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There comes a point in every parent’s life when you become legible to your children’s friends as an individual in possession of distinct traits. This transformation, from formless categorical “adult” to person who is evaluated by the opaque and intimidating criteria that govern children’s judgements of character, is always unexpected and often jarring. Suddenly, when your kid’s friends are over, it can feel like being in the presence of U.N. special rapporteurs. What kind of a report will be drawn up, and what will it highlight? The pantry situation? The overall cleanliness? A weird smell to which, as an inhabitant of your own house, you’ve become “nose blind”? Or maybe it’s something more big picture, like your entire vibe as a person.
Some kids are space cadets, some love to scheme and plot, but an observant kid’s ability to file away details and recall them later is, to my mind, unrivalled by adults and something worthy of reverence. I was a heavy-duty observer as a child, and I hold child observers in high esteem because I know what they’re capable of. Maybe it’s for this reason that I have come to accept that when my kids have friends over, they are going to notice things I wish they didn’t, or things I hadn’t even noticed myself, and it will all be part of their education.
An observant child is doing the important work of trying to figure out how to survive in a largely incomprehensible world. I think divorce can make children more attentive observers, and this can be a skill that they bring into adulthood. That was certainly true for me. I may have only been able to start calling myself a sociologist when I completed a doctorate, but I’ve been doing sociology since before I turned 10, when my parents split up and I began spending more time at my friends’ houses, relentlessly noticing everything that felt different and trying to figure out what it all meant. I consider it to be a gift. In graduate school, when I realized the skill I’d been developing for decades wasn’t a neurotic habit that set me apart from others, as I’d always worried it was, but is in fact a job qualification, the relief I experienced was profound.
As an amateur social scientist, I spent most of my childhood going back and forth between my dad’s in the country and my mom’s in the city and dedicating a lot of mental energy to figuring out the social rules that governed each place. Matters of class were inescapable and bewildering. While living with my dad, I sometimes went over to the house of a girl named Bonnie who had her own four-wheeler and whose parents drank and got rowdy at night. There was a bumper sticker on their bathroom door that said “Shit happens,” which I found vaguely threatening even though I knew it was meant as a joke and was also a statement of fact.
While living with my mom in the city, I spent time at the home of a wealthy friend, Lauren, who was once whisked away to a modeling shoot mid-playdate and left me at home in the care of the housekeeper, who seemed to feel sorry for me. In Lauren’s finished basement, there was a home karaoke machine, which gave rise to a need for me to pretend I knew the words to “Lucky Star,” by Madonna, a song I had never heard before in my life. (Hearing that song still makes me embarrassed.)
It wasn’t only awkward tidbits that I filed away while at friends’ houses; there were at least as many important discoveries. At my friend Jemma’s, where I spent a critical mass of time in sixth grade while living with my dad, I acquired a taste for Aveda’s line of premium toiletries because that’s what her mom used. My dad usually bought us Suave two-in-one, which, up until I smelled the Aveda, I had considered adequate. (Aveda was unrivalled in the ’90s — whoever was responsible for those earthy scents was an artist.) My childhood friend Rose’s dad informed me that you need to brown meat before you make a stew, otherwise it’s chewy, and that Blue Nun wine should never, under any circumstances, be brought as an offering to a dinner party. These are simply not lessons my own parents ever got around to teaching me, and I’m grateful someone else was around to inform me.
I envy my childhood attentiveness to detail and the steel-trap memory I once had. One of the gifts of childhood that has caught a stray bullet from ubiquitous screens is this idle ethnographic habit that is native to so many kids. I worry that all the digital entertainment might be causing that muscle to atrophy. But not completely — I still feel painstakingly seen by my kids’ friends when they’re in my house.
Not long ago, I was with my family in our one-room cabin in Vermont for a ski weekend, hosting a friend of my kids’. They were doing their usual thing of monopolizing the Bluetooth speaker to play Central Cee while my husband and I got dinner ready, and the house felt more chaotic than usual, maybe because the children are getting bigger and their voices are getting louder — probably that. Anyway, my husband got fed up (or, in the parlance of many TikTok moms, “overstimulated”) and left for a walk in the dark. After a few minutes, feeling resentful that he bailed, I called him up to pick a fight. I stepped outside — fighting in front of a guest is rude, I thought — and for a minute I hissed bitchily at him. And then the Bluetooth inside picked up my phone, and the kids were treated to a lengthy tirade of mine before I realized I was on the speaker. I only stopped ranting when my younger son poked his head out the door into the dark with a tentative, “… Mom?” Just wonderful.
Lucky for me (and for our guest), he knows our family well and didn’t seem especially phased by having been patched into our argument. After my husband and I got through it (and I unpaired my phone from the speaker), I went back inside, where I gave the kids a quick “Sorry about that, guys” and a reassurance that all was okay. They seemed satisfied by that, and I certainly had no desire to open the floor for questions. I feel honored by a child’s scrutiny, but that doesn’t mean I owe them explanations about everything they see. In my house, you are welcome to try and figure things out for yourself. That is one of the gifts of being a child guest.
Being subjected to a child’s scrutiny doesn’t always feel like an honor, but that’s how we should consider it. The first place they learn close-up lessons about difference is in their friends’ homes, where they get a rare opportunity to see a family’s backstage life, as opposed to the frontstage version on display in public. Now that I’m a host rather than a guest, I’m learning about other families all over again, through kids’ manners and expectations. Sometimes it’s humbling; one kid singlehandedly broke down and put away the entire blanket fort he and my son had made, leave-no-trace-camping style, whereas I was intending to allow it to fester and settle into my home’s décor for at least another 24 hours. And when a kid’s behavior in your house is unimpressive, or even rude? Your house, your rules: It’s time they learn something that they will (probably) never forget.
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