Why you should write your kids
For reasons I’ve never known, I remember very little about growing up. Maybe as a consequence of that (or maybe because I’m just an overly sentimental human), now that I have my own kids, I am, let’s call it, mildly obsessed with documenting them as they grow up.
When each was born, I created an email address for them. They’re primary school aged now. In the intervening years, I’ve written each hundreds of emails. These emails span all kinds of topics. There’s the blow-by-blow recaps of the big milestones - birthdays, vacations, graduations, etc. There’s photos of artifacts they’ve created, and descriptions of what they are. There are attempts to try to capture the routines of every day life. There are even some audio recordings thrown in there, to capture a sweetly sung song, or idiosyncracy of speech development. And then there are the emails that strike a less documentarian, more reflective tone. This last category is only nominally about them; they’re really about me, and what it’s like to be a parent.
There’s no set cadence to these messages. When I have a moment during the day, after something notable has happened, I’ll try to fire off a message, or at least save a draft of a thought to revisit later. And if I feel like I haven’t written in a while, I try to sit down on Sunday evening and recount some of what has transpired that week. Some messages have media file attached to them, but, critically, all the messages have text to provide context and explain why that thing is worth remembering.
Through this practice of documenting, I’ve tried to challenge myself to identify small but revealing details - about their personality, physicality, environment, belongings, relationships - the memory of which, if undocumented, would surely lapse into obscurity. The bigger life events tend to take care of themselves; if we remember anything, we’ll remember them. But it’s in these ephemeral little details … I think that’s where the real magic lies.
As someone who is really bad at forming habits, I’m surprised that this one has stuck around as long as it has. I have found it profoundly rewarding to be able to browse this archive of minutia (and, search it, thanks to GMail’s excellent indexing). At first this was a solitary exercise. But as my kids have grown, they’ve also started to engage with their (not-so-distant) history. It’s even more rewarding to experience that through their eyes.
I’ve told friends with kids about this practice; some are excited by the idea, and a few have even adopted it themselves. So as inspiration for anyone who might be interested in trying the same, this is a little experiment in regularly sharing ideas for what to write about. A post a week for about a year. Or until I run out of useful things to share.
If you haven’t already, head on over to Gmail (or whatever your email of choice is), create that account for your kids and start writing them. Your future selves will thank you.
