He can’t do this.
Care and Feeding is Slate’s parenting advice column. Have a question for Care and Feeding? Submit it here.
Dear Care and Feeding,
I’ve just been informed of an assignment my son “Patrick” was given in middle school. He’s to select a topic from a pre-approved list, ask ChatGPT to write an essay about it, submit that essay to the teacher, and then fact-check the essay, looking for things the AI got wrong. I do not want Patrick doing this assignment. ChatGPT is an irreducibly sexist device that reads and then regurgitates garbage that pushes impressionable young men into misogyny and inceldom. He is absolutely banned from using AI of any sort in our household, and if I can keep him from ever interacting with it until he’s 18, I consider it the least I can do for him as a parent. Only now the school is mandating he use it. Is there any way I can get the teacher to change his mind about this assignment? Surely it can’t be that hard to just produce a bad essay and have him fact-check that, right?
—Can’t We Just Protect the Kids from the Robots?
Dear Can’t We,
I grant you, AI is spooky. But it is here to stay. And for all its downsides (among them: being so easy to use for cheating, deception, and creating false narratives and “news” [absolutely not an inclusive list]), it is not responsible for creating incels. I promise you, there is no need to exaggerate AI’s potential harm.
Patrick’s teacher is smart—creating an opportunity for his students to see for themselves what a crappy job AI does at the thing kids are most likely to use it for is clever. Pretending it doesn’t exist, forbidding its use at home, and imagining that your son will never be tempted to use it to write a paper for him is not going to protect him, even if it makes you feel better. But an exercise in discovering its limitations will help to make him skeptical about it; it will make him smarter about it. That’s exactly what you want. And it’s not what your proposed substitute assignment will do.
Please keep questions short (150 words), and don‘t submit the same question to multiple columns. We are unable to edit or remove questions after publication. Use pseudonyms to maintain anonymity. Your submission may be used in other Slate advice columns and may be edited for publication.
Dear Care and Feeding,
I have a parenting-adjacent problem. For years I had a best friend, someone I felt closer to than anyone else. That relationship began to show cracks when I was pregnant with my son (who is now 19 and in college, so as you see it’s been a long time). When he was born, my friend was briefly a loving, super-involved “auntie” to him. But soon she lost interest. The cracks widened as she became increasingly impatient with my shifting priorities and availability. But it wasn’t just that or even mostly that. Worse was that although I continued to be a source of support for her, especially when she really needed me—when her mother was dying, when she went through a bad breakup, when she quit her job to try something new and was anxious about it—she disappointed me again and again, in so many different ways it would take a very long letter to itemize them. Anyway, for a long time, I made excuses for her, telling myself that because she wasn’t a parent herself, it might be hard for her to empathize with me or even make sense of my life now, that it was only because she was going through something that she was so irritable/uncharitable/undependable, or that maybe I was asking too much of her, hoping to count on her the way she’d always counted on me. But finally, I gave up. I came to recognize (and yes, therapy helped) that I had created in my mind a version of her that was the friend I needed, and that she had never really been that person. Looking back, I could see that our relationship had always been lopsided.
But here’s the thing: I never stopped missing her and mourning that relationship. There’s no one I’m as close to as I was to her (or thought I was?). And now, with my son grown and in school halfway across the country, I have been (literally) dreaming of her. I wake up and think, “Oh! I need to call her!” (In my dreams the two of us are fine.) And then I remember, No, I shouldn’t. But it’s getting harder to stick with that no. My partner and I have a good relationship, but it’s just not like having a best friend. And I have friends from work, but I don’t feel close to any of them. It’s not so much that I’m lonely as it is that I miss those long, lovely conversations we used to have, the easy companionship and level of comfort. I remember my old life, when my friend and I would go out for lunch or dinner, or talk on the phone for hours, go shopping together, and so on. I am so nostalgic for all that. My question is: Even though I know how deeply flawed our relationship was, and that some of what I loved about her was in my head and not based in reality, would it be possible for us to be friends again? I can’t begin to tell you how much I want to call her. Though I don’t even know what I’d say to her after all this time, or how she’d receive me. Am I crazy for wanting to try again?
—Best Friendless
Dear Best Friendless,
You are not crazy for wanting to try again. (Or, if you are, I am too. And we’re not the only ones, I reckon.) I too had a best friend once upon a time, for years, who I imagined would be my friend for life. And when she let me down, then let me down again (and again, and again), I was devastated. I’ve never had another friendship like it. By now I’m certain that I never will.
Years have passed. And, like you, I have dreams I wake from thinking, “I must call her!” before I remember how badly she hurt me, and how hurt I’d be again by her. I see now that she couldn’t help it. I know she wouldn’t be able to help it if we tried again. And so as much as I still miss her, as sad as it makes me to think back on our own long conversations, dinners, birthday celebrations, and trips we took, I know that reconnecting would only cause me pain (if not immediately, then eventually). Of course, I don’t know your ex-best friend. Perhaps she’s changed in the intervening years. Or perhaps you have, and what you need/want from her now is not going to be unmet by her the way it was in the past. But my inclination is to suggest that you stay the course. You had what you had while you had it. Don’t let her break your heart again.
Meanwhile, you might consider doing what I’ve done. I’ve made a lot of new friends. None of them replace my once-upon-a-time BFF. I’m not trying to replace her. I’ve learned to embrace the pleasures of less intense connections—to appreciate the much larger circle of friends I now have, and to enjoy the time I spend with each of my friends in different ways, at different times, for different reasons. And I’ve found them all by pursuing activities that themselves give me a great deal of pleasure. (For me, that’s in ballet and other dance classes, and in the choir I sing with.) Not long ago I read a New York Times piece about “medium friendship” that struck a deep chord in me. Maybe it will do the same for you.
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Dear Care and Feeding,
My husband and I have been married for 29 years. My husband comes from an affluent family, and I grew up on a farm with a chaotic family environment. My mother-in-law has never liked me and made no bones about it. Whether it was about my weight, job, parenting style, or marriage to her son, she had nothing good to say. After our son married, my parents died, and my father-in-law became very ill, my husband and I moved across the country to Florida. We love it here and are very happy in our new home. However, my MIL won’t leave us alone EVER. She calls weekly needing groceries, which we order for her and pay for. She demands new underwear, stockings, shoes, books—and we pay for it all. She complains to us about her lawyer, her relatives, the internet, etc. If my husband ignores her calls, she calls me. We have done everything to try to make her life nicer but she won’t leave us alone. She lives in a retirement community where the staff are on call to help the residents 24/7 and take them shopping and to medical appointments. But she would rather harass us than utilize the services that are available to her. Help! I’m losing it with her nasty critiques and her never-ending problems and demands.
—Freaking Out in Florida
Dear Freaking Out,
I’m sorry. Your mother-in-law sounds like a lot. And if you have put up with her criticisms of you for three decades, I can imagine how sick of it (and of her) you must be. But at this point, it sounds like she is (mostly?) lonely and feeling like no one cares about her. Constant demands for things and unending complaints about everyone around her—“reasons” to call her son and you—sound to me like ways of trying to connect. Terrible ways, yes. Illogical, absurd, tremendously frustrating ways for you and your husband—yes. And her wanting you two to do things for her that the staff where she lives are paid to do and available to do is more evidence that what she’s desperate for is some kind of connection. Is she going about it absolutely the wrong way? Of course. But this woman seems to have no idea how to have a relationship.
You don’t say anything about what your husband’s relationship with her was like growing up, or what it’s been like in the years since. And perhaps it’s too late to teach her better ways of relating to people, asking for what she (really) wants, and communicating her loneliness. But I think that kindness will go further in improving matters between you than continuing to resentfully appease her. I know some would urge you to cut off all ties with her. My own inclination is to suggest you try to make different kinds of ties to her, and see if that helps. If you and your husband visited/called her before she could call you, and did everything you could to include her in your life (that you love), maybe she’d feel less of a need to complain bitterly about her life? If you spontaneously did things for her she hasn’t demanded of you, maybe she’d stop demanding? It’s worth a try.
—Michelle
More Advice From Slate
I have a 17-year-old son, “Evan,” who brought over his girlfriend “Rachel” (which is a first for him). Granted, I was meeting her for the first time, but what I saw troubled me. Evan did almost all of the talking, and there wasn’t a single time Rachel voiced disagreement with him on anything. She spent most of the time at our home wrapped around his arm and looking at him. I did eventually manage to get them in separate rooms so I could talk to Rachel a bit privately.
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