This week’s question comes to us from April Piluso:

My daughter turns 3 this month. I want to help her have fewer troubles than I did by teaching her about boundaries, values, independent thinking etc. I think if more kids learned this stuff, we’d have more good humans and fewer jerks. What do YOU think every kid should grow up knowing?

Every kid should grow up knowing they are loved.

Everything else is pretty close to a rounding error. Ok, maybe not a rounding error. I’m exaggerating to make a point. But honestly, there is nothing a child needs more in life than knowing they are loved. Love can make up for a lack of a lot, but a lack of love is very hard to make up for.

Regular readers of this newsletter will now be familiar that I didn’t grow up in the best household. I grew up in an abusive household. I also grew up poor. And when I look back on my childhood, growing up poor wasn’t really a big deal. It was just a fact of life. And to be clear, poor is very subjective. We always had a roof over our head. We didn’t miss meals. I knew we were poor because every Sunday my parents would pile us in the car and go for a drive around the rich neighborhoods in town, getting progressively more upset about our own circumstances, and blaming each other—and their kids—for not being able to live in one of those fancy houses. Meanwhile, my brothers and I sat in the back seat, being as quiet as possible so as to not draw my father’s growing anger. We didn’t know we were poor until my father started hitting us for being poor.

I’ll tell you a story, but first—some cultural background: in Portugal, where my parents grew up, if you had a house for rent you’d make a paper cutout and tape it to the windows. (This was pre-internet, obviously.) The cutout could be any of a number of things, probably made by whichever kid the landlord deemed to be “the artistic one.” No, I don’t know how this started, and it’s not the point of our story so I’m not looking it up.

One Sunday afternoon, we’re driving around doing our routine wealth tourism on The Mail Line, and my dad stops the car. He pulls over.

“Go see if that house is for rent.”

I turn towards the house he’s pointing at. This thing was an old-school two-story mansion. Very old-Philadelphia money. Whoever built it probably has their name on a hospital now. Anyway, I ask him why he thinks the house (that we obviously cannot afford) is for rent.

“You see the cut-outs on the window?”

“Yeah, it’s Christmas. Those are snowflakes.”

The slap came before I finished the sentence. Followed by the scream to get the fuck out of the car and do what I was told. So off I went, crying. I rang the doorbell. Some unsuspecting stranger opened the door, wondering why some crying kid was standing there and asking if the house was for rent, even though I knew it was not. He seemed understandably confused, but politely told me it was not, then closed the door. Receding, I’m sure, to a nearby curtain that he could peek out of. (Or possibly straight to the phone to call the police about immigrants in the neighborhood.) I walked back to the car, knowing what was coming. And when I told him the house wasn’t for rent, sure enough—it came. Right across the face. We drove home in silence, where he dropped us all off and went off to do something else with people who were not his family, who he hated.

So yeah, when I think back on growing up, it’s not the lack of anything—except the lack of love—that I think about. Love and safety. Made all the more worse because every once in a while I’d get a glimpse of what those things were like. Sometimes he’d come home in a good mood. Sometimes he’d muss my hair on the way in. But those times were rare, but the fact that they existed at all let me know that they were possible, which made it that much crueler.

Fast forward decades to a therapist’s office where my therapist—who I’m sure isn’t reading this—is telling me that my own relationships are falling apart because how am I supposed to love anyone else when I never learned what love was like growing up. (Yes, my therapist is RuPaul.) If you were raised in a similar environment, please believe me when I tell you that it is never too late to learn how to love. You don’t have to carry your parents’ sins into your relationship with your own children.

Every kid should grow up knowing they are loved.

Telling a child you love them is free.

Also, while I by no means an expert in the field, and my opinions should be treated with much salt, I tend to believe that children are born good. They’re born full of love. They’re born full of confidence. (How fucking confident do you have to be to take that first step?!) They’re born curious. They’re born wanting to be part of a community. It’s not so much that we need to teach them these things, as much as we need to encourage them to keep believing these things. And protect them from people who would work to destroy those things.

Yes, this is about AI. The AI industry can only succeed if it separates people from their joy and their confidence. An industry run by people who were not raised with love, attempting to steal it from others.

I’ve written about this before, but every child is born loving to draw. They draw on everything. They demand crayons in restaurants. They draw on your walls. You should let them do so. Fuck your walls. It’s easier to eventually paint over a wall, than to rebuild a child’s confidence.

It’s wild to me that we parent our children to fit into society, then get together with our friends and talk about how broken society is. I’ve seen people rail against our broken educational system, then demand their children get straight As in school. I’ve seen people complain about not having any time to themselves and then schedule every minute of their kid’s life.

There is more we can learn from children than they can learn from us.

Mostly we need to support children and let them know that they are loved. Children are so ready to love you back. For every cruel thing my father did to me, anytime he walked through the door and mussed my hair I was ready to give him another chance. I was so ready to love him.

Congratulations on your daughter turning three. The fact that you’re worried about this stuff is usually a sign that you’re on the right path. The funny thing about parenting is that the people who are most worried about messing it up, are the ones most likely to get it right. I’m old enough that I’ve seen a lot of my friends have kids, and those kids are now adults in their own right. And one of the first things I noticed was that the folks who were the most chaotic, the most fly-by-the-seat-of-their-pants, the most worried about fucking things up… they were the ones who ended up incorporating their kids into their messy lives, encouraging them to be themselves, giving them the space to be curious, to climb trees, to draw on the walls, to ask their neighbors for help. And ultimately, hold everything together with love. While the friends who made plans, and spreadsheets, and made lists of goals, and fretted about their kids not being able to tie their shoes yet, or read at a certain level yet—and by the way, I totally understand wanting to do these things, and worrying about these things—they were so concerned with how things were supposed to be going that they totally missed how things were actually going. Which is that this new amazing human was unfolding before your eyes, and while it might not be the human you were expecting… aren’t they amazing?!? And if you don’t understand them, well child what happened to your curiosity?!

Your kid is going to be alright. With enough love, your kid is going to be alright.

Don’t judge your children, love them. Because they will, in turn, love you back. And when they do—holy fucking shit, it’s just amazing.

My daughter’s coming over for dinner tonight. I can’t wait to hug her and tell her I love her.

I love you for asking this question.

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🍉 Please donate to the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund. The ceasefire is a lie.

🏳️‍⚧️ Please donate to Trans Lifeline, and for fuck sake if there is a trans child in your life PLEASE tell them you love them, they are SO ready to love you back.