This Advice Column Was So Bad That Slate Actually Deleted It

But I am here to take it seriously!

Yo, MTV Raps! Welcome to another installment of “Here’s An Advice Column Because I Couldn’t Think Of Anything Else To Write About” In this week’s episode, I’m picking on Slate again because they really can’t stop asking for it. The second question is from a now-deleted post where someone wrote in complaining about their son reading the Bulwark. But we begin with the first question, which is about a parent who wants to take two of their three children on vacation.

Do I Have To Bring All My Children On My Family Vacation?

Dear Care and Feeding,

I have three kids: two girls and a boy. My oldest daughter is my biological daughter and our younger two are adopted. My oldest, “Annie,” was 3 years old when we adopted her sister and 6 when we adopted her brother. When Annie was 2, we took her to Disneyland. All three kids have been to Disney World, but only Annie has been to DL. My other daughter is turning 10 this year and my son has been having some medical problems, so we’d like to take the two of them on a fun trip for their birthdays. We would take them during the offseason (fall) to save money.

If I took Annie, it would cost more, and since Annie is in middle school it would be a lot more work to make up. Is it okay to leave Annie behind since she’s already been? I know life isn’t supposed to be fair, but it seems weird to leave a kid behind, even if it’s only for a long weekend. Thoughts?

—Three Kids, One Vacation

Slate’s answer is: you need to take all three of your children to Disneyland.

This is humorless, obvious, and wrong.

I mean, sure. It would be easier to take the child on the vacation. It doesn’t seem to add prohibitive cost to take three kids to Disneyland instead of two. They don’t need their own suite at the hotel.

But let’s pretend that there really is a hard ceiling on the budget for this trip and there are no other frugal cuts to be made but to leave your eldest child at home. Let’s also assume that you have at your disposal some free childcare options for the kid if you do abandon them. 

In this situation, the choice is between a) taking two of them on vacation and b) not going on vacation. This is America, not some Maoist farm where everyone has equal amounts of nothing. 

Is it ok to take some but not all of your kids on vacation? Yes.

The easiest way to do this is to take one of them on vacation. I went to Greece with my dad when we were kids. My siblings weren’t invited. My sister went to Nepal with my mom when we were kids. I wasn’t invited. My brother went to Japan with my dad when we were kids. My sister and I were not invited. 

This situation is very easy to explain to the uninvited: it is a bonding opportunity for the parents to be with one of their kids and the other kids will have their own moments in the sun.

Somewhat harder is the idea of taking multiple children while leaving one at home. But it is certainly not impossible! 

For instance, as this letter writer claims, the eldest child is in middle school and “it would be harder” to get them out of school. This is total bullshit since we’re talking about “a long weekend” ie missing one day of school but lean into the lie. It’s not just hard to get her out of school; it’s impossible! Midterms are coming up, honey! In this family, we do not intentionally abrogate our solemn responsibilities to education. 

In a world where the child would have to miss multiple days of school, it is totally reasonable for a parent to say, “Sorry, you can’t come because you have school,” which makes this a great excuse. A perfect lie is when you only have to make one minor change to the facts of the case. Everything in the logic structure is solid and true except for one tiny exaggeration. In this case, that exaggeration is just how important it is that they not miss school. 

Now your child might say, “Well,  why don’t we just wait to go to Disneyland until spring break?” And you’ll say, “We can’t afford that because of inflation,” or whatever.  And they’ll say, “What’s inflation?” and you’ll roll your eyes and say, “This is why you can’t miss even one day of school!” 

And if they push you too much on this, you can always turn it around on them. I’m sure your daughter isn’t an angel. She’s probably missed her homework once or gotten in trouble for something. You can say, “Your teachers won’t let you miss even a day because you’re already in hot water from the time you fell asleep during biology.” It’s their fault! If they had just been a better student—a better daughter—they could have come to Disneyland.

Let’s say you don’t want to go down this road of using school as an excuse (for whatever reason). You have other options!

You say you want to take the kids to Disneyland off-peak in the fall. So you don’t have a hard and fast date you have to do this trip. It just needs to be in the autumn. You say your eldest kid is in middle school. Do you know what happens in the fall at middle school? The fall dance. 

For whatever reason, the weekend of the middle school fall dance is the only weekend you can do the Disneyland trip. Your daughter will want to go to the dance instead of Disneyland and will beg you to let her stay at her friend’s house that weekend and not go to Anaheim. You can hem and haw and then say, “Fine, but only if your grades improve/learn the piano/clean the gutters.” 

But, Ben, what if my eldest daughter doesn’t want to go to the dance because she has crippling social anxiety and would actually be grateful for an excuse to skip it?

Presumably, you know your daughter well enough to know what she does or doesn’t want to do between September and December. If there is nothing you can think of on her calendar that she would prefer to do than go to Disneyland, then 1) you’re a terrible parent, and you’ve raised a deeply depressed child, 2) you just need to trick her into preferring anything over Disneyland.

Your daughter is in middle school. You’re not playing chess with Bobby Fischer. You can manipulate her fairly easily. Disneyland is a place for dumb, immature little kids, not sophisticated, mature pre-teens. 

Put your two other kids to bed one night and let your oldest kid stay up a little later. Then you and your spouse sit around the kitchen table with them having “adult talk.” Talk about your jobs or complain about some idiot neighbor you don’t like, whatever. Humorously. Be laughing. Let your eldest child feel like she has graduated to the adult section, and, damn, it’s fun in here! Essentially you should let her have a non-alcoholic beer. Even if you don’t actually let her have a non-alcoholic beer. Let her feel like you did.

Then find some reason to bring up Disneyland. Maybe one of you says that your youngest wants to go to Disneyland. You then roll your eyes and groan. “I can’t wait for them to grow up so we can stop going to that boring place for babies. I wish we could go someplace cool that even [eldest child] would like. Like Baja or Hawaii or even Six Flags because at least Six Flags has adult roller coasters and not baby roller coasters.” Then your spouse will say, “But they are so young! You can’t expect them to be as mature as [eldest child].” Eventually, your kid is going to pipe up and agree with you that Disneyland is for losers. That’s when you look at your spouse. “i got an idea: how about you take the little kids to Babyville,” then you turn to your eldest kid. “And you and I hit up the race track and put some money on the ponies?” (Or whatever.)

The absolute best way to sell this would be for only one parent to take the two kids to Disneyland and the other parent to take the eldest on some cheap thing at the same time. (Would also be even cheaper!)  But if you don’t want to do that for whatever reason, then just modify that line to “we take the babies to Babyville while our cool oldest child is in school and then when she’s out of school, we take her and just her to Warped Tour this summer?”

The point is you are tricking the kid into taking the worse prize, the way the Price Is Right tricks people into taking dinette sets instead of cash.

Here’s a radical idea: what if you just told her the truth?

If none of these options are striking your fancy, how about just being honest with her? “We can’t afford to take all three of you, which is unfortunate,  but Disneyland literally has nothing that Disneyworld does not have and you really aren’t going to be missing much and I’ll make it up to you down the line. Here is an IOU/Get Out Of Jail Free card.” 

I want to circle back to the Slate answer to wrap this up. “Whatever the cost would be to bring her along would be nothing compared to the cost of the resentment she would feel if you left her behind.”

This is nonsense. The trip has a real cost that must be paid in American currency. The value of that currency goes up and down. One thing that is more inflationary than the US Dollar is the resentment children have for their parents: the resentment mint never stops printing, and each memory is less valuable than the last. 

So much parenting advice is predicated around this fear the kids will resent you forever because of some minor thing that happened in their childhood. It’s a complicated phenomenon. I wish I could say that the fears are exaggerated and that that doesn’t happen, but that’s wrong. It does happen. In fact, it happens no matter what. No matter what you do, your child will resent you for some things that you did in their childhood. They will be things you don’t even remember. They will be things that your child is misremembering. And some of them will be real! Life is complicated and life is unfair, and sometimes parents have to do things that their children rightfully resent. But that’s life. 

It doesn’t mean they hate you. If anything, it means they love you so much that every little thing has the potential to mean more than it should. You can’t worry too much about doing things that your child might one day talk about in therapy because the only limiting factor to the things your child will one day talk about in therapy is the length and frequency of the sessions. 

All you can hope is that your children understand by their 20s or 30s or 40s or by the time they put you in the ground that you’re just a human who did your best and, like every other human who has ever existed, 98% of the things that you did in your life were unthinking and unintentional, and that mistakes were made but that none of it really matters because the essential truth, the only relevant truth, is that you love each other and if you had one wish and only one wish you’d spend that wish on them.

And if they do know that then they aren’t going to really give a shit that one weekend in the fall of 2023 they didn’t get to go to Mickey’s ToonTown.

—Ben

The Advice Column Slate Actually Deleted Because They Got Dragged So Hard