Have We Lost The Plot On Valentine’s Day?

Dear Good Enough Parent,

Have we lost the plot on Valentine’s Day? I felt like a pro when I bought two (2) bags of Nerds Gummy Clusters™ (primo sh*t, I might add) a full week ahead of time but got home to my family immediately clarifying that each bag only had 24 and each of my kids’ classrooms had 27 kids in it. I can’t help but think the real enemy here is public school class size and therefore state funding, but in the meantime, I took the L. I have an insane week at work ahead of me but will now have “scour the city for another 24-pack of gummy clusters” weighing over me. So that, what? I’ll pass some test? My kids will feel like their parent is competent and safe and maybe even loves them?

Of course I would love to find a better way to show all of this to them, if I had time to do it. This is more of a comment than a question, or maybe the question is just: Can we please think of a better way?

You are right to want a better way. Love is not, at its core, about writing the names of your classmates on 27 bags of Nerds gummy clusters, or Ninjago-branded lollipops, or whatever crap the seasonal aisle of your local drug store in schilling. But, depending on how it’s done and who does it, there can be real love in that act. The problem with Valentine’s Day, for parents, is that any real acts of love get clouded by consumerism, competition, and parental (often, ahem, maternal) labor. It seems like the options are perfunctory branded merch-sharing or hours of careful crafting — which I appreciate that some kids and/or parents really do love. Complaining about all of this, a friend recently told me, “There’s also always some Valentine that a kid and their parent carefully made together, and I’m just like, ‘I’m not that mom!’” And you, it seems, are not the mom who wants to run all over town after a day of work and bedtimes just to check a box (who is, really?). Either way, kids rarely come home from school on February 14th, it seems, with a feeling of having loved and been loved. Instead, they come home with a bunch of trash.

What is a parent to do? I’ll admit, restructuring Valentine’s Day should maybe be low down on our list of causes that require our advocacy and attention. (Here is where, though, I will make my annual shoutout to my kids’ school principal, who has heroically outlawed in-school Valentine’s celebrations in favor of an optional after-school dance, which is actually fun and requires zero preparation.) And yet, it is irksome, isn’t it? That a holiday purportedly meant to celebrate love leaves so many parents feeling exhausted and empty inside, with little benefit to our kids.

When I read your question, I began to think, yes, about public school funding, which is high on my list of advocacy causes, but also about the many definitions of love we have. There is love between first-graders, for whom etiquette requires they show love for every single kid in their class, equally. There is romantic love, the showpiece of our individualistic culture, which all are told to pine for and perform but which many ultimately find unsatisfying. Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, which conducts and disseminates research on topics like love, reminds us that love also includes love of animals and nature, love of friends, love of strangers, love of community. Cultivating love in children, they explain, can happen in many ways. Modeling love between adults — romantic, and otherwise — is one of them.

All of this work may not be the best use of our time as parents, as people, but it isn’t just bullshit — it’s also care.

But I haven’t seen any research that says we have one day a year to model it, and that it must be done with a dozen roses and an overpriced prix-fixe dinner. Maybe you model love for your own children by loving other people’s children — your babysitting swap or your potluck dinners — and by letting others love yours, in their own ways. Maybe you cultivate love every time you pick up the kitty’s laser pointer to play, though it is midnight. Maybe it’s the way you drag them to marches for climate action, or, if that is too much, tell them about the march you joined while they stayed home and grew their little brains.

But the best way to help children understand love is providing ongoing and secure emotional support and care, which, if you’re reading a parenting column (especially one that tries to be humble about the optimization of parenting), you are almost definitely already doing. I am skeptical of the research on attachment, thanks in part to the writing of Nancy Reddy, but I do believe in the general power of reliable, unconditional care for kids, by one or more adults who don’t necessarily have to be their mothers. In my family, my father has been credited as saying that, to have a baby, all you need is love and a cardboard box. It’s later on, often, when they grow up, express their needs better, show their unique personalities, that you start to call on other resources.

With older children, it can often seem like you need high-level negotiation skills, project management training, a child development degree (I happen to have one of those, and can tell you that it only gets you so far) to help them navigate their daily lives. But whether you’re at the cardboard box stage, the Valentine-swapping stage, or taking on the complexities of raising teens, the work you do every day, to parent, to care for yourself? That might be the thing to celebrate.

I agree that you shouldn’t have to rearrange your work schedule to stuff Bluey tattoos into envelopes, that the love exchanged with those valentines is tainted by late-stage capitalism and short-lived, that there are probably better ways. Maybe your child will learn the lesson of imperfection this week as they present 24 matching valentines and three containers of tic-tacs to their classmates. Maybe you’ll do too much and decide not to do it that way again. All of this work may not be the best use of our time as parents, as people, but it isn’t just bullshit — it’s also care.

Many advocates of respecting care might say that all of this mishigas, rather than clouding the love, is the love. When you are raising children, in the words of the great poet André 3000, every day’s the 14th.

The Good Enough Parent is an advice column for parents who are sick of parenting advice. Let Sarah answer your questions about the messy realities of parenting! Send her your questions via this anonymous form or by emailing her at goodenoughparentcolumn@gmail.com.