Hello!
We took last weekend off, assuming that many of you had hotdogs (or veggie burgers) to grill and thus, less time for our newsletter. Same. Happy (unofficial) summer!
Though, to be a bit of a downer: for many American parents, summer is… more stressful than happy. With school out but full time jobs very much still “in,” working parents often see their kids’ summer vacations as an eight week logistical nightmare. Eight weeks of scrambling to pick them up from pickleball camp at noon, or juggling calls from a crowded vacation rental, or beseeching grandparents to come visit your extremely hot city for some quality (childcare) time.
Parenting is a particular shitshow in summer, but, as our former Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy proclaimed last year, parenting in the US can actually feel like a shitshow year round. Fun!
Obviously there are many systemic reasons for this (starting literally from birth, with our lack of guaranteed parental leave), but there are more insidious factors too. In his August ‘24 Surgeon General’s warning, Murthy wrote: “One response to a world in which success and fulfillment feel increasingly out of reach has been an intensifying culture of comparison—often propagated by influencers and online trends—with unrealistic expectations around the milestones, parenting strategies, achievements and status symbols that kids and parents must pursue. Chasing these unreasonable expectations has left many families feeling exhausted, burned out, and perpetually behind.” Essentially… #parenting in an age of social media has left many of us feeling anything but #blessed.
Prism friend/contributor Meghan Nesmith would agree. Read on for her take on parenting in an age of influencers, as well as some crowdsourced analog alternatives to parenting resources from us.
All this said, though, summer *does* still slap…
Jocelyn, veggie burger aficionado
Meghan is a writer and editor with work in the Boston Globe, Gossamer, and more. She writes about motherhood and its discontent in her Substack, Cry it Out, and her debut novel A World Apart is forthcoming in 2026.
One thing that makes Meghan feel well: Cooking a meal my kids actually consent to eat. Peak ‘90s Nigella Lawson, real domestic goddess vibes.
How am I killing my kids today?
A partial list of things I didn’t think about before I had kids:
Ultra-processed foods
Endocrine disruptors
Just endocrines generally
PFAS, phthalates, that cancerous red dye they apparently put in Cheetos
EMFs (where are they???)
Lead paint
It’s an obvious and absurd understatement to say “everything changes” when you have kids. Motherhood quite literally rewires your brain. There is joy, yes, joy that jams its fists inside your chest and cracks you so wide you think you might perish of it—only you can’t, because you’re too tired.
I was prepared for that, in the way that anyone can prepare to be altered on a molecular level. What I was not prepared for, what came for me despite all my best efforts, was the parenting wellness industrial complex.
In my 20s and early 30s, my commitment to health was mostly centered around “looking hot.” It’s not that I didn’t know the world was out to kill me—of course it was! But given the choice between smearing my armpits in aluminum and sweating through my Rachel Comey blouse—well, that’s easy. Something would get me one day, but the anxiety caused by worrying about it, or the stress of trying to defray its onrush, seemed like a waste of my one wild and precious life.
Then, suddenly, you have a baby, and one night you’re soothing them back to sleep, sweet moon-face gazing into yours, as you lazily wonder…
Oh god, is this swaddle crawling with microplastics?