This article is the first in a roundtable focused on what it means to be a parent as a historian.
To my children, it sometimes feels as though history happens to them all at once. Pearl Harbor and September 11 are equally remote and abstract moments, despite my own experience of the latter not as “history” but as an event that unfolded as it happened. The decades that separate inventions of the telephone and internet seem relevant only when explaining old TV shows and movies. The origins of things that are now everyday, all belong to an undifferentiated Ago, a prenatal place that grown-ups sometimes expect them to care about especially when the older generation insists they care about things we find nostalgic.
At times, I can tell that they find it both fascinating and frustrating to have a historian as a parent; when a question about a neighbor’s Christmas decoration leads to tangents about Thomas Nast and the Thirty Years War, I can hear eyes roll. At the same time, I can see them making their own connections to the world around them. It’s not the particular details I expect them to remember; it’s the sense that there’s a deeper story to the things we take for granted. That the world around them—now, today—one with a range of delights and disasters, promises and problems, is shaped by the events that came before. Like everything, parenting has a history.1
At a time when parents across the U.S. are asserting the right to curtail the teaching of factual multifaceted histories, and leveraging their status as parents to score victories in both the classroom and the ballot box, I find myself sometimes struggling with questions of how to balance identities as both a parent and a historian. While other friends and relatives have somewhat easier times with Career Day at school, how do I explain what I do to my children? At what age are they mature enough to understand the emotional complexity that follows many Ph.D.s out of academia?2 What if one of them wants to become a historian? Is the precarity crisis in academic history creating its own overeducated intergenerational trauma?
Often when I have a question about my parenting, or just want to talk through my own intuitions, I turn to the advice of other parents, especially those who may share what I’m trying to understand. That may be one practice I picked up as a graduate student: The comity of seminar discussion transposed into discussions on the playground. But most of the other parents in my circles aren’t historians, and many of the historians in my circles aren’t parents. At the same time, historicizing my own musings, I also recognize that because parenting expectations in my society are so deeply gendered and racialized, my own experiences will differ greatly from others. And the opportunity to reflect on my parenting in a setting like this is also shaped by my position in that society. Where to go to talk through these questions?
Fortunately, I know two things: The internet is never shy about offering opinions about parenting. And Contingent has from its beginnings been dedicated to demonstrating that historians are also people, who have families, finances, and feelings. And so, when I first imagined an opportunity to hear the perspectives of other parent-historians, I knew that Contingent would bring together a diverse group of thoughtful individuals who would consider the parenting-historian intersection from many different angles. I’m grateful to the eight other authors who have shared their wisdom, on a variety of parenting issues, in this roundtable.
And now to click send on this introduction, before the kids wake up.
- James Grossman, “Everything Has A History, Perspectives on History, December 1, 2015, https://www.historians.org/research-and-publications/perspectives-on-history/december-2015/everything-has-a-history
- Erin Bartram, “The Sublimated Grief of the Left Behind, Erin Bartram, February 11, 2018, https://erinbartram.com/uncategorized/the-sublimated-grief-of-the-left-behind/
