Slate's Care and Feeding: When Family Planning Becomes Personal

Slate's Care and Feeding column exists in the space where parenting philosophy meets real life—where the abstract questions about how to raise children collide with the specific, sometimes uncomfortable decisions couples actually have to make. In this week's edition, three families are wrestling with versions of the same underlying tension: what do we owe our children, and what do we owe ourselves?

The first letter arrives from a man we'll call Bad Genes, married four years and ready to start a family. His wife, Irena, has made a condition clear: she wants to use donor sperm. Not because of infertility or genetic disease, but because she doesn't want their child to inherit his nose. He got his father's nose—large, prominent, a source of childhood mockery—and had it surgically altered in college. His sister did the same. Irena, who was overweight as a child and endured relentless teasing before transforming herself through diet and exercise in high school, sees the logic as airtight: why risk inflicting on a child what they both suffered? The columnist's response is measured but firm. There's nothing wrong with wanting the best for your child, the advice goes, but there's a sharp line between that impulse and something closer to eugenics. The columnist acknowledges the real pain of childhood mockery, even validates it. But then poses the harder question: is this his wife's decision to make unilaterally? And what happens when the donor-conceived child develops some other trait the mother finds undesirable? The columnist notes, with some gentleness, that marrying him while apparently planning this all along reads as a betrayal. The real answer, the column suggests, belongs only to him: would he be willing to exclude his own genetic line from his family to prevent a child from looking like him?

The second question comes from parents of a four-year-old named Jacob who received his first pet—a goldfish—with appropriate preparation about mortality. Yesterday they found the fish frozen solid in a ziplock bag in the freezer. Jacob had watched a science show about cryonics with his older cousin and, with the logic of a young child, decided he was saving his fish by freezing it. The mother's instinct is to replace the fish with an identical one while Jacob is at daycare and tell him it woke up. The father disagrees. The columnist sides with the father, and the reasoning is worth sitting with. Goldfish, the advice suggests, exist primarily to teach children about death. If you tell Jacob the fish woke up, you rob him of that lesson and set him up for genuine trauma when something or someone dies and cannot be brought back. The column offers a middle path: you can soften the blow with language about the great ocean in the sky or a rainbow pond, but you have to tell him the fish is dead. Give him space to grieve. Let him have a small memorial if it feels right. Then, when he's ready, help him pick out a new fish and establish clear rules about care. The columnist acknowledges that he may be too sad to engage with a replacement immediately, and that's okay.

The third letter is cut short in the material provided, but it introduces a 22-year-old who moved out of his father's house three months ago to make room for his father's girlfriend and her daughter. He was happy to go—he'd been wanting to move out anyway—but now his new stepmother and stepsister are making ongoing demands on him. The column hasn't yet addressed this one, but the setup is clear: a young adult establishing boundaries with newly formed family structures.

What threads through all three is a question about honesty. The first couple is deciding whether to be honest about genetic inheritance and parental autonomy. The second family is deciding whether to be honest about death. The third is about whether a young adult will be honest about what he owes to people who are not his biological family. In each case, the easier path—the one that avoids immediate discomfort—is also the one that teaches the wrong lesson. The column's voice is warm but unflinching: there are no shortcuts through the hard parts of family life.