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29/01/2025

nullw=500&fit=max]Scott T. Baxter/Photodisc/Getty ImagesI was born with nystagmus, a neurological condition that affects my vision, and until I was in my thirties, I’d only met one person that shared it. At a holiday party with my parents when I was probably eight or nine, my mom pointed out a boy a. See comment for the full story

29/01/2025

Scott T. Baxter/Photodisc/Getty Images

I was born with nystagmus, a neurological condition that affects my vision, and until I was in my thirties, I’d only met one person that shared it. At a holiday party with my parents when I was probably eight or nine, my mom pointed out a boy across the room. ‘He has nystagmus like you’, she said. ‘But not exactly. Your eyes bop all over your head and his just move back and forth. He also has albinism, which is why his eyes do that. We don’t know what causes yours.’ I regarded the ice blond teen across the room. I don’t think we spoke. What would I have said to him? My vision was a point of shame and something I tried to hide. If kids pointed it out, I usually ended up in tears.

My son inherited my nystagmus. It's given me the unusual opportunity to watch how people react to his vision as a window into how the world reacts to me. Being able to watch my child closely -- the flickering of his eyes as he nursed, the tilt of his head as he searched for me among the waiting moms (yes, they were always all moms) at school pickup, as he struggled to read the routes on the approaching buses just like I did -- these were moments of familiarity but also of novelty, as I observed how the world observed him. The social stigma of appearing disabled trained out of me many of the behaviors that mark him as “different,” movement patterns that I have no personal recollection of, but can pick up from the family photos in which I always was tilting my head, my eyes struggling like his do to make contact with the aperture of the lens.

In some ways it has given me the opportunity to revisit my own childhood experience of disability. And one of my main regrets, if I have any, is that I never learned braille. According to the National Federation of the Blind, only about 10% of blind and low vision children in the US are learning braille. Much of this is due to our bias towards learning through sight, and so children who have any vision are pushed towards text magnification as a replacement. But like me, every person I’ve asked who is blind or low-vision wishes they’d been taught braille as a child or, if they’d been introduced to it, wish they’d been pushed to gain true fluency. Access to language is power. That’s why I’m determined to make sure my kid learns it.

In middle school, I learned to hate public speaking. I was in every sense an “overachiever” so I remember preparing fastidiously for my first presentation in English class, where we had to present instructions about how to perform a skill or task for our classmates. I had rainbow pastel index cards where I’d written my presentation talking points.

Then I got my grade. It wasn’t perfect. I’d been marked down because I held the note cards in front of my face and I’d failed to make eye contact with my classmates. It wasn’t so much the grade that bothered me, but the awareness that when I spoke publicly, my disability was super visible. In my attempt to assimilate and be ‘normal,’ I feared that visibility more than anything else. From that point on, any kind of speaking in front of other people made me extremely nervous. I dreaded when other people had to watch me talk, and avoided it as much as I could.

There are moments where my throat catches as I watch my kid encountering situations l can remember from my own childhood.

It wasn’t until my mid-30s when I started to work with other disabled people and from their comfort with themselves and speaking publicly, I pushed myself to get through my shame. But even with this new confidence, public speaking is still a struggle for me. The more stressed I get, the more my eyes move and so I stumble over words and easily lose my place. To compensate, I stopped using written notes for my presentations. Instead of reading from my book at author’s events, I used slides with images to prompt me through the outline of my presentation.

Then I watched as a blind advocate read a proclamation at a public hearing using braille. Her presentation was flawless — the kind of flawlessness I’d been dreaming of since my stumbles in middle school. I wanted that skill. But braille, like any language, is difficult to learn in adulthood. If I worked really hard at it, maybe someday I’d be able to read it fluently enough to crib notes for a talk, but I'd never have the speed of someone who learned it as a child.

In the 1820s, braille was created by and embraced by students at the National Institute for the Blind in Paris. But soon their sighted educators tried to stop its adoption, at one point burning all the braille books. These educators preferred a language that they too had access to, like raised letter shapes embossed on the page. Braille was harder for sighted educators to read and it threatened their control and their careers.

As I’ve pushed at school for my child to have access to braille, it’s been a fight, both to get the educators to work with my son to believe that braille is valuable for him, and for the district to hire qualified staff to teach braille. When educators argue that it’s better to steer him towards the world of sight, the world of print and screens, a world the sighted world can navigate with ease, I often find myself thinking of those sighted teachers in 19th Century Paris.

I spent so much time trying to see better: first the years of early intervention services where my mom spent hours and hours coaxing me to track the ball, follow the light, hold my eyes steady. Then in my twenties, appointment after appointment with doctors and ‘healers,’ all promising unrealized and unrealizable cures.

There are moments where my throat catches as I watch my kid encountering situations l can remember from my own childhood. Last month, I took him to his annual eye exam. I could feel myself tensing as the letters got smaller on the screen, watching him strain his neck, lean forward in the chair, tilt his head — I too could feel these patterns in my body.

I watched him guess at the letters he could no longer quite distinguish, confusing an E and R, then pausing at a Y. The medical student kept shrinking the letters, insisting he keep guessing, even as he missed, struggled and guessed, and kept missing. I cringed. It wasn’t enough for him to say “I can’t see that.” He had to be tricked, proven wrong.

It wasn't until my mid-30s that I realized I could say, “I can’t see that,” when I was at the optometrist. I remember almost crying and becoming angry the first time I refused to guess.

What if it’s okay to see less? And what if I’m okay with my kid seeing less as well.

What if instead of healers and therapy, the world had shrugged and said, “Okay, so your vision isn’t the same as a lot of other humans, but there’s a whole universe of people out there with less vision than you and these are some of the awesome tools and tricks they’ve developed for navigating their communities and connecting to others. This is braille and when your brain and your eyes are struggling to focus, this will give you access to words.”

I’ve asked my mom why they hadn’t felt it was appropriate for me to be included in the blind community, and she said when they first took me to events, they felt like I didn’t belong because I had too much vision. I don’t think they really considered what it would mean then that I would always be in a world where I had less vision than everyone else, without any of the coping tools or skills that I could have learned from the blind community.

I also understand their hesitation. Many parts of the disability community do feel off limits to those of us in more liminally-disabled bodies. But mostly I think their hesitation to explore my connections to blindness came from stigma — a stigma I know lurks in me too from years of being told and believing I wasn’t like those other blind people. Even the interaction with the other boy with nystagmus had been framed as if my nystagmus was different, individual, as if we didn’t have loads we could have learned from each other’s experiences navigating the world.

Low vision kids or kids with some vision are pushed towards the seeing world, instead of towards skills that would help us navigate without relying on sight, because there is such fear around navigating the world with less-than-perfect vision.

What if it’s okay to see less? And what if I’m okay with my kid seeing less as well. We’re surrounded by an overwhelming amount of information — visual information, auditory information, sensory information, information from our phones and watches and computers. Instead of insisting that my kid, or me, or anyone see as much as we can possibly see, maybe we can start to imagine a world where we have agency to choose and the opportunity to develop our ability to process and receive information from more than just visual pathways?

Braille doesn’t have to be a tool exclusively available to those whose vision has failed. What if there were other learners who could benefit from tactile knowledge? Who would benefit from activating different neural pathways to access the written word? Unfortunately, our collective fear of blindness is preventing us from embracing potentially useful tools. Nobody will benefit though until we reduce the stigma around blindness.

As a kid, one of the exhibits I remember most from the zoo was a small and dark window display of a cave biome that featured the white translucent bodies of blind cave fish, who had evolved in a world without light and so had no use for eyes. In retrospect, I’m sure my fascination with this particular exhibit was related to how much emphasis had been put on improving my vision. Here was an entire ecosystem where sight didn’t matter!

I still find myself captivated by learning about the animal world, and as a parent of a young kid who is only interested in nonfiction books, I’ve spent my share of time reading about countless strange and true animal factoids. It’s not just cave animals that can function without sight, the Namibian mole has no eyes, which would be useless as it burrows through the sandy dunes, but instead finds its prey through perceiving the tapping of insect feet in the sand. Or the platypus that has extremely weak vision. The murky swamp water where it dwells has little visibility. Instead, it catches dinner using electromagnetic sensors on its bill that can perceive the electricity generated by living cells.

I’ve decided the platypus is my new favorite animal.

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Scott T. Baxter/Photodisc/Getty Images I was born with nystagmus, a neurological condition that affects my vision, and until I was in my ...

24/01/2025

nullw=500&fit=max]Scott J. Ferrell/CQ-Roll Call, Inc./Getty ImagesThis year, my 9-year-old daughter was assigned her first research report at school. She was excited to learn new facts about her topic, and she was very glad she’d been partnered with a specific boy in her class — not because she had . See comment for the full story

24/01/2025

Scott J. Ferrell/CQ-Roll Call, Inc./Getty Images

This year, my 9-year-old daughter was assigned her first research report at school. She was excited to learn new facts about her topic, and she was very glad she’d been partnered with a specific boy in her class — not because she had a crush, but because she’d identified him as “very good at the internet.” The phrase rang through me like a bell when she said it, or maybe more like a dial-up tone: I saw visions of myself only a few years older on my parents’ computer, playing Myst and typing “a/s/l” into chat boxes. I saw myself a few years after that in the early days of Facebook and then Twitter, fearlessly sharing dumb jokes with strangers.

I asked my daughter what “good at the internet” means to her, and she explained this boy knows which websites to use and how to phrase a search so the results make sense. The reverence with which my 9-year-old complimented her classmate’s skills shocked me into the now-obvious revelation that “the internet” I grew up with as an elder millennial is wildly different from the one she’s starting to navigate — and the same one many adults are still trying to figure out. (Cut to me in this current moment scrambling to determine which posts on Instagram and Threads are real, and which news sites owned by which tech scions are biased in which way.) I realized I didn’t know where to start to help her become “good at the internet” or even what my definition of it should be. But like so much in parenting, I could see the process had already started without me.

Being digitally literate today is about far more than what we were taught as children: how to stick a floppy disk into a drive, how to type at a certain speed, or how to cite websites in a bibliography. Now what’s required is a complicated alchemy of technological fluency, critical thinking, media awareness, and creative problem solving. It’s knowing which websites are real or phony, discerning when a phrase sounds less (or more) than human, and intuiting how to wield an endless list of tools across a growing collection of interfaces. The National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE) considers “the ability to access, analyze, evaluate, create, and act using all forms of communication” to be an essential skill for the 21st century. But right now, Americans are fighting an uphill battle. And as of 2023, one-third of U.S. adults lack the digital skills to be a part of the modern economy, which includes the ability to find and use information on the internet. And in 2023, digital literacy among eighth-graders dropped to below 2018 levels and in some areas, below an international standard.

One reason for this drop is presumably that “the internet” itself is making it harder and harder to know what information to trust and take in. Meta has gotten rid of fact-checking on its platforms, a federal appeals court killed the potential of internet providers to act like utilities and provide equitable support for all websites, and generative AI is spouting streams of non-consciousness across social media and the open web. These are dangerous trends when 39% of adults under 30 get their news from TikTok, and more than 50% of all adults say they often get news from a digital device. And the stakes are even higher for kids; Surgeon General Vivek Murthy advised that social media presents an urgent threat to teens and 13 is still too young to be on those platforms. Experts believe that education is key to pushing back against the misinformation that is rampant online — but who would do this educating? Teachers themselves are woefully undertrained in the realities of an AI-driven world, even when Common Sense Media reports that 7 out of 10 teenagers in the U.S. have already used generative AI tools.

Right now, we’re all confronted with a digital ocean wider and deeper than it’s ever been before. And as parents, what can we do to help our kids swim in it safely?

When she’s explaining the path toward digital literacy for kids, Laura Ordoñez often thinks about her father. She and her dad were eating together when she mentioned taking her son to a baseball game. Her dad warned that kids wouldn’t be allowed in the stadium anymore — he’d read an article about it. Ordoñez thought that sounded absolutely ridiculous. She asked to see the article, and then tried to walk her father through a process of questioning and discernment. “Look at the website — I’ve never heard of it, and it doesn’t look well put together. Look at the date — it’s April 1. It was a joke,” Ordoñez remembers. “It’s very much the same with kids: teaching them to question everything.”

Ordoñez is the head of digital content at Common Sense Media, a nonprofit that provides research, resources, and advocacy around safe media for kids and families. The nonprofit offers a free digital citizenship curriculum that schools across the country have used in their classrooms, and resources about digital well-being for parents as well. As the mom of a 16-year-old herself, Ordoñez understands the fear parents feel around digital spaces.

While many parents’ first instinct is to jump in and set up parental controls immediately, Ordoñez says there’s one step that’s often forgotten: having age-appropriate conversations with your kids about how to approach different devices and platforms and why. Limits and rules are useful, and they will be individual to each family system. But Ordoñez suggests we make this conversation a more collaborative one — bring kids into the process in a way they can understand. This way, limits feel less punitive and authoritarian. “The idea isn’t to just shield them from something,” Ordoñez says. “It’s to teach them how to slowly scaffold the skills to be able to navigate these spaces.” Of course, initiating ongoing, contextual discussions is far more work than simply tapping some buttons on some devices, but Ordoñez says it may be far more effective in the long run.

Pat Yongpradit believes that the key to understanding how to use technology is learning how to make it. As the chief academic officer at the nonprofit Code.org, Yongpradit runs programs to train new computer science teachers and provide computer science and AI curricula to schools. He argues that most kids can learn about AI in an age-appropriate way, and it’s important that they do because the technology has already become deeply integrated into the digital landscape. “Kids should understand that AI is not human and does not think like a human,” he says. “The voice coming out of the box wasn’t recorded by someone, is not someone — understanding that means they won’t just believe everything that [it says].”

The challenge is that, according to a 2023 National Parents Union poll, only 16% of parents understand AI. This is where trained teachers and nonprofits would ideally come in. Code.org, for instance, offers curricula on training an AI model and creating your own chat bot that includes not only the technical side, but the ethical considerations and the societal impacts, too. “When they understand how AI really works, they’re able to use it safely, effectively and responsibly,” says Yongpradit.

As of 2024, only 60% of public high schools and 37% of middle schools in the U.S. offer any computer science courses. But those numbers may be growing, as more than half of states have instituted legislation to establish media and digital literacy educational standards.

My daughter’s research report was for social studies, but as a San Francisco public school student, she takes computer science too. She even goes to a computer lab and gets to play games when she’s completed her assignments as I did years ago. But the similarities stop there. She’s starting to learn simple programming, and did a lesson on how to tell if a website is trustworthy; I feel lucky our city’s public educational system is taking the lead with her. But after talking with Laura Ordoñez at Common Sense Media, I’ve also started chatting with her about the internet instead of hoping that’s a project for a more grown-up age. “It’s about looking at those natural moments that you already have with your kids,” suggests Ordoñez, “in the car, or riding bikes together. It’s the same way you’d ask how their day was. The reality is what kids want from their parents is a connection and an understanding.”

My daughter and I talk about AI when she uses the DJ feature on Spotify. When she triple texts friends on the iPad, we talk about communication etiquette. And we discuss lies and truth when we search the internet for answers to her infinite animal queries. I hope I’m doing a good job, but as always in parenting, I can’t know for sure. She hasn’t declared herself “good at the internet” just yet, but maybe she’ll make someone else glad to be her partner for the next report.

Rebecca Ackermann is a writer and designer living in San Francisco. Her work has appeared in MIT Tech Review, Esquire, Vox, and elsewhere.

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Scott J. Ferrell/CQ-Roll Call, Inc./Getty Images This year, my 9-year-old daughter was assigned her first research report at school. She ...

22/01/2025

nullw=500&fit=max]Westend61/Westend61/Getty ImagesAs soon as I quit my job — a decision I made unexpectedly when my son was 8 weeks old — I began to encounter headlines that attempted to quantify my new role. “If SAHMs were paid, their salary would be $184K/year,” went a typical one [https://www.mot. See comment for the full story

22/01/2025

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As soon as I quit my job — a decision I made unexpectedly when my son was 8 weeks old — I began to encounter headlines that attempted to quantify my new role. “If SAHMs were paid, their salary would be $184K/year,” went a typical one. My son will be 4 on his next birthday, and in my travels across the Internet, I still come across that number at least monthly. It’s a sum that far exceeds any salary I made, but it seemed especially irrelevant once I was doing what felt like both the most relentless and high stakes work of my life. What was the point in knowing my worth in theory, when it was accompanied by nothing material?

That fantasy six-figures appears, too, early on in The Power Pause: How to Plan a Career Break After Kids — And Come Back Stronger Than Ever by Neha Ruch, founder of the website (and popular Instagram account) Mother Untitled. When she invokes the number, it is to point out that, in her words, “Our work inside the home is critically important and valuable, yet few mothers I’ve met feel like a revered six-figure-earner during their career pauses.” Ruch’s mission is to change that. The Stanford MBA and former brand strategist’s current project, launched after leaving her corporate career following the birth of her kids, is to rebrand stay-at-home motherhood.

It is, perhaps, a role that could use some sprucing up. A perusal of any relevant online comment section, as well as plenty of IRL conversations, will tell you that opinion is split on whether the 21st century SAHM is a pitiable or a privileged figure (neither is a positive assessment). Ruch situates herself in the Lean In, girlboss era, but the stay-at-home mother faced disdain and condescension long before Sheryl Sandberg. It doesn’t help that the role as we conceive of it is largely mythological: In the history that Ruch starts the book off with, she shows how the postwar stay-at-home mother of the popular imagination was a historical aberration that became cemented in our minds thanks to the concurrent invention of television. When people picture the kind of mom who stays home, they’re picturing June Cleaver. When her work is done, Ruch hopes we might instead imagine a striving, multi-hyphenate woman whose years at home don’t condemn her to stagnant invisibility but take her somewhere even better — someone a bit like herself.

Ruch is threading a difficult needle at a time when tradwives dominate media attention and real political energy is aimed at reducing the choices women have gained over the last century. To distance herself from such currents, Ruch identifies her project as a feminist one and repeats the phrase “modern and ambitious” like an incantation against all that. She also sidesteps the mommy wars entirely: “Staying home with your kids isn’t a virtue, and neither is working,” she writes, and notes that “research shows that a parent’s career status has no bearing on the happiness levels of their children.” Instead, her focus is on what a career pause — her reimagining of the dreaded “employment gap” — might mean to the person taking it.

It’s a somewhat surprising book: self-help for people in a stage of life in which selfhood may feel secondary, a professional development manual for those out of a profession.

Midway through the book, Ruch recounts a remark by her husband. though it’s something anyone parenting full time has probably heard before, about how he could never do what she does. This is a comment she has come to understand, she writes, “as a ‘polite’ way of saying, ‘I’m just too complex for at-home parenthood. I need the challenge of work to stay fulfilled.’” Her resistance to this extremely common characterization evades its usual forms — unsubstantiated claims about the negative impacts of day care, lists of a million supermom accomplishments, or conservative talking points — and instead rests on a conceit I haven’t seen articulated elsewhere so clearly. It’s the idea that full-time caregiving can offer an immersive period of personal growth and that this alone might be reason enough to embark on it, if you can swing it.

If you can swing it is, of course, the question that conversations about how we arrange our lives after having kids tends to hinge on: the cost of child care or the impossibility of aligning work and school hours, the ability to take a hit to career progress and retirement earnings. This is why being an at-home parent is usually framed as a privilege, though the reality is more complex. According to some research, stay-at-home mothers in the United States today draw from two different pools: women with little education and income and women with a great deal of both, which is to say those with very few options as well as those with many. (It’s also worth noting that rates of SAHMs are relatively consistent across race and ethnicity, but, counter to what one might assume, white women are the least likely to stay home.)

Though Ruch makes efforts to be inclusive — of mothers whose departure from the workforce is not a choice, moms with medically complex children or additional dependent family members, and single mothers — the book, perhaps in congruence with its air of aspiration, mainly depicts mothers with more. A money coach quoted in the chapter on finances advises adding “$24,000 to the rainy-day fund” before quitting your job and the most down-market profession mentioned in the book is teaching. More often, the mothers featured are lawyers, heads of human resources, directors of strategy, or entrepreneurs.

Ruch’s consideration of how to forge and articulate a new identity during your pause that most excited me, offering a counternarrative to the notion — so pervasive once you are primed to look for it — that to depart employment is to surrender selfhood.

And yet, as a person who, though excessively educated, did not possess a $24,000 rainy-day fund, I’m reluctant to dismiss Ruch’s project on these grounds. After all, what isn’t easier to pull off if you’re wealthy? And to get to a place where the decisions about how we organize our lives as parents can be more than just financial ones, we need not just substantial policy change, but alternative ways of thinking about our options. After all, imagining a more robust range of possibilities for mothers, as The Power Pause tries to do, is a necessary step toward realizing them.

Right now, the truth is that, regardless of your socioeconomic class, becoming a stay-at-home mother is to opt for low-status, unpaid work that in the absence of a social safety net makes you vulnerable in ways people are eager to remind you of at every turn. When I somewhat impulsively quit my own job, those vulnerabilities were the what-ifs ringing in my ears: What if my husband was laid off? What if he died suddenly? What if I could never get another job after time away?

As with parenting in general, it was more common to find cautionary tales than clear upsides. Yet when my son was born, the thought of leaving him to go to the office became unbearable on a kind of soul-body level. Unfortunately, neither the soul nor body seemed like the appropriate grounds for such a major decision, not when surrounded by warnings about each year out of the workforce making you less employable. Beyond those stats, I didn’t even have the language to discuss the choice; at that time in my life, I’d spent significantly more time mulling over David Graeber’s theory of “bullsh*t jobs” than I had “the most important one.” So like many people explaining their work and child care decisions — both those who leave the workforce and those who don’t — I defaulted to money and logistics, like the fact that more than half my paycheck would go to child care. The impossibility of discussing the choice in any other terms, I can see now, only added to my sense of being alone in it.

Maybe The Power Pause would have helped. It’s a somewhat surprising book: self-help for people in a stage of life in which selfhood may feel secondary, a professional development manual for those out of a profession. It’s also optimistic, a handbook to a world that is not yet the norm — one in which spending time out of the workforce after having kids might be seen as something positive not just by employers but also by oneself and the culture at large.

Ruch guides the reader through making the decision to take a career pause, finding footing in your new role, and figuring out how to “grow and learn” during your time out of the workforce with an eye toward an eventual return. She draws on a wide network of experts and the experiences of real mothers. There is plenty of space devoted to the practicalities, not just financial ones but also how to seek support and resist the isolation so many SAHMs report. But it is Ruch’s consideration of how to forge and articulate a new identity during your pause that most excited me, offering a counter-narrative to the notion — so pervasive once you are primed to look for it — that to depart employment is to surrender selfhood.

I will never not be stunned that I could contribute to Social Security when I was answering emails that could have been averted by a Google search but not while keeping my children alive and tended to.

Though most of us spending our days with small children do not feel a sense of abundant time and energy, Ruch insists that there is radical potential in this phase: “When you aren’t going to the office every day and you don’t have a specific return-to-work date and you aren’t under a time crunch to get a new job or climb the ladder, you have the freedom to do all the skill building or hobby dabbling you may have been curious about in the past.” She goes on, “Pursuing hobbies, interests, and play is brave in a culture that has long emphasized productivity, pay, and profit.” Ruch declines here and throughout the book to explicitly name these cultural forces as capitalist — I found myself wishing she would push the argument a bit further and situate a power pause as something with more political potential. The stay-at-home mom as radical anticapitalist would be a compelling argument, but this is not that book.

Instead, the book brims with encouraging accounts of women who use their pauses to launch new, shinier, and kid-compatible careers, often making explicit use of skills they’d employed at home or for free in service of their communities, but the one I keep returning to is less conventional. It’s the story of a former tech employee, Christine Merritt, who discovers a passion for songwriting, sparked almost entirely by a poignant interaction she has with her son before bed one evening. Merritt has no musical background but ends up committing herself to learning songwriting, eventually going back to earn a new degree in it. Now this was a transformation! It’s what I’d wish I’d known to dream of when I stepped off the cliff of paid work myself, an alternate vision to weigh against all the dire ones. Does songwriting pay Merritt’s bills? It doesn’t seem to, or not yet. But isn’t it a symptom of the culture we live in that we are moved to ask that question, instead of whether working in tech ever made her heart sing?

As you might expect, The Power Pause includes plenty of LinkedIn speak. In making the case for support, Ruch writes, “Like any executive, you need to strategically assemble the right support team.” On justifying the cost of child care even when you don’t earn: “Child care should come out of the joint family budget because it supports the collaborative family organization.” For me, leaving the workforce had been in part about escaping this type of thinking and its ubiquitous language, a desire for a life less obviously bound by market obligations — and it exposed how thoroughly my identity and relations were bound up in philosophies of transaction, expectations of compensation and “fairness” that my children rightfully rejected from the moment they were born.

Herein lies the curious tension of The Power Pause: Much of Ruch’s credibility rests on her professional pedigree — the corner office she once had, the six-figure salary she gave up, her impressive resume — but she often gives the impression of someone in recovery from climbing the corporate ladder. Up at night, feeding her son during maternity leave, she experiences “a sense of calm and contentment that I’d been seeking since childhood.” She realizes then that “the prospect of exploring this version of myself as a mother and letting this sense of peace and belonging transform me was too enticing to ignore.” After she leaves her career, she finds that “detaching myself from corporate organizations has allowed me to be myself, exactly as I am.” She tells us that her stated goal while home with her kids was to be the calmest and most content version of herself that she could be. The most resonant parts of the book to me are when she talks about her pause in those terms: as a time of profound growth and self-actualization.

I’ve often wondered, even as I’ve insisted that care work is work, and heeded the calls to label what I do unpaid labor, if work is the right metaphor for parenting at all.

But the “power” in the pause is a promise that something external will come of all of this inner work; in Ruch’s case, a new chapter as an entrepreneur running Mother Untitled. Ruch is clear that she sees inherent worth in caregiving — she says she “could write this whole book arguing that stay-at-home parents deserve (and need) a paycheck for their work” — but in the world we live in, if not the one she is trying to create, her message’s momentum relies on the fact that caring for children will be seen as more valuable when it’s viewed as a “leadership training ground.” I get it. And I also don’t really want to think of my role as helming a tiny domestic corporation, serving as my family’s CEO. Why isn’t being the most present and capable parent I can be enough?

I’ve often wondered, even as I’ve insisted that care work is work, and heeded the calls to label what I do unpaid labor, if work is the right metaphor for parenting at all, even for those of us who do it in lieu of paid employment and so may feel especially inclined to legitimize it in those terms. And legitimization is important if we want social support for caregivers: I will never not be stunned that I could contribute to Social Security and appear in employment statistics when I was answering emails that could have been averted by a Google search but not while keeping my children alive and tended to. Still, so much of what has been transcendent for me about parenthood is how little it resembles anything I did before, especially paid employment. In the days with my children, who are neither my employees nor my employers but something far more complex, I marvel at all the change — mainly theirs, a rate of progress I’d always longed for during workdays that could feel stifling in their sameness, but also, not infrequently, my own. That change feels so powerful to me at times that it seems like it should be a currency all of its own. Maybe what I wish, and what I hope Ruch does too, is that someday, somehow it could be.

Lucy Morris is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in The Cut, Slate, BuzzFeed, and more. She previously wrote for Romper about ‘80s parenting books and when diet culture comes for babies.

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Westend61/Westend61/Getty Images As soon as I quit my job — a decision I made unexpectedly when my son was 8 weeks old — I began to encou...