I'M WRITING A BOOK!

By the grace of God alone

Many of you followed along as my second son was born, stayed in the NICU for 61 days, came home for 9, and sadly passed away. It feels a bit like the cruelest possible joke to have one son who skateboards, who can drop in on a 6-foot quarter pipe at the age of 3, and another born fragile and sickly, made whole only by God in heaven, but not by doctors here on Earth.

As if my son dying wasn’t bad enough, we also happen to live in New York City. This is the land where many people get started having kids at age 40, where the median household income is high, where the mayor hopes to help parents outsource childrearing from 6 weeks and on (with little thought given to stay-at-home parents or families who hope to make different choices). It’s a place I’ve repeatedly encountered padlocked playgrounds in 60-degree weather; where restaurants have age minimums and anti-stroller policies; where schools hemorrhage enrollment. The culture feels topsy turvy, and people are either having fewer kids, or choosing not to have them at all.

I’m writing a book––CITY WITHOUT CHILDREN––to construct a wide-angle view of how different forces work in convergence to shape citydwelling American parents’ risk appetites. This book will be part culture, part policy, and part grief memoir, shaped by my experience with my two boys and the fact that I’ve lived through every parent’s worst fear: burying one’s own child.

The world has gotten safer, but we’ve gotten broadly more paranoid, bubble-wrapping our kids’ childhoods. It’s liability fears leading to schools and playground designers removing risk from our play spaces; it’s people having fewer kids, having them later, and having them richer that leads to the “trimester Zero” mentality where women increasingly go to pre-conception consultations, oriented toward optimization culture from the get-go; it’s the public-health authorities’ guidance that (in some cases, rightfully!) instills new fears in parents; it’s the way this cohort of parents has so many stakeholders––daycares! nannies! schools!––but no real village, leading them to import other people’s risk tolerances. And, yes, it’s the heightened fear of investigations from child protective services if you let an 8-year-old walk home from the park solo. We’re far from the days of Etan Patz disappearing from the streets of Soho, and such incidents have become blessedly rare in this city. But why does big-city parenthood feel so damn hard?!

When I had Zev at 26, I didn’t understand other parents’ risk aversion. My amygdala just didn’t quite work properly and I couldn’t quite figure out what everyone else was so worried about all the time. Now, at 30, after Sol’s death, I find myself pulling Zev seven feet back from the subway tracks, waking up in the middle of the night to check that he’s still breathing, refusing to let him near pools. But I’m not correct to do so. We have a mandate from God to protect and steward the lives with which we’re entrusted; living in fear dishonors that. This book is about choosing to live a full life after tragedy––and how other parents can embrace their fears and change the culture.

Follow me on Substack for updates about CITY WITHOUT CHILDREN. (And thank you to The Fund for American Studies for providing me with a wonderful fellowship to write this book that’s so dear to my heart.)