Will it ever be this good again, we ask. No, you have a kid.......

What “You Only Get 18 Summers” Gets Right About Parenting

The phrase pisses off some parents. But it captures the most cosmic thing about child-rearing: nostalgia for the present.

Inae Oh

Technically speaking, August is not the last month of summer—the season officially ends on September 21. But among faithful disciples of the fun season, it prompts urgency, for it contains what seems like the final stretch before grim responsibility sets in and the self-serious soup fans come out in earnest. It is during these weeks when last-minute beach trips are summoned. When we commit ourselves to plans defined by leisure, not labor. Will it ever be this good again, we ask.

Now, the soup people like to argue that it is precisely this attitude, one they dismiss as panicked and mawkish, that informs much of their opposition to summer. There’s so much pressure, they argue, to build out action-packed days and perfect vacation photos. Let me say emphatically: This camp is wrong. And the same forces that guide them animate the hum of outrage over the sentiment, “You only get 18 summers with your kids.”

Not familiar? Well, like most sources of derision on the internet, “you only get 18 summers” is something of a Rorschach test; its meaning, as much as there is one, depends on who you ask. But lately, my algorithm is brimming with denunciations from parents who see it as just another form of “mom guilt.” As a popular Instagram account for parents wrote in May, the phrase creates “pressure to make every summer magical. Every moment meaningful. Every memory count.” Another influencer lamented similarly on Substack: “The pressure of the ‘you only have 18 summers with your child’ content [pushes] us towards trying to create core memories every summer, to try and make it unforgettable for our kids, while maintaining our jobs, cooking 3 meals a day, and making sure everyone has their basic needs met.”

Does it? I searched for the same militant instructions to build five-star memories, but they eluded me. Instead, I was surprised to find the phrase to be an oddly useful, even if corny, reminder to drop one of the worst habits I have as a parent: constantly counting down to the next activity, whatever thing that gets me closer to an imaginary finish line. To stop planning the next memory, quit all that counting, and just sit in it.

Now, finding an internet headline like “you only get 18” meaningful is a bit embarrassing to admit, like finding insight in “life’s a beach.” But for me, “you only get 18” echoes one of the most cosmic things I’ve discovered about parenting: the feeling of nostalgia for the present, even when it sucks. It’s a bittersweet yearning that defies logic, and yet, for so many of us, it’s real. As Stephanie Murray wrote in the Atlantic about why we long for difficult days of parenting:

Only with distance from the minute-to-minute anxieties of caring for a small child does its sweeping beauty come into full view. But this isn’t so much a shortcoming of youth as it is a gift of age. The experiences that follow early parenthood enrich our understanding of it, allowing us to ponder it anew. Hindsight allows us to put suffering into context and recognize the purpose it served in our lives. Hohlbaum likened it to laying bricks in a road: Only after we find out where the path leads are we able to see the purpose each brick served in getting us there. People with grown children have a deeper appreciation for the initial years of parenthood, because they are observing it from a perspective that only time can grant.

Don’t get me wrong. I relate, so acutely, to the parts of parenting that can reel the mind. (This includes the gauntlet of summer activities that, as Caitlin Murray of Big Time Adulting said in a recent video, can leave parents feeling like we are stuck in a “wet paper bag.”) Still, I can’t help but find the irritation over “you only get 18 summers” misplaced. Is it not an invitation for gentleness, to pause and consider, even mawkishly, to give grace to ourselves when we’re in the wet paper bag? Nothing about parenting will ever be perfect, just like those final weeks of August will never deliver the perfect summer. But it’s never been about the pursuit of some elusive perfect summer anyway. Summer is a season that celebrates saying fuck it: Slam those sweating hot dogs even when the meal prep is right there. Trade nice drinks in favor of cheap, ice-cold beers. Celebrate magic in the ordinary flecks of sunlight. Couldn’t we all use that reminder once in a while?