Figure it out, or ask
Parents have been raising children since the beginning of time. They learned from watching their parents and grandparents, from friends and neighbors and the accumulated wisdom of a trusted whisper network that had already figured out everything worth knowing. It was a gloriously imperfect improvisation in all the ways that didn't matter and inspired in every way that did. For millennia, kids were raised anyway, clumsily, haphazardly, often magnificently.
Eventually there was one book—the massive eighties bestseller What to Expect When You're Expecting—but that was really about navigating pregnancy and surviving the bewildering first months of a new baby, not about raising a person. Then the internet arrived.
The great leveler and democratizer of worlds. A global village that promised to make everything fairer, more connected, more equal. We got some of that. The rest we never saw coming. Once the platforms took over and built things they hadn't fully thought through, the world was rearranged under our feet. Every corner of human experience was commodified into a content opportunity. Raising children was no exception. Parenting advice metastasized from a whisper network to a content vertical to a full-blown opinion industrial complex.
Now we have millions of TikTok, Instagram, and X accounts run by parents utterly convinced they've figured it out and can't wait to tell you so. The podcast couple who've turned their family into a curriculum, explaining, for the four hundredth time, why your parenting philosophy is ruining your child. The TikTok dads teaching other dads how to raise boys into men, those boys watching and quietly learning that fatherhood is something you perform rather than just live. The Insta-mom inducting her teenage daughter into the art of presenting herself for the camera, the daughter absorbing lessons about what women are for that she'll spend years trying to forget.
Parenting has become the most advice-saturated activity in human history, accumulating more listen here content and confidently delivered opinions than any other human endeavor, including finding love, losing weight, and achieving happiness combined. Whole sections in bookstores, thousands of newsletters and podcasts, millions of social feeds all sustained by the nagging feeling that someone somewhere is doing this better than you. Attachment theory, authoritative vs. authoritarian, free-range vs. structured, dopamine this, screen time that. Sure, some of it is useful. Much of it you already knew. But most of it is just self-congratulatory performance art dressed up as wisdom. Follow it back to its source and you find the same thing nearly every time—a narcissist in search of an audience.
We've built an entire universe of parenting advice aimed exclusively at the adults doing the raising. A closed loop where parents make the content, consume it, and endlessly debate it among themselves. It's remarkable when you think about it. It's all about kids, and yet nobody ever thought to ask them. Not a single one. Kids are everywhere in this story, but their voices and insights about their actual experience of being on the receiving end of all this parenting are virtually nowhere. The question worth asking is why.
Adults don't really listen to young people. They don't regard them as credible sources of wisdom about their own experience. This has always struck me as one of the stranger hypocrisies of adult life. We observe kids, study them, love them, worry about them, legislate for them, build entire content industries around them, and never once think to ask them.
As a kid I marveled at this. At how reflexively, how automatically, adults disregard the depth and complexity of young people's inner lives. They talk at kids rather than with them, ask questions they've already decided the answers to, always operating on the default assumption that age confers all the answers worth having. You're young, shut up. I'm older, I know.
Parents cherish their children, of course. But cherishing someone and actually knowing them are two very different things. And knowing them—really knowing them—means understanding that each child is a singular person with their own specific interior, their own particular needs, their own individual way of moving through the world that is likely nothing like yours. It means being curious enough to ask. Not because children have all the answers, but because they are the only ones who actually know what it feels like to be them. As if being young somehow disqualifies you from having anything worth contributing. As if the very people living childhood from the inside have nothing useful to say about their own experience.
As a kid, I wanted a say. I wasn't quiet about it. Still, adults generally weren't all that interested. As a parent I made sure my kids knew their voices mattered. That speaking up wasn't just allowed, it was expected, encouraged even. They took me up on that, and what they had to say was worth every bit of the listening. When you give kids genuine room—not just permission to speak but actual space to get things wrong, to sit with uncertainty, to arrive at what they actually think rather than what they think you want to hear—what comes back changes you. They see the world without the filters adults spend a lifetime installing. They notice what you stopped noticing years ago. My kids taught me as much, if not more, than I taught them. About the world, about people, about parts of myself I hadn't fully examined, and above all, about what each of them needed to feel truly seen. Most parents never get there. I know because I lived it. And I had great parents. That's the whole point.
I grew up in a family that talked openly about hard things, that didn't change the subject, that didn't look away from the uncomfortable or unresolved, that even went to therapy as a family back when almost no one did. I fit right in. I was a loud, raucous, highly expressive kid who filled every room he entered and left very little doubt about what he was feeling. The outside version of me was never hard to read. And still, despite all the attention and love and closeness, I didn't feel known. I didn't feel seen past my surface layers into the particular, idiosyncratic version of me that existed beneath the visible one. The one with fears that never made it to the surface, needs that went unspoken, a whole interior that was asking, without ever saying so, to be parented as the specific person I actually was. I said nothing. Not directly, at least. Those feelings just lay there instead, unnamed and unasked, heavy as a piano, for years.
My experience was not unique. Most kids feel some version of that gap between what they show and who they actually are. I know because they've told me. Repeatedly. That felt sense that the people who love them most are only ever seeing the easiest version to see. I've always wanted to understand why. Why kids feel it, why parents miss it, why no one in the long, loud, endlessly expanding conversation about parenting has ever thought to ask the source directly.
So I did.
Over the last several years I've spent a lot of time in coffee shops, places where young people gather to work, kill time, exist loudly in groups. For a long time I just listened. Teenagers and young adults in their natural habitats, especially among their trusted friend groups, say remarkably interesting things. Most adults never hear any of it. They stopped listening long before they stopped being young. I swore I'd never be that kind of adult. And somewhere along the way, through my own kids, through their friends, through years of just being genuinely curious about people, I became someone young people talk to—not because I'd figured out something special, but because I never forgot what it felt like to be young and ignored by adults.
Over time I got to know many of these kids. A nod became a hello, a hello became a question, a question became conversations that take months to get going and then never stop. You can't fake it with young people. They have spent their entire lives being talked at, managed, handled, and humored by adults performing interest without actually having any. They know the difference immediately. Not after a few conversations, immediately. You earn your way in slowly, over time, through consistency and genuine curiosity and the willingness to actually remember what they told you last time. The moment they trust that you're actually curious about their lives, their dreams, the way they see the world, just as a person worth knowing, they will tell you almost anything.
In time, these conversations turned to intimate territory. They shared about their experiences of growing up, of being parented, of what it actually felt like to be on the receiving end of all that love and effort and advice. Once we blew past the surface grievances—curfews, sibling rivalries, the turbulence of young love—something shifted. What emerged wasn't clean or directed like anger or resentment. It was deeper, something that felt much more like longing. Across different kids, different ages, different families, different cities, the same feelings showed up again and again, in different words but always pointing in the same direction.
One of those kids finally gave that feeling a name.
Jacob works at a local Starbucks near where I live. He's part of a tight-knit crew of sharp, lively, self-possessed young people who are more put-together than most adults I know. He's twenty-one, the same age as my son, studying biochemical engineering and putting himself through college on a barista's salary. We'd been talking, on and off, for months about his ambitions, his family, what growing up had been like for him. One day he sat down across from me, said he'd been thinking about something we spoke about weeks earlier, and said: Remember when you asked why I never just told my parents what I needed them to understand about me? That stuck with me. And I finally figured out why. I didn't want to have to ask them. I wanted them to already know.
BAM!
I didn't say anything for a moment. Jacob had just said something I'd felt my entire life but never had words for. Not even close. And then something else hit me. This isn't just Jacob and me. It's so many of us. What Jacob wanted, what I had always wanted, what every kid wants, is to never have to ask in the first place. Because if you have to tell someone how to treat you, how to love you, how to reach the version of you that isn't immediately visible, it's not the same thing as them just knowing, especially when that person is your parent.
The asking is its own small defeat. So kids don't ask. And parents, as we've already established, don't ask either. Not because they're waiting to be told, but because most have already decided they know. One silence born of longing. The other born of certainty. And in that silence, everything kids actually think and feel and carry just sits there. Somewhere, another parent decides they already know. Another kid decides not to ask.
Figure it out, or ask.
Most parents do neither. This piece is an attempt to do both.
Parenting advice, from the parented.
Part one of two.