with a 0.3-percentage-point increase in the probability of highly educated women having had a child in the previous year. According to Delia Furtado, an economist at the University of Connecticut and the author of that study, these mothers might have been responding not only to the cost of child care but also to its convenience and quality.

If the president and his supporters see the tension between anti-immigration policy and pronatalist efforts, they haven’t acknowledged it publicly. MAGA world may talk about both issues a great deal, but deportations almost always win out. Immigration was one of the most important issues to Trump voters in 2024; pronatalism is much less popular as an issue, and the majority of Republicans say the government should have no role in encouraging people to have more kids. In a speech to Congress this year, Trump used the word border 21 times and the word children just 10. Joshua C. Wilson, a political scientist at the University of Denver who studies the conservative movement, told me, “Immigration is the lead-off issue that gets the attention of the base.” Pronatalism, by contrast, is “multiple rows behind.”

The authors of Project 2025 call “open-borders activism” a type of “cheap grace,” which they define as “publicly promoting one’s own virtue without risking any personal inconvenience.” By this definition, MAGA’s pronatalist rhetoric can also be considered cheap grace: a way for the president and his administration to throw red meat to social conservatives without needing to adjust their anti-immigration stance—or to pay up for parental leave or subsidized child care. In his first public address as vice president, Vance said it should be “easier to raise a family” in America. His administration’s immigration policies could make doing so much harder.

Why Couples Therapists Are Sick of ‘Therapy-Speak’

2025-12-12T09:00:00-05:00

The therapists are being gaslit by gaslighting—they’re being told that it’s happening, but it’s not.

Jonathan Alpert, a therapist in New York and Washington, D.C., told me he saw a couple recently who used the term gaslighting to describe nearly every disagreement they have had. “Let’s say one person forgot to pick up groceries or didn’t accurately recall a conversation; the other would say, ‘Oh, you’re gaslighting me. This is psychological abuse,’” he said. “But they weren’t. They were just having what I would consider pretty normal miscommunications.”

Isabelle Morley told me that she has seen a similar pattern at her Massachusetts practice, where people accuse each other of gaslighting at least once a week. What they’re talking about is rarely actual gaslighting, a form of abuse that involves manipulating someone else’s reality. Instead, Morley said, these couples tend to mean that they feel invalidated or just disagree.

Gaslighting is just one of the “therapy-speak” terms that couples therapists told me their clients are misusing, typically after seeing descriptions of the ideas on social media. Other common, wrongly applied terms include boundaries, triggered, and trauma bond. Some clients proclaim to their therapist that their partner has obsessive-compulsive disorder, bipolar disorder, autism, or ADHD, even though their partner hasn’t been clinically diagnosed with such a condition. Attachment styles—the theory that people have different ways of maintaining relationships—have also entered the arena: Alpert had one client who complained that her husband had “avoidant attachment,” and he, in turn, accused his wife of having “anxious attachment.” Alpert said that “neither of the labels was accurate.”

None of these phrases, according to Terry Real, a therapist based in Massachusetts, is used as frequently as this one: “I’m the spouse of a narcissist.” True narcissistic personality disorder is marked by, among other traits, an abnormally high sense of self-importance and a lack of empathy. And in reality, it’s very rare. (Dena DiNardo, a therapist in Philadelphia, told me, “I don’t know if I’ve sat in front of true narcissists in couples therapy.”) Still, the therapists I spoke with said that their clients seem very sure this unusual diagnosis must apply to their spouse. “People are incredibly confident in these conclusions and are not curious, are not open to discussing them and figuring out if they’re accurate,” Morley said. “They’re coming in as the experts.”

People have been observing for a while now that therapy-speak has been creeping into everyday life. The nine couples therapists I interviewed for this story told me that this language is affecting actual therapy too. They said that rather than clarifying a couple’s predicament, these terms tend to shut down conversation and turn spouses against each other, because people generally get defensive, not collaborative, when they’re called a gaslighter or narcissist.

[Read: That’s it. You’re dead to me.]

Most of the therapists I spoke with said they are glad that people are learning more about mental health. They also acknowledged that people have been misusing psychological terms for practically as long as psychology has existed. Before the advent of social media, people picked up these ideas in self-help books, psychoanalysis, and pop culture. Real said that in the past, couples came to him and said to each other, “I’m dysfunctional, and so are you” or, “You need to look at your issues.”

But many of the therapists told me that too many people get sucked into social-media videos and posts about pop-psych concepts that they then misapply to their own relationships. Instagram slides suggesting that you might be married to a narcissist, for example, can be reassuring when your husband seems kind of selfish and you’ve always wondered why. But checking the accuracy of that statement can be difficult. “It’s a feedback loop,” Hannah Khoddam, a therapist in Southern California, told me, “that never has any challenges.”

Finding words to describe a loved one’s frustrating behavior can feel clarifying, but it can also become a form of “medical-student syndrome,” Morley said, referring to the phenomenon in which doctors in training misdiagnose themselves with the disorders they study. Instead of learning the textbook definitions of psychological disorders, however, laypeople are absorbing the oversimplified versions, then diagnosing their spouse. Alpert told me about a client who insisted that his girlfriend had borderline personality disorder, a rare and serious mental illness. When Alpert asked the man why he thought that, the client said, “‘Well, she gets so emotional when we argue,’” Alpert said. “And come to find out, he had Googled borderline and came up with all these articles and checklists online.”

Another source of all the therapy-speak is other therapists. “I see this tendency more in couples where one member has done a lot of therapy,” Rebecca Howard Eudy, a therapist in Boston, told me. In trying to understand their relationship, some of these clients dish to their individual therapist, who attempts to explain the partner’s behavior without ever having met the person. Real said, “The bane of my existence is often individual therapists who ‘empower’ their clients right out of potentially workable relationships.” Some people, in other words, will come in armed with the idea, in many cases gleaned in individual therapy, that their spouse’s rather normal behavior is actually pathological.

Spouses’ attempts to diagnose each other can become a problem in couples’ sessions, these therapists said, because they distract focus from the dysfunctional patterns that both members of the couple are likely perpetuating. If you call your spouse a narcissist, the takeaway is seemingly that they are the sum total of the problem, and that you have little role in the matter. “It’s really hard to make progress when people are saying it’s always the other person because ‘they’re borderline’ or ‘they’re a narcissist’ or ‘they’re love-bombing me,’ as opposed to, ‘I’m clearly contributing to this dynamic in some way,’” Morley said. She added that to label someone in this way is essentially to say, “I’m not gonna change anything about our relationship. You have to change your personality or change all your behaviors to stay with me.” The labeled partner may feel cornered, and dialogue essentially stops.

Another problem is that therapy-speak can exaggerate the severity of what might be typical conflict. Everyone, after all, interprets things differently; everyone is a little bit self-centered. This doesn’t mean everyone needs psychiatric help. Staying married to a narcissist is hard to imagine; staying married to someone who is merely “not always considerate” is how much of America gets the mortgage paid every month.

[Read: Plenty of people could quit therapy right now]

In some cases, this exaggeration can lead salvageable relationships to divorce. Not every marriage is going to work, of course, and some people should probably leave their spouse. But Andrew Hartz, a clinical-psychology professor at Long Island University and the founder of the Open Therapy Institute, told me, “It feels like almost everybody I know who’s divorced, their ex-partner had something”—as in some sort of diagnosis, genuine or perceived. As Real sees it, wrongly convincing yourself that your spouse is mentally ill, and deciding to end your marriage based mostly on the assumption that their “condition” is intractable, can have serious consequences. “These are families we’re talking about,” Real said. “There are children involved.”

Therapists told me that correcting misused therapy-speak can be difficult because many people’s conception of a counselor is, essentially, that they’re a nice person whom you pay to co-sign your grievances. “I think a lot of therapists are shy about challenging too much,” Hartz said. Some of the therapists I spoke with push back on their clients anyway. DiNardo told me that she says something like this: “Okay, cool, you’ve got this word; you’re using it. It’s two years later. Do you feel any better?” Irina Firstein, a therapist in New York, told me she urges her clients to be more precise: Rather than say they have a “boundary,” for example, they should tell their spouse exactly what they need and why. Several of the therapists I spoke with have written books denouncing the overuse of therapy-speak: Morley’s They’re Not Gaslighting You came out in May; Alpert is publishing Therapy Nation next year.

Sometimes, however, counselors just let the therapy-speak happen. This language appears to be here to stay. Instagram and TikTok have billions of users. More and more people are in individual talk therapy, learning a new vocabulary to apply to their lives. I’ve got issues, which originated decades ago as a psychological euphemism for I’ve got problems, is now so much a part of the lexicon that it no longer registers as originating in therapy. Perhaps gaslight and narcissist are headed there too. Morley said that even after she corrects her clients, they will sometimes still say something like, “He gaslit me. I know, I know; not, like, real gaslighting, the other kind of gaslighting.” At least—as a therapist might put it—that’s progress.

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Why Taylor Swift’s Accent Has Changed

2025-12-03T13:30:00-05:00

The lore has by now been recounted many a time: In 2004, Scott and Andrea Swift moved from central Pennsylvania to Nashville so that their 14-year-old daughter, Taylor, could pursue a career in country music. They bought a house on a lak e, and Taylor started heading to Music Row after school to work with songwriters.

As Swift’s star rose, something else shifted: her voice. Researchers at the University of Minnesota analyzed recorded interviews with Swift throughout her career and found that after she moved to Tennessee, she picked up a southern accent. She began to pronounce my like “mah” and boom like “bee-oom”—features not typically present in a Pennsylvania accent. Matthew Winn, a co-author of the study, told me that these changes suggest that Swift’s voice subtly altered to fit in with the Nashville scene. “If you sing country music but you talk like someone from New York or Pennsylvania,” Winn said, “people might not take you as seriously.”

A decade or so later, after Swift moved to New York City, her vocal pitch lowered. This happens to most women gradually over the course of their life, but Swift’s pitch dropped more suddenly than one would expect. This time, Winn told me, the change seemed to be motivated by Swift’s desire to be heard, rather than to blend in. In those years, Swift was speaking out about women’s rights and other issues, and Winn speculated that she wanted to come across as authoritative, as people with deeper voices are often perceived. (She might also have considered New Yorkers to be more powerful and serious than southerners, and rumbled accordingly.)

[Read: The study-abroad accent might be the real deal]

The researchers studied Swift’s voice as a way of exploring a phenomenon called “second-dialect acquisition,” or the way people learn a new style of speaking. Moving from place to place is the most obvious circumstance that might cause someone’s accent to change, but people’s voices can also evolve when they enter into new relationships or start spending time with different groups of people. When it comes to an accent, “the degree of flexibility within a person over the lifespan is a lot greater than we used to think,” Morgan Sonderegger, a linguist at McGill University, told me.

About a decade ago, the predominant thought within linguistics was that people’s speech doesn’t change much after adolescence. But since then, many examples have emerged of people who contradicted this trend. Rather than immutable features, our accents appear to be more like mirrors, reflecting the people we surround ourselves with. Queen Elizabeth II, for instance, changed her a ccent over time to be more similar to that of her subjects, according to analyses by the University of Munich’s Jonathan Harrington and others. Throughout the early part of the Queen’s reign, Britain underwent significant social change, which meant she began to both interact more with policy makers who had different accents, and hear a wider variety of accents on radio and television. In effect, at various points in her life, the Queen no longer spoke “the Queen’s English.”

Adopting a new accent is mostly a subconscious process. One theory for why it occurs, according to Jennifer Nycz, a linguist at Georgetown University, is that we implicitly adopt the characteristics of others’ speech to bridge social distance and get other people to like us. (In lab experiments, people asked to repeat someone else’s speech will subconsciously shift their own speech style to match what they just heard.) “If you move to a new place where you’re consistently doing these little accommodations in the same direction to a new accent,” Nycz told me, “then after a while some of them will stick.” Another theory holds that it doesn’t matter if we want our new neighbors to like us; we all learn language from the sounds we hear around us, and although this happens most rapidly in early childhood, the process continues into adulthood.

Sometimes, though, accent acquisition is explicit, especially when intelligibility is a concern. Nycz told me that British people in the U.S. will sometimes say water with a vocalized r in restaurants because “watah” can flummox American waiters. Abby Walker, a Virginia Tech linguist who is originally from New Zealand, has started saying tuna when she orders a sandwich in America, because when she says “choona,” as a Kiwi would, she sometimes gets chicken.

Not everyone’s accent changes when they move or enter a new community. (Sonderegger told me he once met a Brit who had lived in Montreal for 40 years, and who, in a still very British accent, told him, “I think I’m one of your non-changers.”) A study that followed 11 people working at an Antarctic research station over the course of about six months found that they did begin to develop the first stages of a “common accent,” including pronouncing goat more like “gut.” But when Sonderegger and his co-authors examined the speech, over several months, of a similarly isolated group—participants on the ninth season of the show Big Brother U.K.—he found that only two of the contestants began to speak more like each other, and that was because they started dating each other. What’s more, some accents are difficult to fully adopt because certain sounds are perceptible only to locals. Nycz told me that Philadelphia has differences in its a sounds that are so specific and fine-grained, you will really learn the proper context for them only if you’re “born in Philadelphia to parents from Philadelphia.”

[Read: The answer, my friend …]

How much your accent changes in a new environment depends on a few factors, according to researchers I interviewed. First, you’ll develop a stronger accent if you’re younger when you move to the new location. Also important is your social network in the new place—whether you meet lots of locals. I remember vacationing in Italy with some American friends who had moved to Modena. The husband, a born-and-bred midwesterner who worked with Italians all day, gesticulated wildly and slipped in the occasional broken-English “What it means?” Your attitude about the new place also matters. If a proud New Yorker who disdains the West Coast moves to California, he probably won’t adopt a surfer-dude way of speaking.

The relative prestige of the accent also seems to play a role. Some evidence suggests that people more readily pick up accents associated with power and status. Walker told me that many people from Appalachia lose their accent if they face negative comments after leaving the region. And in her research, she found that English people in America seem to hang on to their accent a little more tightly than Americans in the U.K. do. “My accent is a wonderful weapon. Why would I change something that’s working so well?” one of her British study participants asked. Brits in Ohio told Walker they get out of speeding tickets by speaking in their native accent; Americans in London told her that they thought they sounded “stupid.”

Sonderegger said longitudinal studies that have surveyed people over the course of their life suggest that accents follow a U-shaped pattern, in which a person’s voice changes as they enter college or the working world, before gradually reverting to their home accent in old age. The thinking is that, as we launch our careers, we seek to sound professional and to fit in with our colleagues, but in old age, well, we just stop caring as much. Toward the end of her life, Queen Elizabeth began once again to sound more like she did in the 1950s. One study found that Ruth Bader Ginsburg mellowed her distinctive New York accent while arguing cases as a young lawyer, but embraced it again as a Supreme Court justice who had nothing left to prove.

Adopting a second accent might seem similar to code-switching, the process in which a speaker addresses different audiences with a different tone and vocabulary. But code-switching, researchers told me, involves intentionally moving between styles of speaking throughout the day, depending on your audience (for example, using baby talk with your toddler and corporate buzzwords at the office). An accent shift is more all-encompassing and subconscious.

For the most part, people don’t forget their original accent when they move to a new place—they just pick up a new one. They now can speak with both accents. You might have noticed something like this, such as “when you’re in college and your roommate calls home for the first time, and you can completely tell they’re talking to their parents,” Nycz said, “because their accent switches back to North Carolina or wherever it is they’re from.”

Kendall Spell, a 24-year-old from Clinton, a rural North Carolina town, told me she softened her heavy southern accent when she started college in Charlotte, because people would remark on it so much that she felt a little embarrassed. (Her home accent, she said, is not dissimilar to Parker Posey’s deep drawl on The White Lotus.) But she said she finds that whenever she’s around her family and friends for a while, her accent “does thicken up.” In this way, people’s voices can carry the traces of all the cities they’ve ever called home. Justice may be due to Hilaria Baldwin, the Boston-born wife of Alec Baldwin, who spent part of her childhood in Spain and has been mocked for sometimes slipping into a Spanish accent in adulthood. She might not be faking the accent so much as letting it break through after its years in hibernation.

Some people find changes to their accent distressing, or at least a little bittersweet. Expats may develop an in-between accent that’s not quite native and not quite their original dialect. Walker told me she now sounds too American for her New Zealand friends, but too New Zealand for most Americans. “No one will claim me,” she said. When she interviewed Americans in England many years ago, she met one American woman who was unhappy that she sounded somewhat English, because a family member would tease her about it whenever she returned to the U.S. Walker noted in her write-up that “she kept coming back to this genuine concern for the next five minutes of our conversation.”

Mary Skinner, a TikTok creator who moved from Northern Virginia to Edinburgh, Scotland, about a year and a half ago, told me that her intonation has since become more Scottish. Her sentences now rise rather than fall at the end, and she says “hiya” rather than “hi” when she walks into shops. Sometimes, she says, these linguistic shifts feel like an act of betrayal. The way you speak “connects you to your roots and your hometown, and then to hear yourself changing that without even really thinking about it,” she said, is a reminder that you’re “not the same person you were when you lived back home.”

This change may be uncomfortable, but, as research shows, it’s not at all unusual. Like Swift, many of us have distinct phases of our lives, and each new era may sound different from the last.

The Most Useless Piece of Parenting Advice

2025-11-07T10:00:00-05:00

Possibly the most frustrated I ever got during my pregnancy was when I read a tip in a baby-advice book that said something like, “Swap child care with one of your friends—it takes a village!” At the time, I lived an hour from most of my friends, almost none of whom had kids. I didn’t have a village, but now I had another thing to feel bad about.

No one knows where the adage “It takes a village” came from exactly. Though it was popularized by Hillary Clinton’s 1996 book of the same name, an NPR investigation suggested that it might be “some sort of pseudo-African mix of Hallmark and folk sentiments.” But the proverb is now ubiquitous, along with its equally grating corollary, “Don’t be afraid to ask for help.” To name just one example, the American Academy of Pediatrics’ baby bible, Caring for Your Baby and Young Child, asserts “Family and friends can be helpful; don’t be bashful about asking for assistance” and “Try to create a ‘village’ around you.”

A few “villagers” did come through for me after my son was born: A friend with a slightly older child lent me baby gear, several people visited me during my maternity leave, and a neighbor who was busy with her own kids selflessly offered to watch mine if I ever needed her to. I don’t want to minimize these contributions, without which my Zoloft dosage would doubtless be much higher. And I’m sure some moms are able to create an even bigger village. Maybe they moved back to their hometown when they got pregnant—or, blessed be, their parents moved to be closer to them. Maybe they are part of a faith community that nudges their members to help one another. Maybe they’re doing some sort of communal-living thing, I don’t know.

[Read: Why parents struggle so much in the world’s richest country]

But not every mother is able to create a village of free or cheap helpers whom they already know. Times have changed since Millennials were little and neighborhoods had lots more stay-at-home moms available to pitch in. For nearly 70 percent of kids under 6 today, both parents work, compared with half in 1985. Your friends with kids might not be able to do school pickup in an emergency, because they, too, might be working. “We just don’t have as many people around,” Elliot Haspel, a child-care researcher who has written for The Atlantic, told me. “There are just fewer people physically available to call.”

Highly educated women, who are a growing proportion of American mothers, are more likely to live far away from their family than those without college degrees. These long distances put the most common type of “village” help—grandma and grandpa—out of reach. About a third of Americans with a postgraduate degree don’t live within an hour’s drive of any of their extended family, compared with 14 percent of those who have a high-school degree or less, according to a 2022 Pew survey. I spoke with a variety of mothers for this story, many of whom told me that they did consider moving closer to their family but it wasn’t possible, because of their own or their partner’s career, or because their kids needed resources that were available only in a large metro area, or because raising kids was too expensive in their hometown. (I interviewed mothers exclusively because studies show that child care tends to be performed by women, and because the “village” advice is largely addressed to moms.)

Plus, to truly get help from your extended family, you need to live not just close, but really close. Adriana Reyes, a Cornell professor who studies proximity among family members, told me that some people think that by moving, say, within an hour of their parents, they’ll be able to rely on them for urgent child-care needs, such as picking up the kids if you’re working late. Realistically, she said, “you’re gonna see them more regularly, but I don’t think you’re gonna be able to have the same kind of emergency backup.” And even if your parents do live right down the block, they might not be much help—as people have kids later in life, their own parents are also older and may be less adept at child care. I noticed this myself on a recent trip home to visit my elderly parents, when my toddler waddled up to a fragile glass lamp and broke it while my dad sat two feet away, staring at Russian disinformation on his iPad.

When I asked about the village concept in a Facebook group for moms in the D.C. region, a highly educated, highly transient area, I received one type of response over and over: I don’t have a village, so I buy one. Some of these moms have nannies, house cleaners, dog walkers, and house managers. Or they have less expensive villagers: Various moms told me that the McDonald’s drive-through, Instacart, and Doordash were their “village.” Paying people is a remedy for not having a village (and indeed, it’s the one that I chose), but it’s hardly a solution for everyone, or even for most people: Many parents cannot afford to pay a nanny a sizable chunk of their salary.

But also, a village implies a loose, reciprocal network of people who want to help one another, not an employee who is obligated to work for an employer at certain times. The idea of the village is that you might have someone who wants to help you, because they like you, and because you might help them, too. Finding people like that can be difficult. Liz Suders, a mom of twin toddlers in southern Pennsylvania, told me she is so village-less that when she experienced a medical emergency days after giving birth, she felt she had no option but to wait for her husband to drive hours home from a work trip to watch her newborn twins before she could go to the hospital. She hoped she wouldn’t have a stroke while she waited. Madelline Castillo, who lives in California, told me that when she moved to the suburbs recently, she found a “backyard culture” where you “smile to your neighbor, but then it ends right there.” Castillo said that she wishes she knew who in her orbit would be “willing, available and have the time, effort, et cetera,” to be her village.

Peanut, one of several apps that allow moms to find one another, much as Tinder helps singles find dates, aims to be one solution. “In real life, we don’t walk around with a tag that says ‘eight weeks postpartum’ or ‘trying to conceive for six years,’” the app’s founder, Michelle Kennedy, told me. “But on Peanut, that’s exactly what you do.” Kennedy said that the app’s typical user is about 30 and lives in an urban area, and the most important predictor of whether two users will become friends is their proximity to each other.

[Read: Doomed to be a tradwife]

During my pregnancy, I used Peanut to chat with a few potential mom-friend candidates. But for me, the process suffered from the same pitfalls as online dating: too many options, no clear reason to “go out” with anyone in particular, and tedious app-based small talk that made me want to die. Kennedy told me that making friends as an adult takes a certain level of bravery, and, at least at the time, I seemed to lack the fortitude.

Having friends, though, is no guarantee that you’ll have a village. Parents of school-age kids tend to be swamped with extracurriculars in the evenings or sports practice on weekends. A Northern Virginia mom, Kristyn Admire, told me that she does have a friend group, but the area’s size and transitory nature, combined with peoples’ crammed schedules, make it hard to form a village. She described village building as “just a bunch of type-A, busy people trying to coordinate their personal and professional and social lives. It just seems really hard.”

I did talk with moms who had managed to convene a village of sorts. Another Northern Virginia mom named Cait, who asked to be identified by just her first name for professional reasons, told me that she “leeched off her kids” by befriending their friends’ parents. But this was possible, she said, only after she cut back at work and had more time to get involved in their school. For the years when she and her husband both worked full-time, “I really didn't meet anybody,” Cait told me. “And we were more alone than ever and needed the help more than ever.”

“It takes a village” is advice that sounds communitarian, but in fact, it pushes for an individualistic solution to a societal problem. And it can distract people from demanding the kinds of solutions that could truly help families: longer parental leave; more flexible remote-work policies; child-care support; a work culture that accepts the constancy of kids’ sicknesses. Instead, families are left to “ask for help” on their own: You find the village. You join the app. You move closer to your mom. You need to be friendlier, more active, more approachable, more involved.

Those who can cobble together a network—by virtue of luck or wealth or people skills—come out ahead. Everyone else, the “village” wisdom implies, isn’t asking hard enough.

Avoiding Ultra-Processed Foods Is Completely Unrealistic

2025-10-13T08:00:00-04:00

One day recently, my son had two long, back-to-back doctor appointments, which meant he was in the car and in waiting rooms for much of the afternoon. His lunch and snack would not have earned me a healthy-mom award: peanut-butter puffs, a grape-jelly Uncrustables sandwich, and a package of mixed-berry oat bites. All ultra-processed foods, the new boogeyman of public health.

I have many years of experience as a health reporter, and I understand the importance of healthy eating. I’m well aware of the fervent push by both right- and left-leaning health authorities to get Americans to eat fewer ultra-processed foods. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that parents limit their kids’ consumption of ultra-processed foods, including “anything in a crinkly bag”—that is, everything my son ate that day. Removing ultra-processed foods from Americans’ diets has also become a central plank of the MAHA movement, led by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who blames them for “driving the obesity epidemic.” On the podcast from Levels, the glucose-monitoring company co-founded by President Donald Trump’s surgeon-general nominee, Casey Means, one expert suggested that ultra-processed foods should be in a back section of the supermarket, covered in warnings about their dangers. On the internet, crunchy moms of seemingly all political stripes post recipes for homemade goldfish crackers, for example, or hand-sculpted chicken nuggets. TikTok influencers show off the unprocessed steamed cauliflower and carrot salad that they’ve prepared for their toddlers. (Suspiciously missing are images of the toddlers actually eating this food.)

Nevertheless, like many working parents, I find that feeding my family a diet free of ultra-processed foods is impossible. After a long day of fighting with my 18-month-old over whether he can touch the trash (no), and whether he can eat the trash (also no), sometimes all I can do is throw some (ultra-processed) mac and cheese at him and drown my own sorrows in some Trader Joe’s white queso dip (also ultra-processed). The efforts to get parents to give up these types of comforts in favor of home-roasted vegetables are frustrating—and unrealistic.

It’s true that ultra-processed foods—which tend to be defined by the fact that they contain artificial ingredients and require several industrial steps to create—are, on the whole, not as good for you as unprocessed foods. Diets high in ultra-processed foods are correlated with a much greater risk of mortality. A recent study of 55 overweight people found that a diet of minimally processed foods, such as chicken and vegetables, led to twice as much weight loss as one consisting of healthy-ish ultra-processed foods, such as cereal, plant-based milk, and flavored yogurt—even when both diets met British nutrition guidelines. Ultra-processed foods seem to make people overeat, because they contain more calories per gram and less water and fiber than, say, fruits and vegetables, and because they tend to be what nutritionists call “hyperpalatable,” or extremely tasty, due to their combinations of sugar, fat, and salt.

[Read: Coke, Twinkies, Skittles, and … whole-grain bread?]

Ultra-processed foods have, of course, existed for more than a century. Margarine, one of the first such concoctions, has been maligned nearly since its invention, with one turn-of-the-20th-century U.S. senator disparaging it as “matured under the chill of death, blended with vegetable oils and flavored by chemical tricks.” But the term ultra-processed foods was conceived in 2009 by the Brazilian researcher Carlos Monteiro, who had noticed changes in Brazilians’ diets and wanted to warn of the increasing consumption of prepackaged foods, as the journalist Julia Belluz and the researcher Kevin Hall write in their new book, Food Intelligence. Monteiro believed it was not sugar and fat per se that were contributing to obesity, but those components’ being processed and recombined into ready-to-eat snacks. In the years after Monteiro’s coinage of the term, studies about the harms of ultra-processed foods trickled into medical journals, and mainstream food experts in America and elsewhere recommended sharply limiting their consumption.

Most nutritionists still agree that eating a bag of corn chips is far less healthy than eating an ear of corn. But some are now acknowledging that the “ultra-processed” category, which makes up about 60 percent of the American diet, has become too broad and difficult for many families to understand. “It’s insanity to me that bran flakes is in the same category as sweets,” Nicola Guess, a dietitian and researcher at the University of Oxford, told me. (Guess has consulted for companies that make plant-based meat alternatives—which are also ultra-processed foods.) Jimmy Chun Yu Louie, a dietitian at Swinburne University of Technology, in Australia, pointed out in a recent review paper that tofu is sometimes categorized as an ultra-processed food, despite being “a nutritionally rich protein central to many Asian cuisines for generations.” He concluded, “The evidence suggests that not all UPFs are inherently ‘bad.’”

Lumping soy milk and Takis in the same category has obscured the fact that although many ultra-processed foods are unhealthy, some are reasonably nutritious. Though the consumption of some ultra-processed foods is associated with “every bad outcome you can imagine,” Guess said, foods such as ultra-processed yogurt, bread, and breakfast cereals can be neutral or even beneficial. In fact, in the study that found that eating minimally processed foods led to twice as much weight loss, the participants who ate somewhat-healthy ultra-processed foods also lost weight—just not as much as the people eating minimally processed food. After all, bottled salad dressing is an ultra-processed food that people use in small amounts on healthy foods such as lettuce and cucumbers, which doesn’t necessarily negate the vegetables’ health benefits. In a 2023 study, researchers described how it was possible to prepare a day’s worth of healthy meals in which at least 80 percent of the calories were from ultra-processed foods, with a breakfast of, for instance, instant oatmeal and ultra-filtered milk, and a dinner of gluten-free pasta. Ultra-processed foods can also be essential to people with dietary restrictions: Splenda, oat milk, and protein powder are all ultra-processed. (So is baby formula, which is necessary for infants whose mothers cannot or do not wish to feed them with breast milk.)

More of kids’ than adults’ daily calories come from ultra-processed foods—a fact that, if you’re a parent, you probably already know. Ohhh, do you ever know. You know the head-popping befrazzlement of running late for day-care pickup and needing to just get something into the kid before bedtime, so you reach for frozen chicken nuggets. You know what it’s like to spend hours cooking homemade pasta sauce with hidden veggies for said child, who, because of their picky eating, is on the brink of scurvy, only to be told they “don’t yike it.” (And then to find yourself eating homemade pasta sauce with hidden veggies all week to avoid wasting it.) You know of the best-laid plans to prep homemade veggie bites on a Sunday, only to have to run your kid to urgent care that day, so you beeline instead to the holy land of ultra-processed food: Trader Joe’s.

[Read: Public health can’t stop making the same nutrition mistake]

Unprocessed foods typically require more effort than ultra-processed foods to make palatable, and more money to buy—which many overstretched, budget-strapped parents can’t spend. When cooking an entirely unprocessed meal, “You have to be like, What am I going to cook? What am I shopping for?” Julia Wolfson, a Johns Hopkins University health-policy professor, told me, adding that you then also have to prep and store the food in a way that it won’t go bad. “It’s a lot of planning and cognitive functioning and mental energy, which is not time- or cost-neutral.” Then, of course, there’s the actual cooking: “For a lot of people,” Wolfson said, “you’ve got kids running around, you’ve got stuff going on, you’re multitasking.” And don’t forget the cleanup! In a 2024 study, Wolfson found that people who spend more time cooking consume fewer ultra-processed foods and more unprocessed foods, and other studies have found that people who spend more time cooking tend to have higher-quality diets overall. The average American, however, spends less than an hour a day preparing food.

Reams of studies have also found that healthy diets are more expensive than unhealthy ones—sometimes as much as doubly so. “My tomato sauce that I buy with no high-fructose corn syrup and no sugar, all fresh ingredients, costs twice as much as the other ones,” Christopher Gardner, a nutrition scientist at Stanford, told me. Jessica Wilson, a dietitian based in Sacramento, says that many of her clients are on Medicaid or SNAP benefits, and that if they didn’t eat processed foods, they would skip meals because the unprocessed alternatives are too expensive. She recommends that, rather than avoid all ultra-processed foods, her clients buy canned soups and chilis, cured meats and cheeses, boxed soup broths, and various refrigerated and frozen meals. And even in cases where an unprocessed diet is cheaper than an ultra-processed one, time also has a cost, and many people would rather pay a company to chop or cook their foods for them.

[Read: How baby-led weaning almost ruined my life]

Unprocessed-food moms on social media tend to gloss over the sheer amount of money and prep work involved in life without convenience foods. Gretchen Adler—whose Instagram bio reads “Real food. Better health.”—made her own sourdough pizza, ranch dressing, and honey-sweetened cake for her 4-year-old’s birthday, with no mention of who was watching said 4-year-old during this culinary marathon. Ballerina Farm’s Hannah Neeleman, a mom of eight, seems to spend hours a day making homemade scones and churning butter, which, thanks to the power of time-lapse videography, looks like it takes just a few minutes. But Neeleman is essentially paid to do that; being a farm-wife influencer is one of her jobs. Meanwhile, a life of constant butter-churning is “not how the vast majority of people live or even want to live,” Guess, the Oxford researcher, said.

The dietitians and nutritionists I spoke with acknowledged that, these days, most families cannot completely avoid ultra-processed foods. Instead, these experts promote a kind of harm reduction: adding fresh vegetables to a bowl of instant ramen, say, or just minimizing the amount of saturated fat, salt, and added sugar in the ultra-processed foods you do eat. Guess tells people to worry less about things such as ultra-processed yogurt and to instead avoid the stuff that we “already know is crap,” such as Doritos and candy. Gardner recommended that, when evaluating an ultra-processed food, people consider how many strange-sounding ingredients it has. The fewer additives, the better. And, crucially, compare it with what you might eat instead. If the “instead” is a minimally processed double bacon cheeseburger, just get the ultra-processed dressing and put it on a fresh salad. Your kids still won’t touch it, but at least it’ll make healthy eating a little easier for you.

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What Women Wish They’d Known Before Trying to Get Pregnant

2025-09-21T08:00:00-04:00

When Anna De Souza was in her early 30s, she asked her ob-gyn when she should start thinking about having kids. “When you were 26,” she remembers the doctor saying.

She was surprised. She’d had some sense that fertility decreases with age but didn’t know how significant the drop-off was. No doctor had ever told her, and she certainly didn’t learn about it in school. She took sex ed at her New Jersey high school in the late 1990s, but she said it focused mostly on trying to scare students out of having sex. She remembers little about the class besides watching a graphic VHS video of a woman giving birth.

De Souza, a journalist in Philadelphia, now wishes that class had included the basics of fertility and reproduction. A more robust sex-ed program, she thinks, could have prompted her to check her egg count or freeze her eggs when she was younger, or even try to have kids sooner. She ended up having twins at 36, after two rounds of IVF, and later a son, also through IVF. But if she’d known more about fertility earlier in her life, she might have tried for a family “the good, old-fashioned, fun way,” she said, “instead of the needles way.” Teenagers, she believes, should understand that just because they don’t want kids at 16 doesn’t mean they won’t want kids ever.

She’s far from the only person who feels this way. Fertility doctors and other experts told me that better sex education—with a curriculum that explains both how to prevent pregnancy and how to boost fertility—could help more families have the number of children they desire. This is especially essential as more people wait until they’re older to start trying to have kids. According to the doctors I spoke with, many patients arrive at fertility clinics filled with misconceptions about their own reproductive biology. “It’s been stunning how ill-informed so many people are,” Michael Zinaman, a reproductive endocrinologist in New York, told me.

[Read: The questions sex-ed students always ask]

The doctors I spoke with pointed to some things that they believe all women and men should know about fertility but in many cases don’t. Most obvious, getting pregnant is easier when you’re young. When women see stories in the media about female celebrities who have a baby at 50, Rashmi Kudesia, a reproductive endocrinologist in Houston, told me, they might assume it’s likely to happen for them, too. Additionally, Kudesia said some of her patients don’t realize that their being underweight or overweight can contribute to infertility, as can untreated sexually transmitted infections. Or they don’t know that doctors advise women to take a prenatal vitamin containing folic acid—essential to the development of a fetus—even when they’re only thinking about getting pregnant. Men should know, too, that lifestyle factors, including alcohol and tobacco use, can affect their sperm quality, which in turn can affect their partner’s likelihood of getting pregnant.

Those who may end up trying to conceive later in life could benefit from even more information. Zinaman told me that many of his patients don’t know that a woman has a brief window each month during which it’s possible to get pregnant. Kudesia said that some of her patients come in with overly optimistic views of how well treatments such as IVF can work.

Surveys of women’s knowledge of fertility lend support to these anecdotes. A 2023 study of nearly 1,800 women ages 18 to 29 found that only 59 percent knew the phase during the menstrual cycle when they were most likely to get pregnant, and most erroneously thought that a woman’s ovaries continually make eggs until she reaches menopause. (Women are born with all of the eggs they’ll ever have, and the eggs’ quality and quantity diminish with time.) In a 2016 study of mostly low-income women, just over half knew what ovulation meant, and fewer than a third knew when it occurs. In a 2017 study, reproductive-age women correctly answered an average of only about 16 out of 29 fertility questions, covering topics such as the percentage of pregnancies that end in miscarriage and the lifestyle factors that decrease fertility. Women studying to become doctors fared little better, answering an average of only about 19 questions correctly, leading the authors to conclude that “fertility knowledge is low among U.S. women of reproductive age, including those with children and even among medical trainees.”

Even women who are actively trying to get pregnant tend to be underinformed: A 2021 review found that women who wanted to conceive had “low to moderate fertility knowledge.” In a 2022 study of women struggling to conceive, only a quarter correctly recognized the week during their cycle when they had the highest chance of getting pregnant. This lack of knowledge has real consequences: “A lot of the misunderstanding around fertility and reproductive health lends people to either not be able to have the family size that they desire,” Kudesia said, “or to have lost a lot of time along the way.”

That’s in part why Kudesia and some other doctors think that fertility should be taught as a standard part of sex ed in schools. Although doctors could try to give patients this information themselves, most doctors’ appointments are too brief for a long lecture on ovulation, and some patients don’t bring up fertility challenges until after they’ve started trying to have a baby. “What I hear all the time is people thinking that, Well, if my age is a concern with regards to fertility, my doctor will bring it up to me,” she said. “And that’s definitely not a fair assumption.” What’s more, doctors who specialize in fertility often have long wait times for appointments, and some don’t accept insurance, putting their counsel out of reach for many. Better sex ed in middle school and high school, including lessons on ovulation and fertility cycles, could help make people aware, earlier in their life, of the factors they need to consider if they eventually want to have children. Fertility education in school also has the potential to reach far more people than individual doctors can; not everyone goes to the doctor every year, but almost everyone goes to middle school and high school.

Fertility-education efforts haven’t been studied extensively, but the limited research that does exist suggests that they can be effective. Studies from Canada, Spain, and Japan found that exposure to information about fertility at least temporarily increased young adults’ knowledge of the topic. Conversely, the consequences of educators not broaching the topic in schools can be significant: In a 2019 study based on interviews with 54 American women experiencing infertility, several noted the “conspicuous absence of conversations about reproductive health and fertility from their schools’ sex education.” One 39-year-old woman told the study’s authors that if she and her husband had known more about fertility earlier, “we would not have waited so long before trying to conceive.”

Some places have already implemented more robust sex ed in their schools. California recently enacted a Know Your Period law, modeled after a similar law in Washington, D.C., which requires schools to teach all middle- and high-school students about the menstrual cycle and menopause. And about 500 school districts across the country use a comprehensive curriculum called Rights, Respect, Responsibility, which covers menstruation, the fertile window, and how an embryo implants in a uterus. Kudesia praised one lesson from the curriculum as “excellent,” saying it “seemed like an age-appropriate way of discussing things.” She told me, “When we’re in high school or younger, we often get the impression that if you just touch a boy, you’re going to get pregnant.” A more well-rounded sex-ed curriculum would show that it’s not quite that simple.

[Read: Men might be the key to an American baby boom]

But these programs face the same headwinds that sex ed in general contends with. Attempts to expand sex ed in schools typically fail for a few reasons, among them that some school districts can’t afford to train teachers and develop or purchase additional curricula about sexuality, and anything having to do with sex and bodies can be highly contentious among parents. Kudesia noted that the Rights, Respect, Responsibility curriculum might not be popular in today’s political climate, because it includes discussions of gender identity, a fact that the curriculum has been scrutinized for in the past.

The Trump administration, too, is keen on the idea of fertility education, though not primarily through school-based sex ed: In April, The New York Times reported that a policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation proposed to the White House that it use government funds to educate women about their menstrual cycles. And in July, the Times wrote that the administration was offering a $1.5 million grant to start an “infertility training center” aimed at helping women conceive. But Robin Jensen, a University of Utah communications professor who has researched sex ed, points out that these programs seem as if they’re aiming to increase the U.S. birth rate and not to also help people prevent pregnancy, if they desire. “Fertility education is needed in sex education,” Jensen told me. “But it needs to be the kind that is designed to increase fertility awareness and knowledge across the board rather than the kind that offers only part of the story.”

Young people themselves seem to want to have this more expansive, impartial information about reproduction. The idea for California’s period bill came from a high-school student, Sriya Srinivasan, who had stopped menstruating for three years, didn’t understand why, and felt too embarrassed to ask her doctor. She told me that she thinks kids should have a place to learn about reproduction other than the internet—a place where, as she put it about a hypothetical student, “I can sit and listen to this, and I don’t have to feel that stigma or shame from searching it up online myself, or I don’t have to feel the stigma of my family shaming me.” Ideally, Srinivasan and other teenagers would come away from sex ed understanding both how not to get pregnant and how to get pregnant: basic information about the human body that the body’s owner deserves to know.

*Illustration by Vivian Dehning. Sources: VintageMedStock / Getty; Bettmann / Getty; Jeffry W. Myers / Corbis / Getty.

The Big Lebowski Friendship Test

2025-09-01T08:00:00-04:00

“So, should we Lebowski, or should we not Lebowski?” I asked my friend Alex as we finished our pizza and wine on a recent evening.

I felt like I was asking her if she wanted to make out. The Big Lebowski—the 1998 Coen-brothers movie about bowling, pot, and mistaken identity—is one of my favorites, and I was nervous about introducing it to her. I like to use Lebowski quotes as a way to assert myself while, like Jeff Bridges’s character, “the Dude,” not taking things too seriously. There’s a Lebowski-ism for virtually every tricky situation: Asked to work on a Saturday? “I don’t roll on Shabbas.” Someone does something outrageous? “This is not ’Nam … There are rules!” Disagree about something? “That’s just, like, your opinion, man.” Whenever life has been especially difficult, I’ve returned to the movie and found solace in its “whatever, man” ethos. When I was addled by postpartum depression and my baby would cry nonstop, I would watch Lebowski clips on YouTube and savor a rare laugh.

But it’s a strange movie, and I have known Alex for only a couple of years. I was worried that she would dislike it so much that she would kind of dislike me too, through osmosis. Or that I would realize that we have completely different senses of humor, and that perhaps we aren’t very close after all. In Lebowski terms, would our friendship abide? Or would we be out of our element?

Jitters such as these are rather common. “If something really matters to you,” Beverley Fehr, a University of Winnipeg psychologist, told me, “there’s a vulnerability in sharing it with someone else.” When we declare a favorite book, movie, or album and introduce it to others, Jeffrey Hall, a communications-studies professor at the University of Kansas, told me, “what we’re doing is saying, ‘This is an aspect of my identity that I’m willingly putting out there in order for other people to know me. And if you reject this thing, you reject me.’” Tom Vanderbilt, the author of You May Also Like, said that recommending something to someone can be like giving a gift, in that “it says something about you, but you’re also trying to anticipate what they might like.”

[Read: What’s really behind the cult of Labubu]

Often, our friends will like what we like: Several researchers told me that most people’s friends are extremely similar to them in terms of age, education level, political attitudes, and leisure pursuits. These similarities tend to include cultural tastes. Researchers who have shown groups of people clips of, say, Food, Inc. and America’s Funniest Home Videos have found that people whose brains responded similarly were more likely to become and stay friends. We tend to like people who like the same things as us because they validate our view of the world: “I must be right because there’s this other person who sees it exactly the same way” is how Fehr explained this (largely subconscious) line of thinking to me. And then, once people become friends, they tend to conform to each other’s tastes and preferences. If they like it, we must like it, too—after all, we’re so similar!

The trouble is, Fehr told me, we usually want our friends to be even more similar to us than they actually are. “When we’re presenting something to a friend and we don’t know if the friend will see it the same way we do,” she said, “one of the fears is that we’re going to realize that we aren’t as similar as we thought we were.” Fehr once had a group of friends over to watch Nebraska, a movie she loved, and remembers “not getting too much of a reaction to it.” This kind of letdown can be a threat to your perception of the friendship: Do you not know them as well as you thought you did? Fehr remembers feeling a little hurt, before eventually letting it go. But she hasn’t planned another movie night with that friend group since.

If a friend doesn’t love our favorite cultural artifact, we might try to resolve the resulting discomfort in a few ways. We might change our own minds about it, telling ourselves Nebraska’s not that great after all; we might try changing their minds about it; or, potentially, we might change the way we think about the friendship, Angela Bahns, a psychologist at Wellesley College, told me.

Whether a disagreement over a beloved book or movie sparks friction in the friendship, Bahns said, depends on how well you know the friend; what else you have in common; and how important that particular book, movie, or show is to you. Sometimes, this kind of difference can cause an unexpected level of tension: When Lidia Wiens, a 39-year-old in Seattle, invited her friend Julia over to watch her favorite movie, Sleepless in Seattle, she thought Julia, an agreeable woman with whom she shared similar taste, would love it. But to her dismay, she noticed that Julia was looking at her phone a lot, and occasionally, Julia would make negative comments about the characters. Wiens felt awkward, and the two had a bit of a fight about it. They both ultimately apologized, but Wiens thinks that in the future, she won’t put so much emotional stock in sharing her favorite books and movies with other people. “I don’t know why it became so personal,” Wiens told me. She felt like she wanted her friend’s genuine response to the movie, but she also wanted the genuine response to be a positive one.

[Read: I see your smartphone-addicted life]

As for me, good news: Alex agreed to Lebowski! But I didn’t get any less nervous as the movie staggered through its plot, such as it is. At the time of Lebowski’s release, The Guardian called the film “a bunch of ideas shoveled into a bag and allowed to spill out at random,” and I was finding it hard to refute that assessment. In the movie, a burnout named Jeffrey “the Dude” Lebowski is hired by a millionaire with the same name to rescue his kidnapped wife. Hijinks ensue when the Dude’s best friend hatches a plan to keep the wealthier Lebowski’s ransom money for the Dude and himself. It also features a group of nihilists, a porn kingpin, a bowling competition, and a storyline about the millionaire’s adult daughter’s quest to get pregnant. Actually, I wondered as Alex and I shared a bag of popcorn, why are there so many characters? Is this even a good movie? I grew irritated by its gratuitousness, as exemplified by a scene in which a topless woman bounces on a trampoline outside the porn kingpin’s house. I wasn’t sure how to wordlessly impart to Alex that this isn’t the kind of thing that I, a nice suburban mom, would condone.

Alex didn’t seem to laugh much, and I paused the movie several times to reassure her that we didn’t have to finish it if she didn’t want to. When it ended, I quickly noted how tired I was, and that she must be, too, giving her a chance to make a quick exit without a lot of commentary. Which she did. Lebowski’s not for everyone, and that’s okay, I tried to reassure myself as I padded upstairs to bed.

But my worries about whether she at least mildly appreciated my weird little comfort watch were resolved a few days later. I brought in the mail to find that she had sent me a onesie for my son, emblazoned with the words little Lebowski urban achievers. We did abide, after all.

The States Where It’s Riskier to Have a Baby

2025-08-22T07:00:00-04:00

After Kaitlyn Kash delivered her baby daughter at Austin’s Ascension Seton Medical Center in July 2023, she began hemorrhaging. Her doctor told her that her placenta had not come out of her body as it should have after the baby was delivered and that she would need a D&C—a procedure that removes the contents of the uterus.

Kash consented, but then, she told me, nothing happened. “Are we going to the operating room?” Kash kept asking. She started shaking and vomiting. Hospital staff took her newborn daughter off her chest.

After about 45 minutes, Kash was wheeled to the OR—where, she said, she faced more delays. “People were running around, and there was slamming of cabinets,” she told me. The staff didn’t seem prepared. Kash remembers thinking that she was going to die, that she would never get to name her daughter. She struggled to speak, then passed out.

When she awoke after the procedure, a nurse told her that she was lucky she still had her uterus. She’d bled so much, she ended up needing a transfusion.

Kash didn’t understand what had happened, nor, she says, did the hospital tell her. Only after being discharged and speaking with a nurse-practitioner friend did she realize that her experience was not typical of a D&C. The procedure does not typically take hours, involve significant blood loss, or risk the loss of a uterus.

It is, however, commonly used for first-trimester abortions. The words of the hospital social worker Kash spoke with before she was discharged stuck out to her: “We don’t do D&Cs anymore,” the woman said, according to Kash. Of course, emergencies during delivery can be chaotic anywhere. But Kash began to suspect that, because Texas had banned virtually all abortions in 2022, following the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, either the equipment to perform the D&C was not ready, or the hospital was struggling to justify performing one, even for a placenta. Soon, she joined a lawsuit against the state of Texas over its abortion laws. (Kash provided medical records that support that she had a D&C and lost blood. The hospital did not respond to a request for comment, and it is not part of Kash’s lawsuit.)

I found Kash’s experience particularly unnerving because my husband and I are planning a move to a state that bans abortion after six weeks. After hearing and reading stories like hers, we are wondering if our move means that we should not have another child. Kash’s experience is representative of the kinds of delays, confusion, and other substandard care that some pregnant women now experience in the 19 states that enacted significant abortion restrictions after Dobbs. Pregnancy and childbirth are risky no matter where you live, but the grim stories and maternal-health statistics coming out of abortion-restrictive states have made me consider how safe it is to have a baby in one of them.

[Read: ‘That’s something you won’t recover from as a doctor’]

Today, Kash doesn’t blame the doctors or staffers at the hospital; she blames Texas’s abortion laws for causing unnecessary confusion. She wishes she could have been pregnant and delivered her baby somewhere else. But at the same time, her best friends live in Austin, and her close family lives in Dallas and Houston. “It’s not easy to leave,” she said. “Texas is my home.”

Every year, of course, hundreds of thousands of people safely have babies in Texas and other states with near or total abortion bans. But some women with pregnancy complications do encounter doctors who are afraid to act quickly to provide life- or health-preserving terminations, according to interviews I did with legal and medical experts, patients, and 15 doctors who practice in these states. Though the bans make exceptions to protect the mother’s life, they contain so much uncertainty that some doctors, fearing prison time or the loss of their license, try hard to avoid providing abortions, even when they are medically indicated.

Sometimes, a doctor may be too scared to give the patient an abortion and so point her to a neighboring state. The delays involved in travel can push inevitable abortions later into pregnancy, when they can become more complicated. Other times, the fear manifests as doctors choosing a more invasive or less-effective procedure instead of one that might be considered an abortion. Sarah Osmundson, an obstetrician in Tennessee, offered me the example of an ectopic pregnancy, in which an embryo implants outside the uterus. Ectopic pregnancies are almost never viable, and if left untreated can be fatal for the mother. The safest and simplest way to address an ectopic pregnancy is to give the patient methotrexate. But this drug can be seen as an abortifacient, so some doctors in restrictive states might opt to remove the patient’s fallopian tube instead, according to Osmundson, which could impair her future fertility. “We’re requiring a patient to undergo a surgical procedure as opposed to a very safe medical treatment that we have,” she said. This nearly happened to Representative Kat Cammack, a Florida Republican, when she went to an emergency room with an ectopic pregnancy in 2024 and where, she said, doctors resisted giving her methotrexate because they were worried about losing their medical licenses or going to jail for doing so.

Even if a doctor is comfortable providing a medically indicated abortion, they need to find scrub techs, nursing staff, and anesthesiologists who are, as well. And they might not be able to. “Abortion care doesn’t happen individually in a hospital,” says Leilah Zahedi-Spung, an obstetrician in Colorado who previously practiced in Tennessee, where abortion is completely banned with very limited exceptions. “I anticipated a lot of trouble finding people who felt safe participating in the care.” Tennessee’s abortion laws contributed to her decision to leave the state.

The most consistent concern I heard raised by the providers I spoke with is that the new bans cause unacceptable delays in patient care. In abortion-restrictive states, some hospitals have created task forces and committees of lawyers to help doctors figure out how to comply, which can slow down the process of treating at-risk patients. “There sometimes are delays while there’s this sussing out of like, ‘How do we take care of this?’” Lara Hart, an obstetrician in Georgia, where a six-week abortion ban went into effect in 2022, told me. Though Hart praises her own hospital’s processes for dealing with tricky cases, she said her job now requires more paperwork and calling around to different departments. She told me that she sometimes wonders, “Is some overzealous district attorney gonna come and arrest us or something?” She remembers arriving at work at her previous practice to find a patient in the ICU with sepsis and on a ventilator. The woman had come in with previable PPROM (preterm premature rupture of membranes), a condition in which a woman’s water breaks too early in pregnancy. The other doctors were reluctant to offer her an abortion, which is a standard treatment. She began hemorrhaging so much that Hart had to perform a hysterectomy. Hart remembers feeling angry. “I shouldn’t be here doing this,” she thought. “This should have been taken care of a week ago before she was so sick.”

[Read: The abortion absolutist]

Certain states’ bans say an abortion can be performed to avoid “death or substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function,” but some doctors say this guideline is unclear because many situations can go from reversible to irreversible within minutes. A recent study of post-Dobbs obstetric care in states with abortion bans highlighted this problem. It concluded that, because abortion laws tend to focus on the patient’s current health status, doctors in these states are often unable to consider the likely future health of a patient—including life-threatening emergencies that are all but certain to arise. “In obstetrics, there is an inch of black and an inch of white and, like a thousand yards of gray,” Hart said. This regulation also contradicts typical standards of care, according to Dawn Bingham, an obstetrician who is currently suing South Carolina over its abortion ban. “There’s nothing else in medicine that we wait for people to get sicker,” she told me.

Quantitative and qualitative evidence suggests that the delays created by abortion restrictions are having an effect on health care. A recent report from the Gender Equity Policy Institute, a nonprofit that advocates for women’s equality, found that, although the overall risk of dying from pregnancy is low, mothers living in states where abortion is banned were nearly twice as likely to die during pregnancy or childbirth compared with mothers living in states where abortion is accessible. In states with abortion bans, Black mothers were more than three times as likely to die as white mothers. ProPublica found that when Texas banned abortion after six weeks in 2021, rates of sepsis increased by more than 50 percent for women hospitalized with miscarriages in the second trimester, likely because women were being made to wait until either there was no fetal heartbeat, leaving them at higher risk for an infection, or their infection became life-threatening. ProPublica also found that after Texas banned abortion, blood transfusions during emergency-room visits for first-trimester miscarriages increased by 54 percent, suggesting that doctors were avoiding performing D&Cs. At least four women in states with near-total abortion bans have died because they were denied an abortion, according to news reports. In a 2023 survey from KFF, a health-care nonprofit, four in 10 ob-gyns in abortion-ban states said the Dobbs ruling made providing care during miscarriages or other pregnancy emergencies harder.

A qualitative study involving anonymous doctors in abortion-ban states offers quotes such as “The way our legal teams interpreted it, until they became septic or started hemorrhaging, we couldn’t proceed.” In another study, a doctor described a patient who came in 15 weeks pregnant and hemorrhaging, with “blood everywhere, bleeding through her clothes.” But because the fetus had a heartbeat, the doctor had to talk to the hospital’s risk-management department before performing an abortion. “There’s less evidence-based health care that is provided for everyone that needs it in those states,” Nikki Zite, an obstetrician in Tennessee, told me. When I asked Nicole Schlechter, another Tennessee obstetrician, about the higher mortality rates in abortion-ban states, she put it more simply: “People are dying from being pregnant.”

Supporters of abortion bans deny that conditions are dire. Ingrid Skop, the vice president and director of medical affairs for the Charlotte Lozier Institute, a nonprofit that advocates against abortion, said in an email that “all pro-life state laws allow doctors to exercise their reasonable medical judgment to treat women with pregnancy emergencies, and no law requires certainty or imminence before a doctor can act.” She also pointed out that “no doctor has been prosecuted since Dobbs for performing an abortion to protect the life of the mother.” Christina Francis, the CEO of the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists (AAPLOG) and an obstetric hospitalist in Indiana, told me her practice has been unaffected by her state’s near-total ban on abortion. She says any hesitation of doctors to act in emergency situations is a result of hospitals failing to adequately prepare their physicians. “The problem is not the law,” she told me, “but rather either the guidance or the lack of guidance that physicians are receiving.”

Some states are aiming to clarify their abortion bans. In June, Texas passed the Life of the Mother Act, which clarifies when the state’s near-total abortion ban allows for the procedure, saying explicitly that physicians do not need to wait until a patient is in imminent danger of dying to perform an abortion. In Tennessee, a new law clarifies that abortions can be performed in cases of previable PPROM and severe preeclampsia. In Kentucky, a clarification law added conditions under which doctors can legally perform an abortion, such as hemorrhage and ectopic and molar pregnancies.

Some Texas doctors I interviewed support the clarification law. Todd Ivey, an obstetrician in Houston, told me he thinks it “is going to help us some.” He said he wishes the law had exceptions for fetal abnormalities, rape, and incest, but that Texas doctors shouldn’t “let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”

But some experts say the clarification bills don’t offer doctors much security, because some obstetric emergencies may not meet the laws’ precise legal language. For instance, John Thoppil, an obstetrician in Austin who supports the Texas clarification law, once had a patient whose fetus had a fatal anomaly. He diagnosed the condition at 12 weeks, but the woman was not able to travel out of state for a termination until she was 18 weeks along. In the intervening time, her placenta began to invade her scar from a previous C-section, something that would not have happened, Thoppil told me, if he had been able to perform the abortion at 12 weeks. The patient was hospitalized after the abortion and had to have another procedure, almost losing her uterus in the process. The Texas clarification law, he told me, would not have changed her situation.

This confusion may get worse now that the Trump administration has revoked Biden-era guidance saying hospitals in abortion-ban states must provide abortions if the procedure would stabilize a woman experiencing a medical emergency.

Hector Chapa, an obstetrician in south-central Texas and a member of AAPLOG, told me that this revocation didn’t matter, and that doctors could and should still treat patients in an emergency. “EMTALA still stands,” he said, referring to a federal law that hospitals must stabilize patients. “EMTALA has never gone away.” But Andreia Alexander, an ER doctor in Indiana, told me that patients should not want a doctor who hesitates to save their life. “If somebody is dying in front of me,” she said, “I can’t be thrown off my game to think for a minute about whether or not my actions are going to cause me to be thrown in jail, lose hundreds of thousands of dollars, or lose my medical license.”

The horror stories I heard during my reporting are shocking but rare. In one study, the most common scenario that physicians said they struggled with, post-Dobbs, was PPROM in the second trimester. The risk of previable PPROM is extremely low: less than 1 percent. But in pregnancy, small percentages matter. Osmundson told me her hospital sees a previable PPROM patient about once a month. In my own pregnancy, I had multiple complications that occur very rarely. Complications seem unlikely until they happen to you.

I asked every provider I interviewed whether having a baby in their state is safe, given the current abortion restrictions. Almost all of them said yes. But almost all of them also qualified their answer. They said they, personally, would take appropriate care of a pregnant woman, but they couldn’t say the same about every provider in the state now that the abortion laws have made administering emergency care so much more complicated. They said pregnancy had become “less safe” or “scarier” or “safe, if you have resources.” There’s a new charge to what were previously purely medical conversations with patients: Thoppil said patients ask him “every week” if having a baby in Texas is safe, and Emily Briggs, a private-practice family-medicine doctor in New Braunfels, told me that patients have asked her if they should leave Texas. Hart told me she’s had patients who “get on contraception because they say that they are scared to be pregnant in Georgia.”

[Read: I found the outer limits of my pro-choice beliefs]

The future of obstetric care in abortion-ban states also seems murky because fewer medical students are applying to residencies in states with abortion bans. Zite says she’s not able to train her obstetric residents in the same ways she was before Dobbs, and she’s not sure what’s going to happen with the next generation of doctors after hers retires.

I spoke with some women who aren’t willing to risk having a child, or another child, under these circumstances. Jessi Schoop Villman, who lives outside of Houston and has a history of miscarriages, decided not to try for a second child after Texas banned abortions. “I couldn’t stand the thought of something happening and leaving the baby we already have without a mother and my husband without a partner,” she told me.

Nisha Verma, an obstetrician who works in both Georgia and Maryland, told me she recently saw a patient who was eligible for an abortion in Georgia because she was less than six weeks pregnant. The woman said that she would consider having the baby, “but I am scared to be pregnant in this state as a Black woman,” Verma remembers her saying. “If I developed a complication like I did in my last pregnancy, I wouldn’t be able to get care and I could die.” The woman did something that crafters of abortion bans likely would not have wanted: Just days before it would have been too late to do so, she terminated the pregnancy.

*Illustration by Akshita Chandra / The Atlantic. Sources: Jacobus Johannes van Os / Fine Art Photographic / Getty; Getty.

A ‘Hopefully Completely Unrelatable’ Story About Marriage

2025-08-13T07:00:00-04:00

In the late 1960s, Maurice and Maralyn Bailey sold their house in Derby, in Central England, and commissioned a 31-foot-long sailboat, the Auralyn. Seeking an escape from their boring lives and the dreary English weather, they planned to sail around the world. To “preserve their freedom from outside interference,” as Maurice put it, they did not bring a radio transmitter aboard. Nine months after departing from the south of England in 1972, they made it through the Panama Canal and into the Pacific when a whale struck their boat, sinking it.

A new book, A Marriage at Sea, tells the tale of what happened next: The Baileys transferred themselves, 33 tins of food, and some cookies and Coffee-Mate into an inflatable life raft and dinghy, each barely the size of a stretched-out adult. They hoped for a ship to sail by and spot them. For nearly four months, they floated around, filling their time by catching rainwater and turtles—first as pets, then as food. Together, they clung to life as starvation and illness set in. Somehow, they survived. And they stayed married. And they went on another months-long sailing trip together.

The Baileys’ experience was, as the book’s author, Sophie Elmhirst, put it to me, “hopefully completely unrelatable for most people.” It is not, of course, a marriage-advice book. But perhaps its story can offer lessons about marriage. The Baileys’ seafaring appeared to be a type of “shared meaning” that relationship experts say can glue couples together. Their mission almost killed them, corporeally, but it also seems to have helped their marriage survive. And although most couples would not want to re-create the Baileys’ experience, they can experiment with shared-meaning making in other—perhaps drier—ways.

The two Baileys were strikingly different. Maurice, who had a troubled childhood marked by illness and emotional neglect, was negative and socially ill at ease. Maralyn, meanwhile, was “as socially able as he wasn’t,” Elmhirst told me, as well as confident and enterprising. They met at a car rally where Maralyn was driving a Vauxhall Cresta with a particular level of “chutzpah,” as Elmhirst writes. Maralyn suggested living aboard the sailboat even though she didn’t know how to swim. “She just had that gung-ho quality,” Elmhirst said.

[Read: What comedians know about staying married]

As I read the book, I could not understand what Maurice offered Maralyn. Why had she married someone so difficult, with so many cockamamie schemes? I asked Elmhirst for her theory, and she speculated that in an era of deep social conformity, Maralyn found liberation in Maurice’s atheism, his desire not to have children, and, well, the whole boat thing. They both loved adventure, and both had a sort of British chin-up mentality that can be useful when soldiering on through something horrible.

What Maralyn offered Maurice, though, was clear. Adrift at sea, Maurice started to give up hope quickly, and Maralyn seemed to view spurring him on as a kind of second project, alongside engineering their survival. She made dominoes from strips of paper; when four gallons of drinkable water drifted away, she tried to raise his spirits by opening their last tin of rice pudding in honor of her birthday. She would assure him that they were meant to survive. They did argue, Elmhirst writes, but after a fight ended, they would “unpick it, see why they had snapped or become intolerant, and apologise.” Later, Maralyn would claim to reporters that they hadn’t argued at all.

On the raft, the Baileys discussed the next boat trip they would take as soon as they were rescued. During long days without food or water, they’d fantasize about the provisions for the new boat, the design of the new boat, and where they’d sail it—Patagonia, they figured.

This second boat trip was, in some ways, crucial to getting them through that first, ill-fated one. Maralyn’s strategy for keeping Maurice going was to fixate on a future, one that contained a second, successful sailing mission.

The Baileys’ near-death experience became their shared meaning—a way of defining “this is who we are; this is what we do,” says Carrie Cole, the research director of the Gottman Institute, which focuses on couples’ counseling. It solidified the relationship and, in all likelihood, made it last. “A lot of times when people go through some ordeal like that and they survive it together, it really can connect to them,” Cole told me. “Nobody else has experienced what they have. It’s like they have this deep sense of feeling known and understood.” She notes, though, that most people cultivate this shared meaning in less dangerous ways, such as through volunteering or hiking.

[Read: A wedding reveals how much help is really available to you]

Another possible takeaway from this unusual duo, Elmhirst speculated, is that perhaps the Baileys show that, on some level, we all need someone to love. Maurice needed Maralyn to prop him up, and Maralyn needed someone to prop up. In the interviews the pair gave in the years after their rescue, “he’d make this point again and again that, if it hadn’t been for her, he’d never have lived,” Elmhirst said. Perhaps he wouldn’t have survived without her even on dry land: Maralyn, Elmhirst said, “translated him for the world.” Maybe, she added, “there is something in us that is designed or works well in tandem with someone else.”

In the book, Elmhirst asks, “For what else is a marriage, really, if not being stuck on a small raft with someone and trying to survive?” Throughout all the dramas of daily life—the fender bender, the sleep regression, the surprise layoff—partners can start to feel trapped with each other. Maybe that’s not the worst thing.

We Should, in Fact, Politicize the Tragedy

2025-07-14T10:00:00-04:00

When a reporter asked Texas Governor Greg Abbott who is to blame for the deaths of more than 100 people in this month’s catastrophic Guadalupe River flooding, Abbott scoffed. “Who’s to blame?” he said. “Know this: That’s the word choice of losers.”

The impulse to avoid blame—both placing and accepting it—is common after a disaster. Following school shootings, many political leaders suggest a variation on the idea that “now is the time to come together,” while asserting that anything other than unity might “politicize this tragedy.” After four people were killed last year at Apalachee High School in Georgia, for example, Governor Brian Kemp said, “Today is not the day for politics or policy.”

Perhaps this stems from a desire to protect the friends and families of the victims. I noticed this in my own interviews last week with camping experts. When I asked what they thought had gone wrong at Camp Mystic, where at least 27 campers and counselors died, they dodged the question. “The loss of life is very tragic,” one camp insurer said, but “you got to think about all the kids that also made it as well.” A camp-health expert told me, “We don’t make any determinations or ideas around what happened, what didn’t happen.” To be fair, the details of what, exactly, happened are still unclear. Camp Mystic’s director, Dick Eastland, seemed aware of at least some potential for flooding, and decades ago approved a system of rain gauges to alert people during emergencies. Eastland himself died in the floods. After that kind of a loss, asking if the camp should have been better prepared might feel distasteful.

[Read: The problem with ‘move to higher ground’]

The camp did, however, make some decisions that in retrospect appear reckless. In 2019, it began a project to build new cabins, including some in a flood-risk area. The camp also failed to move several older cabins even though they were in a floodway, which, according to Kerr County officials, is “an extremely hazardous area due to the velocity of floodwaters.” (Camp Mystic did not reply to a request for comment.) The state and local governments, too, deserve scrutiny for the ways they did and did not act to protect Mystic campers and others in the flood zone.

Far from being inappropriate, now is the right time to ask questions, such as: Did camp officials follow the emergency plans with which the camp passed a state inspection two days before the flood? Why was there “little or no help” from authorities as the campers fended for themselves, wading through rising waters to higher ground? Why was an emergency alert called a CodeRED delayed for an hour after a firefighter in the area first asked for it to be sent? Why did Kerr County, which is in an area known as “Flash Flood Alley” and dotted with summer camps, including Mystic, struggle to install a flood-warning system after having considered such a project for years? Why did the state rebuff local officials when they tried? Why were so many people, at so many levels, seemingly unwilling to address the danger these children were in?

In a confusing, anguished time, gentle pabulum such as “come together” and “focus on the mourning” can feel safe and reassuring. And blame can be depressing; accepting responsibility for something that went terribly wrong is often painful and embarrassing. But the alternative is much worse: a world where the loss of innocent life is treated as inescapable, where no calamity can be prevented or bad situation reformed. Admitting that we can improve the world might be initially more uncomfortable, but it is also more hopeful.

Finding out who is responsible for a major failure matters, because identifying that failure can help prevent a next one. As Tom Moser, a former Kerr County commissioner, put it to reporters, “I think things should come out of this. It should be a lesson learned.”

[Photos: Deadly flooding in Texas]

Another word for blame is accountability, and accountability can motivate change. After 9/11, Richard Clarke, who had been national coordinator for counterterrorism leading up to and during the attacks, told families of the victims: “Your government failed you. Those entrusted with protecting you failed you. And I failed you”—an attitude that helped bring about efforts to improve national security. After a man opened fire on two mosques in New Zealand in 2019, killing 51 people, then–Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said she felt almost “complicit” because the nation’s laws had allowed the gunman to acquire his weapons legally. To her, it was the time for politics and policy: “I went to a press conference immediately after and said that our gun laws needed to change,” she told NPR recently.

Accountability was, I would bet, the goal of the reporter who questioned Abbott. Countless studies have shown that outcomes for citizens improve when members of the media ask probing questions of politicians. Press freedom correlates with less corruption in many countries. One study concluded that “how well any government functions hinges on how good citizens are at making their politicians accountable for their actions.” These levers of accountability compel a government to work for its people.

Of course, even if officials take responsibility, misfortune will continue to happen. Even with timelier warnings and cabins on higher ground, children still might have died in the Guadalupe flood. Yet as we come together, pray for the victims, and console their families, we should also try to understand what happened. Tragedy is part of life. But we should not invite more tragedies than are necessary by pretending we are powerless to stop them.

Why America Needs More Public Pools

2025-06-19T13:00:00-04:00

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here.

My husband often hears me say that all I need to be happy is a sunny day and a pool. (He would argue that I don’t say this so much as I whine it.) No matter how bad a day I’m having, if I can squeeze in just 10 minutes coursing through the water, watching the dappled sun reflect off my arms, life feels bearable again. When I dive my head underwater, I feel temporarily hidden from my problems, as if nothing can find me down there.

Pools are so important to me that in 2020, one of my biggest concerns was whether the pandemic would prevent public pools from opening. I couldn’t bear to watch a whole swimming season pass me by. (In defense of my screwed-up priorities, this was before I had kids.)

That may seem melodramatic, but for decades, experts have argued that pools are essential for mental, physical, and social health. Swimming has been shown to boost moods; it routinely ranks among people’s favorite forms of exercise. When I interviewed Bonnie Tsui, the author of Why We Swim, she told me that being in water gives you “the feeling of both being buoyed and being embraced.” The pressure of the water combined with the release of gravity does something uniquely salubrious to our brains. Sure, you can get this same zing from an ocean or a lake, but not everyone lives near one of those. A pool is a bit of backyard magic, a chance to find transcendence in the everyday.

For decades, writers have been documenting the wonders of pools in our pages. In 1967, Leonard Conversi described how his swimming lessons left him flabbergasted by “unanticipated ease, when the world seems to divide before us like a perforation and the body feels itself inebriate, or falling.” However, after Conversi did a “jig of triumph” at the end of the diving board, he was asked to leave the swimming club and find “an organization more suited to your needs and temperament.” Conversi was unfazed: “To have learned to breathe while moving in an alien element is to have begun to master the secret of animal life.”

Even people who aren’t sun-seekers can recognize the salutary effect of immersion. In 2006, the journalist Wayne Curtis traveled to the thermal pools of Iceland and noted that “stepping into thermal waters is like stepping into Oz: life changes from the black-and-white of imminent hypothermia to a lustrous, multidimensional world of color and warmth.” The pools are a social hub in Iceland; people gather there with their friends and kids. Sounds heavenly.

This idea, that pools can be a “third place” for people to meet and chill, has existed for decades. In a 1952 call for cities to revitalize themselves, the developer William Zeckendorf suggested building parks with swimming pools as one way to keep urban workers from fleeing to the suburbs:

I visualize these fun centers as consisting of a tremendous dance hall, bowling alleys, skating rinks, merry-go-rounds for the children, a swimming pool for the children and one for the adults too—in short, a happy, functionally designed center for dancing and exercise and entertainment … People would feel that their city is a great place to live in, not a great place to get away from.

His entreaty serves as a somewhat tragic companion piece to one that Yoni Appelbaum, an Atlantic deputy executive editor, wrote a decade ago. Starting in the 1920s, pools did become the kinds of recreation hot spots that Zeckendorf hailed—until they began to desegregate in the ’50s. Rather than continue to use public pools, which welcomed all races, some suburbanites retreated to private club pools, such as the one at the center of a racist incident in McKinney, Texas—the town where I went to high school and where my parents still live. During a party at a private-subdivision pool in 2015, teens who allegedly didn’t live in the community showed up, someone called the police, and an officer tackled a young Black girl to the ground, pinning her with both knees on her back. (The officer was placed on administrative leave and then resigned; the McKinney police chief said that the department’s policies didn’t “support his actions.” A grand jury later declined to bring criminal charges against him.)

Public pools have been “frequent battlefields” of racial tension, Appelbaum wrote. “That complicated legacy persists across the United States. The public pools of mid-century—with their sandy beaches, manicured lawns, and well-tended facilities—are vanishingly rare.” Many public pools have become neglected and underfunded, usurped by private pools funded by HOA fees.

I say we start the backlash to this backlash: in the spirit of Zeckendorf, dig up some unused parking lots and fallow fields, and open public pools again. Though this would be a resource-intensive endeavor, it would be worth it. Take it from the famed New York City urban planner Robert Moses: “It is no exaggeration to say that the health, happiness, efficiency, and orderliness of a large number of the city’s residents, especially in the summer months, are tremendously affected by the presence or absence of adequate bathing facilities.” This summer and in the hot, hot summers to come, America needs pools—for everyone.

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The Medical Device That’s Become a MAHA Fixation

2025-06-19T07:00:00-04:00

Updated at 10:20 a.m. ET on June 20, 2025

To hear some of them tell it, the companies selling continuous glucose monitors have stumbled upon a heretofore unknown quirk of human biology. Seemingly healthy people, many of these companies argue, have “glucose imbalances” that need to be monitored and, with dietary vigilance, eradicated. Millions of people are going through life eating bananas, not knowing that their blood sugar is rising with every bite. This must be stopped.

To this end, the companies market the continuous glucose monitor, or CGM, a quarter-size sensor that takes a near-constant measure of the glucose in the fluid between a person’s cells. Once inserted into an arm, the sensor allows the wearer to monitor their blood-sugar levels on a phone app for $80 to $184 a month. Doing so allows you to “see the impact of what you eat” (according to the company that sells Lingo), to “motivate behavior change and encourage healthier choices” (according to Levels), and to “personalize your approach” to weight loss, because “everyone’s journey is different” (according to Nutrisense).

The gadgets have been revolutionary for many people with diabetes—previously the main available device for measuring blood sugar required users to prick their fingers multiple times a day. Many insurers cover CGM prescriptions for diabetics; they can pick up the devices at the pharmacy just as they would blood-test strips. But when I asked a half dozen experts whether people who don’t have diabetes should wear CGMs, I got a resounding “Meh.” “It’s a free country. People can pay money for whatever they feel like doing,” David Nathan, a diabetes expert at Harvard, told me. “But from a medical point of view, I am personally unconvinced that they lead to any health benefit.”

Relying on a Harvard diabetes expert to give you diabetes advice, however, goes against the general ethos of the “Make America Healthy Again” movement, many of whose members have been heavily promoting CGMs in recent months, including to people who don’t have diabetes. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of Health and Human Services, talked them up in an April CBS interview as “extraordinarily effective in helping people lose weight and avoid diabetes.” At his Senate confirmation hearing, before becoming Food and Drug Administration commissioner, Marty Makary said glucose monitors help people “learn about what they’re eating.” Casey Means, the wellness influencer whom President Donald Trump nominated for surgeon general, has said that more Americans should use CGMs too. (As it happens, she is a co-founder of Levels.) “I believe CGM is the most powerful technology for generating the data and awareness to rectify our Bad Energy crisis in the Western world,” Means wrote in her best-selling book, Good Energy. (Bad Energy is her term for the metabolic dysfunction that she believes to be at the root of many chronic health problems.)

[Read: How Ivermectin became right-wing aspirin]

The devices are emblematic of the self-reliance that characterizes the MAHA movement. “The Casey Means’s of the world,” Alan Levinovitz, a James Madison University religion professor who has studied alternative health, told me in an email, “are using the rhetoric of naturalness as a way of telling people they can have complete control and expertise over their own health—which is the natural way to be healthy, rather than outsourcing that wisdom to top-down elites.” Indeed, one of the chapters of Good Energy is titled “Trust Yourself, Not Your Doctor.” (Means did not respond to a request for comment.)

CGMs appear to have trickled into MAHA world from the Joe Roganosphere, helped along by the fact that the devices, which in the past had been prescribed mainly to diabetics, were made available last year for purchase over the counter—that is, by anyone. Five years ago, Paul Saladino, a doctor who promotes an “animal-based diet,” said on Rogan’s podcast, “This is the kind of stuff that really tells you about your metabolic health. There’s no way to lie with a continuous glucose monitor.” Since then, CGMs have been endorsed on popular wellness podcasts such as Andrew Huberman’s Huberman Lab and Dave Asprey’s The Human Upgrade, and by pop-health doctors such as Peter Attia and Mark Hyman, the latter of whom called the CGM “a gadget that has completely changed my life.” A wellness influencer known as the Glucose Goddess said that although they may not be for everyone, CGMs can be “a pretty incredible tool to start to connect what you’re eating with what’s actually happening inside of your body,” and offers a guide to them on her website. Gwyneth Paltrow, the empress of Goop, was recently spotted wearing one.

Sun Kim, a Stanford endocrinologist, told me that a few years ago, “I was literally contacted by a start-up almost every month who wanted to incorporate a CGM” into their products. Of course, some CGM companies do specialize in people who have diabetes and need around-the-clock monitoring. But Kim and others I spoke with told me they suspect that, to boost sales, CGM manufacturers are trying to expand their potential-customer base beyond people living with diabetes to the merely sugar-curious.

Jake Leach, the president of Dexcom, maker of the over-the-counter CGM Stelo, told me via email, “Stelo was originally designed for people who have Type 2 diabetes not using insulin and those with prediabetes, however, given the broad accessibility of this device, we are encouraged to see people without diabetes interested in learning more about their glucose and metabolic health.” A spokesperson for Dexcom pointed out to me that most people with prediabetes are undiagnosed. Fred St. Goar, a cardiologist and clinical adviser for Lingo, told me in a statement that CGMs can be beneficial for nondiabetics because “understanding your body’s glucose is key to managing your metabolism, so you can live healthier and better.”

Scant research exists on how many nondiabetic people are buying CGMs, but anecdotally, some providers told me that they are seeing an uptick. Nicola Guess, a University of Oxford dietitian and researcher, said that “10 years ago, no, I never saw anyone without diabetes with a CGM. And now I see lots.” Mostly, she said, they’re people who are already pretty healthy. In this sense, CGMs are an extension of the wearables craze: Once you have an Oura Ring and a fitness tracker, measuring your blood sugar can feel like the next logical step of the “journey.”

Should people who aren’t diabetic wear one of these? Health fanatics who have $80 a month to burn and want to see how various foods affect their blood sugar are probably fine to wear a CGM, at least for a little while. Spoiler: The readout is probably just going to show that eating refined carbs—such as white bread, pasta, and sweets—at least temporarily raises blood sugar to some degree.

[Read: What going ‘wild on health’ looks like]

Normal glucose patterns for nondiabetic people tend to vary quite a bit from meal to meal and day to day. Most nondiabetics’ blood-sugar readings will typically fall within the “normal” range of 70 to 140 milligrams per deciliter. But many healthy people will occasionally see spikes above 140, and scientists don’t really know if that’s a cause for concern. (“Great question” is a response I heard a lot when I asked.) In the studies he’s worked on, Kevin D. Hall, a former National Institutes of Health nutrition scientist, has found that even in tightly controlled settings, people’s blood-sugar levels respond very differently to the same meal when eaten on different occasions. Given all these natural deviations, a CGM may not be able to tell you anything especially useful about your health. And CGMs can be less accurate than other types of blood-sugar tests. In another study, Hall and his co-authors stuck two different brands of CGM on the same person, and at times, they provided two different blood-sugar readings. The conclusion, to Hall, was that more research is needed before CGMs can be recommended to nondiabetics.

What’s more, blood sugar depends on sleep, stress, and exercise levels, and whether any given meal includes protein or fat. If you notice a spike after eating a banana, the banana might not be the reason. It might be the four hours of sleep you got the previous night, because sleep deprivation can affect the hormones that influence blood sugar. As a result, Guess said, “a CGM cannot tell you whether a single food is right for you”—though some CGM enthusiasts make this promise. (A CGM can help you “learn your reaction to individual foods and meals,” Means has written.)

For some people, tracking data does help nudge them toward healthier behaviors. If you get a clear readout from a CGM that your blood sugar has risen after you’ve eaten refined carbs, and it moves you to eat fewer refined carbs, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. But researchers haven’t found evidence yet that nondiabetic people eat better after wearing a CGM. And if you know how to read a CGM, you probably already know what a healthy diet looks like. You could just eat it. Anne Peters, a diabetes researcher at the University of Southern California, told me, “You could just not wear it at all and tell yourself to eat more vegetables and a more plant-based diet and eat healthy, lean protein.”

Many of the biohackers who talk up CGMs also promote a low-carb, protein-heavy diet that would include a T-bone more readily than a Triscuit. (Asprey, the man behind The Human Upgrade, recommends putting butter in coffee.) The potential downside of glucose monitoring is that people who are (perhaps needlessly) alarmed by their CGM data will swap out healthy carbs such as fruit and whole grains for foods that are less healthy—butter, for example, or bacon and red meat. Those foods don’t make an impact on blood sugar, but they can affect other markers of health, such as cholesterol and body fat. Eat a stick of butter, and your CGM will probably show a flat, pleasant line. But your arteries may protest.

I noticed these perverse incentives myself during my pregnancy, when I had gestational diabetes and wore a CGM to manage my blood sugar. A bowl of heart-healthy oatmeal would cause my blood-sugar reading to soar to an unacceptable 157, but a piece of cheesecake—with loads of fat balancing out the sugar—would keep it safely under my goal level of 135. At the time, I wanted to eat whatever kept my blood sugar low, for the sake of my baby. But few dietitians would advise healthy people to eat cheesecake instead of oatmeal every morning.

[Read: How Joe Rogan remade Austin]

Glucose, after all, is just a small part of the picture of human health. “Waist circumference, blood pressure, LDL cholesterol, resting heart rate—they are much better measures of how healthy someone is than glucose,” Guess said. And watching a real-time readout of your blood glucose can become an obsession of sorts—not an entirely harmless one. “Something being a waste of time is a net harm,” Guess told me. “There is something unethical to me about filling people’s heads with worries that never come to pass.”

Many of the researchers I spoke with said that if you are concerned you might have diabetes or prediabetes, you could just get an A1c blood test at your annual physical. Like a CGM, it, too, measures blood sugar, but much more cheaply and without requiring you to wear a device all the time. And if it shows that you’re at risk of developing type 2 diabetes, you could do what doctors have suggested doing for decades now: Eat a diet rich in vegetables and lean proteins, and get some exercise most days. (“Duh,” Nathan said.)

One way for Kennedy and others in the Trump administration to find out if CGMs do all they say they do would be to fund studies on whether CGMs are helpful, and for whom. Quite the opposite is happening. Hall recently left Trump’s NIH because he believed he was being censored when speaking about the results of studies that conflicted with Kennedy’s views, and Nathan’s diabetes-prevention study was recently frozen by the Trump administration. So far, the administration has ended or delayed nearly 2,500 NIH grants, including some related to researching blood glucose. If the Kennedy-led HHS department truly would like to make America healthy again, it could stop defunding the people studying Americans’ health.

This article originally identified Lingo as a start-up.

An Unexpected Argument From the Right

2025-06-16T07:30:00-04:00

Online, they say things such as: “I believe women get to have it all: A career. An education. A happy marriage. And children.” And: “Women—you are strong enough to succeed in both motherhood & your career. You don’t have to choose one.” And: “You don’t have to put your career on hold to have kids.”

They are not, however, the former Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg, or the girlboss head of a progressive nonprofit, or a liberal influencer. Those quotations come from the social-media feeds of, respectively, Abby Johnson, the founder of the anti-abortion group And Then There Were None; Kristan Hawkins, the president of the anti-abortion group Students for Life of America; and the married couple Simone and Malcolm Collins, who run a nonprofit in the conservative-leaning pronatalist movement that encourages Americans to have more children. (Simone also recently ran for office as a Republican.) They all contend that women need to make very few trade-offs between having kids and building a flourishing career.

This argument, coming from these voices, is surprising for a few reasons. The idea that mothers should “lean in” to challenging jobs was popularized by Sandberg, a prominent Democrat, in 2013 and embraced by legions of liberal career women. Within a few years, attitudes had soured toward both Sandberg and leaning in. Many mothers pushed back on the expectation that they be everything to everyone, and opted instead for raging, quiet quitting, or leaning out. A sunny lean-in revival is unexpected, especially from conservative-leaning women, a group that for the most part did not embrace this message when Sandberg was making it.

The specter of conservatives wanting to trap women at home has long been a liberal boogeyman, but it is based in some reality. Historically, some on the right, including Phyllis Schlafly and earlier-era J. D. Vance, have argued that women should, at the very least, deprioritize paid work so they can focus on motherhood. Some conservatives continue to make this claim: At a 2023 pronatalism conference, the far-right businessman Charles Haywood told audiences that “generally, women should not have careers.” Allie Beth Stuckey, a conservative podcast host, once told my colleague Elaine Godfrey that women should put family first, and that any professional enterprise—say, a “crocheting business” or the like—should come second to their kids. The conservative author and podcaster Ben Shapiro has written that girls are troubled because society has told them that they need not “aspire to bear and rear children or make preparations to build a home. Instead, we’ve told them that they can run from their own biology,” including by pursuing “more work hours.”

By contrast, Hawkins once posted a photo of her family, which includes four children, as proof that women can “do both: Have a career & be a mother.” In reference to a picture of White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt holding her baby son at work, Hawkins wrote that it’s a lie that “you need to end a child’s life”—a reference to having an abortion—“to have the career you want.” A female attendee at a recent pronatalist convention told a New York Times reporter, “It’s horrible to be telling young women that having kids is the worst thing you can do for your career.” Kristi Hamrick, a vice president of Students for Life of America, who has four children, told me, “I’m highly offended by the modern-day misogyny that says you can’t have a career and family, so pick career. There is no difference to turn-of-the-century misogyny which says you cannot have home and career, so stay home.”

The women I spoke with who make this argument expressed frustration with those on the right encouraging women to devote themselves fully to housekeeping and child-rearing. Hawkins told me she objects to what she calls “tradwife stuff”—stay-at-home wives who post videos of themselves, for example, milling their own flour—because “that’s not financially possible for the majority of people.” Hawkins said that she has always worked full-time and that her husband homeschools their kids. “I think especially now in the right wing, this messaging is coming across like, ‘You’re either an evil feminist career woman, or you’re a mother,’” she said. “I’m like, ‘What about women who want to do both of those things?’” Johnson, who has eight children, told me that in recent years, “this tradwife movement has been very loud. And I don’t like it. I don’t think it’s helpful. I think it’s kind of reductionist. Like, ‘Women, you are just here to breed.’” She’s heard conservative male speakers at events use the term boss babe pejoratively. “What’s wrong with being a boss?” she wondered.

[Read: Doomed to be a tradwife]

Simone Collins, who works in private equity in addition to running her family’s nonprofit, also pushed back against traditionalist views of women and work. Her mother, she told me, “basically put her entire life on hold to raise me.” After Collins was grown, she “didn’t have anything else to live for and got really depressed, and that’s terrifying to me.”

Now Collins, who has four kids, wants to model for her daughters the idea that having children and working hard at a career is normal. She told me that she works from 6 a.m. to 4 p.m. each day. Unlike the families of some of the other women I spoke with, hers relies on outside child care: Their tenants provide it in exchange for rent. “I’m just not the kind of person who can sit at home,” she said, “and only focus on kids.”

Many of these women embrace progressive-leaning views on family policy. “I think it’s a gross detriment to society that we don’t have federal parental leave,” Johnson told me. (This mirrors a growing sense among Republican voters that the government should boost support for working parents.) All of the women I spoke with mentioned something that is, at the very least, liberal coded: the importance of remote work to working moms. And yet none of them would generally be considered progressive. In our conversation, Hawkins criticized feminists of the 1970s and ’80s; Hamrick described the concept of women working as “very biblical,” pointing out the Proverbs 31 tale of a “wife of noble character” who “makes linen garments and sells them.” Johnson has supported “head-of-household voting,” in which, hypothetically, a husband could cast a ballot for his wife.

[Elizabeth Bruenig: Why the left should embrace pronatalism]

Still, the lean-in argument is taking hold among some of these women, possibly as a practical calculation that backing women into a kids-or-career corner won’t help raise fertility rates or persuade women to avoid abortion. Women attend college at higher rates than men, and men’s labor-force participation has stalled while women’s continues to grow. Only about a quarter of mothers in two-parent households stay at home while their husband works, a steep drop-off from the ’70s. Nearly half of moms are their family’s breadwinner. Despite possible differences in what they believe to be ideal, Republican and Democratic mothers work outside the home at similar rates. Today’s young women will likely end up working—and wanting to do so. “A Leave It to Beaver–style, more patriarchal approach to pronatalism is just not going to work,” Patrick T. Brown, a fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center, who focuses on family policy and has four kids, told me. (He works part-time, and his wife is a tenure-track professor.)

Encouraging Americans to have children seems to require acknowledging that few families can survive on one income. “Everyone has to work,” Collins told me. “If they make it such that you are not a conservative Christian or you’re not part of our community if you have a working mother, they’re not gonna have any more community members, because everyone has to have a job now.”

In their well-intentioned effort to encourage mothers’ career aspirations, however, some of these women may be overstating their case. (Collins told me that she hasn’t sacrificed her career for her kids “even a little bit.”) Many of them have organized their life in ways that are not available to many other working moms. All of those I spoke with work from home, which is something many women would like to do but cannot. Hamrick had a period of working part-time when her kids were young, something that most working mothers would like to do as well, but that relatively few are able to do, because part-time jobs tend to not pay well. The women I spoke with are all high up at organizations that offer a level of flexibility that, say, a nurse or a teacher does not enjoy. (Johnson, of And Then There Were None, lets her employees take naps in the middle of the day.) And they all have very supportive partners, some of whom don’t work outside the home.

The thing is, for many women, having kids can be really bad for their career. Although the “motherhood penalty” on wages varies depending on a woman’s age and profession, and has declined over time, it seems to continue to exist in the short term. That is, although their earnings might eventually bounce back, women tend to make less money immediately after having children—whether because they cut back hours; accept more flexible, lower-paying jobs; or have bosses who discriminate against them. A large study recently found that after working women have children, their income falls by half, on average, and remains depressed for at least six years. Even women who are the breadwinner of their family see their income suffer after giving birth. Hiring managers are less likely to hire mothers than women without kids, and many offer mothers lower salaries. And women with kids may avoid or be steered away from “greedy” jobs—or high-paying white-collar jobs—which frequently require people to work well into the night, long after day cares have closed.

“Of course there’s a trade-off. It’s massive,” Catherine Ruth Pakaluk, a Catholic University of America economist who has eight children, told me. “You have to be blind to deny it.” She went on, “If I didn’t have children, I would have done a lot more professionally.” Nevertheless, she said, “I’m happy with this trade-off.”

[Marc Novicoff: The loneliness of the conservative pronatalist]

When pressed, the others I interviewed, who had previously expressed unqualified positivity, acknowledged some concessions between motherhood and career. Collins believes the sacrifices should come at home: She told me that working hard and raising kids is doable if people are less particular about the parenting part. “If I spend the afternoon with the kids, the house is cleaner than it was before. The kids are well behaved. They’re fed. They’re all dressed. They look neat and tidy,” she told me. “If Malcolm spends the afternoon with the kids, I come home, they’re naked, their faces are smattered with candy smudges.” Many women, she said, don’t accept this more anarchic brand of “dad parenting,” so they cut back at work to do it themselves. “If we revised that and made it more normalized to have kids more chaotically parented or parented in a more chill way,” she said, “then I think women would be more comfortable not leaning out.”

Johnson said with some regret that she has missed key moments with her kids—for instance, witnessing some of their first steps—to keep up her travel-heavy schedule. Despite this, she said, “I’m a better mom because I am not at home 24 hours a day with my children.” Women, she added, “have this feminine genius within all of us that I believe is essential in the workplace.”

Others said they’d made compromises at work: Hamrick said her career has “ebbed and flowed,” and for years she worked part-time. Hawkins said she often tells young women that being a mother and working full-time “does require sacrifice.”

But the women I spoke with seemed especially concerned about the drawbacks that come from not having kids. They want more people to enjoy the fulfillment and sense of meaning they believe children bring to life, and to not regret missing their chance. Research suggests that a small number of Americans without children have regrets, but most do not; at the same time, some parents experience regret that they chose to have kids. Still, some women I spoke with worried that those who don’t become mothers may live to lament their choices.

At some point, Hawkins told me, women who focus on “making as much money as you can, climbing the corporate ladder so then your boss can fire you at any moment, and going on great vacations that you put on Instagram” may well look at their life and think, Wait a minute. What is this really about? Hawkins hopes that when they do, “it’s not too late” for them to have children. So she tells women they can have it all—even though for many women, that’s much harder than it sounds.

The Default-Parent Problem

2025-05-14T07:30:00-04:00

When Austin Estes took his sick infant son to urgent care, he struggled to change his diaper in an exam room not equipped with a changing table. “Oh, if only Mom was here,” the nurse said. Estes, an education-policy consultant in Washington, D.C., wondered why she’d think his wife would better handle an impossible diaper change.

Justin Rauzon, a project director in Los Angeles, told me he listed himself as the primary contact on the intake paperwork at his child’s pediatrician’s office. But the office staff frequently ignores that information. “They usually reach out to my wife, who either tries to handle things (sometimes without the full context), patches me into the conversation, or tells them to call me,” he told me in an email. “Exactly the sort of inefficient experience we want to avoid by listing me to call first.”

Shannon Carpenter, who has written a book (and for The Atlantic) about being a stay-at-home dad, called his daughter’s high school one day to let them know she was staying home sick. The school immediately contacted his wife to confirm that she really was ill. Years ago, he picked his son up from day care and another child asked why the boy was always picked up by his dad. “He has a daddy-mommy,” the teacher said. (“The fuck?” Carpenter thought.)

Schools, pediatricians, random passersby—so many people assume that Mom knows what’s going on with the family, and that Dad does not. If a child has a problem, they think, the first step is to contact the mother—no matter where she is or what she might be doing. Yevgeniya Nusinovich, a mom of four, told me that earlier this year, a doctor’s office called her three times while she was in Taiwan for work, leaving messages for her in the middle of the night without ever trying to reach her husband. When Alexis Miller took an international flight with her husband and their 11-month-old daughter, they booked two seats together and one a few rows back. Her husband took the first shift with the baby, who started fussing. The flight attendant walked past Miller’s husband and approached Miller to tell her to go help her baby calm down. Miller told her, “She is with her dad and she’ll settle in a minute.”

[Read: A grand experiment in parenthood and friendship]

I’m familiar with this phenomenon myself: I once got a call to confirm my son’s physical-therapy appointment, told the office to call my husband instead, and gave them his number. I hung up. They called me right back.

This isn’t just in our heads. Research backs up the idea that people tend to assume mothers are the default parent, even when they explicitly ask not to be. A few years ago, Kristy Buzard, an economist at Syracuse University, and her colleagues posed as fictitious parents and emailed more than 80,000 school principals, saying they were searching for a school for their child and asking for a call back. The researchers found that the principals were 40 percent more likely to call the pretend mothers back than the pretend fathers. Even in cases where the email came from the father, and the father said he was more available than his wife, the principals called the mother 12 percent of the time.

Part of the reason, Buzard posited, is “this underlying belief that moms are more available and are going to be more responsive.” That suspicion was underscored by the fact that in areas with more Republican-voting, religious, and rural people—traits she and her co-authors used as a proxy for traditional gender norms—moms were even more likely to be called. Katy Milkman, a behavioral economist at the University of Pennsylvania, told me, “We have a stereotype of the mother as the caregiver.” Many school administrators and doctor’s-office staffers, she said, “probably are not going through a deliberate thought process where they’re like, Huh, which of these two people should I call? Let me think about the probabilities of which of them is the caregiver.” She told me that “people jump to conclusions, maybe without even realizing it.”

Another explanation is that many kid-related institutions rely on software that’s janky and outdated. “The data systems aren’t smart enough to prioritize who gets called first,” Jen Shu, a pediatrician based in Atlanta, told me. “I never know on any given day which one I’m supposed to call, because our system isn’t smart enough to say, ‘For today, call this parent at this number.’” The software, she said, can sometimes have only one email on file, and can text only the parent whose cell is listed as the main number. If a mom brings in a newborn for an appointment and fills out the intake paperwork and then goes back to work while her husband is on paternity leave, a reliable way doesn’t always exist to notify the office that it should now contact the father. If the mother tells the receptionist, that person might not be the one whose job it is to update the patient’s chart. If she tries to make the change herself online, the patient portal might not feed the new information into the doctor’s records. “In this day and age,” Shu said, “it should be easier.”

[Read: The isolation of intensive parenting]

Of course, in many families, mothers are the primary contact. (Dustin Strickland, the assistant principal of North Murray High School in Georgia, told me that, based on a glance at his records, most families list the mom first.) Nevertheless, treating mothers as the default parent when they don’t want to be can add annoyingness to their already annoyance-filled lives. Unwanted calls from school or the doctor’s office can interrupt their focus at work, and passing the call on to Dad isn’t always as easy as it might seem. In another survey of parents that Buzard and her co-authors also conducted, mothers were 30 percent more likely than fathers to say that outsourcing a job to their partner is “disruptive to their day and that they still have to be involved in the task even after asking their partner for help,” a sentence that was surprisingly not followed by an upside-down smiling emoji. Some mothers get so fed up with the stress of being the one to field emails about flu shots and spirit-day outfits that they scale back at the office or stop working altogether. Buzard and her co-authors found that kid-related disruptions contributed to many women’s decisions to take lower-demand jobs that offered greater flexibility, or to to be a stay-at-home parent.

For dads, getting treated as the backup parent creates its own frustrations. Rauzon keeps track of his son’s asthma-medication regimen, and when the doctor’s office calls his wife instead of him, managing his medications and treatments becomes harder. Similarly, when the day care that Estes and his wife use calls his wife at the office when their son is sick, even though Estes works from home, “it adds an extra unnecessary step,” he told me. “I think people sometimes assume dads are just there for decoration.”

These days, many dads want to step up, and the family runs better when they do. If only everyone else would catch on and let them.

What Jonathan Haidt Thought When He Watched Adolescence

2025-04-15T12:36:00-04:00

Adolescence, the Netflix miniseries, presents a terrible possibility—that a seemingly “good” kid in a normal English town, with two well-meaning parents, could be drawn so far down the poisoned well of the internet that he stabs a classmate to death.

Terrible, but not unfathomable: Just last year, a 17-year-old in England stabbed several children to death after viewing violent instruction manuals online. Social media is also rife with cruelty and harassment that has led to other tragedies: In 2023, a 14-year-old in the United States died by suicide after being bullied over a TikTok video, an incident that echoed several others.

Phones and screens play an important role in the show. At home, Jamie, the 13-year-old accused killer, has a computer in his room, which his middle-class father was proud to be able to give him. At school, teachers entreat students to put their phones away, mostly unsuccessfully. The teens bully one another online through emoji-dotted Instagram comments—a code that the adults in their lives struggle to crack.

[Jonathan Haidt: End the phone-based childhood now]

The show raises questions for parents about how to monitor, or restrict, their kids’ use of devices and social media. (The first and fourth episodes, in which Jamie’s father weeps over his own failures, made me want to phone-proof my kid until college.) For answers, I reached out to Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at NYU and the author of The Anxious Generation. For years, Haidt has been begging parents and schools to prohibit smartphones until high school and to keep kids off social media until the age of 16. An edited transcript of our conversation follows.

Olga Khazan: What was it like for you to watch this show and see it explore so many issues that you focus on in your work?

Jonathan Haidt: The main reaction that I had was as a father. In many ways the father is the essential character, and those iconic, painful scenes at the end of the first and fourth episodes really hit me. Another thing was that, while I was expecting it to really focus on social media, I really appreciated the fact that it was more about the complexities and difficulties of adolescent life and family life, many of which are made more difficult by social media. It portrayed a view of adolescence that was fairly bleak, not much fun, not much learning. And while it didn’t blame that all on social media, there were hints that the phone-based and screen-based childhood was making friendship and learning more difficult.

Khazan: What do you make of the show’s premise that a 13-year-old would kill his classmate over Instagram comments that she made about him?

Haidt: Killings are thankfully rare in the U.K. But what I was more focused on was the theme that I’ve seen since I began doing this work, in the late 2010s, which is that we all thought our kids were safe as long as they were in their bedrooms on a computer. The smartphone has made it possible for literally half of our children to be online almost constantly. The dose makes the poison, so a little bit of online life sitting at your parents’ computer in the ’90s was fine, but living your entire life on a hyperactive commercial platform whose business model is to maximize engagement is not fine. That was one of the key ideas—that the son was just up in his room on his computer all the time, and his parents were uncomfortable about it, but they didn’t think it was anything they had to intervene in.

Khazan: The school seemed to have a no-phones-in-class policy, which is something that schools in the real world are also considering. Is a policy like that sufficient for either stopping online bullying or reducing some of these other harms that you’re talking about?

Haidt: Well, first, the school did not have a no-phones policy. They had a rule that you’re supposed to keep your phone in your pocket. But that’s not a phone-free school, because teenagers cannot help it, so many are addicted. And so schools that say “We banned phone use in class” but leave the phone in the pocket, they have constant conflicts and struggles, and we saw that in Adolescence. I think it’s an argument for truly phone-free schools, which are becoming more popular. It’s only if you separate the kid from the phone, put it in a pouch or a locker, and they get it back at the end of the day—that’s going to slow down some of the warp-speed bullying, rumor-mongering, and drama.

Khazan: On the show, the kids are really mean to one another. Even in school when they're not on their phones, they’re mean interpersonally. What would you say to people who would argue that kids will find a way to bully one another even without social media?

Haidt: Once again, it’s a question of quantity. Of course they will still bully. But if you have something that is greatly ramping up the ease and availability of bullying, that’s going to really change childhood. It used to be that kids couldn’t be bullied on the weekends, they couldn’t be bullied in the middle of the night. But now it’s 24/7, and I think this is why there is a close connection between cyberbullying and suicide. There will be meanness and cruelty, but your childhood is very different when that’s just a feature that pops up here and there, versus when everybody is watching such things happen every day. It’s a question of proportion.

[Read: It sure looks like smartphones are making students dumber]

Khazan: We’ve heard a lot about the effect of Instagram on teen girls, but I thought what was interesting about this show is that it focused on a teen boy. I was wondering if we know anything about the impact of Instagram or other social media on boys, specifically.

Haidt: When I started writing The Anxious Generation, I thought it was going to be a story about girls and social media, because that's where we have the most data. But by the time I finished the book, I realized that the boy story is very different. It’s much more about addiction, violence, drug use, and radicalization.

Khazan: One thing I’ve heard from parents is that the schools are giving kids a laptop or tablet and expecting them to do homework on it, and then it becomes hard for parents to monitor what the kid is doing after the homework is done. What should parents do if their child’s schoolwork actually involves a lot of computer use?

Haidt: They should scream like hell. Whenever a kid is on a multifunction device, they will do multiple things. Laptops and tablets are major distraction machines. They are one of the reasons educational performance is going down. As soon as we started putting a computer or tablet on every kid’s desk, that’s exactly when the educational decline began. The evidence to date seems to suggest that these devices are doing more harm than good.

Khazan: Okay, so you would recommend that parents actually talk with the principal, or whoever’s in charge, and say, “Can we rethink this policy?”

Haidt: Yes, that’s right.

Khazan: Here’s one for the parents of teens. What are you supposed to do if your kids get really, really mad at you for not letting them have an Instagram account, because everyone else has an Instagram account?

Haidt: I know that situation because that’s the policy that I had with my kids. And the first thing is that it is true that they are missing out if they’re not on social media, but in the long run, they’re missing out on a lot more if they are on social media. So in the big picture, it is still very important to delay, and I urge a norm of delaying until 16.

Until now, many of us have been in a situation where our child could honestly say, “I’m the only one who doesn’t have it,” but that was in the past. Things are changing very fast already. Many parents are now delaying. So from here on in, it’s unlikely to be the case that any child is the only one who does not have a social-media account. This is a collective-action problem, and until now, all of us were stuck with the pressure to give in, because everyone else gave in. But going forward, there are enough of us that the best a child can say is “Mom, some of my friends have social media and I don’t.”

Khazan: How do you balance giving your kid more independence with monitoring what they do online?

Haidt: The internet is just not a good place to let your child roam free 24/7, especially at night and especially after bedtime. If you live in a house where out the back of the house is a wild jungle full of predators, and out in the front of the house is a meadow with bunny rabbits, and you let your kids roam in the back, but you don’t let them out in the front, you’re misallocating your protective instincts, right? To say we have overprotected our children in the real world and under-protected them online is no contradiction. It’s a statement of the realities.

[Read: The teen-disengagement crisis]

Khazan: You’ve written that phones are “experience blockers,” meaning they keep kids from experiencing the real world, and I totally see how that can be. But there are a lot of kids who are not old enough to drive, and whose parents don’t or can’t drive them places, and who, if they weren’t on their phone, would just be kind of lonely. Are you sure there are no redeeming elements to being able to connect with your friends from your home, to FaceTime with your friends, maybe even Instagram chat?

Haidt: Sure, but the claims made for the benefits of social media are almost invariably benefits of the internet, not social media. The internet made it possible for people to meet other people and to talk for free. But when social life became dominated by three or four giant platforms that used algorithms to funnel content to people, all under an advertising-based business model that prioritizes engagement, this is not connection; this is manipulation and addiction. The internet helps people connect, telephones help people connect, FaceTime helps people connect, but swiping through an infinite feed does not.

Khazan: Just to clarify, you would say that a kid should be allowed to FaceTime their friends from home?

Haidt: Yes, absolutely. Of course, that’s a good thing. Direct one-to-one communication is great. It’s very important to separate the internet from social media. One-to-one synchronous interaction is great. What’s not healthy is any sort of one-to-many performance, especially when it’s asynchronous, because that’s where the girls in particular get sucked into perfectionism and careful editing and carefully thinking through every word. It’s posting that seems to especially have a bad effect on teen girls.

Khazan: What do you see as the value of a show like Adolescence in terms of raising awareness or starting a conversation? In your experience, do people actually change their behavior after seeing a show like this, or do they just watch it for entertainment?

Haidt: When a work of fiction has an effect on a society, it’s usually not going to be just because the work of fiction was so persuasive that it changed everyone's minds. You have to look at where the audience was. And if the audience was already feeling that something was wrong, something was weird—and then a dramatic production puts it into a drama that we can all watch and talk about—then you can get a very rapid transformation of what psychologists call the common knowledge. We may each have been feeling that there was something wrong when my kid is spending every night or every weekend glued to her phone, swiping. But only once we realize that everyone else shares these concerns can you get very rapid change.

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Why Am I So Tired?

2025-04-14T08:00:00-04:00

The first sign of Mom Fatigue is leaving weird stuff in the fridge. Olivia Walch once got so tired that she put a box of Cheerios in the refrigerator. For Erin Wamsley, it was mugs of coffee and clean dishes; for Amanda Lamp, a pen. Maya Cash Carpenter told me her car keys sometimes turn up there.

As I interviewed mothers about the symptoms of their persistent exhaustion, they described brain fog, sleepiness, and general discombobulation. “I can’t remember the words I’m trying to say, or a concept I’m trying to convey to people,” said Jennifer Wood, a mother of four and a nurse. And they mentioned, unprompted, the refrigerator. (I, for one, recently bought a $7 pint of fancy ice cream and quickly placed it on a shelf next to the eggs and milk because I, too, am a sleepy mom.)

Believe it or not, mothers of young children sleep on average more than eight hours a night—technically “enough” rest. But many wake up each morning feeling like they could easily snooze for two to 10 more hours. Even after they no longer need to breastfeed in the middle of the night, many moms feel zonked, fantasizing about naps (for ourselves!) and spacing out during conversations (when we’re lucky enough to have adult time). This problem seems to mostly affect mothers specifically, not parents in general. Mothers sleep about the same amount as fathers do, researchers told me, but they report higher levels of fatigue. A 2017 study found that for women, having children in the house is associated with “feeling unrested”—not so for men. Moms don’t seem to need more sleep; we seem to need more … time? Brain capacity? Life juice? What, exactly?

[Read: Doomed to be a tradwife]

When I called researchers, some said that tired mothers might, in fact, simply require more sleep than the eight hours that most people assume adults need. “The main way in sleep medicine that we would measure whether you’re getting enough sleep would be whether you’re tired during the day,” said Wamsley, who in addition to being a mother of a teen is also a cognitive neuroscientist at Furman University. If you’re tired, in other words, that means you need more sleep, even if you think you’re getting enough.

But some researchers suggested that a lack of sleep isn’t the main culprit at all. “Parents will talk about fatigue as being something that persists and is unrelenting, even if they’ve had sleep and rest,” Rebecca Giallo, a researcher at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute in Australia, told me.

So what is going on with mothers’ energy levels? The problem might be that, although they are sleeping enough hours, the quality of their sleep isn’t great. About 12 percent of women have their sleep regularly interrupted by their young children, compared with less than 3 percent of men. I sleep with a baby monitor on, and I can hear my son wake periodically throughout the night, roll around in his crib, and fuss a little until he gets comfortable again. I wake up every time he does, and then I usually stay awake for a few more minutes to be sure he’s really settled. All of those minutes get deducted from my seemingly solid eight hours. Walch, the mother of a 10-month-old, the founder of a sleep-app company, and the author of Sleep Groove, told me that parents’ sleep schedules are also often inconsistent—that is, parents aren’t going to bed and waking up at the same time every day, because their kids won’t go down or because they’re trying to squeeze in tasks after bedtime. Staying up an hour later or waking an hour earlier than your body is accustomed to can make you feel tired, even if you sleep eight hours.

Then there’s “sleep debt”: All those nights of waking up frequently to feed a baby or to tend to a sick child contribute to a serious sleep deficit, one that takes a while to pay off—potentially weeks or months, depending on how large the debt is. A mother may have gotten eight hours of sleep last night, but not enough over the past six months. Walch told me about an old study that sounds like every new parent’s fantasy, in which healthy people were confined to a dark room for 14 hours a day. The first night, they slept about 12 hours, and the following night about 10, and so forth. Slowly, they drained the sleep deficit they had accrued over a lifetime.

Finally, many working mothers spend their lives hopping from the treadmill of child care to the treadmill of work, and back again. Before I had a child, I spent my nonwork time decompressing, staring at my phone, and doing nothing in particular. But these days, when I’m not working, I’m never truly relaxing. I’m ordering diapers from Walmart.com, Googling the right way to cut broccoli florets to minimize choking risk, researching different types of rashes, or making my son an occupational-therapy appointment because he’s “sitting wrong.” Oh, and I’m blocking and tackling a high-speed pre-toddler as he climbs the furniture, then frantically showing him how to play pat-a-cake, because learning this is apparently an important milestone. My husband is not doing all of this, because, like most men in a heterosexual relationship, he doesn’t focus as much on the details of our kid’s life as I do. He doesn’t know what the milestones even are.

[Read: The isolation of intensive parenting]

I’m far from alone in how I spend my, uh, “free time”—or in being the one who spends way more hours and brainpower on raising my child than my partner does, Melissa Milkie, a University of Toronto sociologist, told me. Even in families in which the parents earn roughly the same amount, mothers spend six hours more a week on caregiving and housework than fathers do. According to one recent study, women shoulder 73 percent of all cognitive household labor and 64 percent of the physical labor. All of this means that I, like many working mothers, have very few opportunities to wind down. Employed women get only about 13 minutes for “relaxing and thinking” on an average weekday, according to the American Time Use Survey. Employed men get 25. (The study didn’t provide information about working mothers and fathers specifically, but I can only imagine that the moms surveyed had even less time to relax.)

Fathers feel fatigued too, but “mothers, more than fathers, are taking on this really big, huge responsibility of making sure their children turn out successful and happy,” Milkie said. Maya Cash Carpenter, the mom who puts her keys in the fridge, has a 3-year-old, hosts a podcast, and also takes care of her ailing dad. She told me, “Even when I’m technically resting, I’m making mental checklists, responding to texts, planning content, or wondering if my toddler’s quiet time means peace or property damage. I’m quite literally a human browser with 47 tabs open at all times.” She said that her husband is tired in a “just finished a workout” way, while she’s tired in a “my soul needs to be wrung out like a sponge” way.

Working mothers have not historically had to manage such an enormous mental load on their own, Amanda Lamp, a sleep researcher at Washington State University (whom I called by the wrong name initially because I was so tired), told me. In our ancestral past as hunter-gatherers, she said, mothers watched their kids among groups of people while going about their day. Through industrialization and into the early 20th century, mothers were more likely to have the help of extended family and community members; they didn’t sprint home from a meeting to make it to “baby and me” swim class, stop on the way home for groceries, cook dinner, and do their kid’s bedtime routine. And parenting is different from other stressors that most humans are subjected to: A big work project ultimately ends, but motherhood just keeps going. “There’s a different kind of fatigue when you have 16 things pulling for your time, versus one really big project,” Carrie Mead, a therapist in Maryland whose clients are primarily women, told me.

To combat this problem, the experts I spoke with recommended that busy mothers take a few minutes each day for “wakeful rest,” or, in layman’s terms, for mentally zoning out. Lab studies have found that “having some amount of time in which a person is mentally not focused on the here and now is beneficial to memory consolidation,” Erin Wamsley said. This is not the same as meditation, which is beneficial in other ways but involves concentrating on your breath or on a mantra. Wakeful rest means just doing nothing: letting your mind relax. “Our brains are not built to deal with this onslaught of information,” Lamp said. Letting your mind wander for a few minutes can help reset your brain, kind of like turning your computer off and on when it overheats.

But how can mothers squeeze in this wakeful rest when they’re so busy? Lamp recommended that, if you are a tired mom, you take five or 10 minutes every day to do a mindless task—fold some laundry, go for a walk, what have you—during which you don’t listen to a podcast, make lists, or talk to anyone. Try not to think about anything in particular. Just be—the Walmart order can wait.

What Comedians Know About Staying Married

2025-03-26T07:40:00-04:00

Early in his relationship with a beautiful woman named LeeAnn, the comedian Bert Kreischer found himself wandering around Los Angeles at sunset, pleading with God. LeeAnn, whom he was quickly falling in love with, had said she wanted to take a break from the relationship for a couple of days—a suggestion that prompted Kreischer to melt down.

He remembers saying, “God, if you just give me this chick, I won’t fuck it up,” Kreischer, whose latest Netflix special, Lucky, focuses on his family life, told me recently. God did give him that chick, and Kreischer held up his end of the bargain. The two have been married since 2003.

When it comes to comics in long-lasting marriages, Kreischer has plenty of company. Despite a calling that can require late nights, constant travel, unstable income, and jokes at the expense of one’s spouse, many of the best-known comedians have marriages whose longevity would make a Sunday-school teacher proud. Jerry Seinfeld has been married since 1999; Jon Stewart since 2000; Tina Fey since 2001; Conan O’Brien since 2002; Adam Sandler since 2003; Ellen DeGeneres since 2008, when California first allowed same-sex marriage. Maya Rudolph is not married, but she’s been with her partner, the director Paul Thomas Anderson, since 2001. Nate Bargatze has made his nearly two-decade union with his wife, Laura, a centerpiece of his comedy. Stephen Colbert, who actually has taught Sunday school, outdoes them all: He’s been married to Evie Colbert since 1993.

I spoke with several long-married comedians, and their secret seems not to be humor or wealth—though those things probably don’t hurt. As the comedians pointed out to me, they are students of human behavior. They pay keen attention to their own quirks and emotions, and to those of others, for a living. And they apply that same perceptiveness to their marriage.

[Read: Nora Ephron’s revenge]

Of course, plenty of comedians have divorced, or have avoided marriage entirely. And comedians themselves don’t necessarily consider their profession ideal for fostering a long-lasting romance. Jim Gaffigan, the stand-up comic and author of Dad Is Fat, who has been married to his wife, Jeannie, since 2003, told me, “Whenever I hear of a comedian marrying a civilian, I’m like, ‘Why would you do that to that person?’”

Among the industry’s marital threats is that stand-up comedy today is more autobiographical than it was a few decades ago, Gaffigan said. During a set, he told me, “people expect to hear something about your life, whether it’s fictionalized or exaggerated.” That can include jokes about the comedians’ marriages—the kind of ragging that most people probably wouldn’t accept from their spouse in public, and that can be hurtful or sexist in the wrong context.

The comedians who most adeptly circumvent this problem seem to be the ones who collaborate actively with their partners. LeeAnn Kreischer edits and produces all of Bert’s specials. Gaffigan told me that his relationship with Jeannie, who is also a writer and comedian, “transformed and solidified my career.” They wrote some of his specials almost entirely together. “I remember waking her up and saying, ‘All right, we’ve got to think of more bacon jokes,’” he said. “And she was probably breastfeeding my first child at the time.”

Gaffigan and others I interviewed said their spouses have veto power over jokes about their marriage, but the comedians try not to test their limits. “I would probably never do anything that would require a veto,” Gaffigan said. Typically, the emotional core of his marriage bits casts him as the person at fault—for example, a recent joke in his special The Skinny was about Gaffigan agreeing to get his kids a dog even though his wife is allergic.

[Read: Comedy’s most erudite buffoon]

Tom Papa, the stand-up and host of the radio program Come to Papa, said his wife, Cynthia, whom he married in 2000, can nix his jokes, and she has exercised this right “a little bit.” Once, he told me, she objected to a joke about her snoring; Papa reworked it, he said, “until it passed inspection.” Overall, he thinks performing material about his family benefits his marriage because he can “go onstage and vent,” he added. “It’s just me having fun and yelling about something that’s aggravating at home, onstage at the Comedy Cellar.” Then, he said, “You go home and you’re like, ‘I’m no longer mad at her. I said it out loud, a bunch of people laughed, and she doesn’t have to get my pettiness about it.’”

The Kreischers have two rules when it comes to jokes about LeeAnn: “One is he can talk about me as long as it’s not mean,” LeeAnn told me. “And he can talk about me as long as it’s really funny.” Bert said she hasn’t yet vetoed a joke—and in fact, she sometimes eggs him on. One time, LeeAnn farted during sex, then said, “You’re gonna talk about this onstage, aren’t you?”

To which he replied: “Can I?”

“She goes, ‘You have to,’” Bert said. “‘If it’s happened to me, it’s happened to other people.’ And I did it, and it murdered.”

The amount of time comedians spend on the road may also seem like an obstacle to marital bliss. But several of the comedians I interviewed instead saw touring, and the physical and mental space it provides, as a release valve of sorts, easing the pressure on the partnership. “Maybe me traveling is helpful,” Gaffigan said. “It’s like, she doesn’t have to deal with me. In some ways, my stand-up is my golf.” The Kreischers told me that they’d just started couples therapy because with their kids off at college, they’d noticed they were spending more time together than normal—and they wanted to get ahead of any potential problems that this new closeness might bring.

The comedians I spoke with said the most important reason for the longevity of their marriages is their self-awareness, and their ability to tune in to the emotional states of their partners, their audiences, and humans in general. “You’re always analyzing what’s going on in the world around you, and that goes for your relationship as well,” Papa said. “I think that that sensitivity makes us very present in the relationship.” He added, “You’re constantly tending to this relationship. It’s never just left alone.”

[Read: The marriage lesson I learned too late]

Julie Gottman, a renowned psychologist and co-founder of the Gottman Institute, which researches how to build strong romantic relationships, affirmed the importance of self-awareness. “The better you know yourself,” she told me, “the better you can express who you are, what your needs are—the more transparent you can be to the other individual.” This skill can be especially beneficial early in a relationship, when people are first selecting their partners; it might make comedians particularly good at recognizing a romantic match. “The majority of comics were not, like, alpha men in high school,” Bert Kreischer told me. They were funny and sensitive, he said, adding, “All the ones who stayed married were ones that weren’t looking just to get laid. They were looking for someone to understand them.” LeeAnn agreed. Comics, she told me, tend to “become really aware that they’ve found that special person, and then have some reverence for that.”

No profession has a monopoly on good marriages, Gottman said. (Even therapists, she pointed out, “are still making mistakes like the rest of us.”) Still, Gottman has found that one of the most important elements of a successful relationship is knowing what your partner’s priorities, beliefs, needs, and values are. You don’t have to be like your partner, but you do have to know your partner. “The fact that the comedians are really good at assessing other people’s signals for what they may be experiencing, I think, is very useful,” she said.

Early in their relationship, the Kreischers would hold what they called “The Summit,” a yearly meeting during which they had uncomfortable conversations about money, goals, sex, and other important topics in a calm and straightforward way. The practice was a perfect encapsulation of what Bert originally sought in a partner: “I don’t need big tits,” he said. “I need big empathy.” A good title for his next stand-up special, perhaps.

How Baby-Led Weaning Almost Ruined My Life

2025-03-17T07:50:00-04:00

For decades, this was the widely accepted way to feed a baby: Sit them in a high chair, pop open a jar of mushy pureed peas, scoop some onto a tiny spoon, make an “open wide” face, and—whoosh—make it fly like an airplane into the baby’s mouth.

No longer. Over the past 10 years or so, a method called “baby-led weaning” has caught on among many parents. Its proponents claim that infants don’t need to be spoon-fed baby food. In fact, they don’t need to be spoon-fed anything. Parents should give them big hunks of real food to paw at and chomp on as soon as they’re ready to start solids, even if they have only one or two teeth. Just throw an entire broccoli crown or chicken drumstick at your six-month-old and see what they do with it. (The process is called “weaning” because as the baby eats more solids, they’re supposed to drink progressively less breast milk or formula.) By following this method, you can supposedly reduce the risk that your child will grow up to be a fussy eater or an obese adult.

I was drawn to baby-led weaning in part because, as a sometime health reporter, I was concerned about childhood obesity. Baby-led weaning also seemed somehow more natural and pure. It didn’t involve Big Baby Food. And it was a way of trusting my baby to know what he needs because he is smart and advanced.

Still, as I prepared my then-six-month-old son’s first plate of solid food, I didn’t want to start with a T-bone. I decided to test the waters with something pretty soft. Following a recipe from a popular app called Solid Starts, I stirred a little ground turkey into some sweet potato and put it on my son’s tray. Tentatively, he put the clump in his mouth. Within seconds, he gagged so hard that he threw up all over himself. Mealtime ended with him crying and getting hosed off.

[Olga Khazan: Doomed to be a tradwife]

This process repeated itself with every food we tried, until a few months in, when he “progressed” to taking bites of food and then promptly spitting them out. We watched with alarm as our son turned 10 months, and then 11, mere weeks from the age—12 months—when he was supposed to stop drinking formula and start getting nearly all of his nutrition from food. Except he was consuming, generously, 50 calories of food a day.

My husband and I didn’t know what to do. The internet is so awash in posts and videos about baby-led weaning that I wasn’t sure how to adapt when the method didn’t work. Our pediatrician had not previously been helpful in matters of feeding, so we didn’t ask her. Instead, I reached out to baby-feeding experts, who said that if baby-led weaning fails, spoon-feeding your baby mashed-up or pureed food is fine. I also came away from these interviews with the impression that baby-led weaning has less evidence behind it than its supporters claim—and that like many newfangled, internet-supercharged baby trends, it has the effect of encouraging parents to make raising children way too hard for themselves.

Baby-led weaning was pioneered more than two decades ago by Gill Rapley, a British public-health nurse. As she visited families who were introducing solid foods to their babies, she noticed that some babies resisted being spoon-fed. The parents thought the babies didn’t like the food they were offering, but Rapley suspected they didn’t enjoy the process. She would suggest that those parents give their babies large pieces of food to hold instead. “And they would do that,” she told me in an interview, “and it would solve the problem.”

In her 2008 book on baby-led weaning, which has sold more than 100,000 copies—a sizable number for a book of this type—Rapley writes that as babies need more nutrients, they will eat more purposefully, as though the baby “instinctively knows that he actually needs this food.” She asserts that the method promotes greater “satiety awareness,” which means a baby-led baby “may be less likely to overeat when they are older.” She writes that the method carries no greater risk of choking than spoon-feeding because the baby is in control of what’s in his mouth, and recommends treating the baby almost like an honored dinner guest, suggesting that you should even avoid wiping a baby’s face between mouthfuls.

Baby-led weaning really came into vogue after the 2019 launch of the Brooklyn-based Solid Starts, which features recipes and tips for serving whole foods to infants of different ages. Though parents can simply buy Rapley’s book, many parents seem to learn the technique through the influencers, programs, and apps they find online. Half a dozen pediatricians and infant-feeding experts I spoke with said many patients ask them about the practice, usually after seeing it on social media. Solid Starts has 3.7 million followers on Instagram (more than the 3.6 million babies born in the U.S. in 2022) and millions of downloads. One speech therapist who frequently posts baby-led-weaning tips on TikTok has nearly a quarter-million followers. An assortment of baby-led-weaning Facebook groups each has tens of thousands of members who post pictures of their infants slamming down plates of sausage and pasta. Many of the instructions for how to deploy the method come at a price. One program costs $247, another is $59, and Solid Starts is $20 a month. One specialist offers four months of pediatric “nutrition coaching” for $999.

[Carla Cevasco: What parents did before formula]

The tone of pro-baby-led-weaning posts is enthusiastic verging on evangelistic: The speech therapist argues in a video that it’s spoon-feeding, not baby-led weaning, that increases the risk of choking. Moms post time-lapse videos of themselves crinkle-cutting carrots, then steaming them, then burning their fingers as they put them through the “squish” test (if it’s squishable, it’s safe to feed a baby). They post videos of their nine-month-olds eagerly chomping on pork chops, or of slightly older babies eating daintily with a fork. “If you want this,” the text reads, “you have to go through this”—a clip of the same baby messily shoveling yogurt into his mouth.

All of this content has the effect of making baby-led weaning seem like the only thing you should do. “There’s all these things on the internet, and it’s like, you must be a bad parent if you don’t do baby-led,” Mark Corkins, the chair of the nutrition committee of the American Academy of Pediatrics, told me.

As our own baby-led failures started to pile up, I did feel like a bad parent. But as I looked at the science behind this practice more closely, I started to wonder if I was truly failing, or if baby-led weaning is just not all it’s cracked up to be.

Baby-led weaning is billed as “easy” because you’re supposed to be able to offer the baby whatever you’re eating. Some parents do find this approach appealing: One representative comment on Solid Starts’ Instagram page reads, “Feeding our baby the same meals as we eat … is the best thing ever. Introduces her to so many foods and also saves us time and money!”

I do not share this enthusiasm, though, because babies can’t eat many of the things adults do. According to most experts, babies under a year old can’t have sugar, honey, unpasteurized or raw cheese, raw seafood, processed or ready-made meals, or additional salt. Rapley also recommends that you avoid artificial colors, flavors, preservatives, sweeteners, and soy milk. Good luck finding a food in America that doesn’t contain at least one of those things. At one point in her book, Rapley, echoing other baby-feeding experts, suggests that babies avoid certain kinds of tuna, but then recommends that at a restaurant, you share with the baby your meal of a “baked potato with tuna” (coming to a Chili’s menu near you!).

At home, I’m almost never eating something that’s suitable for a baby. Most days for dinner, I have a big salad with thick, crunchy kale; nuts of some kind; and an unpasteurized cheese—none of which is okay for babies. (“Salads are not great for young children,” Rapley acknowledged.) I often serve the salad alongside a salty, spicy pasta dish, but babies aren’t supposed to have salt. Rapley told me you can just add salt later, to your own plate—which would mean that you’re boiling pasta in unsalted water and searing an unsalted chicken breast for you to eat, and for your little one to gnaw on.

Plus, what you’re getting in exchange for this flavor-free lifestyle is not totally clear. The biggest purported benefit of baby-led weaning is that allowing babies to “tune into their bodies,” as Rapley puts it, may help prevent obesity later in life. But this has turned out to not be quite right: Many studies on this question find no difference in weight between babies who are baby-led-weaned versus spoon-fed.

Rapley also claims that children who are baby-led, rather than spoon-fed, become less finicky eaters. Some experts I spoke with agreed with this assessment, but one small study found that baby-led weaning made no difference in picky eating. One childhood-obesity researcher, Rachael Taylor of the University of Otago, in New Zealand, told me that a main benefit of baby-led weaning seems to be that it makes parents feel good: “When you talk to parents who like it,” she said, “they love it.”

That’s if their babies will do it. Another claim of baby-led-weaning proponents is that whether the baby eats much of anything doesn’t matter; just licking or gumming the food and spitting it out is okay. When I asked Rapley what to do if your baby still isn’t eating enough solid food by the time they turn 1, she suggested that allowing the baby to continue to drink formula might be fine.

But infant-feeding experts told me not to do this; they said that babies should be eating lots of actual food by 12 months. If they’re not, Corkins said, “you should have bailed on baby-led a lot sooner.” Another feeding researcher, Charlotte Wright at the University of Glasgow, suggested that families who practice baby-led weaning should combine finger foods with spoon-feeding to ensure that their babies are eating enough.

Mark Fishbein, who runs a pediatric feeding clinic at Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, told me he wouldn’t recommend baby-led weaning to most families. “There may be some benefit, maybe,” he said, “but the risks are much higher.” Infants doing baby-led weaning gag frequently, which, according to Fishbein, occasionally triggers a feeding aversion that can cause the baby to shun all foods, from a spoon or otherwise. (Rapley acknowledged that excessive gagging “can indeed be a bad thing,” but said that it generally correlates with an underlying problem that baby-led weaning exposes, rather than causes.) When I mentioned a common baby-led food suggestion, a whole piece of meat, to Dina DiMaggio, a pediatrics professor at NYU, she said, “I get worried about things like that”—because big, tough pieces of food can pose a choking risk.

[Read: This is no way to talk about children]

Still, most experts I spoke with said that baby-led weaning can be a reasonable thing for normally developing babies to try, but that parents of kids with delays or medical issues should proceed with caution. (Rapley has released a companion book geared toward parents of kids with disabilities, claiming that baby-led weaning can work for them, too—though with a “transitional phase” that involves purees or mashed foods.)

The upshot seems to be that baby-led weaning is fine if it works for your kid, but that the “traditional” way—spoon-feeding your baby—is also fine. That’s not the impression many parents get, though. “My patients, their parents are very concerned,” DiMaggio told me. They’re just doing baby-led weaning “because some influencer said to do it.” In this way, the evangelizing for baby-led weaning has come to resemble some of the proselytizing for breastfeeding and unmedicated childbirth and so many other things that are supposedly free and easy and best for your baby, but can be anything but for the parents.

[Read: The fairy-tale promises of Montessori parenting]

Granted, mine is the only baby I’ve ever interacted with at length, but I’ve come to the conclusion that he should not be leading his own weaning. He should not, frankly, be leading anything, because he is—and I say this with all the love in my heart—not that smart. He thinks the trash can is awesome. He doesn’t realize that I don’t die when I go to the bathroom. He believes the Roomba is sentient. He does not, unfortunately, instinctively understand how to eat a diet rich in varied macronutrients, in order to perfectly complement his formula feeds in an age-appropriate way. That’s my job, and I’m going to lead him through it.

Putin Is Loving This

2025-03-06T14:05:00-05:00

Upon hearing the news that President Donald Trump had suspended military aid to Ukraine, I sat down for some Russian must-see TV: white guys screaming about international relations. Curious to understand how Trump’s Kremlin-friendly move was playing in the motherland, I wanted to compare the reaction of Russian state news to that of American right-wing channels. Pretty soon, I started thinking about that meme from The Office in which Pam holds up two photos, saying, “Corporate needs you to find the differences between this picture and this picture,” before the camera cuts to her privately admitting, “They’re the same picture.”

Over the past few days, Russian news talk shows have consisted almost entirely of translated clips of Trump-administration officials and Trump surrogates—Vice President J. D. Vance, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, and National Security Adviser Michael Waltz, among others—defending the president and attacking Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Fox News. The interview clips were interspersed with video of the fateful meeting between Trump and Zelensky in the Oval Office last week, along with readings, in Russian, of Trump’s posts on Truth Social and Elon Musk’s posts on X, which is funnier than it sounds.

Soon after the Trump-Zelensky blowup, the Kremlin said that America’s foreign policy now “largely aligns with our vision.” Across three different news shows on the state-owned Channel One and Russia-1, which take their marching orders directly from Russian President Vladimir Putin, this cozy alignment was on full display. It seemed that Russian state TV, and Putin by extension, could not be more pleased with what has been happening. The shows I watched simply broadcast clips of Trump officials, and then their all-male panels of analysts—no DEI in Russia!—echoed their exact words, approvingly.

[Read: The simple reason for why Trump turned against Ukraine]

Even when the shows’ panelists admitted to some nervousness about Trump’s next moves, they said his decision to cut off aid to Ukraine “raised our spirits,” as one guest put it. At times, they sounded like they were discussing a problematic friend who everyone agrees is crazy but who inadvertently did something useful.

Panelists repeatedly made reference to Ukraine drawing the world closer to “World War III”—a direct quote from Trump, which has since been parroted in various U.S. media appearances by his loyalists. They fawned over Trump’s prowess and insulted Zelensky; one guest called the Ukrainian president “dust under the feet of Trump,” an even nastier take on the man whom Trump called “no angel” and “a dictator.”

On the show The Great Game, panelists derided Zelensky as someone who believes himself, wrongly, to be “the great leader of the West.” One panelist referred to Zelensky’s conduct during the Oval Office meeting as “hysterical diplomacy” and said, “He couldn’t figure out how to behave himself in the interest of his own country.” The panelist declared that the showdown probably “shortened the war by many months.” Presumably, he said this because he believes Russia will win.

On Evening With Vladimir Solovyov, panelists discussed how the confirmation of Elbridge Colby, Trump’s nominee for undersecretary of defense for policy, “would be very good news for us, because the part of Trump’s team that supports putting Ukraine on Europe’s shoulders would be strengthened considerably,” as one analyst put it. Solovyov noted favorably that Trump hit Europe and Zelensky “on the nose.” The show played a clip of Vance saying that the United States and Europe can’t support Ukraine indefinitely, and one panelist heartily agreed. Actually, they all agreed—they aren’t allowed to disagree—and they voiced this agreement at an eardrum-popping volume. They sounded mad, but they were very, very happy.

60 Minutes—Russia’s version—pointed out how reasonable Trump was being, highlighting that Trump had praised Ukrainian soldiers during the Oval Office meeting. Zelensky, however, called Vance “J.D.,” “as though they are schoolyard buddies,” and was “biting the hand that feeds him.” The show then played clips of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick saying that he wished Zelensky had said “We love America,” and of Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard claiming on Fox News Sunday that Zelensky’s government is canceling elections and silencing the opposition. (Elections there have been postponed because of the war.)

The panelist Spiridon Kilinkarov added that Zelensky “presented not the interests of Ukraine but of the anti-Trump European globalists,” a nearly verbatim echo of Republican Senator Tommy Tuberville’s claim that Zelensky has been “brainwashed by the globalist socialist group in Europe.” The show played a clip of Tuberville saying on Newsmax that “Putin and President Trump and the people on our side … will end up making this decision for the future of Ukraine.” They liked the sound of that.

[Phillips Payson O’Brien: Trump sided with Putin. What should Europe do now?]

Another panelist jumped in with a claim that Zelensky once campaigned for the Democrats in Pennsylvania—a misleading statement, originally made by Vance, that referred to a fall meeting between Zelensky and Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro at an ammunition plant. Then, in an ouroboros of surreality, the show played a clip of The Daily Show, which itself featured a clip of that same Russian show in which a host expressed joy at the crumbling of the U.S.-Ukraine alliance. Perhaps DOGE can make the Russian news industry more efficient by firing all its commentators and broadcasting a direct feed of One America News instead.

Finally, the panelist Igor Korotchenko put a bow on everything by remarking with relief that “Biden financed this war, but the priorities of the new administration are different.” He suggested that the Trump administration should go further than pausing military aid, that it should have Elon Musk cut Ukraine’s access to the Starlink satellite-internet system—something the Trump administration has already threatened to do.

“If Trump is able to remove Zelensky as a political figure from the global chessboard,” Korotchenko added, “he should be eligible for the Nobel Peace Prize.” Darrell Issa, the Republican U.S. representative who nominated Trump for the award on Monday, couldn’t have said it better himself.

Coaching Is the New ‘Asking Your Friends for Help’

2025-03-05T09:30:00-05:00

Serena Kocourek dreaded the lullaby. She worked in a hospital, and every time a baby was born, staffers would play the same song over the loudspeaker. She was going through IVF, trying without success to conceive a baby. When the lullaby played, she told me, “I felt like I was two feet further away from finally being a mom.”

One thing helped: messaging her IVF coach, Kristin Dillensnyder. She’d say, “They just played the lullaby thing and I didn’t cry.” “Win,” Dillensnyder would respond. Or she’d remind Kocourek, “Just because somebody else is having a baby doesn’t mean that you can’t have a baby.” Dillensnyder also offered advice for staying hopeful during the grueling process of IVF: She suggested that Kocourek create a playlist of songs to listen to as she gave herself hormone injections. Kocourek liked that Dillensnyder had gone through IVF herself and would help her come up with responses to insensitive questions from family and friends about when she planned to get pregnant. Occasionally, in the middle of her day, she’d think, “I just need to step away. I just need to talk to Kristin real quick.”

IVF coaching may sound niche, but it’s far from the most specialized type of coaching on offer. These days, if a problem exists, there seems to be a coach for it. Having trouble focusing? An “executive function” coach might be right for you. Undecided about having kids? There’s a coach for that too. Too burned out to plan a “transformative” vacation? A travel coach can help you for $597 (a price that does not include the actual booking of the trip).

[Read: The teen-disengagement crisis]

Discovering all these types of coaches made me wonder: Whatever happened to asking people you know for advice? So I set out to try to understand why people hire coaches and what they get from the experience. Most of the coaching clients I spoke with asked to use only their first name because of the personal nature of the issues they sought help for. One woman, Sarah, sees a meditation coach for $350 a session, justifying it because she does not own “expensive purses or clothes.” Another woman, Liz, has, at various points, had a career coach, an executive coach, a doula (or birthing coach), a co-parenting coach, and two different accountability coaches who focus on diet and exercise. She recently added a Disney “concierge”—a coach for navigating the Magic Kingdom. Each one of her coaches costs at least a couple of hundred dollars a session. She told me that if she hasn’t done something important before and wants to do it right, she tends to hire a coach to help her. “Winging it is so not my style,” she said. “Why not go into it informed if you can?”

People have long sought advice for some of life’s biggest questions—marry that guy or don’t; take or don’t take that job. But over the past few decades, the options for living one’s best adult life have expanded so much that knowing the right or wrong way to do anything can be difficult. Today, many Americans can join a polyamorous triad, remain child-free by choice, launch a new career in their 30s, or dedicate themselves to running ultramarathons, all without ruffling any feathers within their community. “Identities are no longer given,” Michal Pagis, a lecturer of sociology and anthropology at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, who has studied coaching, told me. “They are now achieved … It’s a project.” A number of people seem to crave sounding boards for all of this identity making, especially if they want to do it “correctly”—i.e., in a way that is still impressive, if unconventional. Erik Baker, a Harvard historian and the author of Make Your Own Job, told me that coaching is the latest example of “the therapeutic culture that emerged in the United States in the 20th century: a sense of needing to have some kind of expert to help optimize your performance.” Being “normal” is no longer enough, so people hire coaches to help them transcend normal.

In some ways, coaching stands in for the free, civic sources of support that over the past decade have been slowly fading away. People are less likely now to be members of the kinds of community groups or religious congregations where they might have previously sought help. In some circles, an idea has taken hold that asking strangers for advice without paying is gauche. Emailing someone to “pick their brain” has become a corporate misdemeanor. (“Set the precedent that you are not comfortable talking without a pre-booked and pre-paid official meeting,” goes some typical advice on how to respond to such an affront.)

People today also have fewer close friends than they used to, and they may be reluctant to rely on those friends for help. Overwhelmingly, the coaching clients I spoke with told me that they would not expect their (few, flawed, busy) friends to provide the same level of guidance that their coaches do. Friends and family members are biased. (“You never know if someone has your best interest in mind,” Liz told me.) A stranger who doesn’t know you seems more likely to be neutral. Friends may say clumsy or unsupportive things as they respond to your texts between meetings; a coach’s job is always to have the right mantra at hand.

[Read: Want to change your personality? Have a baby.]

In her book The Outsourced Self, the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild writes that when it comes to advice, “anything you pay for is better.” A coach is like a super-friend—someone very smart and attentive who can help you make the best possible decision. Kiya Thompson, a travel coach, refers to her service “like a best friend pre-trip, during the trip, and … after the trip.” Dillensnyder, the IVF coach, told me that she sees herself as kind of like “a big sister”—one whose counsel is, presumably, better than your real sister’s. “Friends and family are really good,” Dillensnyder said. “However, they often give advice that is not helpful.” Another refrain I heard was that coaches allow you to be messy and depressed around them so that you can be bubbly and interesting around your friends. As another woman, Emily, put it to me about her weight-loss coach, “Your friends don’t want to listen to you talk about that all the time.”

But using coaching in this way undermines one important aspect of friendship: reciprocity. During a common type of friend hang, one person shares their problems for a while and the other person offers their best stab at some solutions. Then they switch. Pagis told me that debts—for example, owing someone a few minutes of uninhibited venting—“are important for social relations.” With coaching, however, “you are avoiding creating these debts.” If part of friendship is being there for each other, what becomes of the institution when you don’t have to be? When the well-heeled can afford to take their problems to a coach, friends risk becoming merely the people with whom we have pleasant catch-up brunches before we rush home to pay by the hour to give the real dirt to a stranger.

Yet the advice a coach dispenses may not be as reliable as clients hope. Coaches, who in many cases bear no qualifications other than personal experience, do not need to adhere to official standards. Some coaches might be only dabbling in the practice: A 2023 report by the International Coaching Federation, a credentialing body for some types of coaches, noted that the average coach spent just 12 hours a week coaching.

The casualness of these arrangements, and the lack of standards, can lead to disappointment—and little recourse—when people pay hundreds for coaching that turns out to be lackluster. One woman I spoke with, Maria, told me she was scrolling through TikTok when she came across a bariatric-surgery coach who promised to help her adjust to the dramatically different eating habits the procedure requires. “I booked a call with her,” Maria said, “and she sold me within, like, 20 minutes.” For about $500 a month, the coach would check Maria’s MyFitnessPal food log and text her an emoji assessing her performance—a fire emoji if she was doing well, for example. But during their one-on-one sessions, Maria felt like she was talking with the coach’s TikTok character rather than with a devoted adviser. “She has, like, five things that she repeats over and over again,” Maria said. She quit after two months.

Coaching can also be a problem if it replaces therapy, which, unlike coaching, is regulated and typically covered by insurance. Most coaches take pains to point out that they are not therapists, and most of the coaching clients I interviewed either have or have had therapists. Still, about 25 to 50 percent of coaching clients have a diagnosable mental-health condition, and they aren’t getting any formal mental-health treatment from their coaches, Elias Aboujaoude, a psychiatry professor at Stanford, told me. “In my clinical work, it’s a common thing that comes up,” he said. “We recommend a therapist to someone, and they’ll say, ‘Oh, but I’m seeing a life coach.’”

[Read: The isolation of intensive parenting]

I do have a therapist. Even so, the more I dug into coaching, the more I wanted to understand what people saw in it. I soon had the opportunity to find out. In the course of my reporting, I spoke with Nell Wulfhart, a “decision coach” who, for $247 per hour-long session, helps her clients make one big life decision—as varied as whether to have kids or what color to paint their kitchen.

Wulfhart told me that she’s always had a “fixer brain,” and that often, she’s simply listening for what the person really wants to do anyway. “It just helps to have a totally neutral third party to check your work,” she said, “and make sure, ‘Yes, this is not a ludicrous risk you’re taking.’” What qualifications does she have? “Nothing,” she said. “People have said to me, ‘You’re so wise.’ And I was like, I think they mean you’re in your mid-40s.”

I’m allergic to people who embellish their credentials, so I liked that she admitted her lack thereof. I also liked that she has worked as a journalist, a profession I associate with straight shooters. And as it happened, I did have a decision I was struggling with. So I decided to book a session with her.

I told Wulfhart that I couldn’t decide whether to move to Florida or to Texas. She began asking me questions about what was important to me, what else I’d considered, and what each place had to offer me. Unlike my therapist, she didn’t ask about my childhood—in fact, she didn’t seem much interested in my backstory, my neuroses, or any of my usual patterns of behavior. “Why you feel this way is not that relevant,” she said. “The only thing that matters is that you do feel this way.”

It did feel like talking with a super-friend—someone who was smart and likable, but also disinterested and ruthlessly rational. After about 30 minutes, she told me what I should do. It was what I’d wanted to do anyway.

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