To camp with kids makes me question my sanity. I crush tasks. Setting up the tent, laying out the bedding, stacking coolers on a bench. The picnic tables are skeined with leaves after a season of rain. I peel and drape their skeletal outlines over a nurse log. Forest doilies. We brought bikes. Our sons pop wheelies in the parking lot, safer than it sounds because few campers have braved late spring at Seaquest State Park.

On the drive along Spirit Lake Highway to Mount St. Helens, the houses are few and well-priced. I marvel; Brian scoffs. That’s because this whole place was destroyed forty years ago. Having timed our trip to the eruption’s anniversary, we ascend through what had been a trail of devastation. Once seared by lahars, the landscape has greened into a wildlife corridor that winds around the Toutle River.

Scientists didn’t think life would come back this fast. Scant weeks after the blast, fireweed poked its green head through the ash, sending purple flowers skyward by July of 1980. The next year, I was born. We don’t always know where hope resides. I spent four decades guarding a secret. Quietude is a fertile state. Sure, I published hundreds of articles with my byline. But I rarely disclosed my own truths.

To this sunny weekend, I had invited a couple that Brian and I met in Seattle. Like him, they’re from the Midwest. Friendly people. She sang at our wedding with her two sisters, one of whom was our officiant. They moved to Portland a year after we met. We have stayed friends, which says something because I have lost contact with people who live in north Seattle. Together we decide on the Hummocks Trail. It’s only 2.5 miles long. I used to burn for monthlong expeditions, but it’s a good length for short legs.

I had never heard of hummocks before, which is the privilege of choosing one’s encounter with destruction. Hummocks are pieces of the mountain blown off by the eruption and carried downhill by a landslide. By the time we arrived, they had settled into place.

Upon these chunks of rock, ecosystems arise. Beneath the alders, bushy green horsetails wave in the unaccustomed sun. Their bright stalks, notched like bamboo, are topped with long fronds that grow in a feathery circle, like squirrel tails. With more than 300 million years of evolutionary strategy in the making, horsetails are hard to remove when they take root. It doesn’t matter how many times you pull them. I was charmed when they touched down in my garden. There, like here, they grow high enough to tickle my children’s hands along the path.

Our boys throw sticks into the ponds. Called the lifeblood of the hummocks by helpful plaques I read at a gallop to keep the kids in sight, the ponds are more like seeps. Or rainfall catchment basins. They were born when chunks of shattered glacier melted, forming pits filled by water then buried in ash. No longer held together by the mountainside, the hummocks slumped apart. Water dribbled through gray crannies. Now exposed to the sky, the ponds are thick with algae and cattails. Damselflies and dragonflies lay their eggs in the stillness. In springtime, the toad and frog eggs hatch into tadpoles which wriggle through the murk.

The ponds are unstable and evaporate quickly. To survive their home, the creatures must reproduce early and often. By the time I birthed our boys, I was in my thirties and had fortified my self-regard. Each autumn, the frogs and toads bury themselves in the muck to wait for spring. I had no knowledge of such metaphors when I was a girl. But I waited for my season to come.

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Fireweed has many uses. I can only name a few. Epilobium angustifolium fights inflammation, bacteria and aging, among other properties. What I can say about fireweed — I know what it is to harden in resistance, to become a seed that flowers in adversity. I work to overcome a tendency toward hypervigilance and its attendant crises of critique and anxiety. My husband has a hard time getting me to relax.

He is practiced. I am wary of his wiles. But Brian loves the prickly spine of me. He did not show up just to harvest the blossoms. He takes time to water the roots. He opens channels to the sun. He accepts sudden rains for the blessings they bring. I married an easygoing man. He trusts eventuality. Our sons scamper down the path with their friends, secure in their innocence.

Called Lawetlat’la, Loowit, or Louwala-Clough, which means smoking mountain, Mount St. Helens didn’t remake itself overnight. The eruption began on the same day in March that our eldest was born and that the Attis passion week concludes. Lavatio. A public ceremony that washes the image of the mother goddess, following Hilaria, a time for celebration. Few continue to worship Cybele, if any, but her rituals persist in other guises. Images of the Madonna are promenaded through the streets of Catholic towns throughout Europe and South America. She is showered in petals gathered from the hills, just like in pagan times. Carried in procession, her image is exposed to public view so that she may confer protection upon that community. With sorrowful eyes and an enigmatic smile, she tells them a story about themselves.

Mount St. Helens collapsed in three separate blocks, the first of which hurtled toward where we are hiking. Standing in the sun, passing snacks, it is hard to imagine the ground — which feels solid under my feet — as it had been, spinning down the mountain at up to 155 miles per hour.

A few seconds after the first block slid, the second block broke through, powered by the blast of released pressure and the magma welling from beneath. Before Mount St. Helens erupted, scientists didn’t know how far away to keep onlookers. Geologists thought the volcano would blow its top upward, rather than sideways. The mountain did not perform according to plan. For this and other reasons — some decided to wait it out — fifty-seven people perished that day in May. Decades of subsequent study have shown that the earth held this knowledge for us, but we did not see it.

Scientists had noticed mounds near other volcanoes, but they believed the hills had formed from mudflows or glaciers. But they were, in fact, evidence of catastrophe. In New Zealand 23,000 years ago, Mount Egmont’s debris avalanche traveled 19 miles. Closer to home in California, Mount Shasta’s debris avalanche traveled 30 miles. In 1888 Japan, a debris avalanche traveled 7 miles from Mount Bandai and became a hilly forest that people now call home. Glistening in the sun, the scooped cone of Mount St. Helens’ summit can be seen from these hummocks which came to rest 14 miles from their source. Snowmelt unfurls from the crater like tentacles.

My home in Seattle is 3,093 miles from the island of my youth. It would take forty-six hours to drive that distance, or forty-two days to walk the diagonal across a country which has not always felt great enough to protect me. I hew to my beloved jagged coast. This place helped make me who I am, a woman who carries stories for our descendants. May they know greener times.

Seeds grow best when given space. To heal from my origin so that I could become myself and a mother, I have accepted estrangement as necessary. My parents are unable to reconcile our facts. They prefer façades. But to remain in relation with falsity is too deep a strain. My narrative belongs to me.

When this book is published, I anticipate my birth family will not speak to me again. While the pull toward my parents is real, separation brought relief to my body. Do these hummocks miss their brethren shoved against the valley walls? Their silt and silica trickle downhill together, grain by grain.

Most entanglements are quantum. The braids of Toutle River are akin to the Missoula Flood patterns, visible from astronomical heights which reveal our land’s history: A mighty ice dam gave way, again and again, to the water it held in abeyance. I have worked hard to pry apart the fractals that have locked my kin into repeating errors at various orders of magnitude. To move forward, I have relinquished the belief that my happiness depends on our unity. They don’t have to show kindness for me to heal. They have their reasons for being puzzles I no longer need to solve. Forgiveness does not imply reconciliation.

Releasing them has freed me to hold space for my own story. My liberation has stoked resentment and dissent. You’re hurting us, they accuse, meaning, You’re hurting our idea of us, and this idea is all that we are. In these pages, I remain in relation to forebears who no longer define my future. Our shared memories make us a family the way rivers carry snowmelt to the sea.

 

It can be hazardous to leave the path that was planned for you. Here on the hummocks, in full view of the mountain which mothered them, I step off trail and slide down scree that skins my shin into a shining ruby constellation. I don’t bother to shield my legs from the sun. My scars remind me: Forging a desire line can be dangerous. So is failing to follow your hope. When I think of my family now, I look for roots I’ve grown into the earth. Sturdy enough to bear witness, they send signals of welcome to you whose presence I embrace, unseen.

With our communion comes responsibility for what happens next. That, too, is mine to accept, though not control. The route to the goddess unmakes you. Our journey was never meant to be linear. Find the whole in the fragments.

Dusk cloaks the grove around our tents. A cinder cone rebuilds herself on a horizon I cannot see. Here I feel safe to revel in the gloaming. Evenings are ceremonial for parents. We remain open to the world in defiance of routines which structure our days. Rituals are made through repetition. We feed our children and tell stories. Not much remains to be done. In the forest, there is no bathing, except in beauty.

Our kids stay up. The campfire warms their small faces. Wet wipes provide the semblance of clean hands after s’mores. The fathers are tasked with bedtime. With kisses good night, my sons step into our tent. My husband zips up the door. From the fire circle, I hear their murmurs and laughter amidst the slight rustle of sleeping bags. My friend smiles, her eyes agleam with patient hope. She is ready for our song time. The night stills but for the crackles of sap. We sip from metal cups, our sparks spiraling toward the stars.

“Desire Lines” is available in print from Red Hen Press or as an audiobook narrated by the author, who is currently on a book tour. 

The post To become the mother I wanted to be, I had to let my parents go appeared first on Salon.com.

Hi readers! Shayla Love here, science journalist and longtime fan of Your Mileage May Vary. I’m honored to be subbing for Sigal Samuel while she’s out on parental leave. I’m diving into your questions as a way to help understand human nature and our choices through multiple lenses: philosophical, psychological, and beyond. Please send in any emotional, body/brain, sociological, perceptual, or other kind of life quandaries you might have.

My child, age 9, has decided she’s vegan. Neither of her parents are even vegetarian — we’re “free range chicken/grass fed beef” types. She has learned about veganism from friends at school, and seems to have come to her position more or less on her own. I want to encourage her ethical choices, but her mother and I agree that children should be introduced to new foods and flavors at this age. She has no allergies or intolerances that we know of. I worry that making accommodations for her dietary restriction may lead to a lifetime of picky eating, even if hers is a reasonable and ethical approach. She seems to be uncomfortable when her mother or I cook meat for meals we share, even if we make her another option. What should I do to support my daughter?

Dear Hold the Beef, 

When I was around your daughter’s age, I went to Hawaii with my parents. One night, we ate dinner on the beach, and we watched as a pig was dug up from an underground steam oven. I was horrified to see its face and nose; most of the meat I had eaten so far in my life didn’t resemble the animal it came from. A few years later, I became a vegetarian, and then in my 20s, a vegan. 

I share this story to reveal my slight bias in answering your question, but also my understanding of the ethical awakening your daughter might be experiencing. As you figure out how to talk to your child about what she decides to eat, we can at least table discussing the pros and cons of veganism itself. Instead, you should think about what amount of autonomy your child should have, and whether the moral decision-making she wants to engage in matches with her current stage of development. 

People don’t turn 18 and then suddenly start engaging morally with the world. As we grow up, we try to understand right and wrong in fits and spurts. Lawrence Kohlberg, a 20th-century American psychologist, is best known for attempting to track a person’s moral development throughout their life. 

Kohlberg presented people with hypothetical dilemmas in order to come up with six moral stages. In one example, he asked people of different ages about a dying woman who could be cured by a drug that was cheap to make, but that a manufacturer was charging an exorbitant fee for. The woman’s husband ends up stealing the drug. Is that right or wrong?

Kohlberg observed that in answering questions like this, young children have what he called a “preconventional morality”: Their notions of right and wrong are dictated by what their parents think, and the avoidance of punishment when breaking those rules. For instance, the main reason not to throw your dinner on the ground or hit your brother was to avoid consequences from parents, not a feeling that there’s something wrong about that action. 

Kohlberg thought this stage lasted until around age 9, and in the next period, children began to understand that there isn’t just one correct action, but that people could have different moral ideas based on their social context. To sum up the rest of the stages quickly, each one progresses to encompass more views — like the moral agreements necessary to make a society function — and more complexity — like the realization that a seemingly immoral action can ultimately be moral, like stealing medicine for one’s wife. 

It’s useful to pinpoint where your daughter finds herself on Kohlberg’s timeline. It sounds like she’s in the shift from the first stage and into the later ones. What you’ve decided — that it’s okay to eat meat if it’s free-range or grass-fed — is no longer sufficient for your daughter in terms of guiding her own actions. That can be a jarring moment for a parent, but at least, according to Kohlberg, it’s a sign of maturation. Your child should, at this age, start to consider her friends, as well as the experiences she’s had without you, when making an ethical choice. 

But I’m her parent, you may protest. That doesn’t necessarily mean that your job is to exclusively provide black-and-white directives. 

Alison Gopnik, a psychologist and philosopher at the University of California Berkeley, has written about the unique perspective and personhood of children (including babies). In her book The Gardener and the Carpenter, she questions how people have come to define the act of parenting as having specific goals in mind for their children. This approach is like being a carpenter, she writes, who follows instructions to assemble a predetermined piece of furniture. She argues that parenting is more like gardening: You cultivate the soil and the environment and realize that you could produce any number of different flowers, fruits, or vegetables. Growth is the point, not a by-the-book final product. 

I see Gopnik in alignment with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the 18th-century philosopher whose novel Émile, or On Education surprised its readers by advocating for a freer and child-centered approach to teaching. Émile, a young wealthy boy, is tutored — in high contrast to the expectations of the day — without strict rules. Rousseau thought you couldn’t make a child turn into an adult any faster, and it was foolish to try. He also thought that children had to learn by having their own experiences out in the world, and learning from those, rather than just overly didactic lessons. 

As your daughter dips her toe into the morality of eating meat, Rousseau would also remind you not to expect her to have the most mature ideas about veganism or her meal plan. She is still young, and may just have come across an idea that feels ethically important to her. Your role as her parent is to help her develop her nuanced morality, a process Kohlberg suggests will continue, and not steer her towards one way of eating over another. Be Gopnik’s dietary gardener, not carpenter. 

Of course, parents do have rights over their children, and an obligation to keep them safe. When we’re young, we’re not always equipped to make the right choice (some would argue this continues into adulthood, too). If your daughter decided to take up smoking cigarettes, for instance, you would step in because her choice would negatively affect her health. As her parent, you should still guide her to build healthy habits. 

You say you’re worried about your daughter becoming too picky, or not being exposed to enough foods if she becomes a vegan. But rather than push back on the choice itself, you can explain what else her choice entails. You can do so in an age-appropriate way. Talk about the nutrients that she might be missing out on if she stops eating meat, dairy, and eggs, and find books or videos about what foods might be a good substitute. 

For me, becoming vegan actually exposed me to all kinds of foods that I might not have eaten otherwise: from Asian and Indian cuisines that are very veggie-friendly to many other protein- and iron-rich plant-based foods. You could collaborate with your daughter to cook vegan meals for the whole family; no challenge sparks a budding home cook more than making delectable tofu. 

I should add that I’m no longer a vegan. I learned a lot from committing to a diet that wasn’t always convenient or tasty, in support of my values. Then, after more than a decade, I incorporated eggs and fish back into my diet. It’s likely that your daughter will continue to change the choices she makes as she tries to align her actions with her maturing moral views about the world. 

Whether or not she eats grass-fed beef with you in her teens, you should be glad that she seems to care about what impact she’s having in the world. It means you’re raising a person whose ethics are developing strongly, even as what’s on your dinner plate may change while she figures it all out.  

Bonus: What I’m reading

• Speaking of tofu, I revisited an essay that George Stiffman (a self-proclaimed “tofu guy”) wrote for Asterisk Magazine about how soybean curds are prepared in China. Warning: This article will make you hungry! He dives into all the creative culinary preparations of tofu that are tragically absent in the West. 
• Several years ago, I bought a plant-based cooking book especially for children, The Vegan Cookbook for Kids: Easy Plant-Based Recipes for Young Chefs. It was a present for a non-vegan family, but the kid in question was interested in learning how to cook, and when kids cook vegan, parents don’t have to worry about them handling raw meat! Looking over these snacks and meals again, I see several tasty things that I wouldn’t mind making for myself, even as a non-vegan, and non-child. 
• When I was a vegan in New York City in the 2010s, I wasn’t constrained to sad tofu and sprout sandwiches. It seemed like every week a brand-new vegan restaurant opened up, covering every cuisine, and with star chefs at the helm. But lately, all my favorite vegan restaurants have been closing. Turns out I’m not imagining it, as Vox’s Marina Bolotnikova wrote in her article: “Where did all the vegan restaurants go?” She investigates why these establishments have become rarer, and what we’ll miss out on if they completely disappear. 

Editor’s note, October 4, 8 am ET: We’re bringing you some of our best-loved Your Mileage May Vary columns while Sigal Samuel is on parental leave. The one below was originally published last year.

This unconventional advice column offers you a unique framework for thinking through moral dilemmas. It’s based on value pluralism: the idea that each of us has multiple values that are equally valid but that often conflict with each other. Submit your own question here.

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My partner and I did IVF recently and luckily we ended up with several embryos. One of those will be implanted in me so I hopefully get pregnant. But which one?

My fertility clinic is encouraging me to do PGT-A testing, which would screen for things like Down syndrome and would also let me see the sex of each embryo so I could potentially choose whichever I want. (And to be honest, I really want a girl!) I’m also hearing about these new companies that can test embryos for all kinds of things — like how smart the kid might be, how tall they’ll get, and whether they’ll have a lower chance of getting breast cancer, diabetes, mental illness, stuff like that.

I don’t know how to feel about any of this. On the one hand, it feels weirdly eugenics-y to do so much tinkering with embryos, and I can’t help feeling a little pressured into overmedicalizing everything with these expensive tests. But then again, if I could do something to make my baby healthier and happier, don’t I kind of have to do everything in my power? What does a parent owe their child?

Dear Expecting,

This is such an exciting — and also confusing — time. You’re about to have your first kid, and that comes with all sorts of fears and insecurities and hopes and dreams. You want to do the right thing — no, the best thing! — for your child. It’s a beautiful impulse. Unfortunately, it makes it easy for companies to prey on you.

So let me walk you through what these companies can and can’t really provide. After we talk about the science, we can talk about the ethics. 

The simpler test you mentioned, PGT-A, has been around since the 1990s. It can indeed screen for conditions like Down syndrome and let you see the sex of each embryo. Mind you, that doesn’t predict what gender your child will ultimately end up identifying with — more on that soon.

The newer testing you mentioned is called polygenic testing. The conditions it screens for are complex ones, influenced by thousands of genes. We’re talking about everything from breast cancer to depression. Some companies even offer screenings not for disease prevention, but for genetic enhancement — so you can select for a taller kid or a kid with higher IQ.

Polygenic testing companies claim to predict each embryo’s risk for each condition, and the potential reduction of risk you’ll get if you choose one embryo over another. As the statistical geneticist Sasha Gusev explains, it’s very, very easy to be misled by this claim. If the company claims to lower absolute risk of Type 2 diabetes by 12 percent, you might think this means, “The chance of my kid ever developing diabetes just went down by 12 percent — great!” But really what it means is that, all else equal, a kid who would’ve developed diabetes is likely now at the high end of pre-diabetes instead, or just develops diabetes a few years later. The same holds true for other conditions, like breast cancer. Sure, if your kid is going to develop diabetes or breast cancer, you’d rather they develop it later — but it’s not the bill of perfect health customers might imagine.  

“Typical risk reduction estimates tend to exploit statistical assumptions to overstate their benefits and lead to confusion,” Gusev writes.

It’s also important to note that there’s a difference between a physical disease like cancer, which is straightforwardly and universally negative, and a complex mental health condition like depression. For one thing, polygenic scores don’t perform as well in psychiatry, as the psychologist Eric Turkheimer notes. Plus, most mental health conditions come in mild to moderate to severe forms, and it’s not clear that we should want to get rid of mild or moderate manifestations. 

“Sure, it would be nice if no one ever got depressed, but what would that actually mean?” Turkheimer writes. “People are going to be sad, and the most modern models of psychiatric disorders view most of them as extremes on continuous dimensions of normal behavior. I don’t think we want some kind of genetic version of Soma.”

To give a personal example: I have generalized anxiety with some obsessive tendencies. Is that a major pain in the butt sometimes? You bet. But if I could wave a magic wand and get rid of it, would I? No. In my experience, this trait is linked to another trait I deeply value: my creativity. The same thing that propels me down rabbit holes of worry also propels me down rabbit holes of getting super curious about some topic, researching it into the wee hours of the morning, and then writing a novel or children’s book about it.

That brings me to one other scientific issue: pleiotropy. It’s a fancy term for a simple truth, which is that genes can have an effect on more than one trait. When it comes to behavioral polygenic testing, we actually know very little about which genes cause what — a gene that’s correlated with depression or anxiety may also be correlated with a bunch of other things. So, if everyone were to start selecting embryos to try to protect their kids from depression or anxiety, what would happen? We don’t know! 

Pleiotropy is a scientific issue, but it’s also a moral issue, because in trying to protect your kid from a negative outcome, you could also be accidentally barring them from a positive one.

And that’s just the tip of the moral iceberg.

Another issue is the potential psychological harm that can result from commodifying our kids — treating them like consumer objects with selectable parts. Let’s say you use polygenic testing to try to select for high IQ. Even if the company’s predictor is right 80 percent of the time, that means it’s wrong 20 percent of the time. What happens if it’s wrong about your kid, and they end up with a low IQ instead of a high one? How will your kid feel? Unless you hide the truth from them, they’ll know that they are not what you wanted, that they failed to live up to the vision you went out of your way to chase.

The same goes for sex selection via good old PGT-A. I know you really want a girl. But what would happen if you select for a girl, and then your child grows up and turns out to be trans? They may feel an extra sense that they’re letting you down by not conforming to the gender expectations you had for them.

Then there are the ethical questions around unequal access. Polygenic testing isn’t cheap. (One company, Orchid, charges $2,500 per screened embryo. Test 10 embryos and that’ll cost you $25,000.) So, at least in the short term, that raises the specter of entrenching a caste system, where the gap between rich and poor expands dramatically as the rich get smarter and stronger.

Technologies tend to get cheaper over time, so maybe everyone will ultimately be able to afford polygenic testing. But that raises another problem: implicit coercion. If more and more of us make ourselves smarter and stronger, we may create a society in which everyone feels pressure to alter their child’s biology — even if they don’t want to. To refuse embryo selection would mean to put a child at a huge professional disadvantage, or to face moral condemnation for making “suboptimal” kids when optimization is possible. Society may no longer offer health insurance benefits or accommodations for kids with disabilities (or even non-enhanced IQ), reasoning that “it was the parents’ choice.” 

Some philosophers, like Julian Savalescu, already argue that parents have a “moral obligation to create children with the best chance of the best life.” Polygenic testing companies love that argument; Orchid founder Noor Siddiqui tells parents that “the responsible decision” is to “protect their children” from disease, using language like, “What if you could have stopped it…but chose not to?” And we generally live in a culture that’s obsessed with optimization. 

So it’s no wonder that you find yourself asking, “If I could do something to make my baby healthier and happier, don’t I kind of have to do everything in my power?” 

It’s a view that will be very appealing to utilitarians, who believe the right action is the action that maximizes well-being or happiness. But maximizing principles can be dangerous. If we’re laser-focused on maximizing one value, however noble it may be, that can lead us to overlook a host of other important values. Think about diversity, for example; polygenic testing could lead to a less diverse world. 

And it’s not even clear how to maximize well-being given that each embryo will have some downsides: How would you choose between one embryo with a slightly elevated risk for schizophrenia, another with a moderately elevated risk for cancer, and a third with a high risk for Alzheimer’s? You’d have to decide how to rank the importance of each condition, which would require a dizzying bit of moral math: How much weight do you put on the longevity associated with each condition, how much on patient-reported quality of life for each condition, and how much on your own ability to cope with each — and society’s ability (which will change over the years)? Plus, even if the screening does end up optimizing life for your individual child, it could have negative effects on the population level, for the reasons we covered above.

As the Nobel laureate Herbert Simon pointed out, many problems contain way more variables and way too much uncertainty for maximizing along a single axis to be feasible or even desirable. So it often makes sense to just go with an option that’s “good enough.” He coined the term “satisficing” — a portmanteau of “satisfying” and “sufficing” — to describe opting for this good enough choice.

What would satisficing look like in the context of embryos? If there’s a very serious condition that runs in your family — like Tay-Sachs or the BRCA mutation that markedly increases cancer risk — then I do think there’s a strong case for screening for that. These conditions are debilitating and can lead to early death. Nobody wants them. Genetic testing that lets us prevent them is an awesome gift. 

Then there are conditions that can include suffering, like autism, but can also be very compatible with a happy life. Mental health conditions in particular are heavily socially constructed — a lot of the associated suffering comes about because society constructs a certain biological reality as a problem and doesn’t support the people who have it. In these cases, if you want to give your child a “good enough” or even “optimized” life, remember that you don’t have to achieve that by biological means; working to change the social environment can be just as important, and it doesn’t carry the societal risks associated with polygenic testing. 

Ultimately, when considering what counts as a “good enough” life, each parent will draw the line in a slightly different place. And there’s a part of that that can’t be boiled down to objective facts about disease, because this is also about how well-resourced the parent feels — emotionally, socially, and financially — to deal with a certain condition. What feels manageable to one parent may feel crushingly hard to another. 

So, I can’t tell you exactly which screenings to do and which to forgo. What I do want to tell you is to resist being bullied or shamed by others, especially those with a profit incentive to push you in a certain direction.

As the epidemiologist Abby Lippman has noted, genetic testing is supposed to offer parents more choice, but it too often has the opposite effect. When someone like Orchid’s Siddiqui says about a disease, “What if you could have stopped it…but chose not to?” — well, that language preys on parents’ worst fears and insecurities. It holds parents hostage while pretending to be giving them more autonomy. 

You are nobody’s hostage. You are a moral agent free to look at the many different relevant factors, weigh them all in the balance, and then make the choice that works well enough for your family.   

Bonus: What I’m reading

• Silicon Valley is obsessed with IQ, so it’s no surprise that tech execs there are using polygenic testing in hopes of creating supersmart babies. This article shows the kind of mental pretzels customers get into when trying to figure out whether to select the embryo with the highest predicted IQ or that with the lowest risk of disorders. One couple asks: “How much additional risk of ADHD cancels out against 10 extra IQ points?”

• Rereading “The Last Children of Down Syndrome,” Sarah Zhang’s 2020 Atlantic feature on prenatal testing, it struck me that when people think “prenatal testing,” Down syndrome is often the first condition that comes to mind, even though it’s not the most severe or straightforwardly negative (it’s compatible with a happy life). It’s just that Down syndrome was easy to test for, so we started testing for it early. I wonder if that built up the condition as a bogeyman in the expectant parent’s imagination — if the fact that we could screen for it shaped the public’s perception of Down syndrome as something that should be screened for and potentially screened out.

• One trait that many people assume we should select for is a great memory. But I highly recommend the short story “Funes the Memorious” by Jorge Luis Borges. It’s a reminder that having too good a memory is not always a benefit.  

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In 1995, gender studies researcher Judy Chu found herself chauffeuring around her 13-year-old brother and his friend. The boys’ curiosity got the better of them, and they asked what she was learning: adolescent girls’ development, she told them. 

One of the boys looked at her and said, “‘You should study boys. You can start with me,’” Chu recalled. So she did. That fall, she spoke to 13-year-old boys from home for her clinical interviewing class.

In the years since, Chu has researched boys between the ages 12 and 18 — their wishes, their desires, what they wanted from their friendships and romantic relationships — and discovered some felt largely unknown. There was a gap between what the world expected of them — the stoic, strong, independent stereotypes that have persisted for centuries — and how they saw themselves, but had internalized so many messages for so long that they felt like they had no choice but to accept this version of masculinity. Chu theorized that these beliefs must have taken root during their childhood, and she later published a book on the subject.

When toddlers enter school, she discovered, they begin learning the rules of boyhood. “Regardless of what their parents had encouraged or enabled at home, they were learning that at school, if you wanted to be seen as and treated as one of the boys and you wanted to be with the boys, you wanted to play with the boys, be friends with the boys, there were rules you had to follow,” Chu said. “It was kind of like a microcosm of our society, which is if you want people to see you as and treat you as a quote unquote real boy or real man, you need to prove yourself.”

Since Chu’s work on the subject, American culture has changed to address gender inequities — the ones that negatively affect girls. As a part of this movement, girls were empowered to be more autonomous and pursue careers and financial independence to build a life beyond marriage and childrearing. (Though it should be said, women still trail men in earnings, outpace them in household responsibilities, and have higher rates of anxiety, depression, and PTSD.) 

But boys are still stuck in place. 

Across the country, lawmakers have promoted policies and legislation aimed at helping men reach their potential. In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a 2025 executive order outlining education, career, and mental health initiatives targeting men. Maryland Gov. Wes Moore created the state’s Young Men and Boys Initiative, focusing on men’s health, employment, and community connections. But these programs are reactive, attempting to disrupt decades of socialization. At the same time, the rise of the manosphere and misogynist online spaces and increasingly right-leaning voting trends among men signal a cohort of young men at a turning point.

Recent studies have found that boys are less likely to graduate high school on time compared to girls — that gap is even bigger for Black and Hispanic boys — and fewer young men obtain bachelor’s degrees compared to their female peers. And as fewer men graduate from college, fewer participate in the labor force, too. The suicide rate among men is nearly four times higher than that of women. While men and women report similar rates of loneliness and number of friends, men are less likely to turn to their social networks for support. Out of the over 750,000 jobs created since Donald Trump took office in 2025, men have gained none of them. 

So what will it take to help men get unstuck? If we are truly committed to ending the male loneliness crisis, to tackling suicide and gun violence — society has the power to change things for the next generation, experts said. Rather than aiming to reach men after the constraining masculine worldviews have already taken root, we can prevent them from warping boys’ sense of self in the first place: To help men, we must change how boys are raised. 

Reject the myth of the “real boy” 

In 2023, psychologist Michael Reichert conducted a nationally representative survey of more than 2,000 American men, asking them questions about their lives, relationships, internet habits, and sources of social support. One finding was particularly staggering: two-thirds of young men between the ages of 18 and 23 felt like no one really knew them well. (In a follow-up report two years later, in which women were also surveyed, equal percentages of men and women — about 50 percent — said they were not truly known.)

The conclusion Reichert came to, he told Vox, was “boyhood is failing at the most important task.” American society is producing young adults who feel like they’re on their own, “a tragic outcome of a boyhood that’s not preparing our males for a resilient life in a world where things are harder, more complicated,” said Reichert, the executive director of the Center for the Study of Boys’ and Girls’ Lives at the University of Pennsylvania.

Because the idea of what a man looks like and how a man behaves is so ingrained, boys are taught to conform from an early age, experts said. From their earliest years, as evidenced in Chu’s work, boys are taught to adhere to stereotypical gender norms reinforced through comments like “boys don’t cry,” “toughen up,” and “don’t be a girl.” 

“It starts with mothers having a fear of turning their son into a mama’s boy, so they push them away at young ages — 3 and 4 years old. Go play with your dad, go play with your older male siblings,” Joseph Derrick Nelson, an associate professor in the department of educational studies at Swarthmore College, told Vox. Fathers, for their part, tend to emphasize self-defense, goal pursuit, and overcoming adversity with their sons, Reichert said. Black boys in particular are perceived as older and less innocent than their white counterparts, only pushing them further toward rigid gender roles, Nelson said. If they don’t conform, they may be teased by other boys.

A large part of proving yourself as a “real boy” means rejecting anything deemed feminine, including emotional vulnerability and relationships. As babies and young children, boys and girls are equally emotionally expressive, but by the time they start school, boys show fewer emotions and use less emotional language. When boys are taught that showing their feelings or forging deep friendships is girly, they stop prioritizing those relationships. That shift happens during the teen years, when boys go from reporting having best friends with whom they can share their deepest secrets, to feeling like they’ve drifted apart from these very connections by the end of high school. And it’s not for lack of desire, Chu said, or some inherent biological difference: Boys have simply learned not to show their need for affection, to hide their sadness, to not be tender. 

A new paradigm for raising boys, experts said, begins with how masculinity is first presented at home and in school. 

To encourage boys to be better in touch with their emotions means adults should not pit masculinity against femininity, Christopher Reigeluth, an associate professor at Oregon Health and Science University, told Vox. This goes beyond simply telling boys not to conceal their feelings, but making clear that confiding these feelings in a friend and fostering platonic connections isn’t girly: it’s a universal human need. 

In schools, specialized emotional education in curricula can help boys express their emotions and embrace vulnerability. 

Simply talk to them 

One of the easiest ways to do this is to allow and encourage boys to engage in an activity traditionally seen as more feminine: talking.

Reichert, the psychologist, has led an emotional literacy program in a boys’ school for over 30 years. In that time, he’s seen the sentiment among students shift from skepticism to genuine interest. “It has become, by 2026, the most popular program in the school,” Reichert said, due to an increased cultural awareness of emotional health. In the group, students discuss their daily stressors and hardships, and they learn that letting their peers see them for who they are — connecting with them — benefits their well-being. 

Before joining Reichert’s peer counseling group, high school senior Chris Burnetta expressed his emotions on the field. “You’re almost allowed to be emotional when you’re playing sports, and you’re not allowed to be emotional when you’re not,” Burnetta, 18, told Vox. In middle school, he attended a co-ed school and found himself performing aspects of masculinity to impress his female classmates. But once he met older classmates who he respected and wanted to emulate, he discovered many of them attended the counseling group and encouraged him to go, too. “I don’t want to speak for everyone, but I think for guys in general, looking up at people above you gives you a big impression and a big influence on how you want to live your life and what you want to be like,” he said. 

Seeing his peers so enthusiastically discuss their struggles and triumphs helps foster maturity and gives him permission to show his emotions, Burnetta said, an outlet he never had before.

Adolescence, a time when many behavioral health patterns are forged or discarded, is the time to engrain healthy social habits in boys — and for parents to be explicit, Matt Englar-Carlson, a professor of counseling and the director of the Center for Boys and Men at California State University Fullerton, told Vox. Now is the time to have dedicated phone-free time as a family, to give them opportunities to share how they’re feeling without fixing their problems, to listen to them even when they’re frustrating you. When his own son was younger, Englar-Carlson thought he knew all the tricks: showing empathy, trying to help. “Me doing that with him actually was making him feel worse, I think,” he said. Instead, Englar-Carlson took a lighter touch. He would acknowledge when his son was upset, but wouldn’t press a conversation. Whenever his son was ready to talk, he was available.

One easy way to do this? Talk to them when you’re driving. As my colleague Rachel Miller previously reported, not having to make direct eye contact can make it a little easier for kids to be vulnerable. 

And if you’re a man, make sure you’re leading by example: Be willing to share your own moments of embarrassment, disappointment, and sadness, so they know it’s okay for them to do the same.  

Help them foster non-romantic intimacy 

While in school, boys have ample avenues for connection through classes and sports, even if they aren’t interacting with others on a deeper level. It’s when they lose access to these organized outlets for socialization in adulthood that they slide into isolation or start looking to their romantic partners to fulfill all of their social needs. 

The idea that emotional intimacy is reserved for your significant other is how society gets to a point where 15 percent of men say they don’t have any close friends. Those without a partner are even more adrift: Men are less satisfied being single than their female counterparts. “We teach boys to not ask for help…figure it out on their own,” Nelson said. “I don’t know why we’re surprised when they become adult men and struggle with building relationships and close and connected communities, because all they’ve been taught, even since they were young children, was about figuring it out on their own and denying emotions, suppressing emotions, that then leaves you not in relationship and quite lonely.”

In the absence of in-person friendships, digital spaces provide an attractive alternative. While not altogether negative, some online forums — interactive video games, sports gambling, the manosphere — enable young men to further retreat from society. While pursuing community, boys may find their way to adult-centric spaces, which can be rife with misogynistic and patriarchal messages, feeding the belief that the only way to advance is through hyperconsumption, materialism, looksmaxxing, and dominating women, Nelson said. “They’re quarantining themselves to their rooms and their tech devices and these online communities where they play video games, they gamble on sports, and they have conversations with other boys and young men online about somehow feeling disadvantaged as men in our society,” he said.

Burnetta, the high school senior, said he and many of his classmates’ feeds are populated with “super masculine” content that sometimes pokes fun at men who open up about their feelings, which can further add to the stereotype that men should not be emotional. 

Even if boys don’t necessarily agree with these sentiments, they often don’t have other alternatives online. “I don’t think a lot of boys go on to YouTube…and say, ‘I really want to find the most misogynistic content I can find. That’s what I’m looking for,’” said Englar-Carlson, the director of the Center for Boys and Men. They may have simply wanted to watch a video about sports but were fed an ad for betting and then fell down the rabbit hole. Because traditional masculinity content is often fed to boys via their social media feeds, a brief introduction to these themes only leads to more. 

By young adulthood, they will have a fairly concrete idea of what’s expected of them as a man. In a 2017 study, young men largely agreed that the cornerstones of masculinity are self-sufficiency, toughness, physical attractiveness, being a financial provider, heterosexuality, hypersexuality, aggression, and control. Notably, they said they feel external pressure from family, friends, and society to meet these ideals.

If adults start with the understanding that boys are emotional and they have the same social needs as girls, they can encourage them to make friends before they learn otherwise. 

Teachers can recognize the signs of loneliness in young boys (resisting authority, talking back, and challenging boundaries) and use it as an opportunity to connect with their students instead of reprimanding them — because when they feel heard, their behavior softens. “What are these behaviors communicating to me from this boy about a met or unmet need, and how can I be responsive to it in my classroom? How can I help them facilitate close and connected friendships with not only their peers, but also with me as their teacher, like a primary adult in their lives?” Nelson said. When young boys simply get kicked out of class, they might fall behind and internalize a “bad boy” persona, he said, a cycle that enforces stereotypes and comes at the cost of their education. 

The story of masculinity online and from political leaders is that men must be protectors, high earners, and muscular and strong, and when boys fail to meet that standard (which they inevitably do because they are children), they are made to feel inadequate. “They’re struggling in school, they’re having a difficult time finding work, but everything about what they’re learning about to live in America is about the dream, the aspirations, acquiring, hitting these life milestones,” Nelson said.

Demonstrate an alternative masculinity

But for some young men, the most impactful interventions take place while they’re young. Growing up, Michael Dean looked to his father and his friends’ fathers for how to be a man. These men often spoke of the importance of providing for a family, being decisive, and being a stable force. Dean thought everyone was raised with these values and had similar upbringings until he reached high school and joined Reichert’s peer counseling program.

His junior year, one of Dean’s teammates on the football team suggested that some of the young men check out the group to discuss any problems at school, issues with parents, friends, or partners. Dean was frustrated with his performance on the field and decided to attend. Hearing from his classmates — their grief, their struggles — helped give him perspective. He also learned how to be an emotional outlet for the people he loves, including his younger brother. 

“I never felt that I had to be some kind of way or be some kind of man based on traditional values of being that strong, tough guy and to keep persevering through. I could definitely see that through my dad, and I did have that belief for a little while as I was in middle school and in the beginning of high school,” Dean, now 21, told Vox. “I learned that that’s not necessarily what it means to be a man, and I can make my own judgment through my own experiences and listening to other people to help me figure out what it means in my own belief to be a man.”

For Dean, learning how to be a man began when he was a child, but his path to adulthood was punctuated by formative adults — his mother, Reichert, and yes, even his dad — who fostered a safe environment to be vulnerable and emotional. Now, when he’s lonely, he knows he can call his family, friends, or his girlfriend for support. These are the outlets experts hope men feel empowered to call upon.

“If we’re really going to make a bigger difference with having healthier men who have connected friendships, who are emotionally expressive and connected in their friendships,” Reigeluth said, “it’s got to start with boys.”

Few things in movies happen by coincidence, and fewer still in a film so self-conscious as Cristian Mungiu’s “Fjord.” The Romanian filmmaker’s stoic drama is designed to provoke viewers in opposite directions, snaring them in waiting traps and causing them to concede in agony, “You have a point!” Every aspect is meticulously studied and worried over, careful not to push the movie’s thorny narrative too far away from Mungiu’s bold central mission: artistic objectivity in one of the most partial, biased and fundamentalist times in modern history. Experiencing “Fjord” is more like playing a puzzle game than watching a film — viewers will be better served if they remember specific details for later. The minutiae are the key to freeing oneself from Mungiu’s clever trap.

That’s also why, when “Fjord” opens with soft piano chords playing “Amazing Grace,” it’s safe to assume the song will be an integral motif throughout the film. Here, grace is doled out either liberally or not at all, restricted by governmental red tape and damning paperwork. As a concept, grace isn’t amazing so much as it is a clerical headache, made all the more complicated by the efforts of the Gheorghius, Mihai (Sebastian Stan) and Lisbet (Renate Reinsve), whose five children have been removed from their care by Norwegian child protection services. Despite their genial nature, the Gheorghius stick out like sore Evangelical thumbs when they immigrate from conservative Romania to Lisbet’s progressive Norwegian hometown. So when one of their children is found with bruises on her in school, the discovery sets off a chain of events in which the Gheorghius’ faith is tested, and their values persecuted.

Or are they? In his biggest feature yet — aiming for Oscar contention after winning the coveted Palme d’Or at Cannes earlier this summer and screening at this year’s New York Film Festival — Mungiu repeatedly asks this question. Who is doing the most good when, ostensibly, everyone is trying to do the right thing, acting within their rights as parents or arms of the government? The answers aren’t at all simple, and Mungiu has no intention of making them so, much less revealing the whole truth behind the film’s central doubts.

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At times, this makes the humble viewer feel a bit like a guinea pig in a focus group; the audience’s reactions are integral to measuring the film’s success. Though “Fjord” is an interesting film on its own, it’s an even more compelling experiment in how today’s over-explained world encourages people to watch movies: looking for the good and bad, right and wrong, protagonist and antagonist. 

The problem is that the world outside the cinema is far more complex than those binary ways of thinking allow. If films are a reflection of the world we live in, Mungiu’s film reflects a reality where objectivity is at risk of extinction. In “Fjord,” Mungiu tests neutrality’s limits when the stakes are at their highest. And while his impartiality occasionally and inevitably falters, the missteps show how difficult, and ultimately useless, it is to ignore humanity’s wide-ranging gray areas to make a beeline for black or white.

Inspired by the events surrounding Ruth and Marius Bodnariu — a devout Christian couple who, in 2015, were separated from their five children by Norwegian social services for seven months on a similar suspicion of mistreatment — “Fjord” quickly gets to the root of its conflict. The Bodnariu case drew international attention from Christian fundamentalist groups, who asserted that the conservative family was facing religious persecution by a liberal government. To the Christian right, the Bodnarius were examples of unchecked left-wing power and an attack on personal freedoms. To Norway’s child services group, the Barnevernet, the Bodnarius were a model of the progressive but necessary systems put in place to protect children. The truth, of course, lies somewhere in the middle, in the opaque unknown.

Enter Reinsve and Stan, an ideal pair of leads capable of providing the understated, baseline emotion that Mungiu requires to pull off an undertaking as tricky as “Fjord.” Neither Lisbet nor Mihai can exhibit too much passion or zealotry, too much unjust anger or warranted affection. They must, at all times, walk a very thin line to maintain just the right amount of clearheaded patience, lest Norwegian officials  — or we, the audience — suspect that any truth is the absolute truth.

But “Fjord” is not a mystery. The overarching question shrouding the film is not, “Did they do it?” but rather, “So what if they did?” Mungiu presents information in a cold, straightforward fashion, asking the viewer to weigh Mihai’s admitted slap or two on the butt as corporeal punishment against the forever unknown extent of the family’s discipline and the government’s ensuing reaction. In the process, Mungiu naturally runs into roadblocks that he can’t pass, dogwhistles to conservative and religious leaders around the world who decry government interference. In a recent New York Magazine profile of Stan, Mungiu admits: “Because I don’t explicitly approve or condemn the positions that I bring to public debate, the supporters of these groups will always try to capitalize on that and claim this simple lack of firm judgment equals a ‘victory.’

That begs the question: How much responsibility does a filmmaker have to take a clear stance in their work, especially in a film that is overtly intended to be a lightning rod for heated debate? None, I’d argue — so long as that filmmaker can present either side of said debate with as much tact as the other. If objectivity is the initiative, then both viewpoints must have their advantages and follies fully rendered. It’s only fair!

As it turns out, equity is difficult to maintain in such an absurd age. Though he keeps a mostly steady balance, Mungiu depicts the Norwegian left as well-meaning progressive dopes a few too many times to remain truly objective. When child services representatives express their shock that the teenage Gheorghiu children don’t have internet access at home, can’t go on YouTube, and — gasp! — don’t have smartphones, their surprise blunts Mungiu’s sharp point.

 

“The people who have the power to rip children from their families believe that it’s in a child’s best interest to have a brainrot device,” these moments suggest with a wink. While these facets might depict our tech-obsessed age, Mungiu writes them in a way that makes the Norwegians look silly, and the Gheorghius look like objectively good parents. But, then again, maybe a critic who doesn’t want to shoot his phone would think differently. Such is the beauty of Mungiu’s observational, deceptively nuanced writing.

If “Fjord” indeed earns the awards attention it’s gunning for, I’d expect that the next months will be filled with debates over whether the film is conservative-leaning or ultimately progressive, all of which will be moot and useless. To deem a film whose worst mistake is some inherent goofiness as “insidious” defeats the entire point. Mungiu’s intention is not to make the audience look more closely — quite the opposite. His film takes a bird’s-eye approach to conflict, carefully studying how the systems set in place for our common good, on either side of the party or religious lines, can cause plenty of damage, too. If humanity doesn’t exist on a binary, perhaps the emphasis shouldn’t always be on trying to see eye to eye; otherwise, no one can take a clear look at what’s happening in the periphery.

“Fjord”  screens from Sunday, October 4 at the New York Film Festival, with a wide theatrical release October 9.

The post “Fjord” tests whether we can ever stay objective appeared first on Salon.com.

The weather forecast might still be screaming “summer,” but the calendar betrays the truth: The holidays are going to be here before you know it. What’s usually billed as a jolly time of year can inspire dread — all the planning, all the spending, all the gathering can be exhausting, especially if you have a large family. Of course you’d like to put that off for as long as possible, right? Surely these conversations can wait until after Halloween.

But waiting too long can actually make the holidays more stressful — and can put undue stress on the women in your life, who often shoulder the burden of organizing and planning. One lollygagger who delays in committing to a plan can prevent the rest of the family from booking flights or buying necessary supplies. What can seem like an annoying text from your sister reminding you to RSVP for Thanksgiving in early October only adds to her mental load in planning a dinner for 20 people.

“There can be an enormous amount of invisible labor involved in making the holiday magic happen, and that labor falls disproportionately on women and caregivers,” Jamila E. Holcomb, a licensed marriage and family therapist and associate teaching professor at Florida State University, told Vox. “If one person is coordinating everyone’s flights, planning meals, buying gifts, arranging childcare, communicating schedules, and managing family conflict, this can cause significant stress. It also makes one person responsible for everyone else’s experience, which is an unequal division of labor.”

The pressure to plan the “perfect” holiday isn’t merely logistical. In our hyper-connected and visible culture, people may feel pressured to orchestrate a high-stakes production that somehow is meaningful, memorable, and Instagram-worthy. In other words, planning for the holidays can be its own form of labor these days. To help make the whole ordeal more manageable for everyone — not just the hosts or Type A family members — five experts offered their advice on sharing responsibilities and actually enjoying the season.

Getting ahead of this coordination can help minimize the stress on everyone in a few months. So even though end-of-year celebrations might be the furthest thing from your mind, the ideal time to start planning them is, I’m sorry to say, right now. Here’s why early fall is the ideal time to start bugging the family group chat about the holidays.

Planning early will save you money

Prices on many goods, from flights to groceries, have increased over the last year. Getting ahead of these purchases before holiday crunch time can help you secure the best price and budget. While there’s no exact date for when to find the cheapest flights, travelers shouldn’t wait to book their tickets believing the price of gas will come down, travel expert Katy Nastro told Vox. In general, Nastro suggested locking in domestic travel between three and seven months ahead of time and between four and 10 months before international flights. “If you can get everything set… by the end of September for Thanksgiving, you’re going to be in a better place than most people,” Nastro said.

The same goes for rental cars: reserve them now. Unlike flights, you don’t need to pay for them in advance, so you can always cancel the reservation if your plans change. Nastro recommends the platform AutoSlash, which aggregates prices from multiple rental companies. “With rental cars, there’s only so much inventory and you want to even make sure that you have that option if you need it,” she said.

Early fall is also a great time to start shopping for presents, especially if you’re on a tight budget or coordinating a group gift with multiple people. Content creator and actor Rachel Ann Thomas and her eight siblings begin brainstorming ideas for their parents’ holiday gift in September or October every year. When holiday and event planner Lance “Mr. Christmas” Devereux decided to buy his loved ones matching Christmas pajamas, he started tracking down everyone’s sizes and placed the order before November. The earlier you nail down your shopping list, the sooner you can start looking for sales and slowly making purchases to save your bank account in December and avoid the stress of paying express shipping on last-minute gifts.

You need time to create new traditions and to split the labor of creating them

The holidays tend to be a period of nostalgia, and some families may heavily rely on time-honored traditions. But if you’ve outgrown them or just want to try something different, now is the best time to determine what would be meaningful, fun, and low-stress. Maybe that’s changing the location of a celebration from a grandparent’s home to a cousin’s; maybe that’s going on a fabulous vacation. The sooner you start thinking about it (and then commit to it), the easier everything else will be.

Holcomb, the therapist, suggested asking your loved ones now what they want the holiday to feel like, what traditions or events matter most, and what they realistically have the capacity for. You can also ask if there’s anything new or different they’d like to incorporate this year. Then you can come up with a game plan for how to share planning responsibilities. “Our cultural expectations around the holidays can make it easy to confuse a ‘successful’ holiday with a highly productive one,” Holcomb said. “Making time to ask these questions is especially important because we can disrupt traditional relational patterns and roles that we have taken for granted as normal.”

Both Holcomb and Thomas recommend creating a shared calendar or spreadsheet to keep track of logistics and divide responsibilities. In Thomas’s family, it’s called the Thomas Christmas Itinerary, and her mother starts it every September. “It basically lays out what the itinerary is for the whole Christmas time,” Thomas said. “What activities we’re doing, when we’re going over to grandparents’ houses, even down to what our dinner menus are.”

A spreadsheet can also be helpful for assigning and delegating tasks so that one person doesn’t end up managing everything by default as things come together at the last minute. So once you’ve committed to a general plan with your family, start breaking things down further — and proactively ask people to take ownership of different events and tasks (e.g., choosing a movie to take all the kids to see together, buying the snacks, and figuring out who is driving everyone). “If you’re hosting, you don’t have to simultaneously be the chef, activities director, chauffeur, mediator, and person responsible for everyone’s enjoyment,” Holcomb said.

Advance planning allows for the downtime everyone craves

When you are able to take a broad view of the holidays without the time crunch, you can be more deliberate with the itinerary and build in breaks. Events can be planned with intention, not obligation, and you’ll be able to zoom out and see that your calendar is getting overloaded before you’re completely underwater. “Another priority should be adding rest into the schedule before you need it,” Emily Barry, the senior vice president of holiday planning at online stationery and art marketplace Minted, told Vox. “Protect mornings or evenings when nothing is planned. Give yourself permission to stay inside instead of attending another event.”

“Don’t try to make the schedule perfect — make it meaningful,” Barry said. “Pick the one or two moments that are most important for everyone to be together, and build the rest of the holiday around those anchors.”

Slow planning over the course of a month or two ultimately makes it easier to offer flexibility to family members who may have traveled a considerable distance, have young kids, or are juggling multiple celebrations, Barry said — and to be realistic about what you personally can handle. “The goal is to spend meaningful time together, not create an itinerary that everyone has to execute perfectly,” she said.

“From the outset, reproduction is a collaborative venture,” writes Anna Louie Sussman, a journalist who has spent years reporting how people all over the world try, and too often fail, to build the families they want. Her work explores how the collaborators of reproduction keep multiplying: doctors, employers, legislators, insurers, and a fertility industry that increasingly promises not just a baby but a better one. 

In her new book, Inconceivable: The Impossibility of Family in an Age of Uncertainty, Sussman traces the economic, political, and psychological negotiations that stand between people and the children they say they want. Her reporting challenges the assumption that falling birth rates can be fully explained by metrics like income, marriage and education that demographers tend to focus on. She argues the answers are much more personal and resistant to measurement. 

I wanted to better understand what Sussman meant by this idea of “impossibility of family” — and how one would even determine that, whether as a prospective parent or as a policymaker. What are the biggest barriers to having kids and how do people tell the difference between what they can’t afford and what they’ve come to believe they need? How much does the media conversation about these issues inform people’s choices? 

I spoke with her about what Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s egg freezing reveals about women who aren’t running for president, what countries that subsidize fertility treatment tell us about the demand going unmet here, and why she hesitates to say outright that having children is good. Our conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

You started working on this book seven years ago. What has most surprised you about how the conversation around fertility and family formation has changed in that time? 

There are some people on the left who have always paid attention to family issues, like Elizabeth Warren with her work on bankruptcy and the “two-income trap,” but I do think we’ve been seeing a lot more movement there, with groups like the Congressional Dads Caucus [in 2023], and care infrastructure ideas like those in the Build Back Better Act. There’s also been all this movement around paid leave in the states, 3-K and pre-K, and attempts for more affordable child care. 

On the right there’s been the rise of this strange pronatalism and the turn that’s taken with what I’ve wound up calling “kid-maxxing.” Plus this embrace in Silicon Valley and among the super rich with so-called super babies and the really overt embrace of technology to make children on this industrial scale. I also did not expect Roe to be overturned. I would have hoped that would’ve come with a lot more attention on the right to support for mothers and children, but that really hasn’t come to pass in a big way.

I was startled to read that you found some philosophers attempting to reclaim the term “eugenics.” You cite one who wrote a paper called “Defending eugenics,” which sets out to “reclaim the spirit” of eugenicists like Charles Darwin and Francis Galton. You cite another who calls for “liberal eugenics” grounded in the freedom of parents to choose how to enhance their children in accordance with their own values.

One Oxford philosopher even says parents have a duty of “procreative beneficence” and should select embryos or fetuses “most likely to have the best life” based on the genetic information they have.

That was also surprising to me. Like you, I also thought it was a discredited and taboo word. It’s hard to know how widespread those views are. I mean to be clear, eugenics has always been part of our culture in the US. I think people forget that a lot of Nazi policy was inspired by American eugenic policies, and it’s an attitude that has never really gone away. We still see it in a lot of subtler forms that I mention in the book. I mean, even just how people are choosing embryos and terminating pregnancies based on certain genetic conditions. 

“Clearly you could have a lot more children being born if these technologies were more accessible.”

This eugenicist rhetoric is gaining steam at a moment when some people are also really hard at work on developing technologies that could enable this sort of thing. While some of these philosophers will definitely make a distinction between parents making some individual choices vs. a state sponsored program, I think it’s the attitude that’s at the root of this, and that’s what we really need to work on criticizing and dismantling.

So the book is arriving just as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been documenting her egg freezing journey, and talking about how she wants to push to expand insurance coverage and federal support for fertility treatments. What does her experience — and the reaction to it — say about our current moment? Some on the right were so mad, as if she should just throw in the towel or eschew hope and agency at age 36. 

What’s so interesting about her experience that I think that people miss is, yes, is it exceptional that she’s contemplating a run for president? Sure. Not many of us are doing that. But on many other levels, she’s doing what a lot of women who can afford to do in their late 30s do when they’re still single. In the book I mention the research of Marcia Inhorn, who interviewed about 150 women who sought to freeze their eggs. And what’s interesting is if you look at their profiles, they were city-dwelling professionals who were on average nearly 37 at the time of freezing.

That is AOC to a tee, and if you asked those study participants why they were doing it, most were not doing so because they felt like they needed to put their families on hold to pursue careers. A full 82 percent cited their lack of a partner as the prime motivation. They wanted to have a family at some point and didn’t want to rule that out. 

What do you think we should take from other countries that do subsidize egg freezing?

So the city of Tokyo has subsidized egg freezing and they were totally oversubscribed. So many women took up the city’s offer, and France has also started offering it. More places offer IVF coverage for people who need it because they treat infertility like a disease, which is how the World Health Organization defines it.

What’s interesting is when you look at places where there is more coverage, it also gives you a sense of the scale of need for it. So in Denmark, where you can get something like up to six rounds of treatment publicly funded for your first child and another six rounds for your second child; I believe about one in nine children is born there with assisted reproductive technologies. If you compare that with the US, it’s closer to one in 36. So clearly you could have a lot more children being born if these technologies were more accessible.

In the book you cite historian Sara Matthiesen, who argues that since legal abortion helped transform having a child into more of a personal choice, pregnancy thus became understood as chosen, with parents then sacrificing or forfeiting some of their claim on societal help. I couldn’t tell where you landed on that argument. Do you find it persuasive?

So I find it persuasive in the sense that I feel like conservatives will grab onto any argument to avoid state responsibility towards families and children. The fact that you can terminate a pregnancy is one more reason that can be provided to individualize the responsibility of parenthood. 

But I think that we’re also seeing the mirror image of that — where the choice to remain or not remain pregnant has also been taken away in so many places post-Roe. And I don’t think that has resulted in the converse of her argument, which is that when that choice is taken away and you can no longer sever pregnancy and motherhood, then states and society will step up to acknowledge that reality. 

In the middle of your book you recall an ex-boyfriend, who was divorced and felt it would be impossible to afford a second kid. You were surprised by this, and later cite a pregnant woman in Venezuela you met while traveling, who was worried about money but excited about parenthood. She told you the Venezuelan proverb that “a baby comes with a loaf of bread under his arm.” The subtext was that they believe things will work out. The subtitle of your book is The Impossibility of Family in Age of Uncertainty. So where do you land? Is it impossible, as your ex said?

I think that’s what people are trying to negotiate with themselves. That’s where things like faith, agency, and disposition come into play. One of the reasons I wanted to write this book was I feel like birth rates and demography are always discussed in terms of these data points that people can measure, like how many people are married and how old are they, and do they have college education or not? Do they earn X, Y, Z income, or not? Do they have a job? 

But it’s just all so personal. So the Venezuelan woman was an optimist, whether that’s culturally or dispositionally, and she did believe things would be okay. And I think we all know stories of people who’ve grown up who came from very challenging backgrounds and wound up achieving some sort of fame, fortune, success…so we know that things are always possible. And that’s where questions of what one is prepared to sacrifice come into play, or what expectations do you have of what you want to provide a child. 

The thing I really want to highlight is how individual these negotiations are, whether you come down on it being impossible or whether you want to lower your standards and maybe your child doesn’t get in-home violin lessons or if music’s really important to you and you can’t imagine a universe in which your child doesn’t play an instrument.

I cover these issues too and I think about a lot about what our role in the media is. I share your view on reproductive justice, and wanting to help people live the lives they want. But you also wrote about experiencing what you called “money dysmorphia” — when someone is feeling insecure about their financial situation even when they are in fact okay. What role do we have as journalists to help people distinguish between genuine financial impossibility and the fear that they can never be secure enough? And if we don’t do that, how do we not end up in a world where only rich people are encouraged to have kids?

So I try to be optimistic, but I also feel like as a country, there’s no bottom to how far someone can fall in America. As Elizabeth Warren found, having a child is a huge predictor of bankruptcy. I would like to be more positive. And I do believe that there’s so many easy policy fixes, so many ways to make parenting easier. But for people I know who’ve gone through serious financial distress because of things in their life changing, there’s a limit to what I can do or say without giving them all my resources. 

Regardless of our job as media, I wish I could say that everything will work out fine. And in some cases it can. Again, people do really great jobs being parents with so much less than I have, which is something I try to keep in mind all the time. But I also would say as a society that we let people fall all the way through the floor and then some. We just don’t have a safety net. So I find it hard to say that everything will work out and you’ll wind up fine.

At the beginning of your book you talk about how having children is an intensely personal decision and you’re not interested in writing about if it’s “good” or “bad” or “worth it.” One of the critiques conservatives make about people like us is that we can be so averse to making any kind of normative statement about having kids that we’ve lost the plot. I’m curious for your thoughts on that. In a book arguing that we need more family-friendly policies, do you think you need to more explicitly say that having kids is a good thing to do?

What I would say is loving relationships are good, and having kids is one of those. I think parenthood is an exceptional one just in the level of responsibility that you’re inviting. Having kids for people who want to have kids is good. But I don’t know, I do hesitate to privilege that relationship above all others because of what doing so means. If you say having kids is good, well, who has kids? That immediately has gendered implications and instantly puts an onus on women.

Though we say public libraries are good and that doesn’t mean we have to make libraries against people’s will. But yeah, I guess I wonder if that position avoids the ways this kind of relationship is different from other loving relationships. While this isn’t what personally motivates me, I think one can definitely make a case that having kids is more of a social good than some other kinds of relationships.

When we say society should be more family-friendly and fund it with tax dollars, it’s not just so everyone can live out the lives they want, but also so we can support our society now and in the future.

Lyman Stone I think gets at this, he says children are good because people are good. Again, I would say if you feel like you might be a good parent and enjoy that relationship, that specific relationship, the whole point of my book is I want that to be more accessible because from what I’ve seen and now in my own experience, it is an amazing relationship. It’s not a relationship like any other one I’ve ever had. But I guess it’s not clear to me what the corollary is of saying having kids is good. It’s definitely good for people who want to have kids, but it’s definitely not good for people who don’t want to have kids.

Though I’m not someone who always wanted to have kids myself. And while I’m strongly against coercing people into having children, I think there are millions of people like me who are like, “I don’t know. I’m not sure. I can’t really picture it.” 

There are people on the right who say, “Therefore, just do it because you’ll like it.” And I don’t think that’s appropriate. But it’s also true that for most of human history, people were simply not asked to come down on this question of: “Do I want it or not?” Now today I’m so glad I have a child and the choice to decide, but if you had asked me five years ago I would have said, “I don’t really like little kids. It’s never been my thing.”

So the identity question becomes interesting and confusing to me, and I think it leaves me more uncomfortable with the idea that we should just support whatever anyone’s choice or desire is today when we know that our choices and desires do change, including based on what people absorb in the media.

I think a lot of young people are just really struggling. I see this all the time on Reddit threads or listening to young people talk about their lives who say, “If I can barely take care of myself, how can I take care of someone else?” We don’t have a society that makes any form of caregiving easy, and people are really struggling to find work. We have a society that doesn’t make it easy to care for oneself, for one’s parents, for one’s friends, for one’s partner.

I mean I did have a kid before I felt totally comfortable and I was just really fortunate that it worked out. I do agree with some of the people on the right who say that a lot of the things you think you need to become a parent, you don’t. And we know that really great people grow up all over the world where they have much fewer resources and infrastructure and everything. So I do think kids need a lot less than we often imagine they need. And that is part of thinking about your own expectations and what you want for a child and also, again, what you’re prepared to sacrifice.

I joke that I go to an annual yoga class fairly regularly. I don’t really cook anymore. I had a single mom who was just resourceful, though she was lucky to be in New York City, where there actually are resources to access. If you’re living in Tennessee or Mississippi those types of resources would probably not be available. 

I haven’t been on a three-way call this emotionally taxing since junior high school. James is explaining the situation — so many dynamics, so much time urgency — to Rachel, and asking if she thinks it would be workable, while I just nervously try to follow the conversation, crossing my fingers and toes. There’s inevitably going to be heartbreak, but is it possible there could also be a silver lining?

So what is this all about? Well, I’m trying to figure out how to donate my 78-year-old dad’s brain. He has advanced dementia and is living in a memory care community. James Watkins is the research and study coordinator of the UCLA brain donation program. Rachel is someone who works at a crematorium, which, as it turns out, cannot make it work. 

Certainly, the demand is there for my dad’s brain. The World Health Organization describes dementia as “one of the greatest health challenges of our generation” and reports that 78 million people will have dementia by the close of this decade (a 188 percent increase since 2000), for an annual global cost of over $2.8 trillion. And yet, research into what causes it and how to cure it remains stymied by a lack of funding, high-quality data, and — this is where me and my family come in — poor coordination with people suffering from dementia and their caregivers.

My dad hasn’t been a part of any research studies, which I have come to understand is how most people who donate their brains get introduced to the process. Instead, I’m free soloing and it’s not going well. I do some research, make some calls, then lose track of it for months on end. I’ve got two kids — 10 and 12 years old — and there are constantly changing camp pick-up and drop-off times to coordinate with my husband, my mom’s post-op knee replacement appointments to make, and lest you think I’m Mother Teresa, a lot of television to binge and dive-bar beer to drink. Meanwhile my dad is getting worse and worse. 

Will I get the administration on this donation done before my dad dies? They don’t call dementia “the long goodbye” for nothin’, but still, the end is near — and a mind is a terrible thing to waste. 

How does one go about donating a brain?

First things first: Where does one donate a brain? 

Not at the DMV, where you are likely familiar with being asked if you would like to be an organ donor. Brains, unlike livers and lungs and the like, can’t be transplanted, so they are handled differently. 

Brains are donated to brain banks dotted all over the country, which have historically been territorial about their recruitment strategies and cache of post-mortem brain tissue. That began to change in 2013 when the National Institutes of Health created the NeuroBioBank, a consortium of sorts between brain banks that wanted to collaborate, rather than compete. The NeuroBioBank now includes Harvard, Mount Sinai in New York, the University of Maryland, the University of Miami in Florida, and UCLA in Southern California, and together, they share the tissue of 18,000 brains.

The NeuroBioBank has partnered with the Brain Donor Project to help potential donors register. Founded in 2016 by Tish Hevel, daughter of a brain donor, the Brain Donor Project has an online form where people like me can register interest and then they do their best to match you with a geographically proximate brain bank that can coordinate what they call “retrieval” (i.e., cutting your person’s brain out before you proceed with burial or cremation rituals). Over the last decade, they’ve pre-registered 30,000 people with all kinds of brains to help advance cutting-edge research. 

That’s how I ended up on that three-way call. We live in the Bay Area. Last fall, after a bunch of internet research, emails, and phone calls, I learned that neither UCSF nor Stanford would take my dad’s brain, because he hasn’t been a part of any of their studies. I lost steam and a few months went by.

New year, new me. Get your shit together, Courtney. In January of this year, I landed on the Brain Donor Project website and filled out their standard form. Within hours, I was chatting with Watkins — who has a bit of a Southern lilt to his voice and a can-do attitude. 

When I told him that my dad wished to be cremated, he explained that I would need to call them as soon as he died at his facility, get him transported to the crematorium, and then the crematorium would need to hold on to him until a “brain retrieval specialist” could come and get the brain. Some crematoriums weren’t willing to do that, so we would need to call them to find one that would, and hopefully wouldn’t charge anyone extra money for it. 

It is in this way that I have so often found myself taking a sharp turn into logistics and finances while doing what is actually pretty existential elder care these last few years. One minute, I’m wondering about my dad’s quality of life (Does he know me? Is he content? What still gives him pleasure?) and the next, I’m discussing whether he requires one or two people to transfer out of his wheelchair (which affects the monthly charges at his memory care community). One minute, I’m hoping my dad’s imminent death can benefit someone else’s expanded knowledge, and then I’m side-barring with Watkins about whether this crematorium is trying to rip me off. It’s jarring, to say the least.   

Watkins and I call seven crematoriums together. All of them claim to not have the right facilities to accommodate a brain retrieval. It’s feeling grim, but Watkins stays positive. “I won’t be doing my job until we’ve done absolutely everything we can think of to try to make this happen,” he reassures me. 

Hevel says that people like Watkins make all the difference: “It takes a special person because you are helping someone during what may be one of their darkest times. And you’re dealing with logistics…it takes sensitivity and smarts.”

The other “middle man,” as it were, is what they call a “brain retrieval specialist,” who must get to the body within 24 hours of death in order to extract the brain and ship it off to the brain bank. Believe it or not, Hevel reports that this role is often performed by freelancers these days. (Studs Terkel might come back from the dead for that interview!) 

But even if we find one, everything needs to align just right, with multiple specialists and institutions all working together, for us to have any chance to pull this off. 

What are the brains for? 

Looking at real brain tissue under a microscope is a vastly different experience for scientists than using imaging (MRI and PET scans) or blood tests. Dr. Melissa Murray, a professor of neuroscience at Mayo Clinic, compares it to “almost like looking into outer space.” 

The stars, in this case, are our cells, and being able to look so closely at them creates an opportunity to identify them more accurately and understand the most vulnerable among them — which, down the line, can lead to gene or cell-based targeting. “We are getting closer and closer to understanding the genetic underpinnings of everything,” Hevel tells me. “As weird as this sounds, it’s kind of thrilling.” 

It doesn’t sound weird to me. Part of why I want to donate my own dad’s brain is so I can get an accurate diagnosis of what kind of dementia he actually has. My dad’s gerontologist has said he likely has frontotemporal dementia with Lewy body dimensions, but this was her best guess based on examining him once he was pretty far along in his disease, and with no MRI (my mom and dad didn’t opt to get one). 

For many neurological diseases, the only way to know with certainty what someone had is to examine their brain after death. One of the benefits of donating a brain is that you get a neuropathology report that does just that; many people find out that their loved one had diseases that weren’t even on their radar. 

That’s what happened to Cathy Butler, whose husband died in 2024 of what she thought at the time was frontotemporal dementia (FTD). What she learned after donating his brain and getting the pathology report was that “if he hadn’t succumbed to FTD, there were plenty of other pathologies warming up in the bullpen.” 

His brain showed evidence of arteriosclerosis, Lewy body dementia, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and FTD. All these years later — how does she feel about the choice? 

“With benefit of hindsight, I’m glad I did this,” she said. “It’s the only meaningful opportunity we get to smack back at that miserable bitch FTD.”

Other top reasons that people register with the Brain Donor Project are serious mental illness, Parkinson’s, and traumatic brain injuries caused by — and this made me so sad to learn — intimate partner violence. But scientists desperately need healthy brain donations as well; after all, every experiment needs controls. It’s thrilling that the Brain Donor Project has gotten 30,000 people in the system, but also so inadequate when you consider the scale of these illnesses and their impact on all of us. 

The barriers to brain donation

So why don’t more people do it?  

Well, there are surely some who are religiously opposed to it or feel strongly about leaving their loved ones’ bodies intact. Others have very obvious reasons to distrust the medical and scientific communities (see: Henrietta Lacks). 

But I think more people don’t do it for a very obvious reason that has nothing to do with these oft-cited sacred values: sheer exhaustion. Those most likely to be dealing with the administration of getting a brain donated are burned out and overwhelmed. 

I asked my friend Tricia Boyle, whose mom died of dementia, if she considered donating her brain and she said: “I’m actually frustrated that no one in my family thought to talk about this, but there was so much I was dealing with. I’m giving myself grace for not being on top of it, but I am super sad, as my family likely would have easily said yes to it had someone asked!”

No one did. Not Tricia’s mom’s doctors, social workers, hospice workers, anyone at her assisted living community, etc. And this is true in the vast majority of cases. There just isn’t a centralized system or culture of making sure the people most in touch with those who can donate know it’s an option. 

And by the way, mentioning brain donation in your medical directives or your will isn’t the way to go either. Often those documents are not consulted until it’s too late and a brain bank needs to retrieve a brain immediately. 

Hevel is trying to raise awareness through a variety of creative strategies, including doing partnerships with “death influencers” like @HospiceNurseJulie, who wrote the book Nothing to Fear: Demystifying Death to Live More Fully and has almost 2 million followers on TikTok.

But even if Hevel succeeds in creating the will, there still isn’t much of a way. Take my situation as a case in point. Who wants my dad’s brain to be donated? Me and my family, my friend Watkins and the UCLA brain bank, neuroscientists all over the country, and the leadership at my dad’s memory care community. Who benefits from it happening? The whole society, which knows far too little about one of the most common, demoralizing, and expensive diseases. 

Who can make it happen? Despite the heroic efforts of the Brain Donor Project, the infrastructure needed to coordinate all these moving parts just isn’t there to meet the scale of the challenge. Someone needs to be the brains of the operation, so to speak. Without, that the individual family is responsible for duct taping a system together while we’re facing the imminent death of someone we love. 

My family brain plan

After six months of research, awkward phone calls, and holding my dad’s hand every week, we had a decent plan. When he died, I was to call Sunset View Cemetery, who would transport his body on ice to their facility. I would also call Watkins, who would rustle up a freelance brain retrieval specialist who could get my dad’s brain out and get it on a plane to LA as fast as possible. The cemetery would charge us a $500 fee for the room where the extraction would take place (the brain bank would pay for $200 of that and we’d have to spring for the other $300). For all this effort we’d get a “football-size” amount of ashes and a pathology report potentially unlocking important genetic information, not to mention the cathartic knowledge that our grand loss had furthered science just a little bit. 

Except, like so many best laid plans, it didn’t go that way.

At about 4:45 pm on Thursday, August 13, I noticed my dad’s breathing had significantly changed. I played “Blackbird” by The Beatles off my iPhone for him and then whispered in his ear, “Goodbye dad. I love you forever and ever.” 

He took one last gulping breath and was gone. 

After crying my eyes out, I called Watkins. He said, “We’re not going to be able to do it.” 

Sunset View Cemetery only allows for brain extractions from 9 to 5. Death, as it turns out, doesn’t abide by standard business hours. There was no way to get it to LA within the 16-hour window.  

When I spoke to Hevel when I was first trying to figure all this out, she assured me: “It’s a lot of work, but you will find some comfort in knowing that it wasn’t all for naught. It sounds so corny. I told myself, ‘I’m not going to say that to people when it happens to them,’ but everyone who donates actually says that to us. It’s just true. It restores my faith in humanity on the daily.”

If only it didn’t require so much luck and administrative stamina to do the altruistic thing.