The water American parents swim in

It's hard to understand in your gut just how deep it goes—until you leave

Contemplating the deep on the Costa Brava

Maybe you know the story about the fish, as recounted in a famous commencement speech by David Foster Wallace: two young fish are swimming along when they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way. The older fish says, “Morning boys, how’s the water?” The two fish continue on for a bit, puzzled, until one of them turns to the other and asks, “What the hell is water?”

It’s a banal didactic parable, Wallace says. But that doesn’t make its lesson any less significant:

The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the culture of our native land (whichever land that may be) as the water we swim in. Even as self-aware as we may try to be, the ability to recognize the water we swim in is exceedingly difficult. And even if we do, we’re unlikely to recognize just how deep, or warm, or perhaps polluted it may be.

Sacrificing for our kids

In 2022, I wrote one of my very few posts about parenting. My main point was that one of the best possible things you can do for your kids is to be an example of how to live.

Yet this is not as straightforward as it may sound because being an example of how to live is in stark contrast to another core value of parenting, which is that, as parents, we should accept personal sacrifices for their wellbeing.

For example, if you want your kids to be ambitious dreamers who work hard and pursue their passions, then perhaps you should dream big, work hard, and let it be seen that you too are pursuing your passions.

This sounds all well and good, except that what I usually see instead is parents who engage in a kind of slow-drip sacrificing of one’s dreams. Why do parents do this? For the sake of their kids, of course.

We parents rarely think of our actions as sacrificing our dreams. Yet, when it comes to decisions both small and big, we repeatedly prioritize our kids over ourselves. We make choices we feel will give them a better future. And this feels like the most banal, virtuous thing we could possibly do as parents:

Sacrificing for your kids is… condoned by everyone, acceptable to all. It’s evolutionary. What could be more natural, than to sacrifice for your kids?

And yet to do often requires that we minimize or abandon altogether the first principle, which is to be an example:

Do we arrange our lives around our kids? Let me suggest that, not only is doing so only something that wealthy 21st-century parents who live in wealthy countries can do, but doing so is counterproductive to our goals as parents.

Do you really want that to be the example you set, that you arranged your entire life around their wants and needs?

I think sacrificing for one’s kids is not water that we swim in—it is a sentiment that crosses nearly all cultural and political boundaries.

Yet living in Spain has helped me understand on a gut level (even if I already knew on an intellectual one) that several of the things we take for granted as parents in the U.S. are in fact like swimming through polluted water. We don’t realize just how crazy it is to be swimming there.

One of these is our attitude toward paying for College.

‘I have kids’ college to pay for’

Not too long ago, I was talking on the phone with a nurse I know who lives in the U.S. She told me that she and her partner would love “nothing more” than to spend a large chunk of time in Barcelona. Not move here necessarily, but perhaps take three months, as much as their tourist visas would allow.

As a nurse, she couldn’t work remotely—but, I suggested she could take a leave of absence, or failing that she could always get another nursing job upon return to the U.S. Almost by definition, she works in one of the most secure, in-demand, well-paid jobs in the country. Surely nursing will always be there.

But no. It wasn’t possible, she told me. I have kids’ college to pay for.

At that moment, I was standing on a Barcelona city street, my favorite cafe in front of me, where a coffee and a croissant cost €2.30. At least three free, high-quality public hospitals were within walking distance. Nearby was the University of Barcelona, where average tuition for an international student is about €5,000 per year (for locals, it’s €1,000). Over the past eight months, I had met dozens of students from around the world who had come to study here, most of them doing programs entirely in English.

So it was that her comment struck me as patently ridiculous. College was so cheap!

But that is not the reality if we limit our thinking to the United States. There was a mom, a parent, who said she would love “nothing more” than to come spend three months in Barcelona, but couldn’t—obviously couldn’t—because, you know, the cost of college.

The water American parents are swimming in

The thing is: a decade ago, faced with the same calculus, I might have said the same thing.

The average high-income family in the U.S. considers saving for their kids’ college as something of a religious commitment. There are tax-advantaged savings accounts in every state to help them do so. In Bethesda, Maryland, where I lived for several years, it wouldn’t be unusual for households to have hundreds of thousands of dollars in an account specifically intended to pay for kids’ college.

In the U.S., the average cost of a 4-year private university is $34,041/year, and that’s not including money for housing, food, books, or the innumerable, multiplying fees for various administrative functions. All in, it is completely normal to expect to pay around $55,000 per year, per kid to send them to a private university (and don’t look now, but some colleges are approaching $100k). Choosing an in-state public university could halve that cost, but for upper-middle-class parents in the U.S., limiting their kids’ college search to one or two choices near home, when there are hundreds of interesting options around the country, feels like serious parental malpractice.

Then there is healthcare. Most Americans are somewhat aware that the rest of the developed world looks upon the U.S. as being deeply troubled on this subject. But I wonder if Americans understand just how deep. I’ve been working in healthcare (and ghostwriting for physicians and senior executives there) for twelve years now—so I am well-versed in a kind of fatalism within the industry. We’ve all inherited a system that is difficult to imagine any other way. Fundamental change feels impossible.

Even to recount the costs feels like a masochistic exercise, familiar to all: The average out-of-pocket healthcare expense for health insurance (not even health costs) in the U.S. is nearly $8,000 per year. For a family, it’s more than $22,000 per year. And many of those plans require you to spend thousands more each year out-of-pocket before the insurance even kicks in.

For almost any citizen of any other developed country, the situation is patently ridiculous.

Yet, Americans swallow these expenses basically out of fear. We stay in jobs we hate. We don’t start businesses. We don’t take risks. We don’t follow our dreams. All because the cost of health insurance would be prohibitive.

Understanding the crazy

I’ve always known on some intellectual level that this is all crazy. That costs for healthcare and college in the U.S. have diverged from reality, and that most Americans have just accepted it.

But it’s taken me living abroad for eight months to realize just how deeply blind we are to what an alternative society might feel like.

Yes, Spain has free, high-quality healthcare, and the University of Barcelona is €1,000 per year. But the cost of College and healthcare are more than just budgeting issues. Making these costs free or nearly free results in a completely different state of mind, one without the low-level background anxiety that nearly every parent has simply learned to live with.

And it’s not just one’s mental health that’s at stake.

I wouldn’t be the first to suggest that Europeans actually have more freedom to pursue happiness than Americans do, simply because Europeans don’t have to fundamentally alter the entire course of their lives, careers, and financial decision-making in order to accumulate hundreds of thousands of dollars for their kids’ college or to protect against the catastrophic cost of a medical emergency.

To do these things in Spain, or in almost any other developed country, would feel just insane. Madness. Who would do such a thing? Who would make such choices?

An American, I suppose.

---

P.S. Lest you think it’s “worth it” to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to send your kids to an elite university in the U.S., I direct you to a large and growing literature on the fallacy of such thinking. Not to mention there are other considerations beyond simple ROI. I recommend starting with this New Republic piece from some years ago:

Look beneath the façade of seamless well-adjustment, and what you often find are toxic levels of fear, anxiety, and depression, of emptiness and aimlessness and isolation… Our system of elite education manufactures young people who are smart and talented and driven, yes, but also anxious, timid, and lost, with little intellectual curiosity and a stunted sense of purpose: trapped in a bubble of privilege, heading meekly in the same direction, great at what they’re doing but with no idea why they’re doing it.