This essay was adapted from the parenting newsletter the Pomegranate. Subscribe here.
Last year, I responded to a tweet asking for unpopular parenting takes with my most Flynn-from-Rapunzel-swords-at-the-throat hot take:
We should stop putting kids in strollers as soon as they learn how to walk.
The replies, while in abject disagreement, proved that at the very least, I understood the assignment.
Let me get my caveats out of the way:
I live in a cute suburb that is fully unwalkable. None of my errands or outings are within walking distance, and even if they were, we don’t have sidewalks. So when I say my 13-month-old was toddling around without a stroller, I mean after we’d already driven to our destination.
I am good at suffering.
To elaborate on that second point, I have to get into one of my Life Philosophies. My preferred mode of exercise is running, which I do on the trails in the forest near my house. It’s a beautiful spot, with all sorts of different terrain that attracts friendly mountain bikers and dog walkers all year round. If I turn left off the main trail, there’s a path that makes for an extremely pleasant run, an easy, flat trail that goes along the river where turtles sunbathe on logs and beavers swim placidly.
I don’t run that trail. I turn right, which is a path that travels uphill forever. I huff straight up that hill until I’ve reached half the intended distance of my run, at which point my chest is on fire, my breathing is ragged, and I can barely put one foot in front of the other. It sucks. It sucks so bad. But once I’m halfway there, I turn around, and the second half of my run is all downhill. I coast down the path and by the time I reach the bottom, my breathing has regulated and I trot easily home down the main trail.
“Frontload the suffering” is a life philosophy I’ve developed over the years. If I trace it back, it probably starts with internalizing Tom Hanks in A League of Her Own insisting that “The hard is what makes it great,” followed by extreme harrow and tumult in my early adulthood. The great thing about extreme harrow and tumult in early adulthood is that once you’re through it, everything else feels like a breeze. You’re coasting.
So I apply this philosophy to parenting wherever it fits, starting with my son’s first steps.
My son Adam had a difficult babyhood. He was miserable. He never slept. He cried and fussed nonstop, never happy no matter how much I soothed or entertained or fed or sang songs. Then he took his first steps the week before he turned 1 and he became an entirely different baby. He was unusually pleasant and easygoing. He could move now, and he did, quickly becoming steady on his feet and opening the door to so many opportunities for exploration. My miserable baby had just been bored the whole time.
Now that he was on the go, he couldn’t stop, and he still wouldn’t sleep. Those early toddler days were filled with errands and outings, anything to stay out of the house and make the time pass, but at the end of the day he was awake and energized.
That was when I decided I would never put this child in a stroller again. I spent nine months growing this boy a pair of legs and he was gonna use them.
When we went to the grocery store, I’d haul him out of his car seat and firmly hold his doughy hand as we slowly made our way across the parking lot. Inside, rather than putting him in the front seat of the shopping cart, I’d let him walk alongside me. We’d make our way slowly through the mall or Target, his miniature legs taking seven steps for every two of mine. The zoo, the aquarium, the amusement park, wherever we went, he was on foot.
If you’ve ever spent more than three minutes with a toddler, you can imagine that I suffered through these outings. At the grocery store I incessantly redirected him away from the eggs and glass jars of spaghetti sauce he was desperate to take off the shelves. I had to stay vigilant, because that ball of energy was a runner and a flight risk, liable to dash out into traffic at any given moment. I was constantly correcting. “We don’t run in the parking lot. We don’t pick trash up off the ground. We don’t put our mouth on the lamppost.” It sucked. It sucked so bad.
My friends were not shy about telling me how stupid this was.
“Why don’t you just put him in a stroller and … enjoy something? Why make your life harder than it needs to be?”
Because at the end of the day, around 7 p.m., his eyelids started drooping, and when I picked him up, he’d snuggle into my shoulder, already almost asleep. I suffered all day, but then for the last few hours of the night before I went to bed, I was coasting. It was the first moment of peace I had as a parent. I could sit on the couch. Eat a cookie. Watch Jeopardy! Have an entire conversation with my husband.
That was already worth everything, but I noticed some other benefits too. By my calculations, you have to correct a toddler 10,000 times before they learn a behavior, and by having Adam out of his stroller, I reached 10,000 corrections much faster than I would have if he were contained. This came in handy when I doubled down on my situation and had my second baby the same week he turned 2. In our first slow trek across the grocery store parking lot, with the newborn’s bucket seat hooked on my elbow, I realized Adam wasn’t even trying to escape the firm grip of my other hand. He knew the routine and it was overriding his instinct to flee. When I tripled down with a third baby two years after that, I could trust him to hook a finger onto my belt loop while I held his sister’s hand.
My friends continued to think I was unwell. My best friend said she even let her 9-year-old ride in a stroller when they went to the zoo (and sent a picture to prove it, when I didn’t believe her). “Otherwise we’ll only last a couple hours and I want to make the most of it.”
I hear that, but maybe kids—especially toddlers—aren’t meant to last at the zoo for longer than a couple of hours. Even if they’re being pushed or pulled around on wheels, it makes sense to me that a toddler or small child would be mentally exhausted, or let’s face it, straight-up bored, after two hours at the zoo. I allowed myself to reframe outings in my mind, so that if my kids clocked 50,000 steps by noon (I never fitted them with a pedometer, but I wish I had), and then were over it, that was OK. It wasn’t a ruined trip. Maybe that was the most that could be made of it.
I do have a third caveat here, where I will acknowledge the universal truth that you can’t make a toddler do something they don’t want to do. Sometimes they don’t want to walk, which meant sometimes I was lugging them around, but I found that I actually enjoyed popping a kid on my shoulders for an occasional ride. I remember the thrill of riding on my dad’s shoulders when I was a kid, and I find myself unbothered by the work.
It’s all work, and it’s hard, but somewhere inside of me Tom Hanks is still screaming “The hard is what makes it great!” And just like my delts are ripped from all the times I’ve turned right off the main trail and trudged uphill with a 3-year-old on my shoulders, doing this the hard way has made all the moments when I’m coasting downhill even sweeter.
