Your Kids Are Alright

Gabrielle Blair, creator of Design Mom, on building a family culture that supports strength and resilience

As I sat down to write this, I got a note to donate to a GoFundMe for a friend in L.A., whose house has burned to the ground.

It’s been hard to peel my eyes away from the scenes of disaster, and the stories of whole neighborhoods that may never be rebuilt.

This story, about historic Black neighborhood of Altadena, really brought this home for me.

In times like these, moments of pure terror, like the one we’re facing while watching L.A. burn, or the one we’ll face together on Inauguration Day, it’s been helpful for me to have a few touchstones to come back to. “Islands of sanity” as the philosopher Margaret Wheatley calls them.

One of these touchstones is a conversation I had a few weeks ago with the writer, designer and conference founder, Gabrielle Blair.

I spoke to Blair back in November, and published part of our conversation just before Thanksgiving, when we talked about how to handle your post-election anger.

You Don't Need to Make Nice with Trump Voters This Holiday Season

But our full conversation centered around her newest book, which she co-wrote with her husband, Ben Blair: The Kids Are Alright: Parenting with Confidence in an Uncertain World.

It’s a funny and thoughtful book, and touches on everything from giving your kids permission to reject the family religion, to encouraging them to be life-long learners, to — most importantly — teaching them to be flexible and adaptable in the face of an unknown and often terrifying future.

(I read it while sitting side-by-side with my husband, who was reading another of Blair’s books — Ejaculate Responsibly: A Whole New Way to Think About Abortion - also highly recommended!)

Blair, who also writes a newsletter and maintains her popular Design Mom blog, now lives in northern France (she recently hosted an event where she walked people through the details of how to move abroad) and we chatted over Zoom.

I edited the conversation for length and clarity.

Photo by Justin Hackworth

I want to start by talking about building a family culture with care. In the book, you share examples of making things together, having new experiences together. You even give us a guide to think about the family culture we want to have. How do we start building that culture, and what are the key pieces that you think are so important?

In the guide, what we suggest is that you go to a family friend, a relative or someone that loves your family and has spent time with your family, has observed your family up close, and ask them, “How would you describe our family culture? What did you think of it?”

And then think about what you would want them to say. That's the exercise.

I picture how I want to be described.

So, for example, I really care that we work together as a family. It can be a small project, a big project, but working with purpose. I love that experience. That's when I'm my happiest. So I want that for my family, for sure.

I love some of the design-specific decisions you made to encourage your family culture. You write: “We could put up a sign that reads ‘I’m interested in hearing about your frustrations and successes with school or social life.’” Or you could do something a little less direct, like keeping the kids’ bedrooms boring so they spend more time in the common areas, or making creativity easily accessible.

I want my kids to participate, not just feel they're sitting on the sidelines and observing. If it's in class, if it's in sports, whatever: Get up, try. Do what the coach asked. Try it. Do your best to experience all that life has to offer.

So those are ways I would want people to describe our family. I'd want them to say, “Oh, they jump in. They're enthusiastic, they work hard. They're smart and interesting.”

These are ways that I would want people to describe us, and that's how I figure out that those must be my values.

Another chapter in the book is about how we shouldn't expect our kids’ baseline emotion to be happy. I love this: “Our expectations aren't related to our child's emotions, but to their participation. We try to show them how to participate, and expect them to participate meaningfully.”

But it's very, very hard to see your child not be happy. So why not expect our child's baseline emotion to be happy?

I think people can see it more easily if we talk about perfection.

So I'm very critical of the church I grew up in, and that I'm still a part of. One of the things I'll do is criticize the leaders of our church, when I see them do something that I disagree with. That can really stress people out in my church community. These leaders are often held up as just as close to perfect as you can be on earth. And I will repeatedly say to these people, “You are doing them a disservice if you're expecting them to be perfect. I know you think that you're honoring them by saying that. I know you think you're treating them with respect by thinking they can't make mistakes, but you are wrong. You're doing the opposite. They have to be allowed to be human.”

If you're expecting them to be perfect, and then they eventually do something that you or disagree with, you have to reject everything now. They were never perfect, so everything they said was wrong.

I'm much more respectful by allowing them to be imperfect, to make mistakes, right?

So having your kid have to be happy all the time is a little bit that. They would only be happy and grinning all the time, if life was somehow perfect, right?

But we know it's not. I certainly don't walk around happy all the time. So if I'm not happy all the time, and we know life isn't perfect, why are we expecting our kids to be happy all the time?

One, it doesn't make any sense. Two, it's putting a lot of pressure on these kids. They feel that. Even if we haven't stated that outright, they feel it. Your ability to feel happiness is in part from your ability to feel sadness.

There are four main pillars in this book: One is that the idea of a reliable path of success is a cultural myth, and it does a lot to harm to people. Another idea is a commitment to staying flexible, and open to change. Part of your approach here is to remember that your child is not you and their childhood is not your childhood.

That one comes directly from thousands of questions from Design Mom readers over the last 18 years.

There’s a realization that you had something great in your childhood and you're trying to replicate that, or you had something horrible in your childhood and you're trying to avoid that.

That's what we're talking about here. It really has nothing to do with your kid.

We don't get an instruction book for being parents, but we were all kids, so we're using our own childhood as the closest thing we can have to an instruction book, because that's all we've got.

We use an example in the book where you bought a house on a cul de sac because you loved it as a kid. And you say, “I'm making a sacrifice. I'm taking an extra job so you can get this house because I want this for my kids so much, because I loved it so much when I was a kid.”

And then fast forward eight years, and for your kids, this is the worst possible location. “I wish we lived right on a public transit line. I wish I lived in a city on a subway line. I can't get anywhere. I'm not interested in driving, because my generation doesn't drive.”

So we're constantly making decisions that may or may not be good for kids based on what we had ourselves. I find that when I'm butting heads with my kids, that is often the reason. If I really can step back for a minute and say, “What is the disconnect here?” It's often that I’m trying to give them something, or help them avoid something, from my childhood.

So instead I have to ask: What is it that they need? Need right now, in this childhood? Not, “What did I need when I was a child?”

I want to go to the idea of the “reliable path to success” as a cultural myth. It’s one of the main ideas of the book: that this path isn’t so reliable.

Some of this comes from me and my personal exasperations as a parent. So I have this example from when we were living in New York and we enrolled our oldest in a T-ball team. I had, at the time, two other younger kids, so there's three kids having to get to T-ball practice. Get the uniform ready, get the snack, all that.

And I'm exasperated after two weeks. I'm like, “What is this about?” I remember talking to their parents just going, “Am I insane? What is this for?” The kids are four and five years old. Are you really thinking, “My kid is going to play pro ball!?”

There's all sorts of good reasons to do sports, but it doesn't mean we need to spend 20 hours a week on a T-ball team from age four, right?

We don't have to force them into these things.

You write: “If you've discovered an activity is taking over your family's life and you're resenting it, it's worth taking a minute to figure out what you really want out of the activity.” And that ties back to family culture, right?

Right. It could be taking over your family, and you're like, “We are here for it.” Maybe you're a gymnastics family, and that's what you do. I'm not asking you to change anything.

But if you’re like me, and you’re asking “What are we doing?” We can at least question it for a minute.

Our obsession with this myth of this reliable path to success is, like, “If I just do step A, B and C, and then follow up with D, then somehow I will be ok.”

It's the same instinct of wanting to use our own childhood as a guide. It comes from a good place. I don't want to mess up my kid. I want them to have the best shot at happiness that they can have. So, okay, here's this path that's been laid out in front of me. Let's rely on that, on anything, that can take some of the pressure off of us.

It comes from a good place, but in fact does not work. And, in fact, it is very harmful.

Photo by Gabrielle Blair

This is a chance to talk about something that could feel really scary, but you're embracing it: Which is that the future is unknowable and unpredictable. We want to get our kids on the train and send them in the direction of the path to success, and yet the future is completely uncertain. How are we supposed to relax in that context?

We just have to manage it.

I cannot spend this much of my brain worrying about this future that I cannot control. It is too painful. It hurts, and it doesn't help me do anything.

It doesn't improve my life in any way. The future was always unpredictable. It's crazier, for us, and crazier for our kids, because the future is changing so fast.

So how do we prepare them?

So I think we say, “You know what? Here's where I feel comfortable taking risks.”

Everyone has to take risks sometimes, and I know I'm the most confident in taking risks when I have that home base."

I can say risky things on the internet because I have many layers of safety net. I've got my husband and I've got my kids and I've got my church community, and I've got my neighborhood here. I've got my readers. I've got so many layers of people that will love me and support me even if I say risky things, and even if I'm wrong.

So how do we provide that for our kids? Well, you've got a home base, you've got security and safety as deep as I can offer it to you, so that you can try whatever you need to try. Say you went to college, and you say, “I'm going to be a lawyer,” and then you find out your law job that you were excited about has been taken over by AI. It's okay. You can absolutely come home. There will be no one mad at you, no one mocking you.

If I can offer you physical safety and comfort, great.

But if I can offer you that emotionally as well, super. You're going to switch jobs a million times. We're not mad about that. Or, you're not going to be able to find a job. Job hunting now is ridiculous. It's all these things.

They're going to have to take risks, they're going to have to make decisions. They're going to have to choose things that aren't familiar to us, that we can't predict, that they can't predict.

Take risks and try something new and shift gears. That's all we'll be able to do to navigate the future. We don't know what's coming right?

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Matriarchy Report is written by Lane Anderson and Allison Lichter.

Lane Anderson is a writer, journalist, and Clinical Associate Professor at one of those universities for coastal elites. She has won fellowships and many SPJ awards for her writing on inequality and family social issues. She has an MFA from Columbia University. She was raised in Utah, and lives in New York City with her partner and young daughter.

Allison Lichter is associate dean at the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. She has been a writer, producer and editor at New York Public Radio and the Wall Street Journal. She was born and raised in Queens, and lives in Brooklyn with her family.