Children Are a Rebuke to Our Schedules

After our baby, Beatrice, was born, I wrote a piece for the Institute for Family Studies on children as natural born interruptors, including of some of our culture’s mistaken expectations about time.

We can deceive ourselves (at least for a little while) about our limits and our control—by staying up too late to finish something for work, by cancelling on a friend we know will understand, by carving out more time, whatever the cost, to stay on schedule. But a child, starting in pregnancy, cannot be negotiated with in the same way.

That’s why children and pregnancy are the canary in the coal mine of our control-obsessed culture.

Read the whole thing at the Institute for Family Studies…