America in 2024: A Problem Solving Exercise
Discussion post for November 22, 2024
In Sarah and Beth’s second book Now What?! How to Move Forward When We’re Divided (About Basically Everything), they discussing the value they still get from their high school Future Problem Solvers Academic Team. Beth still coaches FPS teams and values this process because it takes us from “Everything is awful, and there’s nothing we can do about it!” to “Here’s a thing we can do that would make a difference.”
We know that so many of you are eager to make a difference (and make sense) of this year and our election, so as we are reflecting on how we want to move forward when we’re divided about basically everything, we came back to this process.
Today, Sarah and Beth are stepping up to the drawing board, taking a look at many sectors of American life as they see it today, and talking about the problems and solutions that are available to us.
Topics Discussed:
Future Problem Solving: America
Outside of Politics: Paying Kids for Chores
Pantsuit Politics Resources:
Pantsuit Politics Fan Gift Guide
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Episode Resources:
Future Problem Solving: America
A Chorus of 10,000 Voices (Pantsuit Politics)
How Cheerleading Became So Acrobatic, Dangerous and Popular (The New York Times)
Upcap the House (X account)
Ryan Salzman Episode: When the News is Overwhelming (Pantsuit Politics)
Studying Conservatism on a Liberal Campus with Eitan Hersh (Pantsuit Politics)
Happiest Toddler on the Block | Top Toddler Books (Dr. Harvey Karp)Main Block Resources (Title Section)
Paying Teenagers for Chores
Does Your Teenager Know How To? (Nicole Shiffler via Instagram)
Episode Transcript
Sarah [00:00:07] This is Sarah Stewart Holland.
Beth [00:00:09] This is Beth Silvers.
Sarah [00:00:10] You're listening to Pantsuit Politics.
Beth [00:00:12] Where we take a different approach to the news.
[00:00:14] Music Interlude.
Sarah [00:00:29] Thanks for being with us today. Our team was able to take time together in person earlier this week, which is a very rare occasion for us. And we spent a lot of time putting on our own oxygen masks after this very brutal election cycle, but also planning for the future. And it feels like a real whiteboard moment to us both as a team, but as a country, definitely as a Democratic Party. And so we hope to have a lot of conversations in the coming months and years that open up our politics and understanding to new approaches and ideas. And Beth had the best idea that one way we could do that right now is using the Future Problem Solvers framework. And then Outside of Politics, we're going to talk about teen responsibilities inside of family and whether or not you should pay for those.
Beth [00:01:19] Before we dive into all of that, please don't forget that we have tried to make your gifting easier through the Pantsuit Politics fan gift guide that's on our website right now. You'll find it linked in our show notes. There are lots of fun ideas for you to share with someone who might want to spoil you this holiday season or fun ways to enrich your own life by participating even more with the wonderful community of people who listen to this podcast.
Sarah [00:01:43] Next up. Let's solve some future problems.
[00:01:46] Music Interlude.
Beth [00:01:57] Well, thanks for saying this was my good idea, Sarah. It actually came, though, from you. We were sitting at breakfast when we went to Boston for our live show, and you said, "I got some things that I've been unhappy with for a long time." And I was like, "I would love to hear what those things are." And you started making a list. And that list reminded me of the first step of feature problem-solving, which is a competition that involves teams of four students. I coach this for our middle and elementary schools. It's a six step process where you take a feature scene like a little story about something 20, 30 years down the road and work through those six steps to find a path forward. Not to solve anything, which is misleading because solving is right there in the title, but to improve the situation. And so I wondered if a good post-election whiteboard container might be a riff on those six steps. Now, if any of my students are listening, we're going to skip some very technical parts of this process and we're doing that intentionally. And we're not taking a future scene today; we're taking the current scene. Just the state of America as we personally experience it, to talk about some of what's bugging us and then to use those other steps to think about a path forward.
Sarah [00:03:13] Important Pantsuit Politics trivia note. Not only is Beth a future problem solving coach, but we were both future problem-solving competitors. In fact, we realized at one point during our high school careers, we competed against each other in the State Governors Cup competition. So her knowledge and comfort with this process is much better than mine because I haven't done it since high school. So that's a long time. But we both have a deep love and loyalty to the future problem-solving competition.
Beth [00:03:43] So step one in this process is to identify challenges, and it is a true brainstorming step. So we are going to put the chorus of 10,000 voices, as we've talked about before in the draw, because when you're listing challenges, you don't stop and say but somebody else has a worse challenge, or this challenge comes from a place of privilege, or any other filter that you might use to talk yourself out of naming the challenge. You just list the challenges. And so that's the first process that we're going to go through today. As we experience America in 2024, what are things that we personally find difficult, concerning, Troubling.
Sarah [00:04:28] You go first.
Beth [00:04:29] Okay.
Sarah [00:04:30] How many do we need? Are we limited?
Beth [00:04:32] You do 16 challenges, and you're supposed to hit a broad range of categories. I don't know if you remember this, Sarah, but as a competitor, you memorize a list of categories, and then when you get in the room, you write those down. And the idea is that you don't want to cluster all of your challenges around one particular problem. So I just wrote the categories down and picked a challenge for each category. So I'm going to start in a place that doesn't feel high priority, but this process is supposed to be robust. The first category is arts and aesthetics. And for arts and aesthetics. I wrote down that in my everyday life, almost everything looks and feels about the same. The stores, the restaurants, the people, when I open Instagram to scroll, the fashion. It's really hard to have an experience that feels distinctive in my everyday life. And I think that's a problem.
Sarah [00:05:31] Yeah, I agree. In arts and aesthetic, I think we're just drowning in choices. I think that the Netflix-ification of it all is just too much. That's why we cling so much to some of the remaining shared cultural experience be it in football or Taylor Swift or some combination of both. But the idea that something that's supposed to be relaxing like watching television or even scrolling social media can so rapidly become overwhelming. I think is contributing to people's sense of frustration that they can't quite name. That's always the problem with arts and aesthetic, is it's a problem that you can kind of feel, but it's difficult to name.
Beth [00:06:13] You want to do the next one?
Sarah [00:06:15] Sure. What's the next category?
Beth [00:06:16] Basic needs.
Sarah [00:06:19] Basic needs. That's a good one. How about the cost of housing? The cost of health care and the cost of higher education? I'll just keep it real simple.
Beth [00:06:27] I think those are good ones. I also put down how easy it is to get into a hoarding mentality right now when anything funky is going on in the world. You hear about the port strike and you think, do I need to stock up on toilet paper? Do I need to get more bread if it's snowing? I think we're in a place where everything feels so precarious around our basic needs that if something slightly moves, if a Jenga block comes up to the top, we think, I need to fill my car up with gas right now because I might not be able to for a while. The next category is business and commerce. I said on this one that I struggle with just not feeling any connection to or trust in the places that I spend my money.
Sarah [00:07:14] Yeah, I just think we have too many monopolies. I think we have some very, very large companies that control health care-- and not just health care. CVS owns the pharmacy. They own the pharmacy benefit manager. They hold the health insurance. That's unacceptable. We have some real capture going on. And I think that is a part of what we talked about with arts and aesthetic, that you have companies that own everything. I think it is an increasing problem with regards to technology because those tech companies aren't just providing a software or a tech solution or a computer. They're providing everything. There's the cell phones and the social media and the movies and TV.
[00:07:58] And, of course, I'm talking about Apple right now, but I think there are lots of Google parallels that it feels as if the same six companies own everything. And to me that deeper almost like dark matter where I if I dive in my brain starts to melt a little bit with business and commerce, is that the stock market is predominantly occupied buy these index funds. So the index funds own so much of the companies, but the index funds are not stock owners. Their retirement savings in an index fund that owns a majority the stock. You see where I'm going like way in the dark matter? It will melt your brain if you start to think about like this is not how this was built. This is something very different.
Beth [00:09:00] I was talking to Chad, my husband, sexiest man alive, as we discussed in the last episode, about how we were going to do this exercise. And I said, "What would you name as some problems?" And he told me that he thinks the overarching problem is that we don't have any sense of trust in each other. And I think that relates to this business and commerce problem. Because you can't have trust without relationship and you can't be in relationship with CVS. You can be in relationship with a pharmacist at CVS, and that's great for the people who cultivate that. But the way that CVS operates makes that harder and harder for the pharmacist to even have that opportunity to interact with customers. And that's everywhere.
Sarah [00:09:40] Well, and it runs small pharmacies out of town. The pharmacies have built trust over decades. They control the drug prices because they're the pharmacy benefit managers. And so they run them out.
Beth [00:09:52] And so that's true about your pharmacy. It's true about your bookstore. It's true about your grocery. We can't have trust with that relationship and these big corporations you can't be in relationship with. So I think that's a big one. Okay. Well, you started down the path of tech, which is relevant because the next category is communication.
Sarah [00:10:09] It's the phones. The phones broke us. I can't say it any more plainly. It's the first thing I said on Wednesday after Election Day when my husband told me the results. It's the phones. Because I think it gets to the crisis of meaning that Senator Murphy named in his long Twitter thread. I don't think anybody is happy with how much they're on their phone. They feel defensive, as we always do as Americans, of our bad behavior. And I think everyone is sad, angry, frustrated, in particular with the relationship between kids and technology and communications specifically.
Beth [00:10:51] Completely agree. The only extra sentence I would put in our framing of this problem is that net-net, my phone facilitates more tasks for me than relationships. It's supposed to be a communication tool, but it doesn't really facilitate communication. Okay. The next category is defense. This is always a hard one to teach the kids about because you automatically think military, but defense is anything about safety and security. And I had a hard time admitting this to myself, but the true thing for me to say here is that I am preoccupied with violence in a way that I don't want to be. I think too often in traffic if we have a contentious traffic encounter, I think, does that person have a gun? When I put my kids on the school bus, I think about school shootings. I can just be walking down a sidewalk and suddenly just have a sense of like what could happen? And I know that some of that is because I live in the news. And I'm not fearful. I'm not changing my life because of this, but it occupies a bigger part of my imagination than I wish it did.
Sarah [00:12:02] This is where I will put one of my biggest concerns, which is what I'm going to call vices and disorder. So it's not violence, even though I am obviously very concerned about the amount of guns present in America. But I have bigger concerns right now about the proliferation of vices. And what I mean by vices is alcohol, marijuana, porn and particularly gambling. I am very concerned that these industries-- because that's what they become very quickly in American life, it's industries, very, very powerful industries-- are exploitive and they exploit addicts and they exploit people in poverty. I read a study the other day about Brazil and how Brazil is really trying to get the online gambling under control because they have such a high proportion of their population that lives in poverty and poverty is an accelerant to any kind of gambling problem because that one big hit could pull you out. But I think it's with marijuana where we've told ourselves it doesn't cause problems. The New York Times had a great piece about how it most certainly does. People will get like prolific vomiting. The younger you're exposed to the very potent marijuana that's out there right now; you can have psychosis that sometimes doesn't go away.
[00:13:24] And all of these vices follow a business model that we see with alcohol, which is the regular disordered users are the business model. They're the people going every day in a way that's very harmful to themselves. And their communities are the ones that on which these industries are built and on which these industries make money. Even if you don't have a personal experience with these vices that harms your family or community, they contribute to a sense of disorder, which I think is intimately connected to a sense of violence at any moment. The increasing sense of homelessness in big cities. You see such a rightward turn with blue cities, big cities. A sense of disorder, a sense of you got to lock things up. There's these groups shoplifting rings. Even to some of the content you see on Instagram where people are like quadruple locking their hotel doors or their cruise door when they're on vacation. I just think this is all wrapped up together with this sense of growing disorder. And this sense that vice is creeping into every area of our lives.
Beth [00:14:41] Economics is the next category.
Sarah [00:14:45] I've been thinking about this a lot. I just think Neufeld understood that post-Citizens United there was capture, but I told myself that there was nothing we could do about it and I chose apathy. And now we have Elon Musk basically as like Ezra Klein described him as the Pretorian guard for Donald Trump. And I think the people who have been rightfully sounding the alarm about Citizen United saw a situation like this coming where it doesn't matter how much people raise, they can't compete with someone like Elon Musk using his wealth as the wealthiest man in the world to purchase politics or to purchase media. And so I think that we have a massive problem with money and politics. And I just think Americans have been telling us that for a while. I don't think they learned the lesson I wanted them to, which was just to get their rich guy. But I feel like Americans have been saying for a long time everything's for sale, can't you see?
Beth [00:15:52] Yeah. If Citizens United isn't a reference that you know or have thought about in a while, that's the Supreme Court case that struck down legislation Congress had passed to try to tighten up campaign finance laws. And in that case, the Supreme Court decided that money is speech, and so there isn't a lot that can be done to restrict the flow of money into politics. And I think you're right that it has been extremely destructive and corrosive and fosters that lack of trust and the cynicism that everything is for sale. I went in a different direction in my notes on economics. It's related to what you said about basic needs, though. I worry about health insurance and retirement. These are different propositions for us now as small business owners. Small business owners who just cannot offer health insurance to ourselves and our employees. Retirement feels possible but shaky to me and shakier all the time and closer all the time. I remember rolling my eyes about people recently who are concerned about their 401Ks. But I see the clock ticking for myself now, too. And so those are big, personal stressors. Even as I recognize that I'm pretty well positioned, it feels like that could not be so any second.
[00:17:14] The next category is education. For me, my biggest concern here-- and two schools that I've been exceptionally impressed with is that even in these two schools that I'm exceptionally impressed with, I don't see a lot of depth in what my daughters are learning. Because public schools are asked to do so much that everything has to consolidate around some type of average. And that average is informed by just how much have the kids in this class slept? Who's hungry? Whose attention can I keep? What level of behavior can we maintain to have any semblance of order? I'm doing something you shouldn't do in the future problem solving process. I'm sensitive to the teachers who I know listen to the show because I don't want this to be heard in a cruel way. And I'm sensitive to the fact that some of the teachers in my daughter's school system listen to this show. And I am very happy overall with what's happening for them at school, but I don't think they are getting anything past the surface level on almost any topic. And I don't think overall they're developing a whole lot of critical thinking skills at school. And that concerns me.
Sarah [00:18:35] This will come as no surprise to anyone who listens to this show. I am concerned that both public education and higher education are leaving boys and young men behind. I read in a Richard Reeves editorial today that the gender disparity between young men and women in higher education is starker than it was when we passed Title IX to address discrimination in higher education. And I think you see this up and down. I do not think this is nefarious. I also don't think it is a pure positive for girls and young women in education. And I think so much of it is what you named, which is we're trying to do a lot with a system that was not designed to do a lot. Don't hear me say that I think school choice is the answer. I do not. But I think education is in desperate need of some white boarding. And I am not worried about offending any teachers in our audience because they are the first ones in our inboxes when we talk about this saying, "Absolutely, I'm being asked to do too much, I can't do what I need to do." And so I think that we have huge, huge problems.
Beth [00:19:58] Environment is the next category. I tried to put this is plainly as I could not catastrophizing just my present reality, and that is that the temperature is weird and unpredictable and off; and you can see it in what's growing when things shouldn't be growing and what's not growing when things should be. And I just can, in a more tangible way every single year, feel that the climate is shifting and that is going to have some really bad results.
Sarah [00:20:38] I am worried that the reason we do not react to those shifts in temperature and the increased likelihood of natural disasters that kill people and tax our government and economy, is because people just like it warmer. That's the only thing I can make sense of the fact that people moved to Arizona and Florida in droves and identify it like I read a New York Times piece about people moving towards their politics. But one of the Democrats who moved from Wisconsin to North Carolina said, "I got tired of the winters." I'm just a little worried that on the most basic level, people just like it warmer. They want 70 degree days in November and December and January and February. And I don't know what we do about that. I don't know what we do about that we are animals driven by our own personal comfort. That's what's really concerned me. That's just what really concerns me about that, honestly.
Beth [00:21:47] That feels like a segue to the next category, which is ethics and religion.
Sarah [00:21:54] We need it. Can I just say we don't have it? Again, if you listen to the show, you'll hear me say I just think people need to go to church. I don't care what that looks like. Not because I think you're going to go to heaven or hell. I don't care if it's CrossFit. I don't care if it's the Lions Club. I don't care if it's a movie watching club. I don't care what it is. Humans need a space to gather with other humans and ask questions like what does it mean to be a good person? And we don't have that right now, and it's hurting us. Or we have places like that that offer that, but really are just exploitive slices. They're offering that sort of connection, purpose, search for meaning, and what they're really doing is exploiting people once they get there. But I am just increasingly convinced that we desperately need a place of belonging where we can go that is not always easy, comfortable or fun, but that asked us hard questions like what does it mean to be a good person in the world?
Beth [00:22:58] Well, sticking with my short plain statement, I wrote down churches, hard, and not many people are there. I have a good church. I have a non-exploitive place where people can gather to ask me questions, and not many people are there. And it's hard. The money is hard. The programing is hard. The squeezing it into the schedule is hard. The trying to gather with people who have really different kinds of lives than you is hard. Church is hard and not many people are there. And I think that not many people being there makes the hard harder. So I think this is a very big category.
Sarah [00:23:37] And can I just say that I do not believe that churches are the only places that exploit people who show up for a sense of belonging and purpose? I read a very long New York Times piece about the cheerleading industry and that it has built this behemoth on the backs of parents paying 10 - $20,000 a year. And I think some of the reason people keep coming back to spaces like that, especially revolving our kids, is because the kids are like a built in sense of purpose and a built in sense of belonging. We had a conversation recently with a parent whose children had gone to college, and they talked about the grief and loss when they lost that team sport community. So the team sports, I think, are functioning as a place of belonging and connection and purpose, but that can be exploitive profit wise. And comes to an end because your kids can't be the sense of purpose and belonging forever. So I don't think it's just churches that are exploiting this need that people have.
Beth [00:24:42] Well, the next category is government and politics. And I know that we robustly discuss the problems with government and politics all the time. I wonder if we were just going to name one that we experience in a really personal, tangible way. What that would be.
Sarah [00:24:56] Mine is easy. Uncap the House. Four hundred and thirty five members of the House of Representatives is not enough. Period. I would do that before the Electoral College. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
Beth [00:25:08] Well, that's a solution, right? So the problem is just 435 people are not enough representation.
Sarah [00:25:14] Not enough for 330 million. Not enough. And that's fine. We can do a thing where it's not like always expensive for the size of the population. In fact, we have. It's called the United States Senate.
Beth [00:25:28] So I tried to think about this really locally. And I think that my main concern is just that running for any office seems terrible. Because of the way that we think about politicians, because of how nationalized local races have become, I see a difference in this past election than from even four years ago. For our people who just want to be on the fiscal court, you still see national issues creeping in at the local level. And so I struggle to encourage other people to run and I can't even countenance a run for something like the school board for myself, something like the school site based council, where I feel like I have a lot to contribute. Because everything is about everything, that prospect is just completely unappealing.
Sarah [00:26:22] Just to add to your problem, to me, it's less psychologically. You have to have money in free time to run for office. A lot of it, depending on what you're running for. So what does that lend itself to? It lends itself to older people and independently wealthy people. And it really doesn't matter. I was able to run for office because my husband was our primary breadwinner and I had a lot of flexibility and support. That shouldn't have to be the reality for someone to run for office. If we want a broader array of people in office, it cannot just be so financially and resource driven, the decision around before you even get to the politics and how people are going to treat you.
Beth [00:27:03] So law and justice is the next category. For me, I just don't know when or how to interact with law enforcement. When I see a police car on our street because someone's had a noise complaint, I feel like that's a broken way to use the police. I once witnessed what looked like the beginning of a domestic dispute that could get really ugly, but it was just the beginning. And I sat in my car paralyzed about what to do because it was just the beginning. I didn't see a crime in progress. And I thought, if I call the police, will that make the situation worse? Will that place more stress here on the situation? I just feel like we need authorities and we need people with skills to come intervene when there is disorder or violence or harm. And I don't have a sense of when and how to interact with those authorities.
Sarah [00:28:13] Mine is that the Supreme Court is broken. Fundamentally broken.
Sarah [00:28:19] And I don't mean because there's a majority conservative. I mean broken ethically by design. It is broken from one end to the other.
Beth [00:28:32] So physical health is the next category.
Sarah [00:28:38] I think Americans feel shitty. I think most Americans feel bad inside their own bodies for a lot of reasons. But I just think that the crisis of meaning and purpose and the numbing and the phones and a lot of the overarching issues that we've talked about rests on the foundation of the fact that a lot of people just feel bad and they feel bad for some basic issues. This is going to sound like I've been listening to RFK, but I've been saying this for a long time, which is our food is not food. It's just not food. What the majority of Americans eat every day is filling, but not nourishing. No moral judgment. I'm not putting morals on the food. What you eat doesn't make you a good person or a bad person. But it certainly makes your body feel a way depending on what you're eating. And I think a lot of people just feel yucky.
Beth [00:29:48] For me, physical health the problem here is that interacting with a health care system, a doctor's office, a hospital, whatever is extremely unpleasant and mostly not helpful. Again, I'm not trying to pick on anybody or make anyone feel bad. There are people out there doing their absolute best heroic things within these systems. But the systems themselves make it so that the interaction between individual and system is mostly unpleasant and rarely helpful. And I think that's something that we're all pushing up against in a whole bunch of spaces in life. Psychological health is the next category. And here for me, I just think we are all in some way dysregulated right now. Whether it is the constant default state of stress or exhaustion that people are experiencing or the propensity to violence or just popping off our inability to solve problems together, I just think we are all some flavor of disregulated almost all of the time.
Sarah [00:30:58] This is a big problem because this is really about evolution but our brains are evolved to fight flight or freeze in the face of threat, and that is very poorly suited to modern life. In modern life, you need to think critically when there's a problem, and that is not what our brains are designed to do in moments of stress. And so the fact that our executive functioning goes offline in the face of threat, which was well designed when you needed to run from, I don't know, a wooly mammoth, which apparently we're going to bring back. Good, solid design. Does not work as well when the threat could be a comment on Facebook or any of the numerous sources I think you named well as dysregulation in modern life. It's not a threat that you need to run from or freeze or fight. It's a threat you need to bring all the capacities of your executive functioning. And we don't do that. It's not choice. I think it's just a design that has outlived its usefulness based on how we live today.
Beth [00:32:16] The next category is recreation. Which I love existing as a category. I think that shows a lot of the wisdom in this process. But what would you name as a recreation problem?
Sarah [00:32:28] I think this is related to the arts and aesthetic. I think we're in this really weird paradox where our expectations for conversation, let's say, for example, are really high because you're listening to podcasts where they're practiced conversationalists, and so it's easier to put a podcast in your ear and go for a walk outside than to join a friend for maybe a stilted, awkward conversation in parts for a walk through the park as recreation. Same for I was thinking about live shows and concerts and music and stand up (and you went to a skit performance) there's always this little piece of you that's like, well, I could go see this thing, but it could be bad and it probably won't be as good as the television show I'm in the middle of. And so I think we have this thing where entertainment, even though we're unhappy with all the choices, is constantly cannibalizing recreation.
Beth [00:33:39] I wrote down leisure feels like work because I think a lot of leisure quickly starts to feel like work and it's just hard to find pure recreation.
Sarah [00:33:51] How do you distinguish leisure from recreation?
Beth [00:33:55] I don't think that I do.
Sarah [00:33:57] See, I do. Leisure, to me, is relaxation largely done individually. Recreation is active, involves other people. Leisure to me is relaxing, watching TV. Recreation is like going on to play pickleball for example. Like parks and Recreation. See what I'm saying?
Beth [00:34:18] Sure. That's just not the distinction that I make. But I would say that both can feel like work right now. It's easy for both to feel like work. I need a certain set of tools. I need a habit and a discipline of it. Like there's organization involved that eventually leads to the need for fundraising or large amounts of time being carved out or an email to put this on everybody's calendar. I just think quickly everything starts to feel like a job. Okay. We have three left. Social relationships.
Sarah [00:34:52] I feel like this is the thread that we've picked up through several other categories, which is the siren song of entertainment that leads us to stay home, stay away, automatized, including the phones and the social media. So we have all these like faux social connections that are designed to be appealing and addictive but are not actually social connection.
Beth [00:35:21] So in my immediate life, most people are not atomized. They're out and about doing things. And the problem is that we are spread like peanut butter across so many things that it's hard to feel like you belong anywhere. Church is squeezed in. This process. Chad and I coach academic team. Academic teams is great. It's a really manageable commitment. And because it's a really manageable commitment, most kids who do it do five other things and it gets squeezed in and it's not anybody's main thing. And something has to be your main thing as a kid to feel a real sense of belonging or at least a primary thing for you. And I just feel that with almost everything; that everybody is spread like peanut butter in my immediate circles across so many things that there is a loneliness and an inability to have recreation and an inability to have leisure that fosters true deep social connections. Technology would be another thread that has been running through this conversation.
Sarah [00:36:24] I don't know if it has its own category.
Beth [00:36:25] It has its own category.
Sarah [00:36:28] It's fucked us up. That's it. That's the problem. It's the phones.
Beth [00:36:36] And then the last category is transportation. And for me, I just live in a place where almost nothing is walkable. And I wish more things were walkable.
Sarah [00:36:45] I think transportation is as big, if not equal to the phones, honestly, particularly when you're talking about a thread that run through this that we have in articulated, which is parenting and the expectations around kids. I read this great piece that just talked about we sacrificed childhood to have the convenience of cars. So we used cars to gain convenience, but what we sacrificed is the ability to say go outside and play because you're afraid they'll get hit by a car over or they'll get kidnaped. Like you can't walk from one place to the other. The walkability of it all, even in cities that are 'walkable'-- now, I do have friends in New York City that kids walk to school, walk to things. But there's still this undercurrent of fear. I mean, pedestrian crossing is dangerous in New York City and increasingly so. And so I think that this sense that we were gaining it was a pure benefit with regards to cars and we know, of course, of the way it's split up neighborhoods and the way that we kind of sacrificed rail that really would have expanded people's possibilities across the country, it all just was on the altar of the car.
Beth [00:38:01] So that's step one of this process. And obviously, some of you where you live or your life, your community, your circle is going to be different than ours. But I think it's really valuable to walk through and just kind of personally inventory what do I see in America 2024? That's a problem.
[00:38:17] Music Interlude.
[00:38:28] Step two is to choose one problem to focus your attention on and to set some parameters around your ambition towards that problem. So, Sarah, like you and I probably need to decide as we're thinking about a problem and making progress on it, do we want that to be the kind of future problem solving endeavor where lots of different stakeholders could come in and solve it? Or do we want to focus on political messaging? Here's what the Democratic Party should do, or here's what up and coming leaders should do. So we want to frame up a manageable but significant issue. I think, for me, the issue that I would advocate for us to use as our underlying problem is technology. It's the phones. Because it came up in so many of the problems that we named because it does feel like a manageable scope and because it feels to me like something that we need political leaders to speak into more and in more honest and vulnerable ways.
Sarah [00:39:33] I can't decide if it's the phone or it's the money. Because the money is definitely a piece of the phones, be it Amazon, be it Meta, be it Apple, be it Google, be it Elon. It's the money. And I think you see this with the media, the movies, the TV, the fact that it just feels like everywhere you go, everything you do in American life, the most important role you occupy is consumer. So you can't quite decide if it's the money or it's the phones because the phones, to me, have just turned every place into a store, an advertising front, a billboard. Those tasks, all those tasks you're talking about, how many of them involve money?
Beth [00:40:24] So if my team was having this discussion, I would say, well, let's talk about scope. Do we want to talk about this as an issue that we want to speak into how the Democratic Party should approach it? Or do we want to talk generally, societally, how everyone should approach it? So what do you think about that? What kind of parameters do you want to draw around our underlying problem?
Sarah [00:40:46] Well, I think we talked about a lot the whiteboarding for the Democratic Party. And, look, I think it could just be anybody opposed to the current populist movement in America. That would work, too. It doesn't have to be Democrats; anybody that's opposed to the current populist, nativist bent in American politics. So you could be conservative and still get on board with this.
Beth [00:41:18] So the underlying problem is presented as a question. Usually begins how might we? And so I think you could how might we, the pro small l liberal order coalition, more effectively address the influence of money in society, in politics. How narrow or broad do you want to go?
Sarah [00:41:49] How might we, a coalition of pro liberal democracy people, address the role of money in transforming Americans into consumers instead of citizens?
Beth [00:42:08] Okay. So if my students are listening, you know that's not a good verb. Address is not a good verb, but we're a political podcast and that's what we're going to do today. So there are lots of parts of this that we're not pulling into the technical framework.
Sarah [00:42:22] Well, what is the better verb than address?
Beth [00:42:23] I don't know that we have a better verb because this is so broad. This is also probably too broad for the competitive process to future problem solving. But I think this gets to what we want to get to in terms of pulling out the whiteboard to think about how people run for office, win elections and do good in the world. So I like this for our exercise. I just want to note, students, that I would have some notes for you if you framed your problem up this way. Okay, so step three then is pulling out the whiteboard again, this time for solutions. Sixteen solutions, same categories. Do you want to just run through the categories and think through like what we might propose?
Sarah [00:43:06] That's a lot of categories. I think we should keep it a little thinner than that.
Beth [00:43:09] Okay. We could just start spit balling, too. That's what our students often do and then we try to go back and see if the categories give us help if we're stuck.
Sarah [00:43:17] I'll start spit balling. I think we need a constitutional convention. I think when we're talking about some of the big things here where we feel like there's like a massive influence of money with Citizens United, which would take, I guess at this point, a constitutional amendment. If you're talking about-- now, we can unpack the House with legislation, but the Supreme Court, Electoral College, the sense that the institutions have been captured, I feel like the founding fathers had an idea for that. A good one. Give the people back the power and have a constitutional convention. We can uncap the House.
Beth [00:43:55] Second idea. Candidates for office can be bold in running new kinds of campaigns. I understand that Citizens United has made the campaign finance laws toothless. I think a lot of Democrats bring don't hate the play or hate the game energy to everything. And I think the Republican Party, meanwhile, has been saying, no, if you're a player, change the game. Just do it. And I don't like all the ways that that's manifesting. But I think that some of that energy, some of that belief in your own power, is important. I've seen candidates for local office and we've had candidates for state offices on this show who've approached their campaigns not as a fundraising endeavor so that they can put out their commercials and their print pieces, but as acts of service. Where they go into communities and say what does this community need? We talked to Ryan Salzman, who I know personally, who ran for office and learned that his community really wanted a dog park and so they built a dog park together through the campaign. That's not going to be the answer for everyone in all kinds of campaigns. But to have that spirit of like, okay, the campaign finance laws suck. The way that you build a campaign is hard. Money has become way too important. How can I get creative here? How can I innovate?
Sarah [00:45:19] Yeah, I'm trying to think about bold campaigns that break through something we didn't name explicitly, but that is a huge problem. Which is the disengagement, the low propensity, low info voters you have to engage. So something has to be big enough and bold enough to break through and catch their attention and to build trust to say so much of that innovation has to be deliverables. There has to be deliverables, not just pretty slogans and ideas. I think all the time about Eitan Hersh's book about political hobbyism, where he talks about the Democratic Socialists of America will set up car repair clinics so that they are actually doing something for people instead of just showing up in election season and saying this is what I will do if I'm elected. Because that's a death spiral. If you're a permanent minority in someplace like Kentucky where I live, you have to have a deliverable. You have to say we're listening and we hear you and this is what we can do right now before we're in power. But once in power, I think bold ideas saying Medicare for all is not working. Health care is not working. It's too expensive. It's not delivering what people want. The nurses and doctors are miserable, too. It's not working. So let's have a bold idea. Let's shake it up. I'm ready for big ideas that say, we hear you. This has been bought and sold, so let's just break it apart. Let's just break it apart.
Beth [00:46:53] I would like to add to the whiteboard moving away from the review culture. I think we should basically take down Yelp. I think tour companies should say to their employees, "I don't care what reviews you get, please don't ask people for reviews on these tours." I think that we should just take off the five star function on almost all websites. I think as we are trying to move people away from thinking of themselves as consumers in every single space, a first step to that is just shutting down some of the spaces where we show up and act like our worst version of being a consumer. I think the way that we're all chasing like a net promoter score is just really damaging. I experience a lot of things now through the prism of like what grade would I give this? And that's just a bad space to be in. And it prevents relationships from being built and it prevents you from seeing yourself as part of what's happening instead of just as a person who rolls in to see if what's happening meets your needs or not. So I would like to shake that up.
Sarah [00:48:10] I'm trying to think of the phones of it all. I think for too long we have asked people as individuals to try to do this heavy lifting, to try to walk away as consumers from Amazon or Facebook or Instagram, and particularly to try to take on as parents pulling their children out of this consumer supercomputer we all carry in our pockets. And so I think we need big legislation. I am very interested in Australia's legislation to outlaw any social media accounts under 16. This is very interesting. I want to see how it goes. I like that they're going, okay, let's do something. Maybe it won't work, probably won't work exactly the way we hope it will. But instead of asking people to battle-- not just battle the role as consumers, but to that review culture, that the only thing you can do, the only tools we give people, donate, boycott. Donate. Boycott. Donate. Boycott. Enough. You know what I mean? Enough. That's not the only tools in our toolkit. It is if we're just consumers, but those are not the only solutions available to us as citizens.
Beth [00:49:42] So again, adding to the brainstorming process, we're not evaluating solutions right now. We're just brainstorming potential solutions. I want to throw into the mix a mandatory year of service after high school. And maybe that recurs. That obligation comes back around every seven to 10 years; that you are drafted in to some kind of civic role at regular intervals in life, regular enough to connect you to the big picture, to give you some skills and experiences you wouldn't have gotten otherwise, to kind of disrupt the pattern of climbing a career ladder or just trying to make ends meet in a job or trying to figure out who you are. I think that some structure that helps us see our role in the larger picture would be really valuable.
Sarah [00:50:34] I think it's beyond individualism, though. It's beyond what it can offer to you as an individual. We need more places of social cohesion. We need places where we are not around people just like us. For better or for worse, because of some of the ways in which public school is funded, public school is becoming less of a place like this. I was thinking the other day because my public school is a huge source of economic and experiential diversity in my life-- I was thinking the other day that I had two friends in middle school that dated and one of them is now a janitor and one of them is now a neurologist.
Beth [00:51:14] Wow!
Sarah [00:51:15] And I thought, where else in life does that happen?
Beth [00:51:17] Yeah, that's great.
Sarah [00:51:18] Where else in life does that happen? Because I think we need some more places like that where we remember that we are more than our consumerism because that's very siloing very quickly, even if everything looks the damn same. That we are more than our jobs. That we have connections to one another. And I think a year of service where you are working together, serving together-- I think the military provides this to a lot of people in a really powerful way-- where you're not being preached at about diversity, that you are living diversity side by side.
Beth [00:52:00] On the cultural side of things, I would love to see more regular commitments to gathering. More dinner parties more. Everybody goes out in the cul de sac and plays kickball. And here again is my I live in the suburbs bias. But a suburb is a really easy place to atomize, to open the garage door, leave, go do your thing, come back home, close the garage door and stay in. It is also a really easy place to turn into a lot of fun and connection and community because people live within steps of each other. And I don't know exactly-- implementation refinement, all of that for your solution comes later in the process. So I don't have all the answers to how to do this, but I would just like to see pushes to say to people, you know what, let's work reasonable hours, which takes bigger change to, and let's have as a cultural practice a gathering outside, everybody taking walks, chatting with each other, deciding to order pizza, whatever it is. But just more opportunities for people to socially engage in less structured ways, because I think that really does pull you out of a sense of I am just a worker and a consumer. It gives you a fuller sense of personness and a community; a greater sense of we're all in this together.
Sarah [00:53:37] I think we're going to need a government solution to our media environment that's going to happen. A little bit heavier hand to say media serves a purpose besides a platform for advertising. Because as long as you can again highly select what you watch, that's not shared among everybody-- we eliminated reasons for gathering. I used to get together with my friends all the time to watch finales and episodes. We would watch Gray's Anatomy every week. We would watch Friends finale together. And so I think as long as we continue to allow media that we've ceded the territory, we say it serves no public purpose. The nightly news, the equal time, the public service like there's nothing there except for to pump out as much as possible to make as much money as possible off our backs. Then it's going to be tough to compete as individuals or communities or families in the face of that onslaught. And I'm open to what that innovative solution looks like. Real media regulation.
Beth [00:54:47] I'm thinking categories, I'm thinking about education, and maybe what I would recommend is an additional two or three years of something post-high school that everyone has access to. And maybe it's just college for everybody, which is not a thing I ever thought I would say. But I think a lot of what drives our constant deep sense of consumer behavior and scarcity is how few great opportunities people feel exist and how desperate they are to have those opportunities for their kids and to have their kids and their families be the people in the best position to seize those limited opportunities. And I would just love a way to get at we can all take a breath and know that on the other side of high school there will be something that leads to a really good life for our families. We do not have to do this hoarding rat race thing about college.
Sarah [00:55:52] I have a real radical solution for education. I think we should just stop grouping by age. I think it's dumb and I don't know why we do it and I don't know why we cling to it. I think it's really stupid. That's why we're asking teachers to do so much because we're creating this categorization. But why? Why are we doing that? Didn't we all watch the Bluey episode with the babies and the crawling and everybody's different and everybody comes at different times. So why do we insist on categorizing that way? I think we would solve an enormous amount of problems with public education, pre-K education, higher education if we just said, hey, we're going to stop doing this by age because it's not working no more. We decided that we're going to educate based on need and ability and trauma. I don't really care about gender. I don't care. Just not age. It's stupid. It doesn't work. And not for nothing, kids need kids of other ages. I think they learn a lot in like a one room schoolhouse situation where everybody's all together. And so I just want us to stop doing that because I don't think it's working anymore.
Beth [00:57:01] So typically we would get to 16 solutions and then the next step of the process is to develop criteria to evaluate the solutions. So in the competition process, you come up with five questions to test your solutions against. And those questions are designed to say, okay, when we think about our underlying problem, how we defined what we set out to do, what are five ways to test our ideas so that we can see which one is the best way to accomplish that?
Sarah [00:57:35] Well, it feels like to me when we're talking about our big overarching problem about the consumer versus citizen, the bigger things we pick up all the time are trust in our institutions, the siren song of individualism. Did we just read Democracy in America? Yes, we did. So trust in our institutions, the siren song of individualism, the need for belonging. And I don't know if yours would be, mine is (I don't know how to phrase) a heavier role for government in regulation and responsibility and duty. I don't know how to phrase that question of what's the role for government here? Where can it relieve the tension on the rest of us to solve these problems by doing what it can do in these different arenas?
Beth [00:58:32] So we would write those questions like which solution will most increase trust in institutions? Which solution will foster the greatest sense of community? You always choose a superlative to test against? Yeah, probably I don't mean any solution to come from government to be my best solution, but I could go with which solution will represent the most effective collective action, or which solution will least rely on individual choices. Because I think we've defined a problem that is beyond the scope of what individual choices can get at. I think almost all the problems that we identified today are beyond the scope of what just individual actions can get. And I want to say as a footnote here, I believe in the power of individuals. I know we both do. It is not to mean that people cannot alone make a difference.
[00:59:33] I don't want everybody to leave this episode all depressed and down in the dumps like you personally can't do anything to make anything better, everything's terrible. That is not how I feel at all. I do think, though, that the election in particular is a primal scream of the American populace for some collective solutions. So that's how I would frame it. Okay. So we got our five criteria. And then in the competition process, the next step is just a grid where the students rank their solutions based on that criteria. Now, this is an audio medium, not a visual one. So I think the best thing that we can do here, Sarah, is just talk through what floated to the top for you of our solutions. And especially as you think about those questions, those evaluative questions, what floats to the top for you?
Sarah [01:00:20] I think the mandatory year of service, because I think that's a bold thing that would get through to low propensity and low information voters. I think Medicare for all, because I think that's the thing that would get through to low propensity and low information voters. So those are the two that I'm thinking about immediately.
Beth [01:00:37] Well, of those two, I think I have lots of questions about Medicare for All. But I'm trying to put those aside and just think about addressing the underlying problem. And I think the year of service probably does that in a more holistic way for me because I think we could have a different approach to how we pay for health care that still leaves people with a very individualistic sense. If we want to really shift that attitude from consumer to citizen, I think there is greater possibility in connecting people to institutions, building institutional trust when I participate in one of those institutions. Building a sense of community. I'm getting to know people outside of my socioeconomic status. I think there's a lot of potential there.
Sarah [01:01:23] My concern, though, is that that is a higher solution on the hierarchy of needs. If we have to take care of people where they are before they feel they have the capacity to go take care of others or contribute, again, ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country, was in the middle of an era of great American prosperity and not a lot of income inequality. So I'm just trying to think about that's a good one, but can we jump to that one? Is there a solution we need before we get there where we say we did something for you that impacts you right now before we ask something of you? Because I'm a little worried, we, particularly as Democrats, skip to the caring and the ask and the worry about your fellow Americans before we can get people out of the fight, flight or freeze situation in which they are very, very susceptible to propaganda.
Beth [01:02:28] I think that's really fair. So I have one process response to that and one substance response. My substance response would be involving more people in providing services will meet more needs. Think of the capacity created through that year of service to meet people's needs that are lower on the hierarchy of needs, that are more fundamental and more basic. So I think that there is a partial answer to that obstacle in the capacity we would create by involving more people. My process observation is that when we identify our best solution to our underlying problem, we are not trying to do anything else. That's why the container of the process to me is valuable because, yeah, is this the highest, best priority for the Democratic Party or for elections or for the world? Probably not. But it is a really good idea to get at people feeling like consumers versus citizens.
[01:03:31] So the last step of the process, step six, is when you flesh out an action plan and you do exactly what you just did. You say, what are the obstacles to this working and how are we going to address some of those obstacles? And you recognize that with your action plan, all you're doing is creating a new future scene because there is no end to any of this and there is no perfect state. And even if you for a millisecond create a perfect state, it's just going to be there for a millisecond because nothing stays the same. That is to me why coaching this particular group of students is so meaningful. It reminds me all the time that we make progress and then we just create a new future scene that you can turn right back around and do 16 more problems and pick one to focus on and six more solutions. And it just goes again and again, but every step that you make is meaningful. There's value in it.
Sarah [01:04:28] Yeah, I think beyond creating another future problem, I think there's a lot of value in the entire process, particularly naming the problems. I think the primal scream wasn't just a call for collective action; it was you're not listening to me. You are not listening to me. I keep thinking about the example in the Happiest Toddler on the Block where Dr. Harvey Karp uses the example of the frustration of toddlers to say, like, if you said I wanted to watch Rocky and somebody went, "I think we should watch Steel Magnolias." You're like, "I want to watch Rocky." Steel Magnolias is such a great movie. I want to watch... Like you would escalate as well, because you don't feel heard. And so I think using the process to think what are we not listening to? We had a conversation over our retreat where Maggie said, "I'm just trying to think about what rooms I'm in." And I said, "That's it. We keep trying to invite people to the table. They don't want to come to the table. They're in their room. We need to go to their room." And so I think the process of the problem identification to me is really important and something that we need to spend a lot of time listening, both as a Democratic Party, as a populace. But like you said, continuing on so it's not an apathetic place.
[01:05:52] Where it's not we're drowning in problems. What do we do next? Because the what do we do next outside of the future problem solving process is what you can do next. As Emily P. Freeman says, the next right thing. And sometimes those are going to feel small. But somewhere in America right now, and of this I am 100 percent confident, other people who never listen to Pantsuit Politics are right now thinking, how can I run for office in a new and different way? How can I address people's frustration with the public schools? What solution can we think of legislatively to the harm social media is doing to our kids? What can we do about the fact that people feel so shitty inside their own bodies? There are Americans every day, everywhere, all the time thinking of solutions. It's one of our biggest gifts. It's our big, diverse, messy populace that is pretty good at whiteboarding, really, really good at it. And that always gives me enormous hope, not just when I'm a feature problem solver, but when I'm having conversations or out in my community or thinking about even the granular of election results, I just know that I'm not the only one. That's not how Americans work.
Beth [01:07:19] A lesson that I draw from the process that I think would be really valuable to keep in mind politically, especially as we think about political messaging, which because of the Internet, those of us who care about news and politics are part of all the time, is the purity of brainstorming in steps one and three. It is so easy, especially through Internet culture, to hear a problem and to go into debate mode about whether that actually is a problem or whether it is an important problem or whether it is a problem that deserves anyone's focus or whether it's a problem that the person expressing the problem created. And that's okay. Perspective is important, but it does not lead to solutions to debate and dissect every problem like that in the beginning. People do need a space to just say it. And the same thing with solutions. It is much, much easier even as the words are coming out of your mouth, here's a possible way we could get at this, to go through all the reasons it won't work or can't work, or who it would work for and who it would not work for. And all that's important. But it's a different stage.
[01:08:37] You got to get some ideas out before you evaluate the ideas and you got to decide how you're evaluating them. You could choose way more than five things, but then you'd never have a best solution. You can criteria yourself to death. And I think we do that a lot politically, which is why the Democratic Party, I think, has been really stuck in the same set of policy ideas for a very long time. And every election is a reiteration and a rehashing of those same policy ideas. We're not talking about Republicans right now. So in my brain, immediately I hear somebody saying, but Republicans are worse, sure, fine, good; that doesn't move anything forward either. Where can we bring something fresh and new to the table without talking ourselves out of it before we've even really developed a concrete sentence or proposal?
Sarah [01:09:34] And that's what we hope to do here at Pantsuit Politics. We really want to have more of these whiteboard conversations with lawmakers and activists and influencers inside our culture. And we're thinking about that. We're working on that behind the scenes. And we thought this would be a really interesting way to kick off that type of thinking. Where are we missing problems? Where are we criteriaing (sic) ourselves to death before we can get to solutions? And we've always found this audience up for that kind of mental exercise and active participatory conversation. So we can't wait for you guys to share with us on Substack and in our other social media gathering places what your thoughts are on the big underlying problems and the solutions out there for America as we wrap up 2024.
[01:10:29] Music Interlude.
[01:10:39] Couple of months ago I saw an Instagram post that was like a list of things your teenager should be able to do. It was like cook a meal, schedule a doctor's appointment, babysit their siblings, set a goal. And the first comment was this absolutely not. They're not here as your labor. I was a little shocked by it. And then there was a debate about like, yeah, they should do things for the family, but you should pay them. So let me just say plainly and transparently, my children do a lot of labor around my house. They make dinner, they clean up dinner, they do yard work, they watch their siblings. And I do not pay them for that. I give them an allowance to teach them to manage money. But the labor they do around their house is unpaid, just like mine.
Beth [01:11:34] I also ask my children to do things and do not pay them. We don't do an allowance. We talk a lot about money. Jane babysits for other people and we talk about how she manages the money that she makes when she does that. But my perspective is that one of the most valuable things I can give my kids is the gift of being able to live independently. And I think that's something that you have to practice all the time. And I don't think it will serve them well in life to imagine that you should get money for unloading the dishwasher or taking the trash out or watching your sibling for a little bit. Now, I think all these things have to exist in a healthy range. But I am confident that we are well within the healthy range and could probably stand to push harder.
Sarah [01:12:25] Yeah, I don't adultification my kids over here. Nobody's like watching their siblings for weeks at a time. It's not some dagger situation where everybody's got a partner. I am intrigued by the no allowance. Like, what are you going to do when she needs gas money? When she gets older and she needs more money.
Beth [01:12:40] She works. She pays her cell phone bill with the money that she makes babysitting.
Sarah [01:12:44] Wow.
Beth [01:12:45] Yeah. And we'll talk about some of those things. I buy a lot for her. Listen, she asked me for Christmas for gift cards, and I said, "Jane, what am I to you other than a walking gift card?" I don't ask her to pay for a lot. But when she wanted a cell phone that she could text friends with, we said, you know what, you're going to pay for the service on that because that's not something that you really need. It's not something we're super comfortable with. We're going to talk about the parameters of it. And so she babysits a lot in the summer, has learned to save that money so that she's able to pay her phone bill over the school year. So I think we're giving her some of those financial tools, but we're also giving her the gift of learning that she's got to make it happen.
Sarah [01:13:22] Yeah, all my kids have a dollar per year of age every two weeks until they hit high school, and then it's every week. So Felix gets $9 every two weeks. Amos gets $13 every two weeks. Griffin gets $15 every week. It's set up on the Greenlight card. Shameless plug. It's not a plug. I used it before they were our sponsor. Because that was always my beef with allowance. I'm like, what I'm I supposed to be doing? Getting cash out? That's like total paying them. I'm not doing that. And so it just flows into their Greenlight cards. It's so interesting to kind of watch if they save it up and they're like, oh, should I spend it on this? Should I get that video game? If it's going to deplete-- or they'll inevitably just buy candy at the first souvenir shop. And I'm like, you're going to wipe out the whole week long souvenir shopping on the rock candy? And often the answer's yes. And we're like, all right, live your life. Or they like to go out and eat with their friends after school and they have to have money for that.
[01:14:22] Watching the decisions they make and how they save it or how quickly they will wipe it out, it's always been endlessly fascinating to me. But no, I do not pay-- I read that early in my parenting journey. I read something like give an allowance so they know how to manage money, but chores are unpaid. Because in this comment thread somebody was like they don't owe it to you. I don't teach my children that they owe nothing to the family. That's not how families work. Everybody owes something. This is a group that we are in to survive. And so I don't understand the idea that, like, they don't owe you anything. They're not indebted servants. They're not working off some debt that was accumulated when they were born because they could never outearn that, because they are always adding to that debt. But the idea that this is not a group, that it's mere functioning, it's mere existence, creates labor for everyone. Living in a house together-- sometimes I think I'm just trying to teach them to be good roommates because they're going to be roommates one day. So I got to teach them this stuff doesn't happen magically. My kids have been unloading the dishwasher since they were like five years old. We've talked about this where they do their own laundry. It's not magic. This stuff happens. This is what happens when you live together in a group.
Beth [01:15:39] That's right. They do something to the family just as I owe things to them as part of the family unit. There are different things, but we all owe something to the group. Beyond that, there is a self-interest at work here, and there is something that I owe them in the form of equipping them to be in the world. I was an R.A. in college. I saw all kinds of people who were never asked to do anything at home who suffered because of it once they got to college. Who did not know how to do their own laundry.
Sarah [01:16:09] It's embarrassing.
Beth [01:16:10] Who could not make a meal for themselves if they had to. Who were scared to call and order a pizza or to pay at a restaurant or to go get their own groceries. Not even a sense of what they would need or where it is located in the store. That is not good parenting. To enable your children to decide what life skills they're going to acquire at home based on how they feel and whether they want to earn some extra cash, to me is like just a failure of my duty as a parent to the kids.
Sarah [01:16:41] Yeah, and that was 2000. That was before college administrators had created the term helicopter parent. I think it is hard. It's not fun.
Beth [01:16:50] It's a ton of work.
Sarah [01:16:52] Make no bones about that. It's a pain in the ass. It pays off. I mean, now Griffin can cook dinner. It's freaking awesome. And Amos can clean up dinner. Freaking awesome. But I think that it is an enormous amount of work to teach these kids these skills. Nicholas was saying the other day we probably need to teach them to paint a room. That's a skill he had when we got married, which became enormously helpful and useful. Just to know how to paint is just something you got to learn how to do. And, yeah, I guess you could get to be 25 and look it up on YouTube, but there's just something I think about going out into the world with that sort of baseline confidence of I don't have to go ask for help. Not that there's anything wrong with asking for help. You're going to inevitably ask for help. It doesn't matter what a good job your parents do in equipping you in these skills.
[01:17:35] But I do think there is a sense of being in a place where learning and failure has a safety net. That's very valuable. That you can learn these skills and there's a safety net underneath you. And if you spend all your money and there's nothing left, the stakes are very low. Or if you burn the dinner, the stakes are low. Even if you drop something on the floor and burn a hole on the floor, I'm not going to like it, but it's a little bit better outcome than if you did that in your first rental and you make minimum wage and you have to fix that with your own money, right? Just all these little things, I just feel like we think we're protecting them by not asking them to do it, but really asking them to do it is you're there as the insurance. You're there as the protection as they learn these skills to soften the blow of some of the steeper learning curves and failures.
Beth [01:18:31] Yes. Fail here with us because we love you and we will help you through it. Don't fail on your own for the first time. And I think confidence is exactly the right word that you just used. I see this with Jane. I have been really insistent for a couple of years with her that she keep her own calendar. And I see the result of that. She has very, very high executive functioning for someone her age, and she's proud of it. She can organize a meeting at school. She can set a budget for a project that she wants to do with her friends. And I just every day witness the confidence that exudes from her because of these skills that she's been acquiring on her own. I want to give whatever version of that gift is available to both of my girls that I can. They're going to have different strengths and interests. I would not say that Ellen has extraordinarily high executive functioning right now, but she does have a lot of confidence because she can cook almost anything. Ellen has really spent a lot of time with me in the kitchen and she feels so proud when she makes dinner. Even when she cleans up dinner, she complains about it but you can see that she still feels really good about what she's done at the end of it.
Sarah [01:19:43] When I really know we've made is when they stop complaining. And my older two don't complain about anything anymore, really. As far as clean up or helping us to do it, they just do it. Some of that was once they finally entered the Boy Scout troop. It's not all parenting. Not everything they do with confidence or capability is a direct result of my choices as much as I wish it was. And there was like a real smoothness that happened once they entered the Boy Scout troop and would go on camping trips and would have to provide the meals for the whole troop and listen to people's feedback and do all that. I just noticed such a difference. It's probably developmentally what age they hit when they hit the troop, too. Boy Scouts have been around for a long time, so I'm sure that they've sort of figured this out and it's built into the process. But I totally agree. I think that confidence and the sense of connection it can form in their groups. Listen, you guys, you've been a long journey with me as far as Advent calendars here in this podcast. And can I tell you today that Griffin has organized a Christmas movie Advent calendar for him and his friends. And I hope he graduates top of his class and gets into college, but I don't know if I'll be any more proud than when he told me that he organized a holiday movie Advent calendar for him and his friends. He watched them all, went and rewatched some to make sure they work thematically with what he was doing. And I just thought I've done it.
Beth [01:21:09] That does sound like the particular metric of success for you to feel extremely proud and excited.
Sarah [01:21:16] Absolutely.
Beth [01:21:16] I think that this sense of have your kids do chores without paying them just speaks to a more basic thread of how and when and under what circumstances do we ask our kids to be uncomfortable? And we ask it a lot around here. And whenever I ask it, I do it often accompanied directly by a sentence like I know better than you do about this. I know that you can do this because I'm your mom, and I have experience that you don't. Chad and I were talking to Ellen about her very first academic team match last week, and she was arguing with us about all the things that she needed to know and how scary it was going to be. And I finally looked at her and I said, "Ellen, your dad and I have been doing academic team almost uninterrupted for 30 years. We know better than you do about this, so trust us. We are not going to ask you to do something that doesn't work for you, that's too big or too scary. We're not going to tell you to prepare in a way that doesn't make sense. We are the adults about this and you are the kid. And so here's what we're telling you. You're going to go do it and you're going to have fun." And she did. It was great. But even as I'm saying that, I can hear people reacting to the harshness of it because that is not how we talk about parenting in many spaces right now. That is how we do parenting here. We are the adults. We got you. I wouldn't ask you to cook dinner if I didn't know that you could because of my experience. And it's good for you to be able to relax into that trust of me.
Sarah [01:22:52] Well, I think it's a lot about how often we're willing to be uncomfortable, not just our kids being uncomfortable. Believe me when I say the first couple of times I left my 15-year-old with my type one diabetic nine-year-old, it was uncomfortable. There was risk involved. I did it anyway. Often, you don't know if they can do it. Often, they can't cook a meal or do a thing, or they're going to drop a ball and there will be consequences. And you just have to be comfortable with that risk or recognize your own discomfort and not let that stop you. We leave our kids alone when we travel at least one night and every time I'm like something's going to happen. I have to talk myself down for my own anxiety because I think that we've been taught that if we're not there, bad things will happen. That's the message as parents. You need to be watching all the time, every second of every day, because if you don't something bad will happen.
[01:23:46] And so I think that you have to recognize your own anxiety and your own discomfort, especially when they're sad or mad or upset because you're pushing them. That's hard because we are told in so many parenting spaces that the name of the game in parenting is never to be harsh. It's always to be a soft place to land and to be kind and affirming and all of those things. True. I'm not trying to never affirm my kids feelings, but there's another side of that that involves discomfort, that involves pushing myself and my kids, because this is all of our first trip through life as parents or as a 15-year-old or a 13-year-old or a nine-year-old. And so I think that's another thing that's hard about it. Is that it doesn't just involve the kids discomfort, it involves yours. So in summary, we have solved America and modern parenting in well over an hour.
Beth [01:24:42] I don't think that's the process, but I hear you.
Sarah [01:24:45] I think that's what we did, Beth. I think that's what we did, we have done here. So you're welcome, everybody. Thanks for joining us today. Don't be rolling in our comments. Despite what I said at the end of the last segment, poking holes in my conclusion that we fixed everything. No, I'm just kidding. Y'all can do that if you want to. We do look forward always to more conversations where we take expansive problem solving approaches to challenges in our country and in our homes. We'll be back in your ears on Tuesday. We're going to share a conversation I had with Chef Sarah Bradley earlier this year that we've been saving up for a special time like Thanksgiving week to share. We'll have one of our favorite episodes coming to you again on the Friday after Thanksgiving, and then we'll resume our regular schedule on the Tuesday after Thanksgiving. We'll be back in your ears processing whatever's happening around the United States with the new Trump administration or around the world. So until then, keep it nuanced y'all.
[01:25:42] Music Interlude
Sarah: Pantsuit Politics is produced by Studio D Podcast Production.
Beth: Alise Napp is our Managing Director. Maggie Penton is our Director of Community Engagement.
Sarah: Xander Singh is the composer of our theme music with inspiration from original work by Dante Lima.
Beth: Our show is listener-supported. Special thanks to our executive producers:
Ali Edwards, Nick and Alysa Vilelli, Amy & Derek Starr Redwine, Amy Whited, Anya Binsacca, Ashley Rene, Ashley Terry, Barry Kaufman, Becca Dorval, Beth Loy, Brandon & Jessica Krausse, Catherine Kniss, Chelsea Gaarder, Christi Matthews, Christian Campbell, Christie Johnson, Christina Quartararo, Connie Peruchietti, Crystal Kemp, The Adair Family, Ellen Burnes, Emily Holladay, Emily Helen Olson, Gabrielle McDonald and Wren, Genny Francis, The Charney Family, Heather Ericacae, Jacque Earp, Jan Feltz, Janice Elliott, Jeff Davis, Jen Ross, Jeremy Sequoia, Jessica Whitehead, Jessica Boro, Jill Bisignano, Julie Haller, Julie Hough, Karin True, Katherine Vollmer, Katie Johnson, Katy Stigers, Kimberley Ludwig, Kristen Redford Hydinger, Kristina Wener, Krysten Wendell, Laura Martin, Laurie LaDow, Lee Chaix McDonough, Leighanna Pillgram-Larsen, Lily McClure, Linda Daniel, Linsey Sauer, Bookshelf on Church, Martha Bronitsky, Megan Hart, Michelle Palacios, Michelle Wood, Morgan McHugh, Onica Ulveling, Paula Bremer, The Villanueva Family, Sabrina Drago, Samantha Chalmers, Sasha Egolf, Sarah Greenup, Sarah Ralph, Shannon Frawley, Stephanie Elms, Susanne Dickinson, The Lebo Family, The Munene Family, Tiffany Hassler, Tracey Puthoff, Veronica Samoulides, Vicki Jackman
I haven't listened to this whole episode yet, but I love that you used this format! We did not have Future Problem-Solving in the time/place where I grew up and I really think I would have loved it.
I just wanted to comment on one thing before I forget, which is the idea that people don't care about the environment because they like the warmer weather. I don't think that moving to a warmer climate is the same as thinking it's ok that everything is warming up. I've lived my whole life (51 years) in New England, which is a place that people tend to move from when the winters start feeling too hard. Before the pandemic I used to take a bus to work, which was especially difficult in the winter. Navigating icy sidewalks, having to literally climb over snowbanks, waiting in the freezing cold for a bus that is 30 minutes late - these things are all much harder and more risky when you get older. Now I drive to work, but I still have to clean snow and ice off the car and shovel it out. This is physically demanding work. It is exhausting I can understand why people want to move to Arizona when they start getting older. But that doesn't mean that we welcome 65 degree weather in November. It's getting real weird here in New England and I think we're all acknowledging that. "Nice day today! It shouldn't be this nice in November though!" No, I think the reason people seem like they don't care about climate change is because we feel powerless to do anything about it. The tiny things that individuals can change in their own lives are nothing compared to the effects of decisions by large companies and governments. It really feels futile sometimes.
I’m not done with it yet but I think this might be my favorite PP episode ever (and I’ve been listening for years)! Consider making this a recurring feature. ♥️