According to experts.
Child-rearing can feel like a crowd-sourced endeavor. An entire market of books exists solely for the purpose of instructing parents on best practices for raising their kids. Every well-meaning person in a parent’s life will proffer their unsolicited opinions. And online, a new trend or term championed by creators somehow renders every other parenting style dangerous or outdated.
What’s worse is this churn of ideals changes with every generation, says family therapist Craig Knippenberg, host of the podcast Legit Parenting. “When I was a kid, it was all discipline and responsibility — that was the main thing parents focused on,” he says. “The turn now, which I really do not like much at all, is this whole gentle parenting and we should focus on our child’s feelings and don’t want them ever to feel hurt.” (Labels aside, any approach to parenting that keeps your kids safe and healthy — and works for you — is fine.)
With constantly changing frameworks and a community of people — online and off — who are quick to point out supposed flaws, there are so many standards to live up to. Aside from the thrum of social judgments, accusations of “wrong” parenting can have very real repercussions. Unknowing outsiders may make calls to a child’s school or to child protective services — which most often and unequally impacts Black and brown families. The pressure to be the “ideal” parent has never been greater. “Parents are always trying to get it right or be perfect,” says licensed clinical social worker Mercedes Samudio, author of Shame-Proof Parenting: Find Your Unique Parenting Voice, Feel Empowered, and Raise Whole, Healthy Children. The reality is, parents aren’t perfect and neither are their children.
But don’t panic: There are plenty of facets of parenting in which people are naturally sufficient. To assuage your anxiety, here are the domains where experts say parents are doing just fine.
Letting kids look at screens
Throughout her career, Samudio observed as technology’s role grew within families. The shame that some parents might feel for allowing their children to watch TV while they attend to chores is unfounded. “Where do people get the idea that they shouldn’t allow their kids on screen time?” she says. “What measuring stick are you using?”
Instead, pay attention to how your family utilizes technology: Do your kids enjoy watching TikTok? Maybe you allow your younger child to play on an iPad while you help your older kids with homework. Then, set boundaries for when tech and social media are allowed, and when you’ll put it away, Samudio says. “If it is watching fun TikTok videos, maybe you can do it together,” she says.
Barring your child from social media or digital devices altogether may prove futile, Samudio says, as they’ll find ways to access it without your knowledge. Creating a technology roadmap for your family is more sustainable than denying screen time or comparing yourself to another family’s ideals.
Allowing children to have time to themselves
You’re probably spending enough time playing with your kids, says psychologist Juli Fraga. “I hear that an awful lot,” she says. “[Parents] feel like they have to play with their kids every time that kid wants interaction.” Don’t feel guilty if you send your child off to play by themselves or if you leave them with a babysitter on a Friday night.
Research shows quality time spent with children is far more impactful than the duration of time spent together. When you’re engaging with your kids, eliminate any distractions and tune into them.
Otherwise, let your kids use their imagination to play on their own or with other children. In cultures around the world, children most often learn from their peers and adults through observation and mimicry, says Dorsa Amir, a postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley’s psychology department who studies kids and culture. By just allowing children to play with no agenda, they are in fact learning, Amir says.
Not shielding kids from “negative” emotions
Parents are well-intentioned in wanting their children to have a positive childhood. “The problem is,” Amir says, “that that’s not the full spectrum of the human experience.” Emotional pain, social conflict, and boredom are unavoidable in life and can be learning moments for kids. Letting children resolve conflicts on their own or to navigate cooperation among their peers doesn’t mean you aren’t protecting them — you’re just giving them space to process their emotions and to practice social skills, Amir says.
The first step toward promoting mental health for your children is to take care of your own, Fraga says. Kids can pick up on and internalize their parents’ anxiety, sadness, or fear. “If parents aren’t aware of that,” Fraga says, “they might think that their kid totally has anxiety, not recognizing that there’s anxiety within themselves.” By knowing how to identify and regulate your own emotions, you can teach your children skills like how to name their emotions and talking through different choices they could’ve made in a stressful or emotional situation.
Samudio also suggests keeping an open dialogue with your children, especially as they get older. “We’re not just communicating to manage conflict, but we’re also communicating … to get to know each other,” she says, “so that way we can actually talk to each other and understand how you’re feeling.” Having established an open line of communication, your child may feel more comfortable broaching topics of mental health should they arise.
Setting boundaries
In modern society, children’s needs and preferences are centered, Amir says, but sometimes at the cost of the parents’ wants and desires. It’s perfectly fine not to cater to your child’s every whim all the time, Amir says. “Your preferences matter, too,” she says. “You have a seat at the table, too.” You won’t be sacrificing your child’s happiness by bringing them along while you run errands.
Similarly, the gentle parenting movement, where parent and child collaborate on choices and decisions, may have eroded boundaries. But most kids of all ages need boundaries, Fraga says. Take, for example, a boundary such as “You can’t be late for school.” According to Fraga, parents might be unintentionally signaling to their child that they have a choice when saying something like, “It’s time for school. Why don’t you get your shoes on, okay?” Setting and sticking to boundaries means not giving kids an option to do anything other than the task at hand. A statement like, “Put your shoes on. We’re leaving in five minutes,” helps uphold the boundary. “Kids actually respond better to that type of [communication],” Fraga says. “Little kids don’t want power, even if they think they do. It can make them feel really anxious.”
Parents should feel empowered to set boundaries around bedtime, mealtimes, and “whatever they need for their home life to run smoothly,” Fraga says. “Just because a kid might feel bad about something doesn’t mean that it’s wrong.”
Cutting kids some slack when it comes to schoolwork
Given parents’ increased access to their kids’ grades online, it’s normal to feel inundated — and stressed — by every incremental change in your children’s academic lives. Try as you might, most parents can’t engineer their child into a top performer and high earner, Knippenberg says. Rather, you can shepherd them through life, protecting them with rules and limits, and supporting them. “You have very little control over who your child’s going to become,” he says. So don’t stress over what elementary school you send them to or if they missed a study session in high school.
Instead of hyper-focusing on every aspect of your kid’s school and extracurricular life, give them space to unwind. Knippenberg suggests allowing children 30 minutes of exercise and a snack after school before they start their homework. If they’re toiling away well into the evening, Knippenberg says it’s okay to ditch the academics for the day. “Turn off the homework and watch a TV show together,” he says.
Just making it through the day
The greatest parenting achievement, experts agree, is simply keeping your family safe day in and day out. Give yourself some credit for that. Modern parenting in individualistic societies is extremely difficult and parents often have little support. You can cut yourself some slack.
However you get from wakeup to bedtime is sufficient so long as you move through the world with kindness, Knippenberg says. “If you, as a parent, are a kind person to your neighbors, the grocery store workers, the gas station attendant, other parents at the school,” he says, “your kids will become kind and that will last them the rest of their lives.”
With courts coming for abortion and IVF, it’s hard not to wonder what the Supreme Court will go after next.
When the Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade, it swore up and down that its decision didn’t necessarily have any implications for other rights. “‘Abortion is a unique act’ because it terminates ‘life or potential life,’” Justice Samuel Alito wrote for himself and four of his Republican colleagues. He added that “our decision concerns the constitutional right to abortion and no other right” and that “nothing in this opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion.”
But even as Alito wrote these words, Justice Clarence Thomas drafted a concurring opinion calling upon his Court to eliminate the rights to contraception, same-sex marriage, and the right “to engage in private, consensual sexual acts.” Justice Brett Kavanaugh, meanwhile, published his own opinion disclaiming any desire to come for anyone’s marriage or birth control.
All Americans now live in a land of uncertainty, somewhere between Thomas and Kavanaugh. In Alabama, the death of Roe meant that in vitro fertilization clinics closed after that state’s justices ruled that, at least under the state law governing wrongful deaths of children, a frozen embryo has the exact same rights as a child.
The clinics are now reopening after the Alabama state legislature, chastened by a nationwide backlash against the court’s decision, enacted legislation protecting IVF. The state supreme court’s original decision targeting IVF, however, contains some language suggesting they might rule that this new state law is unconstitutional. So it is unclear whether we’ve read the last chapter in this dispute over whether women in Alabama may receive IVF care.
This also isn’t the only way the right to privacy is under threat. Red states enacted several laws forbidding physicians from providing transgender health care to children experiencing gender dysphoria. Indeed, at this very moment, the Supreme Court is considering whether to reinstate such a law in Idaho which was blocked by a lower court. (The specific issue in the Idaho case turns on a narrow procedural question, but nothing prevents this Court from using that procedural question as an excuse to reinstate the Idaho law.)
Not that long ago, it would have been hard to imagine either Alabama’s attack on IVF or the red state laws targeting trans children surviving federal judicial review.
The right to an abortion lost in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022) was itself part of a broader “right to privacy,” which guaranteed that our most intimate, personal decisions — decisions like who we marry, who we have sex with, whether and when to have children, and, with some exceptions to prevent abuse or neglect, how we raise those children — will be made by us alone and not by the government.
As the Court said in Lawrence v. Texas (2003), “In our tradition the State is not omnipresent in the home. And there are other spheres of our lives and existence, outside the home, where the State should not be a dominant presence.”
Now, however, it is far from clear what, if any, of this right to privacy still exists. Justice Thomas proudly calls for it to be burnt to the ground. And even Kavanaugh’s more moderate Dobbs opinion may simply be a call to freeze the right to privacy in place — leaving existing freedoms like the right to same-sex marriage intact, but refusing to extend the right to privacy to previously unlitigated issues like IVF or trans health care.
Our most personal and self-defining decisions — the kinds of choices that we make alone, after praying to our own God, speaking to our own family, and consulting our own doctors — may now belong to the government.
No one knows exactly which rights are protected by the Constitution
One reason the modern right to privacy rests on shaky ground is because it is not explicitly laid out in the Constitution. The oldest Supreme Court decision protecting such a right is more than a century old, and the Constitution includes several provisions protecting so-called “unenumerated” rights that are not itemized anywhere in its text.
But one searches the Constitution in vain for specific language protecting, say, the right to choose your spouse, or the right to guide your children’s upbringing.
The Court’s earliest right to privacy decisions, moreover, are relics of an era when the justices frequently treated enumerated rights — that is, rights that are explicitly laid out in the Constitution — as optional guidelines that could be ignored.
In Meyer v. Nebraska (1923), the Court struck down a state law which forbade schoolteachers — including teachers at private schools, who are not state employees — from teaching “any subject to any person in any language [other] than the English language” before the student passed the eighth grade.
You might think this law would be struck down on First Amendment grounds, since it obviously violates the right to free speech.
But four years before Meyer, in Debs v. United States (1919), the Court held that a prominent union leader and political candidate could be sentenced to 10 years in federal prison for giving a speech opposing the draft, and this was just one of an orgy of World War I-era decisions treating the First Amendment as a virtual nullity. So teachers who wanted to educate their students in a foreign language could not rely on the right to free speech to attack Nebraska’s law.
Instead, Meyer featured the Court’s earliest articulation of what became the unenumerated right to privacy. Individuals have a right “to marry, establish a home and bring up children,” the Court said, and this right brings with it a parent’s “natural duty” to “give his children education suitable to their station in life.” To fulfill this duty, parents must also be allowed “to instruct their children” in subjects they wish those children to learn.
For the next four decades, the Court said little more about the right to privacy — although it did hold that parents have a right to send their children to private (and, specifically, Catholic) schools in Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925). Beginning in the 1960s, however, the Court started to flesh out this right, and to include within it the right to make certain medical decisions without government interference.
The first of this second wave of right-to-privacy decisions was Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), which held that married couples have a constitutional right to use contraception.
The idea that anyone had a right to sexual autonomy of any kind — even something as seemingly noncontroversial as a married couple using birth control — was reasonably novel in the 1960s. An 1873 federal law known as the Comstock Act, a law that is still on the books, bans pretty much any kind of contraception, sex toy, abortifacient, or even art or literature depicting nudity or sex, from being mailed. And similar state laws often targeted this kind of material.
In some cases, this led to art gallery owners being convicted for selling reproductions of famous works of nude art. In other cases, it led to people arrested for providing contraceptives or other forbidden items dying by suicide after being hounded by law enforcement. Anthony Comstock, the anti-sex crusader after whom the federal law is named, once bragged that 15 people targeted by his investigations took their own lives.
Read in the light of this history, Griswold is best understood as a repudiation of Comstockery. It is also one of the Court’s first articulations of the idea that some aspects of our lives are walled off from government regulation specifically because they are private — and because there are some places where law enforcement officers simply do not belong.
“Would we allow the police to search the sacred precincts of marital bedrooms for telltale signs of the use of contraceptives?” the Court asked in Griswold, before answering that “the very idea is repulsive to the notions of privacy surrounding the marriage relationship.”
One reason to fear that this right to privacy is in danger is that one of the Court’s fullest articulations of the right’s scope came with Roe v. Wade (1973), the decision now held up as an icon of judicial overreach by the Court’s current, GOP-appointed majority. As Roe explained, this right extends to “activities relating to marriage, procreation, contraception, family relationships, and child rearing and education.”
Specifically, the Court has said that the right to privacy includes the right to marry a person of our own choosing (1967’s Loving v. Virginia, 2015’s Obergefell v. Hodges); the right to choose our own sexual partners (Lawrence v. Texas in 2003); the right to have, or not to have, children at a time of our choosing (Griswold, 1972’s Eisenstadt v. Baird, Roe); and the right to raise those children as their parents deem appropriate, with exceptions prohibiting abuse, truancy, and similar offenses (Meyer, Pierce).
Read together, these rights provide a strong basis for protecting women seeking IVF or families with transgender children. The Court has said many times that the government may not interfere in our most intimate decisions involving our families, including medical decisions.
Now, however, all of these rights are potentially threatened by a Supreme Court that has already torn away one key component of the broader right to privacy. And it is far from clear which of the remaining components will survive.
Four ways that the Supreme Court could handle the right to privacy moving forward
It’s dangerous to predict how the current Supreme Court will rule on any issue, or, at least, on any issue where the Court’s current members have not yet staked out an explicit view. The Court’s current majority has a weak attachment to “stare decisis,” the doctrine that courts should be reluctant to overrule previous decisions.
And the Supreme Court has a long history of ignoring constitutional rights even when they are explicitly protected by the Constitution — hence the World War I-era decisions suppressing the First Amendment, or the Jim Crow-era decisions nullifying amendments intended to guarantee equal citizenship to Black people.
As of now, we know, based on the concurring opinions in Dobbs, that Justice Thomas would likely abolish the right to privacy in its entirety. And we know that Justice Kavanaugh would leave some existing rights, like the right to marry whomever you choose, intact. We don’t know where the rest of the Court’s Republican majority falls along this spectrum.
That said, there are four ways that this Court might approach right to privacy cases moving forward, and at least one of these approaches could end in good outcomes for women seeking IVF treatments, or for families with transgender children.
The first possibility is that Thomas finds five votes for his sweeping assault on the right to privacy. This outcome is unlikely at the moment, given Kavanaugh’s declaration that he does not support it. But if Donald Trump wins the 2024 presidential election, he could potentially replace some of the Court’s relatively moderate members with hardliners similar to Thomas. And that would mean the death of a long list of rights, from the right to same-sex marriage to the right to contraception.
In the second and third possibilities, Kavanaugh’s approach prevails, and the Court leaves most of the privacy rights protected by existing Supreme Court precedents in place. No married couple is stripped of their marriage license and no one needs to fear a ban on legal birth control.
What distinguishes these two possibilities is how the Court reads a line in its Dobbs decision, which says that the justices will determine which unenumerated rights are protected by the Constitution by asking “whether the right at issue … is rooted in our Nation’s history and tradition.”
Broadly speaking, the idea of a right to privacy and the right to guide your own children’s upbringing first announced in Meyer are firmly rooted in American legal history and tradition. These rights have been around for more than a century, and can certainly be read broadly enough to encompass, say, the right to decide which medical treatments your child should receive if they are diagnosed with gender dysphoria.
That said, the Supreme Court has not yet read the right announced in Meyer to encompass a right to IVF, or a right to provide a child with gender-affirming health care that the government finds objectionable. So it would not be hard for the current, very conservative Supreme Court majority to rule that novel applications of the right to privacy are not part of America’s “history and tradition.”
And then there is a fourth possibility. Several conservative organizations, including groups with very close ties to Trump, see the right to privacy as a tool they can use to impose their own values on the nation.
Before we sacrifice our constitutionally protected right to privacy at the altar of gender identity politics… https://t.co/wDMwaI94Br
— Heritage Foundation (@Heritage) June 29, 2016
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