The Phrase I Texted My Kids 133 Times
· The Atlantic
Too loud.
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Too loud.
Too loud.
If you were to scroll through my archive of texts with my children—from the start of the coronavirus pandemic, in 2020, to the end of last year—you would find that I sent 133 of these messages.
I discovered this a few weeks ago, sitting alone on the couch in my living room, when, on a whim, I searched for the phrase on my phone. My youngest daughter, age 19, has been the most frequent recipient of the text, though each of my three children appears in the archive. Typically, I sent these messages between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m. The backstory to each, I’m sure, was relatively consistent: I was in bed, thinking about my schedule for the next day—a board meeting, a difficult conversation I needed to have—when from downstairs came the noise. Shrieks of laughter. Trash talk escalating over a video game. A heated debate about a book or a TV show or a person, infused with teenagers’ fierce intensity. Or perhaps it was someone deciding at 11 p.m. that they would absolutely die without a McFlurry, kicking off a negotiation over who should place the DoorDash order.
In every instance, it was the same routine: I picked up my phone. I typed two words. I put the phone back down.
About 80 percent of the time, the message really did say just that: Too loud. Sometimes, depending on my mood, I would write a little more: Too loud. Love you, good night. Or, when I was feeling more like a school administrator than a father: Too loud. Shouldn’t you be working right now? Occasionally, someone would text back: Sorry. More often, the signals that the message had been received were subtler—a brief dip in the noise, maybe half an hour of relative quiet. Then the laughter would find its way back up the stairs. And I’d text again.
[Read: In praise of ‘difficult’ kids]
Read one way, the archive is exactly what it looks like: evidence of a dad who wanted to sleep and couldn’t, a catalog of minor annoyances sent into the dark and mostly ignored. Only in hindsight have I realized that I had been keeping a record of the years my house was full.
The messages captured so many scenes: my youngest daughter and her friends in the dining room, doing homework, waiting for their food to arrive, making one another laugh over nothing in particular; my son, the eldest, and a couple of his friends, watching basketball and losing their minds over a last-second shot that sent a game into overtime; my middle daughter, often with a coed crew, playing a board game or debating The Secret History or doing that thing that teenagers do where they reconstruct a shared experience they all participated in and still can’t quite believe happened.
My wife and I wanted them there. We loved the idea, and the reality, of a house full of kids. So we kept the pantry stocked with food they liked. Many of our children’s friends had keys to our front door. Some days, I would come home from work to find teenagers in the living room—without any of my own children present. “Where’s my daughter?” I might ask. “She’s still at school; she’ll be here soon,” the kids might say. It didn’t feel strange. It felt right.
My children knew, I think, that the Too loud texts were not quite what they appeared to be—that, yes, I was saying Keep it down, but what I meant was closer to I know you’re there; I’m glad you’re here. This was never spoken between us. I never thought to say it out loud. Instead, I kept stocking the pantry. Parental presence doesn’t always look the same, and isn’t typically announced. Sometimes it’s just a house that says Please come in, no questions asked.
[Read: Lighthouse parents have more confident kids]
It turns out that research can help explain what my wife and I were doing. Homes in which parents are emotionally present without being controlling tend to draw teenagers in rather than push them out. The kids wind up confiding in their parents more. They bring more of their real lives home. The noise they make isn’t incidental—it’s evidence of the fact that they have chosen to be there.
To be clear, none of this was in my head when I was texting Too loud at 11:30 p.m., annoyed and half-asleep. I am not that thoughtful a parent. I’m not sure any of us are, in the moment. But never once did I think to myself, I wish they were at someone else’s house. I also know that not every parent has space for this, literally or otherwise. Some kids live in small apartments, or they have parents with night-shift jobs, or parents whose constitutions don’t do well with chaos. (Parents can, of course, show up for their kids in many ways other than keeping an open house.)
The last text I sent was dated January, during winter break. My two younger kids, who are still in college, were home, catching up with their high-school friends, doing the things that college students do: comparing notes on roommates, dorm food, and work loads; being teenagers again for a few weeks before going back to the place where they are trying to become adults. I was working by then—winter break for college students runs longer than it does for school heads—and was lying awake, thinking about the next day. I heard the noise from downstairs. I picked up my phone.
Too loud.
I didn’t know it would be the last one. You never do.
What I know now is that so much was ending at once that I couldn’t see any of it clearly. Next month I will step down as head of the school I have led for 16 years, ending a role that has become, over time, part of the architecture of my daily life. My wife has already moved to Colorado to begin her new job. The house that has spent years accumulating noise—a cacophony of laughter and debates and late-night snacking—will still be here. But the sounds that filled it have already moved out.
[Read: When helicopter parents touch down—at college]
Nearly all of those kids causing a ruckus on our first floor this past winter were students at my school. Over the years, out of all of the children it had been my duty to look after, a decent number had found their way to my living room, my pantry, my Friday-night Shabbat table. Leaving the job and leaving the house are different losses, but they are related ones. Both ask me to let go of roles that have become a part of my identity.
I’ve spent much of my career telling parents that their job, ultimately, is to make themselves less necessary to their kids—that growing up is supposed to look like this: children pulling away, needing you differently, building lives that don’t require your constant presence. It’s sound advice. I’ve given it for 30 years. I’m still learning how to take it.
Now I get into bed before 10 p.m. most nights. The house is quiet. Our dog leaps up beside me, which I’m grateful for. I pick up a book and read and feel something I can’t quite name. Grief, maybe. But mostly a spaciousness where the noise used to be.
I don’t think I’d change a thing about the way things were—not the sleep I lost, not the half-hour reprieves that never lasted. Actually, I would change this: I would have known, while it was happening, what I was in the middle of. I would have known that every time I typed Too loud I was also saying Don’t go anywhere yet. But for most parents, that’s probably not how any of this works. You don’t know you’re in the good years until you’re standing in the quiet they left behind.