Anne Hathaway recently announced that she is expecting a third baby. There is only one appropriate response to that news, especially from people who claim to value children and families, and it goes like this: Congratulations, what a blessing!

Instead, the Academy Award winning actress’s pregnancy reveal has been met with a cascade of judgment. Why? Because the married mother of two is 43 years old. And that’s too old for new motherhood, say many self-professed traditionalists.

One post on X asked that we “not normalize having kids at 40” since babies born that late in a mother’s life might not know their older grandparents. Other critics were even more unkind, pointing out the increased likelihood of birth defects in babies born to older mothers.

This negative response to Hathaway’s pregnancy announcement is both mean-spirited and misplaced. While conservatives are right to push back on today’s elite scorn for young marriage and family formation, older child-bearing deserves support as well. There is no contradiction here.

In fact, the historical precedent that traditionalists claim to support involves more, not less, pregnancy for 40-something women — along with more, not less, pregnancy for 20-something ones.

A healthy, family-centered society would seek a return to both sides of that erstwhile reality, not just one or the other.

Older Mothers and Antinatalism

Negative reactions to Hathaway’s pregnancy are rooted in conservative anger at an elite culture in which babies are often treated like commodities to be obtained at will rather than honored as gifts to be received in faith and humility. And, indeed, the zeitgeist among educated Americans today does attempt to pit 20-something marriage and motherhood against women’s self-actualization, equality, and flourishing. As I have written, this is a grave mistake predicated on a series of lies.

So, yes, 20-something marriage and motherhood should be the norm. In a culture with biological and moral reality principles, such a norm would not only be accepted but taken for granted. The rootless malaise and extended adolescence afflicting our youth, hollowing our social institutions, and ultimately reducing our population are predominantly a product of the narcissism that ensues when chronological adults remain de facto children instead of raising some.

And, yes, technological aids to reproduction, such as egg freezing and IVF, are too often marketed to make a woman believe that her biological clock can be outrun. Of course, pregnancy does get more dangerous — and, ultimately more difficult and then impossible — as women age. Moreover, these same technological aids can be and are too often used to negate or subvert each child’s right to a mother and a father.

For the True Pronatalist, Life — and Openness to It — Doesn’t End at 35

But a preference for 20-something marriage and child-bearing and the embrace of 40-something child-bearing are in no way mutually exclusive. In fact, they’re complements. Not just historically, though that is true (40-something women with babies the same age as or younger than their oldest grandchildren were once commonplace), but also culturally and morally.

A society that is open to life — that sees children not as commodities, props, or impediments, but as gifts — would and should expect messier and less optimized decisions around child-bearing, among women of all ages. Yes, this means 20-somethings prioritizing marriage and welcoming children before today’s elite parenting gurus might deem them “ready.” But it also means women in their mid-to-late-30s or early 40s approaching the question of whether to welcome that third, fourth, or fifth baby in a spirit of generosity and humility.

Unfortunately, progressives and conservatives alike often approach the question of parenthood as though it’s about parents, when in fact it should be about children. A curated commodification of parenthood as a lifestyle choice with predetermined requirements and rewards is what leads young couples to delay childbearing until everything is “just so” as they see it. It also leads so-called traditionalists to attack 40-something mothers for bearing children when things are not “just so” as they see it anymore.

Sure, you won’t have as much time with a baby born when you’re 42 as you will with one born when you’re 22. And indeed, starting a family at 25 is better in all kinds of ways than starting one at 35.

This is all true, and it is all irrelevant in relation to the pregnancy announcement of a 40-something mother.

The overarching fact of Hathaway’s pregnancy, as of every pregnancy, is that a unique image-bearer of God is soon to enter the world. That individual — that person (who those criticizing Hathaway disproportionately believe is a wholly formed soul and body awaiting his or her birth) — could not be born to any other woman or at any other time.

Pope Leo XIV’s mother, for example, was 43 years old when the future pontiff was born in 1955.

Perhaps we all, progressives and conservatives alike, should be a bit more content to let God do His job and to stay in our all-too-human lane.

Last fall, my third-grade son was home sick for a few days. His teachers sent some class workbooks home with his older brother. As I flipped through them to find the pages he was supposed to complete, I noticed that my son (who was and is a capable student, acing his tests and doing well on homework and other work I assign him) had been doing a terrible job in these workbooks. Think: chicken scratch writing, missing punctuation, skipped exercises—just, all around lazy, lousy, rushed work.

As the mom of a self-driven boy who had clearly decided for himself that the work book in question was not worth his time, I did what I knew I had to do. I remained as stoic as I could muster; erased every single page that had been “completed” in the book since week one of the school year; sat my feverish but feeling-good-on-Motrin son down at the dining room table; required him to complete every last one of those pages correctly and neatly, then and there; and assured him that I’d henceforth be spot-checking his class workbook and that if I ever saw crap like that again, I would make copies of the pages at home and make him redo every one of them—twice.

The necessary messages for a spirited male child still in his early grade school years but fast approaching tweendom? You have earned zero autonomy of any kind; your deference to legitimate authority is expected to be total. You are not at liberty to decide when you perform appropriately and respectfully versus when you don’t. If you are caught producing sub-par work, even where you expect no one can see, consequences will follow. Haste makes waste. Rush through your work to get to what’s coming next, and you’ll lose far more time and control than you gain.

Girls and Boys Are Not the Same…

Now, had this been a daughter instead of a son, my reaction would have been 180 degrees different. I would have thumbed through the workbook, smiled, had my daughter do the assigned pages without checking them, and uttered not a word. I would have been glad of her sophistication in being able to tell what is make work and what is real work. Moreover, I would have been reassured that her innate ability and willingness to flout authority where it doesn’t count—to decide for herself where to be neat and where to not care—would serve her well in the adolescent years coming all too quickly.

To be sure, I am of course happy to recognize all these same qualities in my son. His ability to prioritize, his observational awareness, and his self-direction will pay enormous dividends as he hits adolescence and beyond. But, to get the best bang for his characterological buck, he has to earn via increasingly adult performance the right to act on his own judgment in a way and to an extent that his female peers should gain largely by default (in part because they mature faster and in part because nature and peer group dynamics both make them vulnerable—and therefore, ideally self-possessed unto self-protection—in ways that males simply are not).

In other words: In a tween or adolescent girl of my son’s personality type (and, yes, I was one myself), physical, biological, and social realities serve the same function for which similarly spirited boys require continued, unforgiving, adult authority.

Tween and teen girls (if we do not lie to them, which remains a big if) know that their own self-will, no matter how strong, has myriad limitations, both innate and constructed. But boys of the same age require strict reinforcement (in the form of unrelenting expectations of rote obedience) on that score. This is why traditional societies (and wise parents) rely on hierarchical para-militarization and policed conformity to mold decent men—while simultaneously trusting that some combination of nature and reasonably virtuous socialization will mold decent women.

Hence, as a disagreeable, self-possessed boy, my son will benefit from a much stronger hand for a much longer time, as compared to his female counterparts.

Apropos this point, one of my most popular and controversial pieces to date argues that the right-leaning notion (which is now also gaining adherents on the center-left) that today’s schools are anti-boy is mostly nonsensical cope for the failures of weak, indulgent, gentle parenting of spirited boys.

As I argue in this essay: Yes, boys are harder to socialize for civilization than girls; we need to accept that that as a truism, and then do it anyway. This goes triply for “spirited” boys. That is, the ones who are both disagreeable and aggressive. By contrast, girls at the far end of the female bell curve for disagreeability and aggression are not all that far from the male median for those traits.

Young children (especially disagreeable, aggressive ones) need to be habituated to obedience exactly like puppies. We know that German Shepherds are harder to train than Labrador Retrievers and that this is no excuse not to train German Shepherds—but a reason to do so even more zealously. So, for the most disagreeable and aggressive children, all of whom are boys, doing this training right involves total rigidity and zero give, ideally very young.

Raising girls well—including disagreeable, reactive ones—simply does not require this same level of harshness.

So, this is all to say: Yes, I understand and accept the reality (coded conservative, but really just commonsensical) that boys and girls are not the same; and that spirited boys and spirited girls are even more different from one another than their more agreeable, less aggressive counterparts. I also accept the reality (coded progressive, but also commonsensical) that the social construction of femininity and female in-group dynamics are at least as responsible for the reality of female vulnerability, holistically understood, as is the raw fact of biology.

…But Being Bossy and Being a Boss Are Also Not the Same

That said, too many left-leaning gentle parents tend to excuse girls’ rudeness and antisocial behavior in many of the same ways that right-leaning gentle parents tend to excuse these traits in boys. If conservatives are too apt to say that “boys will be boys” in response to their sons’ failures to exhibit order and discipline, progressives are too apt to allow conservative straw (wo)men to inhibit their ability to raise other-regarding, socially adept girls.

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Deep down, a lot of gentle parents are gentle parenting because they are afraid that if they don’t their kids will think they’re mean. Often, these millennial parents thought their own parents were mean when they were kids. And maybe their Boomer parents really were mean. But more likely, they didn’t know how to transition the puppy-training model applicable to young kids to the coaching one required to manage tweens and teens. When their millennial kids were 12, that incompetence passed for meanness.

In other words, this fear of being thought mean if you don’t gentle parent your five-year-old is rational. But it’s also misplaced. In reality, being thought mean by a small child usually means you’re doing something right.

Kids Want Fun. It’s Adults’ Job to Do What’s Best, Even When That’s Not Fun.

When one of my young sons is disappointed to be denied something that he wants, I ask him: “What’s Mommy and Daddy’s job?” He responds: “To keep me safe and make me good.” (Now that the implacable authority figure is often an older brother instead, I sometimes use this variation: “What’s [big brother’s] job?” Answer: “To help Mommy and Daddy keep me safe and make me good.”)

The foundational understanding that we all must be made good—that we aren’t born generous, hard-working, honest, and focused (but full of sinful inclination to be selfish, slothful, venal, and oblivious) and must learn to choose virtue by first having it chosen for us by those entrusted with our care—is as succinct a rejection of gentle parenting’s Rousseauian foundations as there could be.

We learn to be good by having virtue modeled, expected, and enforced. Work comes before play. We finish what we start. We respond to people with grace and tact. We show mercy, not seek vengeance. And so on. The thing about living in accordance with these values is that it often means living contrary to our own wants and desires.

One thing that we as parents want is to have a peaceful, positive relationship with our children. Gentle parenting content feeds on that desire, and preys on those who harbor it.

We need to recognize children under the age of reason as people vis-a-vis whom positivity and peace as gentle parenting conceives of it (i.e., with parent and child as essential equals, if not with child as dictator and parent as subordinate) is dysfunctional.

Then, we can accept young kids’ frequent dislike of us as part of the price of being an adult who is correctly parenting a child.

Alex Sasse, 22, is the eldest daughter of former Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse, who is presently fighting a public battle with pancreatic cancer. She recently wrote movingly about her dad’s parenting, recounting how little she liked him—yet how much she respected him—when he made her work harder than she wanted to, denied her trendy pastimes and technology that he deemed injurious to her development, and insisted that she stay the course in various endeavors when she wanted to quit. Today, Ms. Sasse is clearly a young woman of work ethic, resilience, and grit—exactly the kind of young American we need in large numbers if we are going to restore the virtue and valor of this republic.

The only way to raise more sons and daughters like Ms. Sasse is to do, en masse, exactly what she recounts her father doing: Care more about our children’s ultimate well-being and ability to serve others than we do about whether or not they feel happy (and whether or not they like us) right now.

Ironically, of course, if you demonstrate the kind of character that it takes to raise a person who develops Ms. Sasse’s kind of character, said person is likely to like you just fine.

Once she grows up, that is.

Kids Need Emotional Safety. Less Gentle Parenting Is How You Provide It.

When my second-born (the naturally defiant one) was between two and seven, he told me that he hated me several times a week. Early on, he typically hated me when I put him in time out for refusing to follow directions, where he would spend 45 minutes screaming before (inevitably) forfeiting the power struggle in defeat. Later, he hated me when I made him write lines like “haste makes waste” increasing numbers of times after redoing work that had been completed sloppily in his eagerness to get outside and play.

If you parent your young children less gently—meaning with presumptive and unyielding authority—they will think you’re mean. Some of them will even tell you just exactly how mean they think you are, and how incredibly much they hate you.

Hearing “I hate you!” from a child under eight whose desires you are not granting for reasons you find credible should, frankly, delight you, for two reasons.

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Here, at long last, is my long ode to gentle parenting. Gentle parenting—defined as prioritizing and responding to kids’ feelings over their behaviors—is actually necessary. It is just popularly mistimed.

Relating to kids seven and under in any way other than puppy-esque behaviorism is (as I have explained in the first 11 installments of this series) ruinous for all kinds of reasons. But one of the biggest is that it inhibits one’s ability to effectively gentle parent kids who are eight and up.

Prioritizing dialogue and feelings over behaviors and outcomes—i.e., gentle parenting—is exactly how you should relate to tweens and teens. But you can’t productively do that with tweens and teens whose behavioral boundaries still need work. “First we listen, then we talk” is an oft-repeated mantra in my household. It is also, contra the so-called “experts,” the correct framework with which to approach child development more broadly.

You do not train your two-year-old like a puppy so that you can dominate and control him at 12; you do it so that you won’t have to.

The reason I can reliably dialogue with my 11-year-old about how annoying it was to lose a game because someone made a bad call, for example, is because the likelihood that he threw a punch or sulked or slammed down his helmet in response to that loss is virtually zero. He was trained early and tested often; good training holds in all but the most extreme of circumstances. So now, he can participate in the emotional self-expression that is pointless and destructive with someone who is not yet well-trained. This renders him capable of the kind of mature connection that kids under age seven (i.e., the age of reason) can only play at, patronized by credulous and weak parents. It is no kindness, being asked to co-lead before you have learned to obey. You’ll never be what you could have and should have been, had your development been attended to in the correct order.

Millennials are irresponsibly gentle-parenting two-year-olds not because it makes any sense, but because they don’t want to inflict on their kids the pain of not being gentle-parented at 12, when they should have been but weren’t. In other words, they’re trying to do a good thing! They just have insufficient experience with little kids to know that doing this good thing at the wrong time is worse than never doing it at all.

Before I talk about how to gentle parent well-trained tweens/teens (an area of parenting where I am admittedly still a newbie and thinking out loud!), I want to do some speculating/theorizing about why millennials didn’t get the (gentle) parenting they needed, and how that kinked their way of relating to small children.

Millennials Needed Gentle Parenting as Tweens/Teens, But Didn’t Get It

Gentle parenting—or, perhaps more accurately, “elder millennial parenting” (because it is my fellow elder millennials, not our younger millennial friends and siblings, who began this nonsense)—is at bottom a reaction to one thing: Being raised by Baby Boomers.

So now, I am going to wildly overgeneralize—but in what I hope is a useful way—about the experience of being between 10 and 18 at the turn of the millennium, the child of parents who were then between 35 and 55.

But first, let’s talk about those Boomers themselves, particularly those who grew up without much or any wealth in or near urban centers, which is a lot of them—and, I would bet, a disproportionate number of the very ones whose elder millennial children would go to four-year colleges (which some but not most of their parents did) and ultimately forfeit sufficient common sense to later forget that small children are not their parents’ peers.

These Boomers were the last people to grow up in a society that worshipped age and experience while disdaining youth and idealism. For good and for ill (and it was both), they changed that; they upended the world. Bob Dylan lectured “mothers and fathers throughout the land” on their behalf not to “criticize what you can’t understand.” Unlike the rebellions and youth cultures that came before, the Boomers’ rebellion and youth culture succeeded on its own terms. That is, they thought and lived differently from their parents in ways that were not merely technological (of course, that’s always been the case) but also ideational.

Til the 1960s, old people mostly thought and believed more or less as their own elders did; and young people eventually conformed, more or less. So, a parent-child dialogue prioritizing emotional communication, or “interiority,” as we understand it now, was rather unnecessary. What was there, really, to say? Besides, more kids per household and proximity to extended family meant that relationships between the generations (as well as, to a somewhat lesser extent, within them) functioned mostly “side by side” rather than “face to face.” The tribal kind of solidarity that has been what closeness meant for most people for most of history comes from time, protection, material sharing, and simple presence—not emotional intimacy or shared understanding. (For an understanding of why that is, see Maslow’s hierarchy of needs).

So, when the Boomers discarded en masse the convention of elder worship and adopted a youth culture of identity and self-expression, their own WWII generation parents mostly could not and did not follow them. The Boomers’ parents were, by and large, not just ill-equipped to understand them, but either entirely oblivious to or actively resentful of the idea that there could be anything to understand.

Let’s take a look at a fictional extreme that resonates so powerfully because it dramatizes the real norm: The least interesting thing about The Sopranos’ protagonist Tony Soprano is that he’s a New Jersey Mafia boss. The Sopranos is arguably the iconic American story in part because Tony is the archetypal (sub)urban, Boomer man: Hoping against hope to be seen (in the psychological sense) by a mother who would rather literally have him killed than entertain the notion that there is anything to see beyond her own insularity. Meanwhile, Tony is equally unable to see his own millennial children, despite truly wanting to, due to the limitations of the experience that he ultimately can’t see beyond either.

Tough and resourceful despite his limitations, Tony runs on the fumes of his own father’s self-assurance about who he was and where he was in the world; no one “saw” or “understood” the WWII generation Johnny Soprano. They didn’t need to. He was, as most people in most places throughout history have always been, someone whose identity and destiny happened more by birth than by choice. His Boomer son has no such luxury. Instead, he has panic attacks.

Meanwhile, Tony and his wife, Carmela, have no idea how to actually give their tween and teen children the validation and camaraderie that they want but can’t get from their own WWII generation parents. Like many of their fellow Boomers, they naively thought that they could have their cake (or, cannoli) and eat it, too: That they could get all the benefits of individualization and self-actualization without paying (and, more importantly, having their children pay) the costs of suburbanization, secularization, and atomization. They also thought that the world they upended would remain as they left it, such that they could retain their parents’ assumption of credibility and authority without being as solipsistic and out of touch—as emotionally absentee and incapable—as their parents were.

But, of course, it doesn’t work like that. For every good, there is a price. The old order, once upended, doesn’t stay static.

So, in the end, these self-made Boomer parents apply parenting emotionally fit for three-year-olds to 13-year-olds.

The Sopranos offers insightful iterations of this phenomenon. When his teen daughter, Meadow, is upset, Tony comforts her with hugs and platitudes rather than offering compassion; minimizes her feelings with dismissal rather than listening; or attempts to fix her problem himself rather than coaching her through doing so. Whenever Meadow expresses any vulnerability to her mother, Carmela takes the conversation back to either her daughter’s grades or her own feelings. Neither Tony nor Carmela has any coordinates for their kids’ interior or social worlds. But they assume that they do; after all, they are so different, and (truly) so much better intentioned, than their own parents.

Why do Tony and Carmela so disserve their tween and teen kids? Ironically, because they mean well. After all, parenting fit for three-year-olds is the only parenting Boomers like them ever got that felt like love. By the time they were 13, their own parents were either essentially done with them or actively taking advantage of them (as most elders in history have done vis-a-vis their adolescent children).

But, to these Boomers’ elder millennial children, the compartmentalized dismissal that facilitated appropriate formation at three feels—understandably—like belittlement, disconnection, and alienation without recourse at 13.

Elder millennial children of guys like Tony have two reactions to that: They grow up, like his daughter, Meadow, and come around to the closeness they always wanted with their parents after establishing themselves as fellow adults and thereby inviting it on terms that their parents can accommodate; or they don’t grow up, like his son, Anthony Junior, and act out and/or remain accordingly both reliant and resentful.

It’s mostly elder millennials like Meadow—the worthy ones!—who fall victim to gentle parenting. These are the elder millennials who matured enough to have and raise kids at all in an era where that’s no longer a given. They are the ones driven to Tik Tock gentle parenting content at 3am, looking to “break the cycle” and ensure that their own kids never feel the kind of alienation from them that they did from their parents at the most crucial moments.

But here’s the thing about those moments: They don’t involve three-year olds still learning how to simply live. They involve 13-year-olds trying to figure out what to live for.

How to Gentle Parent A Tween/Teen

My oldest kids are 11 and nine. So, take me with a grain of salt, because I am very much still a work in progress here! No doubt that some of my theories are more correct than others and will be of more use than others. And, to be sure, I’m open to critique and correction from those right-thinking moms with more experience!

Nevertheless, I do have three fairly good (I think) general guidelines for how to gentle parent your (well-trained!) tween/teen in order to build— when it’s both possible and appropriate to do so—the very parent-child connection that the gentle parenting people misguidedly say you can and should focus on far too soon.

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Over the weekend, I saw The Devil Wears Prada 2. It was highly watchable! Not the equal of the first one, but no one expects that. In fact, I have a new piece up at Law and Liberty, with some thoughts on the original at 20 years old.

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I’ve got a new piece up at USA Today, arguing that conservatives need to stop myopically idealizing the male breadwinner/female homemaker model if we want to realistically prioritize younger family formation and (more controversially) decent character formation for the (many) kids today with moms who can’t or won’t impos…

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In the course of this series and elsewhere, I’ve ruffled more than a few feathers with my claim that toddlers (especially male ones) need to be “trained,” not unlike puppies. Well, I’m here to say more.

Not only is gentle parenting a counter-productive and inane way to relate to any child of six or under; but puppy training is absolutely a solid framework for how to relate to toddlers and preschoolers. Indeed, it is the framework used (knowingly or not) by effective and exemplary parents of kids that age. That’s because it is the framework that indicates a proper understanding of and disposition toward childhood, adulthood, authority, identity, citizenship, civilization, human nature, and the human condition. Gentle parenting, by contrast, when applied to young children, is an abdication. It is not parenting. It is enabling, facilitating, and praising the lack thereof. (This also goes for alleged rejections of gentle parenting that will nevertheless not adopt the correct understanding of early childhood as primarily a time for habituating, training, and civilizing little souls).

Before I go any further, let me offer a couple of reminders: (1) I’m not talking about 13-year-olds here, but about 3-year-olds! (2) Nobody who knows what she’s talking about advocates hitting puppies, and I am not advocating hitting kids! (3) I’m stipulating neurological normativity here; obviously, neurodivergence changes things somewhat. (Yes, I think that many ill-trained boys are resultantly pathologized into the unnecessary diagnosis of various neurodivergences; but there are also genuinely neurodivergent kids).

***

Here’s how loving, responsible parents train their young (under age seven) kids. (Hint: Pretty much like loving, responsible dog owners train their puppies).

(1) Parental authority without dialogic reciprocity. Commands, not requests. Directives, not questions. I, the parent, dictate the schedules, the values, and the norms. You, the, child, follow. I do not seek your input or consult your preferences to frame our days or decisions. We’re outside if I determine it’s best for us to be outside; we’re inside if I determine the opposite. Within the framework I unilaterally create, I offer you as near total freedom as I possibly can. We are not equals or peers, nor do I cosplay as though we are in a patronizing show of pseudo-respect that actually amounts to fundamental contempt.

(2) Behavioral habituation without “big feelings.” Prosocial behavior is inculcated via rewards and punishments. When I, the parent, say a sharp “no,” and you, the toddler, listen, I offer warm praise. When you do not listen, I calmly redirect at age one and punish with a time out until compliance is exacted at two or three. Save true illness, your emotional state is not relevant to my expectation of your obedience, though I do my part (see #1, above) in structuring your life such that you are not overwhelmed by choices and expectations incompatible with your inability to reason.

I do not ever narrate, attempt to identify, or otherwise initiate any direct engagement whatsoever with your emotions, except insofar as I calmly and lovingly comfort you after any physical injury that upsets or scares you. I never ask how you feel with an intention to probe or assess your emotional state; if I say “how do you feel?” I only ever mean “does your stomach still hurt?” I also never reference my own feelings or anyone else’s in relation to your behavior. If you snatch a toy from a playmate, I return it and say, “good boys share,” not “when you don’t share it hurts my/her feelings.”

(3) Enforcement of baseline behavioral standards without accolades for progress or improvement. I, the parent, hold baseline behavioral standards as zero sum, nonnegotiable, and expected. I am proud of you, the child, when you master the ABCs at two, or write your name at three, or score a goal in your soccer game at five. I am not proud of you when you don’t hit another child after he took your toy at music class at two, or sit still through library story time at three, or don’t whine when I tell you “no” to an ice cream cone after soccer practice at five. I expect you to do those things. It’s not an achievement; it’s a given.

To the extent that you hit, squirm, or whine in response to stimuli that well-formed children your age can be expected to tolerate (no, I’m obviously not expecting you to sit still through opening night at the opera!), I am interested in that behavior’s immediate elimination, not its incremental amelioration. Academics, athletics, and sociality are growing skills to be improved; appropriate behavior, by contrast, is a baseline standard to be met.

***

There are three main objections to this understanding of young child-rearing as, fundamentally, training. In the remainder of this essay, I will address them in turn:

(1) Training a child like he’s a puppy is authoritarian (i.e, cruel and cold) and that’s bad. In a world where people treat dogs like family members, this one always makes me laugh. Who advocates being cruel to dogs? Where are these evil, callous people? I don’t have a puppy, but if I did, I’d cuddle his adorable, furry self a ton. I’d also take zero cognizance of his “big feelings” when I scared him with a sharp “no!” every time he inched his nose toward the garbage or began to have an accident in the house.

My kids are bored of being told how much they’re loved because they’re told so often, and they’re accustomed to physical affection at every turn. They’re also secure in the knowledge that the adults who love them so much are in fact charge, and secure in their own authority. There is no contradiction, only complementarity, here.

See, when you train a young child, as when you train a puppy, pack dominance is the first nonnegotiable. That presumptive mantle of authority is not cruel; it is necessary. In fact, it is expecting a young child (or, indeed, a puppy) to function without the security of knowing who leads her—that is, who it’s safe to trust and also to push back on sans any fear that she’ll actually fold—that is cruel.

To be four years old, incapable of reason, and summarily endowed with the power to derail your own and your family’s day by acting out, all because no one bothered to make it clear half your life ago that there is zero tolerance for your nonsense? To be able to provoke your mother into endless narration of your feelings and hers to get you to put on your shoes? To draw bedtime out to endless lengths because no one will simply say “no” and mean it? To require all kinds of technological machinations to limit your screen time because there is no one in charge in your house? What unspeakable cruelty, this so-called gentleness.

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Time to update and re-up this one, originally published in The Hill…

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Almost 15 years ago, I was teaching introductory rhetoric – medium, message, etc – to university freshmen in a required course. We first read, and then watched on the smartboard screen, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous 1963 “I Have a Dream” Speech. I offered a few guiding questions, then invited reactions.

One quiet young man raised his hand. I can’t recall anything about him other than that his Italian last name (like mine at the time, before I was married) began with “Di” followed by a capital letter. But will never forget what he said that day: “Honestly, I think it’s overrated.” I probed, tried to reframe, offered him a chance to elaborate. He continued: “You know, I just didn’t really like it.”

It is fair to say that at that moment I found language for one of my life goals: Raise people who have sufficient respect, but also sufficient appreciation for what is good, never to say or even to think such an ignorant, solipsistic, arrogant thing. But it was not until many years later, with young children of my own, that I realized how reluctant many parents are to do what it takes to effectuate this outcome.

To cultivate kids’ appreciation for art, rhetoric, and literature that is enduringly great and worthy of admiration—to cultivate taste that can distinguish between high art, low art, and trash—you have to do a few things that do not jive with gentle parenting norms.

When Low Art Is (And Isn’t) Trash

In a world of aptly named brain rot, it’s important to be able to distinguish not just between what is high/classic and what is low/popular, but among the low/popular as well. Not all comedies, all graphic novels, all cartoons, or all political rhetoric are created equal.

But when it comes to pop culture, there are two opposing pitfalls that parents stumble into.

The first tends to coexist, broadly, with basic, baseline gentle parenting. It is a pervasive fear of being deemed uncool, unto an unwillingness to simply tell your kid that the book, movie, or show she loves is stupid.

Parents are not peers. We have a different role. When we evince a reluctance to judge and a reflex to validate, we fail our kids by withholding our adult judgement. It’s important to be able to recognize that Harry Potter is not The Iliad, sure; but it’s equally important to recognize that Dog Man is not Harry Potter.

Dog Man is stupid. It’s useful to simply say so, including and especially to the kid who’s into Dog Man. Worried that will make him feel judged? Good! That’s how you develop judgment! Taste is cultivated through culling, not through validation. That doesn’t mean he’ll stop reading Dog Man or that you even want him to!

It just means that he’ll read it with the same developing awareness that he brings to eating skittles—which you’ve probably told him without hesitation are not the nutritional equivalent of Greek yogurt.

Once you’re a parent, your claim to cool is supposed to be over, fully and for good. Own it.

Meanwhile, there is a different parenting pitfall around popular culture that tends to affect those who are rightly unconcerned with what’s current or cool. This is a preemptive, ideologically inflected nostalgia that rejects all lower art and culture as though it is in fact all low. These are often the “no screen” people, whose kids will grow up insulated from forbidden fruit—among which is included both trash and treasure that could easily be mistaken for trash by someone with pseudo-taste who rejects anything modern, edgy, or impure.

But it’s actually not a great idea to deprive kids of high-quality modern story-telling and humor (much of which has been produced as movies and television) because, if you leave that aspect of a growing character entirely untended, the desire to engage the human condition in ways that did not exist pre-screens does not go away. And, absent the discernment that comes from exposure, a kid actually cannot tell the difference between the low art of, say, many popular comedies and the trash of Youtube brain rot.

Some High Art Is Mandatory

Beyond reacting to what your kids pick, when you are picking what your young kids read, watch, and listen to, pick some good stuff!

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Marriage rates and birth rates are falling. Meanwhile, the average ages for marriage and motherhood are rising. Fewer women are getting married and having children, and those who do are usually older and more educated than ever before.

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I am kind of a squish when it comes to kids’ sleep. Not entirely; I sleep trained each of the babies that warranted sleep training. The first at 11 months (that was too late for my taste!) and the second and fourth at six months. (The third sleep-trained himself early and thoroughly, i.e., was the easiest baby ever). I also put a baby gate on the door of a child-proofed room and let bedtime-resistant toddlers bore themselves to sleep once they (eventually) realized that no amount of whining or jumping would change their fate.

But I say I’m a squish despite being fairly draconian about bedtime in kids’ own beds for two reasons. First, because I am super soft about middle of night wake-ups (yep, go ahead, come into our bed). And second, because I have no theory of the case when it comes to sleep. That is, unlike with pretty much every other topic I’ve covered, I have no advice about how draconian parents generally should be in handling kids’ bedtimes, wakeups, and other sleep-related issues.

Here’s what I do have to share, though: Sleep is the ultimate in habituation and trade-offs. You should handle it, in my view, however you think is best for you and your family. But to do that honestly, you have to recognize that there is no free lunch.

Here’s what I mean: I rocked my first to sleep for 11 months because it was easier and more efficient in the moment than sleep training him. When I did eventually sleep train him, though, it was hell. Then, I missed out on some sleepy cuddles with two of the other three; but I also got to skip the trauma and time suck of later sleep-training.

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The television in my living room is front and center, hanging on the wall over the fireplace in my 1920s center hall colonial. If that makes you cringe, this piece is not for you. Or, maybe it is. The point, though, is that my family, kids included, watches television.

We gather around the tube regularly, in fact: weekly movie nights, various sporting events, and occasional preschool shows (for those who are still in preschool and thus home during some school days). There is little lost—and, to be honest, much gained—from limited, collective engagement with worthwhile shows and movies.

The Disney classics merit viewing; they are as worthy of attention as many books (and far worthier than others). Ditto for many other films. Meanwhile, yes, some kids’ shows are addictive, mind-numbing trash, best banned (ahem, Cocomelon). But others are wells of useful information (Weird but True, for example) and still others (Paw Patrol, Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, Spidey, and more) are better than a lot of what I watched in the 1990s and not nearly as bad as the screen-time absolutists seem hell-bent on believing. Moreover, family sports fandom is not only harmless but enriching and unifying.

So, this is all to say: My kids have screen time, and I think that’s just fine.

Here’s what’s not fine: Parental dependence on screens for a break from kids’ demands. If a parent needs screens for that, something is dreadfully wrong. That something is, almost inevitably, the incessant parental responsiveness inculcated by gentle parenting, in which children’s misbehavior is only ever paused via distraction rather than eliminated via discipline.

A parent who uses screens—whether television or (far worse) a tablet or phone—to create a respite from behaviors she would rather a child not engage in is by definition not in charge of her own home or family. And that, not the screen, is the problem.

I don’t want to pick on here, precisely because I think she is representative of this common pitfall of gentle parenting and not in any way a unique offender. But she recently provided a useful illustration of exactly what I mean.

Bridgers says that she cancelled all streaming services and went to a DVD-only strategy in her house because having streaming services meant that her kids could watch too much television. Now, with only DVDs to watch, her children are clamoring less for screens and playing better together independently, such that she doesn’t need screens as much to get a break.

First, that’s great for Bridgers and her family. Truly. But second and more importantly, I struggle—genuinely, struggle—to understand this entire situation.

Whether a household has streaming services or doesn’t, young children can only watch what parents allow. That is, if (and I guess this is the rub) the parents understand themselves to be the authority figures in the home, not their kids’ equals.

Really, pause to think about what’s going on here: Some screen time is desired to escape kids’ demands, but we don’t want them watching or clamoring for endless television. So, the solution is to eliminate the whole family’s access to all kinds of content in favor of a limited number of DVDs.

That’s fine, of course, if you just want to have DVDs for some other reason; but it’s also (I hope this goes without saying) entirely unnecessary to achieve this goal.

Why not simply have rules for screen time (along with everything else) that are then enforced rigorously, deftly, and consistently across the board? Incidentally, adopting this mindset with parenting more broadly will eliminate any perceived need for screen time altogether. Then, screens can become a positive in the life of a family (streaming included if desired!), without any fear of need-based dependency.

The optimal way to get a break from children’s demands and misbehaviors, it turns out, is to form children who are less demanding and better behaved. I’ve written a lot, in my prior installments of this series, about what that entails.

There are exactly zero circumstances (save illness—big exception!) in which you should be reliant on a screen to manage your child’s demands or behavior. If she’s under 4, literally all you need to manage her sans screens is a boundaried, safe enough physical area (think, a part of the house cordoned off with a baby gate or a fenced in yard); a willingness to say “no” a lot; and maybe ear plugs (for you). If he’s over four, and you’ve thus trained him, you need hardly anything at all save your voice. Which still needs to be heard saying “no” more often any other single word.

So, with that, I’m going to get more specific and prescriptive than I have to date. Here’s how to make screen time a welcome friend to your young family rather than a needed support/insidious enemy.

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I have a new piece up at The Dispatch, reflecting on the 25^th anniversary of Bridget Jones’s Diary (the movie). In it, I wade into The Discourse on millennial feminism, delayed marriage, falling birth rates, and the growing ideological and cultural divide between men and women.

My take: Lots of smart people are right about …

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If I had a nickel for every time I’ve seen a parent patiently correct a preschool or even school age child for some breach of basic playground etiquette for the fourth time, I could take us all out for coffee. If I had one for every time I have heard people explain that a given child is not quite reading yet because she knows how but just hasn’t put it all together; or is not quite swimming yet because she’s afraid to put her face in the water; or is still getting into trouble at school regularly but it’s going in the right direction, slowly but surely…I could take us all on a getaway for the weekend.

Don’t get me wrong: I have four kids and I know that teaching them things, from potty-training to behavioral training to various academic and athletic skills, takes time, and that every child is different. My first was a bear to potty-train, a delight to teach to read, and a semi-harrowing experience to teach to swim. The second was nothing to potty-train and took to the water like a fish from moment one; but getting him to reading fluency gave me grey hair. The third was and is middling across the board. Number four is still TBD, though potty-training has been fairly easy so far. And to be sure, they all had and have their behavioral struggles: The first can be forgetful and in his own head; the second can be defiant and controlling; the third is none of the above and thus will get away with whatever he can; and the fourth is daring and reckless, even for a youngest of four boys.

And, to be clear, I am a big proponent of picking which stones to kick: No one in my house learned to sleep through the night uninterrupted in his own bed until well after age one or to tie his shoes particularly well til age seven. In response, I shrugged, rocked babies, tied shoes, and was patient.

So, I am in no way claiming that learning can always be done on command or that it’s always easy or prudent to accomplish mastery of every skill as fast as possible.

What I am arguing, though, is this: The endless timeline that gentle parenting encourages for learning important, foundational skills—behavioral, academic, and athletic—actually encourages children to progress slowly when they might just as well do so quickly. And when doing so quickly would benefit them greatly.

Excessive patience in these circumstances does children a grave disservice in at least two ways. First, it fosters extended dependence on parents. Second, it inculcates a sense of oneself as less capable than one actually is.

How Parental Patience Can Hold Kids Back

When my first son was learning to swim, we got to a point where he had developed some skills but was afraid to implement them in water where he could not stand. We were lucky to have a young teacher with an old soul. I saw how she barked directions at the kids with no girlish give in her voice. A godsend, especially after a few rounds with teachers of various ages who I had watched implicitly ask preschoolers for permission to do their jobs.

After a session where my son clung to the teacher whenever he was pulled off the wall in the deep end, I asked her, “wouldn’t it be better to just drop him in the middle of the deep end so that he has no choice but to swim?” She looked at me with a grin: “Of course. But are you okay with that? He may cry or scream. A lot of parents find that hard to watch.” I assured her that this parent would find it delightful to watch, since it would be inextricable from his learning to swim.

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Reposting for free easily my most popular piece to date, here. Having heard from so many of you, I think that what resonates is a message about adulthood, authority, order, and purpose that goes beyond parenting but is perhaps reflected most importantly and universally in parenting (especially in the absence of those very virtues).

Originally in Public Discourse:

Not long ago, I was chatting with a family friend in her 60s, who mentioned that her daughter was afraid to have kids. “I tried to tell her it doesn’t have to be as hard as she thinks,” the mother, who would like a grandchild, told me; “but she doesn’t listen.”

Married, educated, employed, and in her early thirties, the younger woman has explained over and again that becoming a mother while retaining one’s sanity is clearly impossible; that all her friends who do have kids are constantly on the edge of despair; and that mothering is a relentless, full-time job requiring total self-abnegation.

So, clearly, she is listening all too well. Just not to her mother.

Leaning in … to Hell?

Earlier this year, pop singer Chappell Roan created a stir when she said with conviction: “All my friends who have kids are in hell.” This certainty that parenthood equals self-inflicted torture is now the baseline perception among what I would hazard amounts to a plurality of today’s increasingly child-free young women.

Yes, this may be in part the result of ever more curated TikTok reels and Instagram posts and ever fewer organic interactions with actual parents and children. But posting and scrolling are no longer wholly separable from touching grass; these realities of life now bleed into and inform one another. Together—alongside economic considerations that may be influential but are ultimately not determinative—online perceptions of parenthood and the lived observations of actual parents are convincing more young women to forgo motherhood.

Conservatives tend to blame two broad cultural trends (potent both online and off) for the decreasing birth rate. The first is so-called “Girl-boss” feminism, that is, the presumptive premise of higher education and mainstream popular culture that mothers who prioritize caring for their children are unfulfilled and oppressed, while women (whether mothers or not) who prioritize “leaning in” to their careers are fulfilled and empowered. The second trend is intensive parenting, the idea that children are best served by constant engagement, supervision, and enrichment—and the attendant normalization of time-consuming parenting practices that endlessly engage, supervise, and enrich.

I am a thirty-eight-year-old mother of four boys. At baseline, I “lean out” more than “in” professionally, so that I can provide primary childcare. I also mostly resist the admittedly potent temptation to overparent my sons. So, I have no doubt that both the girl boss’s facile iteration of feminism and the intensive parent’s vampiric maternalism are in part to blame for young women’s hesitancy to embrace motherhood. Indeed, I have argued that these false idols reinforce one another: when children are perceived not as universally acclaimed goods in themselves but as morally neutral commodities—when motherhood is no longer seen as “breeding immortal beings” but as making a personal lifestyle choice like any other—the work of raising those children is reduced from a vocation to a hobby. Why spend time and money on a mere hobby only to be mediocre at it?

Toddler Boss

Nevertheless, the trend that I think really pushes having children today over the perceptual line from “challenging” to “impossible” is gentle parenting.

In The New York Times, Caitlin Moscatello defines gentle parenting as “an approach that steers away from punishment and focuses instead on helping children to become more self-aware.” Gentle parents prioritize understanding children’s feelings over modifying their behavior. To the extent that they attempt to inch children toward compliance, they rely on the kids’ sympathy for their own feelings. For example, according to the Cleveland Clinic, instead of saying, “Stop [whining] and put on your shoes,” a parent trying to get a child out the door in the morning could say, “When you don’t get ready on time, it hurts my feelings and makes me anxious. Why are you having a hard time?”

Notice the lack of any presumptive difference between right and wrong (“being late is rude”) or between adult and child (“because I said so”). In gentle parenting, erstwhile parental standards like these are verboten.

Unsurprisingly, as Macalester College Professor Annie Pazella has documented, gentle parenting has adverse consequences for parental well-being. Parents in thrall to this trend report “hanging on for dear life.”

Meanwhile, as anyone who’s been to a crowded playground in the past half-decade knows, gentle parenting is failing to deliver on its promises for children as well. As Abigail Shrier argues in Bad Therapy, constant parental narrativizing of children’s emotions fosters not inner peace and emotional resilience but deep fragility and endless dysregulation. According to Pazella, “parents often underestimate their kids’ resilience; … ironically, they may be doing a disservice with all the lavish care and heady, cerebral talk.”

Yet gentle parenting is far more endemic and universal than either mainstream feminism or intensive parenting. Even today, you can stay home with children whom you let walk around town unaccompanied and refuse to sign up for travel soccer while still inhabiting a sizable slice of the mainstream. The assumption of basic adult authority in relation to one’s children, by contrast, is now countercultural in a way and to an extent that would have been unimaginable as few as twenty years ago.

Hence, I would go so far as to claim that parenting today looks so prohibitively daunting more because of the perverse fruits of gentle parenting than any other single factor.

More children now behave badly because more parents allow it. As a result, parents and nonparents alike have come (not incorrectly) to view having children as something akin to indentured servitude under poor conditions. As a parent, you are obliged to accept this lot: a tyrannical, unreasonable master; zero autonomy; and zero self-determination. “Big feelings” will govern your days. Unreasonable demands will dictate your decisions. Meanwhile, you are no longer ultimately in charge in your own home. A toddler will rule the roost—unless he’s particularly willful, in which case you will cede the authority you never claimed to therapists and counselors who give you elaborate instructions in how to manage said child without upsetting his sense of presumptive entitlement (by, say, asserting your mandate to be his parent).

This does not sound appealing, nor should it. So, the question becomes: How can we empower today’s parents to reclaim their authority and, by extension, give motherhood the rebranding it so desperately needs in order to regain its vocational place in the lives of more women?

Shrier recommends that parents follow their own intuitions instead of the influencer scripts that codify the hell of gentle parenting. And for Shrier’s Gen X peers, that probably makes sense. But many of my fellow millennials seem to have no intuition. This is not their fault; compared to Shrier’s contemporaries, they came of age in a world with less social density (more families with fewer than three children) and more infantilizing pacification (by the 1990s, the participation trophy era was well underway). So, parents and prospective parents under about age forty today cannot rediscover an authority that they never had. Instead of throwing out all scripts, then, they need a better one.

Take it from me: girl boss or not, travel sports or not, having kids can be a lot easier and more fun if you just remember that you’re the grown-up, so you can just tell kids what to do.

Less Gentle Parenting

Children are not small adults. They are inherently unreasonable. It’s not important to understand why they don’t want to put their shoes on. They would rather continue playing than get ready to walk out the door because getting ready to walk out the door is boring. I would rather continue drinking my coffee than get ready to walk out the door, too. But, unlike me, my young children have not yet learned to delay gratification. It is my job to teach them how to behave in accordance with the need to do things we don’t want to do, so that they become habituated to that kind of multi-step self-discipline. So, I don’t ask, “Are you ready to put your shoes on?” or “Why don’t you want to put your shoes on?” I just tell them what to do: Put your shoes on. Clean up your room. Do your homework. And so on. Functional adults do these things without being told, regardless of how they feel. That starts in childhood, with being told to do them and being expected to comply—with alacrity and without dialogue.

Raising Good Kids, Raising Expectations

When an adult tells a child what to do, it is not a suggestion or a negotiation; it is a command. The parent is in charge. When we raise our expectations of preschoolers to include standards that they are entirely capable of meeting but that most people do not make their preschoolers meet, that consequence can be quite simple and not particularly punitive: “You have to come back downstairs to clear that plate,” which shortens bedtime story time; or, “I will stop reading or pause the television unless and until you sit calmly,” in a way that respects the privilege of hearing the book and/or watching the television. When, by contrast, we heed the “experts,” and wait until children are approaching middle school to expect basic follow-through and focus, we rob them of formative experiences they should be able to have—and ourselves of pleasant, increasingly reciprocal bonding time sharing those experiences.

It is not “authoritarian” to deploy authority. In fact, some research shows that it is the best way to reliably raise children who are unentitled, focused, functional, and increasingly capable of mature interpersonal relationships, including with their parents.

Obviously, we have to raise our expectations within reason. We cannot and should not subject three-year-olds to constant management. The expectation that a preschooler put her shoes on with alacrity and engage read-aloud books while sitting still is only functional within a broader framework in which child-directed play free of adult interference is the baseline. After all, children are not adults. Nevertheless, appropriate expectations are far higher than we’ve been primed to believe. Yes, a three-year-old should be expected to sit through a meal without screens and without whining. A nine-hour car ride, however, likely requires a distraction or two. Judiciousness about expectations, along with plenty of time when there are no expectations to be met, is essential to sustainably raising our standards.

The Dangers of Narrating Fears

Gentle parenting instructs us to engage and rehash our children’s fears and anxieties ad nauseum in a bid to make them feel understood. But there is a better time to talk out your kid’s fears: after he’s conquered them. In The Vanishing American Adult (2017), former U.S. senator Ben Sasse endorses this method for teaching preschoolers to ride a bike: dress them in snow pants and a helmet, take them to the top of a low-grade hill, and let go. When I did this with my sons, one of them was frightened. I let go anyway. Eventually, we discussed his fear of that hill. After he had mastered bike-riding. This kind of parenting—what Shrier calls “shake it off” parenting—is not born of parental indifference. On the contrary, it comes from the selfless conviction that children are capable of developing the capacity to engage, conquer, understand, and enjoy all the world has to offer.

Coddling kids and encouraging them to ruminate makes most childhood fears worse. It should come as no surprise that the more deference we give to children’s fears and hesitancies, the less mentally healthy those children become. Facing and conquering fears, by contrast, provides a boost in kids’ confidence and autonomy.

Ironically enough, my husband and I mostly (not entirely, but mostly!) gentle parent our ten-year-old. While we remain most concerned with his characterological and behavioral formation, we also recognize that dialogic engagement with his emotions is now a part of that development. Why? For the same reason that we engage dialogically with one another’s emotions and those of our friends: unlike any four-year-old, these are reasonable, functional, self-aware people who typically evince both appropriate conduct and presumptive resilience. Which is exactly what all our children have a prayer of becoming by age ten or so, if we buck this gentle “parenting” trend and actually parent them.

Editor’s Note: This piece was originally published at Public Discourse.

Axios reported on Sunday that top Democratic strategists believe “parts of the electorate are too biased to support a woman or other diverse candidate for president,” and conclude that the Democrats should therefore nominate a “straight, White, Christian man” to run in 2028.

The depth and breadth of Democrats’ self-parody this time is truly remarkable—and so insidiously convoluted that it’s actually worth rebutting in full.

At bottom, Democratic strategists who claim that the party needs to run a straight, White, Christian man in 2028 are positing that the sole reasons why Hilary Clinton and Kamala Harris both lost to Donald Trump (but Joe Biden defeated him) are sexism and (in Harris’ case) racism. Therefore, they conclude, straight, white, Christian males can defeat MAGA; others cannot. Because, remember, “parts of the electorate are too biased to support a woman or other diverse candidate for president.”

There are a few things that this line of “reasoning” leaves out: (1) Polls show that if Barack Obama and Donald Trump were to run against one another for the presidency today, Obama would win. (2) Clinton won the popular vote in 2016. (3) The ostensibly biased electorate appears to have no problem electing people of both sexes and various races to Senate seats, among other top governmental posts, in both parties.

It’s almost like intra-group variance exists, and people are in fact capable of understanding that.

Not Democratic strategists, clearly; after all, these are the people that gave us the “two Tims.” Both Tim Kaine, Clinton’s VP pick in 2016, and Tim Walz, Harris’ VP pick in 2024, were supposed to be balm to white men just by virtue of being white men—never mind each of them being among the least talented, least appealing, and least inspiring politicians ever to appear on the national stage.

See, voters live in 2026, not 1956. Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. had a dream a really long time ago about content of character taking precedence over color of skin. For most people (Democratic strategists notwithstanding) that dream is now so taken for granted as to be banal.

Did Obama’s election inspire racist backlash? Absolutely. Is there a deeply troubling preoccupation with race on parts of the new right? There is indeed.

But this supposed “concession” from Democratic strategists regarding the need for a straight, white, Christian male has nothing to do with that. It has to do, rather, with their unwillingness to acknowledge that they have taken and continue to take positions on questions of basic reality that over 85% of the country, which includes a majority of their own voters, believe to be not only false but patently insane. It has to do with their inchoate yet definitive decision never to either acknowledge or deny that fact.

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