As a former nanny who now regularly babysits in my spare time, I do my best to stay up on the parenting discourse, and one topic that surfaces time and time again is gentle parenting—its merits as well as its drawbacks. I’m not a parent myself, so my skepticism about the movement’s approach to punishment (avoiding it) should definitely be taken with a grain of salt. But personally, I can’t think of anything that’s enriched me or prepared me for the so-called “real world” more than having an ever-so-slightly mean mom.
To be clear, there’s a major difference between being mean and being unkind; my mom has been deeply and unfailingly kind since the day I was born, celebrating my wins and always making time to handle my various woes and crises, whether it was spraining my finger rollerblading at age eight or being dumped via text at age 28. She’s a tough crowd, though, and always has been—she herself being the daughter of an Italian and Russian-Jewish mother who grew up in hiding in a Catholic orphanage in Rome, and raised her four kids never to feel too good or confident about themselves.
If you’ve ever met my mom at a cocktail party—not impossible, since she’s worked in journalism since long before I was born and co-founded the publication Air Mail with Graydon Carter in 2019—and complimented anything about me, you’ve likely been met with an eye-roll and a quick, cutting comment about my flaws; my mom believes it’s the height of bad taste to brag too publicly about your children’s successes. Did that used to hurt my feelings? Sure—until I recognized it as a kind of self-deprecation by proxy. She viewed me as an extension of herself, and she would never accept plaudits for her own accomplishments with anything other than a witty dismissal and a follow-up question about whoever it was lobbings praise her way. (And besides, I have a Jewish dad who’s all too happy to brag about me at parties, so I feel covered in both directions.)
My mother was no Tiger Mom during my childhood; she never came down hard on me about my grades (a good thing, too, given my series of academic flops) and was pretty lax about household chores (to this day, I don’t own a vacuum…red flag, I know). But the way I comported myself was extremely important to her, and she let me know it. She wasn’t an Emily Gilmore clone obsessed with cotillion-perfect manners, but for as long as I can remember, she emphasized the importance of listening and drawing other people out, telling me: “Always talk to the person who’s standing alone at the party.”
When I was a teenager, I grumbled about my mom’s weird habits and rules, unclear on why my friends’ mothers doled out empty praise and Oreos while my own was more likely to cock an eyebrow at my outfit and say something mildly devastating (but very funny) as I walked out the door, a glass of white wine in her hand. I would get annoyed about her insistence on politesse, wanting desperately to participate in the age-old adolescent ritual of social exclusion, yet always hearing my mom’s voice in my head, asking me who I was to leave anyone else out.
Now, as an adult, I couldn’t value my mom’s unorthodox parenting style more. Because of her, I’ve been able to hold my own at a dinner party since the sixth grade—very Whit Stillman, I know—and more importantly, I know the importance of shutting the hell up and asking other people questions, whether I’m reporting a story or on a first date or just riding the bus in LA. “Everybody is interesting about something, you just have to figure out what,” my mom once told me, and really, isn’t that a lesson more kids should be learning?
Did my mom make mistakes? Of course. As I’ve gleaned from a decade and a half of making guest appearances in other families’ care dynamics, pretty much the only constant of parenthood is that you will fuck up in some way or another, and probably not in the ways you’d expect. Now that I’m 32 and living across the country from her, though, my mom and I talk on the phone every day for as long as she’ll let me pump her for story ideas and dating advice and recollectsions of what it was like to party at Dan Tana’s in 1983.
I don’t know if I’ll have kids, or even what my life might look like in a few months. But if I do become a mother, I know I’ll want to skip the imperative to soften the world for my children and instead try to make them as prepared as possible to actually face it with humor and empathy. That, after all, is what my mother has always done for me.
