My Wife’s Nightly Ritual With Our Daughter Goes Against Our Family Values

Care and Feeding Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by AnnaStills/Getty Images Plus. Care and Feeding is Slate’s parenting advice column. Have a question for Care and Feeding? Submit it here. Dear Care and Feeding, My wife and I have a 10-year-old daughter. She doesn’t have a phone and isn’t going to have one for as long as possible. My wife and I agree on this. However, my wife lets our daughter watch TikTok in bed with her for like 20 minutes each night. I think TikTok is stupid and brain-rotting, but my wife says it’s important for our daughter to know “what’s going on in the culture,” and that her TikTok algorithm is it, I guess. I just feel like this is so stupid. We don’t want our daughter to have a phone because they’re addictive, and social media makes kids hate themselves. So why is she indoctrinating our daughter into this mess? I either need advice on why this isn’t so bad or better talking points for why my wife needs to stop. —No TikTok Dear No TikTok, I have that fear, millions of people have that fear—and it’s not just parents, it’s every human who realizes that iPhone technology is sinister in ways no one considered when it was first introduced to us. I’ll admit right up front, I’m terrible at allowing our kids to use my phone to watch YouTube for Kids, which, as you probably know, is just YouTube, full of dark and corrupting corners and with terrifying slop the “Kids” channel is supposed to filter out. And my 9-year-old son is already fully-fluent in influencers who open baseball cards, or who play MLB the Show, or who can throw a baseball through a barn door. I keep telling myself “it’s just sports” and it’s fine, but he’s still getting bombarded with ads so much so that he is fluent in some of the hateful rhetoric pumped out by some of the more fringe PACs. (He also encouraged me to vote for Brian Goldsmith in last week’s election. “He seems nice.”) Bottom line: Social media is a scourge. But—it is also the world we live in and is never going away. I grew up in a household that was paranoid about my heavy metal music and how much I watched horror movies. They were convinced those were dangerous influences. I mean, outside of me having a pretty severe hockey mullet throughout most of my junior high years I never went on a crime spree or played my Judas Priest records backwards to try to contact Satan. (That’s not true—I totally did that but he didn’t answer.) A.J. Daulerio But I think the only way to combat your daughter’s screen habits is to look at your own. Your wife should do the same. If you don’t want TikTok in your house, remove it from your home. If you don’t want her to ever have a phone, throw yours in the trash. Otherwise, accept the realities of the world and do your best to keep your daughter safe. Please keep questions short (<150 words), and don’t submit the same question to multiple columns. We are unable to edit or remove questions after publication. Use pseudonyms to maintain anonymity. Your submission may be used in other Slate advice columns and may be edited for publication. Dear Care and Feeding, I have a 6-year-old daughter. I really like buying toys and books for her. I have a desk job with a lot of downtime, and I like to do searches for toys with her special interests (currently: mermaids). I don’t know how often I give her a new toy, but it’s at least once a week. Not everything is a hit, but it feels so good when I’ve picked something out that is a hit. My mom, who helps me a lot with childcare, gets really upset when she sees that I’ve bought yet another new toy. She thinks gifts should be for birthdays and Christmas, and that I’m “cheapening” those occasions and making them less special by always buying my daughter toys. She thinks I should save everything for one of those occasions. But my feeling is, why postpone joy? She loves mermaids now, the toy will make her happy now, I want her to have it now! I’m really sick of fighting with my mom over this, so I told her I would write to Slate and see what they said. Should I be saving presents for special occasions? Am I causing her harm here? —Gift-Giving Mom Dear Gift-Giving Mom, I also buy my kids too many toys, whenever I feel motivated to do so. Kids are only going to be young once, and if you can afford it, do what makes them happy, because it also makes YOU happy. And I’m way more over-the-top than you are, honestly and I have three of them. If one has a stomach ache? Let’s buy them a new Fuggler. Did you have a rough day at school? Here are some baseball cards. I’m not worried about harming them, as if me buying them a Squishmallow “just because I love you” will turn them into some self-entitled monster when they grow up. I don’t have any official-sounding behavioral studies backing this, but I’m willing to risk being wrong here. However, I would not buy your daughter a toy if she becomes pushy or demanding—you can’t negotiate with terrorists. But the rest of the time, if you want to buy her 60 mermaids because you want her to have a memorable, wonderful childhood, continue to do so. Your mom isn’t the parent here—you are. —A.J. More Parenting Advice From Slate My wife and I are a young couple with a beautiful, smart, and spunky 3-year-old daughter whom we love dearly. Obviously, we want her to be as safe and happy as she can be, and have all the usual worries of first-time parents. However, in the last few months, my wife has begun to take this to an extreme. For some reason, she has become inconsolably afraid that our daughter is being abused whenever she isn’t around Never miss new Slate Advice columns Get the latest from Prudie and our columnists in your inbox each weekday, plus special bonus letters on Saturdays. Advice Family Kids