Adaptive Screens Are Great, But I Still Want My Son To Learn Braille

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I was born with nystagmus, a neurological condition that affects my vision, and until I was in my thirties, I’d only met one person that shared it. At a holiday party with my parents when I was probably eight or nine, my mom pointed out a boy across the room. ‘He has nystagmus like you’, she said. ‘But not exactly. Your eyes bop all over your head and his just move back and forth. He also has albinism, which is why his eyes do that. We don’t know what causes yours.’ I regarded the ice blond teen across the room. I don’t think we spoke. What would I have said to him? My vision was a point of shame and something I tried to hide. If kids pointed it out, I usually ended up in tears.

My son inherited my nystagmus. It's given me the unusual opportunity to watch how people react to his vision as a window into how the world reacts to me. Being able to watch my child closely -- the flickering of his eyes as he nursed, the tilt of his head as he searched for me among the waiting moms (yes, they were always all moms) at school pickup, as he struggled to read the routes on the approaching buses just like I did -- these were moments of familiarity but also of novelty, as I observed how the world observed him. The social stigma of appearing disabled trained out of me many of the behaviors that mark him as “different,” movement patterns that I have no personal recollection of, but can pick up from the family photos in which I always was tilting my head, my eyes struggling like his do to make contact with the aperture of the lens.

In some ways it has given me the opportunity to revisit my own childhood experience of disability. And one of my main regrets, if I have any, is that I never learned braille. According to the National Federation of the Blind, only about 10% of blind and low vision children in the US are learning braille. Much of this is due to our bias towards learning through sight, and so children who have any vision are pushed towards text magnification as a replacement. But like me, every person I’ve asked who is blind or low-vision wishes they’d been taught braille as a child or, if they’d been introduced to it, wish they’d been pushed to gain true fluency. Access to language is power. That’s why I’m determined to make sure my kid learns it.

In middle school, I learned to hate public speaking. I was in every sense an “overachiever” so I remember preparing fastidiously for my first presentation in English class, where we had to present instructions about how to perform a skill or task for our classmates. I had rainbow pastel index cards where I’d written my presentation talking points.

Then I got my grade. It wasn’t perfect. I’d been marked down because I held the note cards in front of my face and I’d failed to make eye contact with my classmates. It wasn’t so much the grade that bothered me, but the awareness that when I spoke publicly, my disability was super visible. In my attempt to assimilate and be ‘normal,’ I feared that visibility more than anything else. From that point on, any kind of speaking in front of other people made me extremely nervous. I dreaded when other people had to watch me talk, and avoided it as much as I could.

There are moments where my throat catches as I watch my kid encountering situations l can remember from my own childhood.

It wasn’t until my mid-30s when I started to work with other disabled people and from their comfort with themselves and speaking publicly, I pushed myself to get through my shame. But even with this new confidence, public speaking is still a struggle for me. The more stressed I get, the more my eyes move and so I stumble over words and easily lose my place. To compensate, I stopped using written notes for my presentations. Instead of reading from my book at author’s events, I used slides with images to prompt me through the outline of my presentation.

Then I watched as a blind advocate read a proclamation at a public hearing using braille. Her presentation was flawless — the kind of flawlessness I’d been dreaming of since my stumbles in middle school. I wanted that skill. But braille, like any language, is difficult to learn in adulthood. If I worked really hard at it, maybe someday I’d be able to read it fluently enough to crib notes for a talk, but I'd never have the speed of someone who learned it as a child.

In the 1820s, braille was created by and embraced by students at the National Institute for the Blind in Paris. But soon their sighted educators tried to stop its adoption, at one point burning all the braille books. These educators preferred a language that they too had access to, like raised letter shapes embossed on the page. Braille was harder for sighted educators to read and it threatened their control and their careers.

As I’ve pushed at school for my child to have access to braille, it’s been a fight, both to get the educators to work with my son to believe that braille is valuable for him, and for the district to hire qualified staff to teach braille. When educators argue that it’s better to steer him towards the world of sight, the world of print and screens, a world the sighted world can navigate with ease, I often find myself thinking of those sighted teachers in 19th Century Paris.

I spent so much time trying to see better: first the years of early intervention services where my mom spent hours and hours coaxing me to track the ball, follow the light, hold my eyes steady. Then in my twenties, appointment after appointment with doctors and ‘healers,’ all promising unrealized and unrealizable cures.

There are moments where my throat catches as I watch my kid encountering situations l can remember from my own childhood. Last month, I took him to his annual eye exam. I could feel myself tensing as the letters got smaller on the screen, watching him strain his neck, lean forward in the chair, tilt his head — I too could feel these patterns in my body.

I watched him guess at the letters he could no longer quite distinguish, confusing an E and R, then pausing at a Y. The medical student kept shrinking the letters, insisting he keep guessing, even as he missed, struggled and guessed, and kept missing. I cringed. It wasn’t enough for him to say “I can’t see that.” He had to be tricked, proven wrong.

It wasn't until my mid-30s that I realized I could say, “I can’t see that,” when I was at the optometrist. I remember almost crying and becoming angry the first time I refused to guess.

What if it’s okay to see less? And what if I’m okay with my kid seeing less as well.

What if instead of healers and therapy, the world had shrugged and said, “Okay, so your vision isn’t the same as a lot of other humans, but there’s a whole universe of people out there with less vision than you and these are some of the awesome tools and tricks they’ve developed for navigating their communities and connecting to others. This is braille and when your brain and your eyes are struggling to focus, this will give you access to words.”

I’ve asked my mom why they hadn’t felt it was appropriate for me to be included in the blind community, and she said when they first took me to events, they felt like I didn’t belong because I had too much vision. I don’t think they really considered what it would mean then that I would always be in a world where I had less vision than everyone else, without any of the coping tools or skills that I could have learned from the blind community.

I also understand their hesitation. Many parts of the disability community do feel off limits to those of us in more liminally-disabled bodies. But mostly I think their hesitation to explore my connections to blindness came from stigma — a stigma I know lurks in me too from years of being told and believing I wasn’t like those other blind people. Even the interaction with the other boy with nystagmus had been framed as if my nystagmus was different, individual, as if we didn’t have loads we could have learned from each other’s experiences navigating the world.

Low vision kids or kids with some vision are pushed towards the seeing world, instead of towards skills that would help us navigate without relying on sight, because there is such fear around navigating the world with less-than-perfect vision.

What if it’s okay to see less? And what if I’m okay with my kid seeing less as well. We’re surrounded by an overwhelming amount of information — visual information, auditory information, sensory information, information from our phones and watches and computers. Instead of insisting that my kid, or me, or anyone see as much as we can possibly see, maybe we can start to imagine a world where we have agency to choose and the opportunity to develop our ability to process and receive information from more than just visual pathways?

Braille doesn’t have to be a tool exclusively available to those whose vision has failed. What if there were other learners who could benefit from tactile knowledge? Who would benefit from activating different neural pathways to access the written word? Unfortunately, our collective fear of blindness is preventing us from embracing potentially useful tools. Nobody will benefit though until we reduce the stigma around blindness.

As a kid, one of the exhibits I remember most from the zoo was a small and dark window display of a cave biome that featured the white translucent bodies of blind cave fish, who had evolved in a world without light and so had no use for eyes. In retrospect, I’m sure my fascination with this particular exhibit was related to how much emphasis had been put on improving my vision. Here was an entire ecosystem where sight didn’t matter!

I still find myself captivated by learning about the animal world, and as a parent of a young kid who is only interested in nonfiction books, I’ve spent my share of time reading about countless strange and true animal factoids. It’s not just cave animals that can function without sight, the Namibian mole has no eyes, which would be useless as it burrows through the sandy dunes, but instead finds its prey through perceiving the tapping of insect feet in the sand. Or the platypus that has extremely weak vision. The murky swamp water where it dwells has little visibility. Instead, it catches dinner using electromagnetic sensors on its bill that can perceive the electricity generated by living cells.

I’ve decided the platypus is my new favorite animal.

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How Do You Teach A Kid To Be ‘Good At The Internet’ Now?

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This year, my 9-year-old daughter was assigned her first research report at school. She was excited to learn new facts about her topic, and she was very glad she’d been partnered with a specific boy in her class — not because she had a crush, but because she’d identified him as “very good at the internet.” The phrase rang through me like a bell when she said it, or maybe more like a dial-up tone: I saw visions of myself only a few years older on my parents’ computer, playing Myst and typing “a/s/l” into chat boxes. I saw myself a few years after that in the early days of Facebook and then Twitter, fearlessly sharing dumb jokes with strangers.

I asked my daughter what “good at the internet” means to her, and she explained this boy knows which websites to use and how to phrase a search so the results make sense. The reverence with which my 9-year-old complimented her classmate’s skills shocked me into the now-obvious revelation that “the internet” I grew up with as an elder millennial is wildly different from the one she’s starting to navigate — and the same one many adults are still trying to figure out. (Cut to me in this current moment scrambling to determine which posts on Instagram and Threads are real, and which news sites owned by which tech scions are biased in which way.) I realized I didn’t know where to start to help her become “good at the internet” or even what my definition of it should be. But like so much in parenting, I could see the process had already started without me.

Being digitally literate today is about far more than what we were taught as children: how to stick a floppy disk into a drive, how to type at a certain speed, or how to cite websites in a bibliography. Now what’s required is a complicated alchemy of technological fluency, critical thinking, media awareness, and creative problem solving. It’s knowing which websites are real or phony, discerning when a phrase sounds less (or more) than human, and intuiting how to wield an endless list of tools across a growing collection of interfaces. The National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE) considers “the ability to access, analyze, evaluate, create, and act using all forms of communication” to be an essential skill for the 21st century. But right now, Americans are fighting an uphill battle. And as of 2023, one-third of U.S. adults lack the digital skills to be a part of the modern economy, which includes the ability to find and use information on the internet. And in 2023, digital literacy among eighth-graders dropped to below 2018 levels and in some areas, below an international standard.

One reason for this drop is presumably that “the internet” itself is making it harder and harder to know what information to trust and take in. Meta has gotten rid of fact-checking on its platforms, a federal appeals court killed the potential of internet providers to act like utilities and provide equitable support for all websites, and generative AI is spouting streams of non-consciousness across social media and the open web. These are dangerous trends when 39% of adults under 30 get their news from TikTok, and more than 50% of all adults say they often get news from a digital device. And the stakes are even higher for kids; Surgeon General Vivek Murthy advised that social media presents an urgent threat to teens and 13 is still too young to be on those platforms. Experts believe that education is key to pushing back against the misinformation that is rampant online — but who would do this educating? Teachers themselves are woefully undertrained in the realities of an AI-driven world, even when Common Sense Media reports that 7 out of 10 teenagers in the U.S. have already used generative AI tools.

Right now, we’re all confronted with a digital ocean wider and deeper than it’s ever been before. And as parents, what can we do to help our kids swim in it safely?

When she’s explaining the path toward digital literacy for kids, Laura Ordoñez often thinks about her father. She and her dad were eating together when she mentioned taking her son to a baseball game. Her dad warned that kids wouldn’t be allowed in the stadium anymore — he’d read an article about it. Ordoñez thought that sounded absolutely ridiculous. She asked to see the article, and then tried to walk her father through a process of questioning and discernment. “Look at the website — I’ve never heard of it, and it doesn’t look well put together. Look at the date — it’s April 1. It was a joke,” Ordoñez remembers. “It’s very much the same with kids: teaching them to question everything.”

Ordoñez is the head of digital content at Common Sense Media, a nonprofit that provides research, resources, and advocacy around safe media for kids and families. The nonprofit offers a free digital citizenship curriculum that schools across the country have used in their classrooms, and resources about digital well-being for parents as well. As the mom of a 16-year-old herself, Ordoñez understands the fear parents feel around digital spaces.

While many parents’ first instinct is to jump in and set up parental controls immediately, Ordoñez says there’s one step that’s often forgotten: having age-appropriate conversations with your kids about how to approach different devices and platforms and why. Limits and rules are useful, and they will be individual to each family system. But Ordoñez suggests we make this conversation a more collaborative one — bring kids into the process in a way they can understand. This way, limits feel less punitive and authoritarian. “The idea isn’t to just shield them from something,” Ordoñez says. “It’s to teach them how to slowly scaffold the skills to be able to navigate these spaces.” Of course, initiating ongoing, contextual discussions is far more work than simply tapping some buttons on some devices, but Ordoñez says it may be far more effective in the long run.

Pat Yongpradit believes that the key to understanding how to use technology is learning how to make it. As the chief academic officer at the nonprofit Code.org, Yongpradit runs programs to train new computer science teachers and provide computer science and AI curricula to schools. He argues that most kids can learn about AI in an age-appropriate way, and it’s important that they do because the technology has already become deeply integrated into the digital landscape. “Kids should understand that AI is not human and does not think like a human,” he says. “The voice coming out of the box wasn’t recorded by someone, is not someone — understanding that means they won’t just believe everything that [it says].”

The challenge is that, according to a 2023 National Parents Union poll, only 16% of parents understand AI. This is where trained teachers and nonprofits would ideally come in. Code.org, for instance, offers curricula on training an AI model and creating your own chat bot that includes not only the technical side, but the ethical considerations and the societal impacts, too. “When they understand how AI really works, they’re able to use it safely, effectively and responsibly,” says Yongpradit.

As of 2024, only 60% of public high schools and 37% of middle schools in the U.S. offer any computer science courses. But those numbers may be growing, as more than half of states have instituted legislation to establish media and digital literacy educational standards.

My daughter’s research report was for social studies, but as a San Francisco public school student, she takes computer science too. She even goes to a computer lab and gets to play games when she’s completed her assignments as I did years ago. But the similarities stop there. She’s starting to learn simple programming, and did a lesson on how to tell if a website is trustworthy; I feel lucky our city’s public educational system is taking the lead with her. But after talking with Laura Ordoñez at Common Sense Media, I’ve also started chatting with her about the internet instead of hoping that’s a project for a more grown-up age. “It’s about looking at those natural moments that you already have with your kids,” suggests Ordoñez, “in the car, or riding bikes together. It’s the same way you’d ask how their day was. The reality is what kids want from their parents is a connection and an understanding.”

My daughter and I talk about AI when she uses the DJ feature on Spotify. When she triple texts friends on the iPad, we talk about communication etiquette. And we discuss lies and truth when we search the internet for answers to her infinite animal queries. I hope I’m doing a good job, but as always in parenting, I can’t know for sure. She hasn’t declared herself “good at the internet” just yet, but maybe she’ll make someone else glad to be her partner for the next report.

Rebecca Ackermann is a writer and designer living in San Francisco. Her work has appeared in MIT Tech Review, Esquire, Vox, and elsewhere.

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I Chose To Be A Stay-At-Home Mom, But Not For The Reasons You Think

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As soon as I quit my job — a decision I made unexpectedly when my son was 8 weeks old — I began to encounter headlines that attempted to quantify my new role. “If SAHMs were paid, their salary would be $184K/year,” went a typical one. My son will be 4 on his next birthday, and in my travels across the Internet, I still come across that number at least monthly. It’s a sum that far exceeds any salary I made, but it seemed especially irrelevant once I was doing what felt like both the most relentless and high stakes work of my life. What was the point in knowing my worth in theory, when it was accompanied by nothing material?

That fantasy six-figures appears, too, early on in The Power Pause: How to Plan a Career Break After Kids — And Come Back Stronger Than Ever by Neha Ruch, founder of the website (and popular Instagram account) Mother Untitled. When she invokes the number, it is to point out that, in her words, “Our work inside the home is critically important and valuable, yet few mothers I’ve met feel like a revered six-figure-earner during their career pauses.” Ruch’s mission is to change that. The Stanford MBA and former brand strategist’s current project, launched after leaving her corporate career following the birth of her kids, is to rebrand stay-at-home motherhood.

It is, perhaps, a role that could use some sprucing up. A perusal of any relevant online comment section, as well as plenty of IRL conversations, will tell you that opinion is split on whether the 21st century SAHM is a pitiable or a privileged figure (neither is a positive assessment). Ruch situates herself in the Lean In, girlboss era, but the stay-at-home mother faced disdain and condescension long before Sheryl Sandberg. It doesn’t help that the role as we conceive of it is largely mythological: In the history that Ruch starts the book off with, she shows how the postwar stay-at-home mother of the popular imagination was a historical aberration that became cemented in our minds thanks to the concurrent invention of television. When people picture the kind of mom who stays home, they’re picturing June Cleaver. When her work is done, Ruch hopes we might instead imagine a striving, multi-hyphenate woman whose years at home don’t condemn her to stagnant invisibility but take her somewhere even better — someone a bit like herself.

Ruch is threading a difficult needle at a time when tradwives dominate media attention and real political energy is aimed at reducing the choices women have gained over the last century. To distance herself from such currents, Ruch identifies her project as a feminist one and repeats the phrase “modern and ambitious” like an incantation against all that. She also sidesteps the mommy wars entirely: “Staying home with your kids isn’t a virtue, and neither is working,” she writes, and notes that “research shows that a parent’s career status has no bearing on the happiness levels of their children.” Instead, her focus is on what a career pause — her reimagining of the dreaded “employment gap” — might mean to the person taking it.

It’s a somewhat surprising book: self-help for people in a stage of life in which selfhood may feel secondary, a professional development manual for those out of a profession.

Midway through the book, Ruch recounts a remark by her husband. though it’s something anyone parenting full time has probably heard before, about how he could never do what she does. This is a comment she has come to understand, she writes, “as a ‘polite’ way of saying, ‘I’m just too complex for at-home parenthood. I need the challenge of work to stay fulfilled.’” Her resistance to this extremely common characterization evades its usual forms — unsubstantiated claims about the negative impacts of day care, lists of a million supermom accomplishments, or conservative talking points — and instead rests on a conceit I haven’t seen articulated elsewhere so clearly. It’s the idea that full-time caregiving can offer an immersive period of personal growth and that this alone might be reason enough to embark on it, if you can swing it.

If you can swing it is, of course, the question that conversations about how we arrange our lives after having kids tends to hinge on: the cost of child care or the impossibility of aligning work and school hours, the ability to take a hit to career progress and retirement earnings. This is why being an at-home parent is usually framed as a privilege, though the reality is more complex. According to some research, stay-at-home mothers in the United States today draw from two different pools: women with little education and income and women with a great deal of both, which is to say those with very few options as well as those with many. (It’s also worth noting that rates of SAHMs are relatively consistent across race and ethnicity, but, counter to what one might assume, white women are the least likely to stay home.)

Though Ruch makes efforts to be inclusive — of mothers whose departure from the workforce is not a choice, moms with medically complex children or additional dependent family members, and single mothers — the book, perhaps in congruence with its air of aspiration, mainly depicts mothers with more. A money coach quoted in the chapter on finances advises adding “$24,000 to the rainy-day fund” before quitting your job and the most down-market profession mentioned in the book is teaching. More often, the mothers featured are lawyers, heads of human resources, directors of strategy, or entrepreneurs.

Ruch’s consideration of how to forge and articulate a new identity during your pause that most excited me, offering a counternarrative to the notion — so pervasive once you are primed to look for it — that to depart employment is to surrender selfhood.

And yet, as a person who, though excessively educated, did not possess a $24,000 rainy-day fund, I’m reluctant to dismiss Ruch’s project on these grounds. After all, what isn’t easier to pull off if you’re wealthy? And to get to a place where the decisions about how we organize our lives as parents can be more than just financial ones, we need not just substantial policy change, but alternative ways of thinking about our options. After all, imagining a more robust range of possibilities for mothers, as The Power Pause tries to do, is a necessary step toward realizing them.

Right now, the truth is that, regardless of your socioeconomic class, becoming a stay-at-home mother is to opt for low-status, unpaid work that in the absence of a social safety net makes you vulnerable in ways people are eager to remind you of at every turn. When I somewhat impulsively quit my own job, those vulnerabilities were the what-ifs ringing in my ears: What if my husband was laid off? What if he died suddenly? What if I could never get another job after time away?

As with parenting in general, it was more common to find cautionary tales than clear upsides. Yet when my son was born, the thought of leaving him to go to the office became unbearable on a kind of soul-body level. Unfortunately, neither the soul nor body seemed like the appropriate grounds for such a major decision, not when surrounded by warnings about each year out of the workforce making you less employable. Beyond those stats, I didn’t even have the language to discuss the choice; at that time in my life, I’d spent significantly more time mulling over David Graeber’s theory of “bullsh*t jobs” than I had “the most important one.” So like many people explaining their work and child care decisions — both those who leave the workforce and those who don’t — I defaulted to money and logistics, like the fact that more than half my paycheck would go to child care. The impossibility of discussing the choice in any other terms, I can see now, only added to my sense of being alone in it.

Maybe The Power Pause would have helped. It’s a somewhat surprising book: self-help for people in a stage of life in which selfhood may feel secondary, a professional development manual for those out of a profession. It’s also optimistic, a handbook to a world that is not yet the norm — one in which spending time out of the workforce after having kids might be seen as something positive not just by employers but also by oneself and the culture at large.

Ruch guides the reader through making the decision to take a career pause, finding footing in your new role, and figuring out how to “grow and learn” during your time out of the workforce with an eye toward an eventual return. She draws on a wide network of experts and the experiences of real mothers. There is plenty of space devoted to the practicalities, not just financial ones but also how to seek support and resist the isolation so many SAHMs report. But it is Ruch’s consideration of how to forge and articulate a new identity during your pause that most excited me, offering a counter-narrative to the notion — so pervasive once you are primed to look for it — that to depart employment is to surrender selfhood.

I will never not be stunned that I could contribute to Social Security when I was answering emails that could have been averted by a Google search but not while keeping my children alive and tended to.

Though most of us spending our days with small children do not feel a sense of abundant time and energy, Ruch insists that there is radical potential in this phase: “When you aren’t going to the office every day and you don’t have a specific return-to-work date and you aren’t under a time crunch to get a new job or climb the ladder, you have the freedom to do all the skill building or hobby dabbling you may have been curious about in the past.” She goes on, “Pursuing hobbies, interests, and play is brave in a culture that has long emphasized productivity, pay, and profit.” Ruch declines here and throughout the book to explicitly name these cultural forces as capitalist — I found myself wishing she would push the argument a bit further and situate a power pause as something with more political potential. The stay-at-home mom as radical anticapitalist would be a compelling argument, but this is not that book.

Instead, the book brims with encouraging accounts of women who use their pauses to launch new, shinier, and kid-compatible careers, often making explicit use of skills they’d employed at home or for free in service of their communities, but the one I keep returning to is less conventional. It’s the story of a former tech employee, Christine Merritt, who discovers a passion for songwriting, sparked almost entirely by a poignant interaction she has with her son before bed one evening. Merritt has no musical background but ends up committing herself to learning songwriting, eventually going back to earn a new degree in it. Now this was a transformation! It’s what I’d wish I’d known to dream of when I stepped off the cliff of paid work myself, an alternate vision to weigh against all the dire ones. Does songwriting pay Merritt’s bills? It doesn’t seem to, or not yet. But isn’t it a symptom of the culture we live in that we are moved to ask that question, instead of whether working in tech ever made her heart sing?

As you might expect, The Power Pause includes plenty of LinkedIn speak. In making the case for support, Ruch writes, “Like any executive, you need to strategically assemble the right support team.” On justifying the cost of child care even when you don’t earn: “Child care should come out of the joint family budget because it supports the collaborative family organization.” For me, leaving the workforce had been in part about escaping this type of thinking and its ubiquitous language, a desire for a life less obviously bound by market obligations — and it exposed how thoroughly my identity and relations were bound up in philosophies of transaction, expectations of compensation and “fairness” that my children rightfully rejected from the moment they were born.

Herein lies the curious tension of The Power Pause: Much of Ruch’s credibility rests on her professional pedigree — the corner office she once had, the six-figure salary she gave up, her impressive resume — but she often gives the impression of someone in recovery from climbing the corporate ladder. Up at night, feeding her son during maternity leave, she experiences “a sense of calm and contentment that I’d been seeking since childhood.” She realizes then that “the prospect of exploring this version of myself as a mother and letting this sense of peace and belonging transform me was too enticing to ignore.” After she leaves her career, she finds that “detaching myself from corporate organizations has allowed me to be myself, exactly as I am.” She tells us that her stated goal while home with her kids was to be the calmest and most content version of herself that she could be. The most resonant parts of the book to me are when she talks about her pause in those terms: as a time of profound growth and self-actualization.

I’ve often wondered, even as I’ve insisted that care work is work, and heeded the calls to label what I do unpaid labor, if work is the right metaphor for parenting at all.

But the “power” in the pause is a promise that something external will come of all of this inner work; in Ruch’s case, a new chapter as an entrepreneur running Mother Untitled. Ruch is clear that she sees inherent worth in caregiving — she says she “could write this whole book arguing that stay-at-home parents deserve (and need) a paycheck for their work” — but in the world we live in, if not the one she is trying to create, her message’s momentum relies on the fact that caring for children will be seen as more valuable when it’s viewed as a “leadership training ground.” I get it. And I also don’t really want to think of my role as helming a tiny domestic corporation, serving as my family’s CEO. Why isn’t being the most present and capable parent I can be enough?

I’ve often wondered, even as I’ve insisted that care work is work, and heeded the calls to label what I do unpaid labor, if work is the right metaphor for parenting at all, even for those of us who do it in lieu of paid employment and so may feel especially inclined to legitimize it in those terms. And legitimization is important if we want social support for caregivers: I will never not be stunned that I could contribute to Social Security and appear in employment statistics when I was answering emails that could have been averted by a Google search but not while keeping my children alive and tended to. Still, so much of what has been transcendent for me about parenthood is how little it resembles anything I did before, especially paid employment. In the days with my children, who are neither my employees nor my employers but something far more complex, I marvel at all the change — mainly theirs, a rate of progress I’d always longed for during workdays that could feel stifling in their sameness, but also, not infrequently, my own. That change feels so powerful to me at times that it seems like it should be a currency all of its own. Maybe what I wish, and what I hope Ruch does too, is that someday, somehow it could be.

Lucy Morris is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in The Cut, Slate, BuzzFeed, and more. She previously wrote for Romper about ‘80s parenting books and when diet culture comes for babies.

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School Dropoff Is Everything That Sucks About Car Culture

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The first and only phone message I’ve gotten from my kid’s elementary school this year was about parking lot safety reminders: “Please listen to the directions of our staff that are in the parking lot to help direct traffic and keep children safe.” The welcome meeting for new parents was dominated by a discussion of drop-off and pick-up concerns. Last year, at his previous school, the weekly newsletters from the principal always included a note about the same. And I’m guessing if you’re a caregiver in the US, this sounds all too familiar.

I’ve come to see that the inherent chaos, inefficiency, and safety risks of school drop-offs by car mirror the paradox of car dependency more broadly: the more that people who have the choice or the privilege of driving are incentivized to drive, the more difficult, less comfortable, and less safe it becomes for people who don’t. As a parent who can’t drive, I’m reminded of this catch 22 almost daily as I navigate getting my kid across a busy intersection.

While children under the age of 16 make up about 10% of the population, nondrivers— a term that refers to everyone who doesn’t have reliable access to driving themselves in an automobile— all together make up around 30%. That 30% includes people like myself who have disabilities which prevent us from driving, like vision disabilities, developmental disabilities, mobility disabilities, neurological disabilities, mental or chronic health conditions. It also includes people who wouldn't identify as disabled, but aren’t able to safely drive, or safely drive in all conditions -- like seniors who are aging out of driving or people with anxiety or PTSD that prevents them from feeling comfortable getting behind the wheel. And it includes people who are unable to afford vehicles or afford gas, insurance and maintenance, many of whom are also disabled and from Black, brown, immigrant and tribal communities. Nondrivers include people whose licenses are suspended, young people who haven’t had the resources to go to driver’s ed, and people who choose not to drive or own vehicles. And of course, children are also nondrivers.

What if, instead of thinking about transportation access for nondriving children and youth as requiring unique and separate interventions, we develop solutions that work for all nondrivers?

For instance, all nondrivers benefit when we invest in safer routes to schools by reducing car speeds, shortening crossing times, and building better sidewalks and protected bike infrastructure. Giant cracks or uplifts in the sidewalk prevent wheelchair access, they also make it really hard to push a stroller, or if you’re a kid, you’re probably going to wipe out if you hit one of these on a bike or scooter.

For children who are fortunate enough to live within walking, rolling, or biking distance to school, it’s wonderful to encourage this “active transportation,” as it’s known. But it’s also important to consider whose work schedule allows the time to bike your kid to school, who has the physical ability to bike, not to mention access to one and somewhere to store it.

I’m particularly excited about some of the programs that exist in Washington state to make biking more available and inclusive. Our state has recently begun to fund statewide in school bike education, which offers adaptive bikes for children who need them. And while bike buses have gained some momentum, I’m more excited about initiatives like the Major Taylor Program at Cascade Bike Club that offers bike instruction and afterschool biking activities to middle school students in under-resourced communities, with the option (with state funding) to earn a bike to keep at the end of the sessions.

At the same time, when schools or after school activities assume or require a driving parent, we are also excluding many of the same families, families with the least resources and most barriers to participation. For many children, school may not be located close enough for active transportation, especially in rural areas. Many children need to attend a more distant school that offers specialized programs or resources. Access to school buses and access to public transit networks for older children and for children traveling with caregivers can make all the difference between being able to access a school with more resources or a special activity, and not having that access at all.

Dr. Kelcie Ralph at Rutgers University found that even when controlling for income, wealth, residential location, family composition, and race, “young adults who were carless as children completed less education, worked for pay less often, experienced more unemployment, and earned less than their matched peers with consistent car access.” The car dependence of our communities, in particular in the opportunities available for children, have generational impact.

And, at some level, our communities recognize this by funding school bus transportation systems. According to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, the majority of children from low-income families take the school bus. We understand that a child’s ability to attend school shouldn’t depend on the ability of a caregiver to transport them. But a national school bus driver shortage means that many districts are having difficulty serving routes.

Rethinking access means designing communities that are accessible to people who can’t drive, whether those people are of driving age or not.

Free transit for students helps young people develop the skills and confidence to navigate public transportation, skills that can translate to young adulthood, when they may not be able to drive or afford vehicles, or would prefer to remain free from the costs and stressors of driving. Transit agencies in Washington state are free for those 18 and under, and in Canada, most cities offer free transit to children under 12. In the US, cities that offer fare free transit to children and those with student IDs include Washington DC, Denver, and many California jurisdictions including Los Angeles, Riverside, San Diego, and San Francisco. (Not included on this list: systems that are fare free for everyone).

Just as children would benefit from the freedom of better access to public transit, adult nondrivers could benefit from the resources used to provide bus transport to children. In many of our rural communities, school districts provide bus transportation. But as soon as children leave high school, they age out, whether or not they can drive or afford a car. Wouldn’t it be amazing if when we provide rural transportation access to students, those routes could also serve other nondrivers who need transportation to and from population centers?

Rethinking access means designing communities that are accessible to people who can’t drive, whether those people are of driving age or not. When we think of children’s transportation as separate and different from the transportation needs of other nondrivers, we lose the potential of scalable solutions that work better when more people take advantage of them — better active transportation infrastructure, more reliable and frequent transit, and less exposure to crashes and poor air and noise quality as a result of mode shift.

So many of the indignities and limitations on the mobility of children exist because we consider nondriving children to be nondrivers only in a temporary way, not considering the children who as adults will not be able to safely drive or to reliably afford a vehicle. As a recent report from the Pedestrian and Bicycle Information Center at the University of North Carolina noted:

“Research shows that individuals with travel-limiting disabilities are two to three times more likely to live in households without a vehicle and rely on buses, subways, and commuter rail, compared to those living without disabilities. This means that many teens with disabilities will be using public transit, which will also require walking trips to and from transit stops, or relying on walking and bicycling when not being driven.”

If we consider the needs of nondriving children, nondriving teens, nondriving adults and nondriving seniors all together, it begins to feel inexcusable to design communities that require car ownership and the ability to drive. Recognizing the existence of nondrivers as a constituency allows us to question the profound misalignment between the way we have designed our communities around car dependency and the needs and desires of everyone who would like the freedom of movement and access without needing to be able to drive.

Anna Zivarts is the author of When Driving Isn’t an Option: Steering Away from Car Dependency (Island Press, 2024).

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With The Fires Still Burning, An L.A. Mom Looks For The Helpers

Photos by Fortesa Latifi

It would be a beautiful day if it weren’t for the ash. It’s everywhere, even in my neighborhood in Venice — settling over the streets, falling from the sky. Even with the doors and windows shut and air purifiers running throughout the house, you can smell it. I’ve had a headache for days and the shrill shriek of rescue vehicles and their siren songs are so constant that they’ve faded into the background.

This is Los Angeles in the first weeks of 2025, as wildfires rage across the city, destroying entire neighborhoods, thousands of homes, and charring 39,000 acres of land and counting. As the disaster reaches new heights — and with evacuation orders ever-expanding — the people of Los Angeles are turning to mutual aid and community organizing to combat both the effects of the fire and their despair about their city burning down around them.

The mood in my neighborhood is eerie and quiet and panicked. On Instagram, people post links to GoFundMes or directions to shelters that are looking for donations. In a seemingly exhaustive spreadsheet detailing local businesses providing mutual aid — where community members band together to help each other without the help of official organizations — I find Fiorelli Pizza, a restaurant on the famous Abbot Kinney Boulevard in Venice. When I get there, co-owners Liz Gutierrez and Michael Fiorelli are setting up for the day, getting ready to make countless pizzas which will be delivered to emergency workers and people affected by the fires.

“We’ve been in hospitality our whole lives,” Gutierrez tells me as she packages cookies and seals the packages shut with stickers. “So when something like this happens, we can only do what we can do and that’s feed people.”

They made the decision on Tuesday, as the wildfires consumed the city: They would deliver pizzas to local fire stations and feed anyone who showed up looking for a meal. Neighbors have donated ingredients and volunteered to run deliveries.

It’s easy to get jaded in the day-to-day, Gutierrez tells me, but seeing how people have stepped up for those affected has been heartwarming. “You think of how you can help, you make a list of things you can do,” Fiorelli says. “Our list is a very short list. We can do very little. We make pizza. So that’s what we do.”

“This is the same thing I would do in a refugee camp, except I’m doing it at my mother-in-law’s house.”

There’s something to be said for this kind of direct action in the face of such despair. “Human connection is what’s left when all else is gone. Provide that connection to someone you know,” writes Dr. Cara Natterson, a pediatrician who lives in Los Angeles, in her newsletter. “As the shock of the catastrophe wears off, the need to act replaces it.”

My sister, Chessa Latifi, who has lived in LA for 14 years, is no stranger to disaster. As the deputy director of emergency response and preparedness at Project HOPE, the lead of the Los Angeles Emergency Response Team, and someone who has spent her entire working life in disaster relief, it’s become second nature to her — but this is the first time she’s responded to a disaster in her own city. In addition to the work she’s doing for Project HOPE, she’s been trying to help her community in the most direct ways she can. Her mother-in-law is out of town, so she offered her house as a refuge to a family from my niece and nephew’s school community, one of many families there who lost their house and everything in it. Before they arrived, Chessa stocked the fridge with basics like milk and eggs (and beer and wine) and bought toys and stuffed animals for the kids.

In large-scale disasters like the ones she’s worked in previously, my sister tells me there’s a focus not only on providing basic necessities like food and clothing but something that aid workers call “protection.”

“Within protection, you want to provide children with safe spaces,” she says. “And what’s in those safe spaces? Toys, art materials, books, a place where a kid can be a kid and have those activities that give them an outlet and a distraction. This is the same thing I would do in a refugee camp, except I’m doing it at my mother-in-law’s house.”

Down Venice Boulevard, at Saba Surf, a surf shop and café has been transformed into a place for community members to gather donations. Laura Quintana, one of the co-owners of Saba, posted on Instagram that they were accepting donations, and clothes, food, and hygiene products poured in. Quintana didn’t know how they would transport all of it to donation centers, but after another post on Instagram, volunteers showed up to do it for them.

“Everything was gone within 20 minutes,” Quintana says. “It’s really cool how everybody’s showing up.”

Now Saba is looking to launch a drive where people can donate children’s wetsuits, leashes, and fins. Consider it “protection” for surfer kids.

“I want to use my own hands to help someone. And so that sense of empowerment helps us all deal better with the anxiety of this catastrophe. But it also aids people in a more immediate way.”

A 2022 study published through the University of Chicago found that one of the leading values of people who participate in mutual aid is that of understanding their act as one based on shared humanity. And taking part in mutual aid is beneficial for both parties involved: a 2023 study on the early days of Covid found that mutual aid organizers experienced benefits to their own well-being as a result of being involved in helping others.

“Mutual aid works from a model of solidarity rather than charity,” says Kimberly Bender, a professor of social work at the University of Denver who led the 2023 study. “Solidarity centers our collective relationship and responsibility for caring for one another. Everyone has needs and everyone has something to give. When we share and when we receive, we feel a part of something bigger that will sustain us through multiple crises.”

I saw this working all over the city these past few days.

Down the street at a sprawling coworking space on the corner of Venice Boulevard and Abbot Kinney Boulevard, I find Veronica Velasquez dispensing directions to volunteers. When the fires first started to burn, Velasquez tells me she felt “what everyone was feeling: helpless.” She couldn’t stand just watching anymore, and that’s when she started organizing donations.

“Really, this is just a grassroots effort,” she says with a wave toward the space, which is filled with boxes of diapers and nonperishable food and hygiene products and children’s toys. The toys, specifically, are close to Velasquez’s heart. As a child in Colombia, she was evacuated because of a bomb threat followed by a volcanic eruption. “As a kid, I dealt with sitting in a gym with your backpack for hours, not knowing what’s going to happen and what you’re going to do next,” she says, her eyes filling with tears. “So for me it was really important to have a little kids area where there are toys and books and things for them to do and read.”

“Everyone has needs and everyone has something to give. When we share and when we receive, we feel a part of something bigger that will sustain us through multiple crises.”

As the coworking space buzzes with the energy of volunteers eager to help their community, Velasquez explains why she chose mutual aid and direct organizing over donating to organizations. “I want to use my own hands to help someone. And so that sense of empowerment helps us all deal better with the anxiety of this catastrophe,” she says. “But it also aids people in a more immediate way.” Even if you’re not here, you only have to open up social media to see the ways Angelenos are doing this for each other

After I finish speaking to Velasquez, I tuck my recorder in my pocket and walk home. When I get there, I search through my daughter’s nursery for things we haven’t opened and pack three boxes full of diapers, baby wipes, manual breast pumps, swaddle blankets, and a diaper bag. As I lug the boxes to my car to bring them to a donation center, I look out at the plumes of smoke floating in the sky. It’s easy to feel enveloped by despair. The news drones on, updating me on how many thousands of houses have been lost and how many people are displaced. But then I think of my sister buying toys for kids who lost their house and scroll through Instagram stories of my friends gathering supplies for donation centers and pack the boxes in my car to bring supplies to babies and mothers who need them. And just for a moment, I feel something else — not hope exactly, but something close to it.

Fortesa Latifi is a journalist who is currently working on a book about family vloggers and child influencers. She has bylines in places like The Washington Post, The New York Times, and Teen Vogue, among others. You can find her anywhere @hifortesa.

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5 Questions To Ask Your Pediatrician About The Updated COVID-19 Vaccine

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We all want the best for our kids — keeping them healthy, happy, and safe is always top of mind. But with the ongoing threat of COVID-19, you may be wondering what the latest steps are to protect them. While many are diligent about staying up to date with their family's yearly flu vaccines, COVID-19 vaccination is sometimes met with hesitancy, often due to lingering questions and concerns about its newness. A study found that 70% of pediatricians discussed and had an affirmative opinion about COVID-19 vaccine for children. Despite this, vaccine acceptance was lower for children aged 5–8 years compared to older age groups (9–12 and 13–18 years).¹

To help you feel more empowered and informed, let’s dive into some questions you can ask your child’s pediatrician to stay informed and help keep your little ones safe from COVID-19.

1. Is The COVID-19 Vaccine Right For My Child?

Many parents have concerns about the COVID-19 vaccine for their children. The reassuring news? According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), COVID-19 vaccines for children have undergone rigorous testing and have been carefully studied in clinical trials to ensure they meet necessary safety standards.² Between these clinical trials and real-world data, the vaccine has demonstrated that it can help reduce the risk of severe illness, hospitalization, and complications associated with COVID-19.³ Those who received the updated COVID-19 vaccines were 54% less likely to get COVID-19 during mid-September to January.³ They not only help protect against severe illness and hospitalization but can help prevent long-term issues, including Long COVID.³

It’s also worth noting that the risk of serious outcomes from COVID-19 in kids isn’t just a concern for those with underlying conditions. In 2023, 54% of hospitalized children and adolescents had no pre-existing health issues before contracting the virus.⁴ This data highlights how COVID-19 can impact everyone, even children, differently and why it’s so important to vaccinate all eligible children—not just those considered high-risk.

While it’s rare for adolescents to have a serious reaction to the COVID-19 vaccine, it’s important to always discuss your child’s health history with their pediatrician before vaccination.

2. What Should I Know About Long COVID In Children?

There’s a lot of talk about Long COVID — and it’s not just adults who are feeling the effects. Recent reports tell us that Long COVID now affects about one in four children, with symptoms that can linger for weeks, impacting their daily routines making it challenging to keep up with schoolwork, participate in sports and even engage in social activities.⁵ ⁶ Understanding how Long COVID can affect their day-to-day lives and well-being is the first step in keeping kids healthy.

According to the CDC, Long COVID symptoms can range from fatigue and brain fog to exhaustion.⁷ Fortunately, vaccinating your child and taking preventive measures can greatly reduce their risk of developing Long COVID. It’s one of the most effective ways to protect you and your child from the initial infection and any long-term effects that may follow.⁷

3. When Is The Best Time To Get My Child Vaccinated Against COVID-19?

The CDC recommends that everyone aged 6 months and older get an updated COVID-19 vaccine.³

If your child recently had a COVID-19 infection, the CDC advises both children and adults may delay receiving the updated COVID-19 vaccine for up to 90 days (about three months) from when they received a positive COVID-19 test or the start of symptoms.⁸ As always, make sure you’re talking with your child’s healthcare provider about the best time for them to get vaccinated.

4. Can My Child Receive The COVID-19 Vaccine Along With A Flu Shot?

Wondering if it’s okay to give your child the COVID-19 and flu vaccines during the same appointment? In most cases, it’s acceptable for kids to get vaccinated simultaneously to keep your child’s immunizations on track without needing to come back for separate appointments.⁹ This is especially handy during the winter virus season to protect against COVID-19 and the flu at the same time, reducing your child’s risk of getting sick from either virus.³ ⁹ ¹⁰

Your pediatrician can work with you to coordinate your child’s vaccination schedule, making sure they’re fully protected. They can also answer any questions about how these vaccines work together to ensure your child receives effective protection against multiple illnesses.

5. Can I Get The COVID-19 Vaccine During Pregnancy?

If you’re expecting, data from the CDC shows that getting vaccinated while pregnant is highly recommended. Pregnancy may make you more vulnerable to serious illnesses from COVID-19, which could lead to complications for both you and your baby. Receiving an updated COVID-19 vaccine can help protect you from these risks and give your newborn some protection through the antibodies you pass on via breast milk.¹¹ Extensive studies have shown that the benefits of vaccination outweigh the risks, and there’s no evidence that the COVID-19 vaccine affects fertility.¹¹ However, some common side effects include pain, soreness, and redness at the injection site and chills, fever, tiredness, and headaches.²

If you’re pregnant, talk to your healthcare provider about any concerns regarding COVID-19 vaccination so you can make the best decision for you and your baby.

Taking the lead in conversations with your pediatrician about COVID-19 vaccines is an excellent way to advocate for your child’s health. By asking the right questions, you’ll get the latest info and feel more confident about making the best choices for your child. Even though COVID-19 can still feel like a new challenge, we have more tools and knowledge than ever to protect our kids. With your pediatrician’s guidance, you can navigate the changing landscape of COVID-19 with confidence.

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Maybe We Can Be Mothers And Still Feel Free

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Last month I peeked my head into my son's bed cave at 9:15 AM and whispered to him that I was off to a meeting, then to a friend's house. When I squeezed his foot as I zipped him back in, his pre-teen body making the twin bed look tiny, I felt happy. I immediately thought of the word freedom.

And then I thought, as I often do, of a photo from 2021. In the picture it's also winter, and I'm hiding under that same son’s bed. We are in our tenth month of no childcare, no school, no daycare. My ear is pressed to my shoulder and my knee is in my armpit. I look like I’m playing 2-dimensional Twister, and losing. I remember the moment my daughter took the picture with her iPad, delighted because she’d found me in our game of hide and seek. In the photo, I look contorted and trapped. I am, of course, smiling.

During those lockdown months, my children were 2, 3, 4, 5. And I don't know if you have been around any 3-year-olds lately, but there was a physical and emotional intensity to parenting during this time that is beyond any description; if you have ever been furious with a child, imagine being locked in a room with them and unable to leave for a year. Imagine how much you would want to be alone.

And so there is a part of me, emotionally but physically too, that is constantly bracing, as if I'm still alone in the house with my kids. And I can't stop thinking about that photo because in some ways I'm still in it. I think, I know, it's the reason that, in the years since, what I always wanted — what I still want, need, more than anything — is space. Time alone so I can breathe; unclench.

My husband, thankfully, works long days out of our house. He takes the kids out to breakfast on weekend mornings so I can have a few hours to myself; they have regular dad and kids dinners at restaurants while I exist alone in our house. A friend described herself as Gollum, the way she guards her time alone, and I felt seen. I guard my girls' trips, my book club times, my silent baths. I curl around my precious snatches of time like Gollum with his ring, too, hissing at social obligations or even another hour of snuggles (please say I'm not the only one?).

But something has changed, and I'm only just starting to notice it. I don't feel trapped in the same way. I don't know if it’s that (for better or worse) social supports are back and running post-pandemic, or if it's just my kids getting older. I do know any sliver of community care —playdates, shared pickups — still feels extraordinary.

And I know the feeling of freedom can go away at any time — a medical diagnosis, job loss, even relationships. There are many ways mothers can be trapped, and just because I feel some freedom now doesn’t mean I always will.

I thought I’d need time alone forever —it truly felt like a black hole of need, one I’d never be able to satisfy.

But still: yesterday I came out of hiding in my bedroom, where I'd holed up to get some writing in, only to find the house was quiet. I had come out into the living room, dreading the immediate dive into the what was for dinner debate, but my kids were off running around the neighborhood. My house was empty, but I was still hiding.

Who, exactly, am I hiding away from?

This possibility, this perspective, that motherhood doesn't have to mean feeling trapped feels something like a secret. I wonder if I might be alone in this feeling, or if I'm just a selfish mother (another thing to discuss in therapy this week), or if many lockdown parents feel this way.

This year, though, I plan to notice when I feel free. I’m going to pay attention to the moments that feel like freedom, even, especially, the ones within my family.

And to the moms that feel trapped right now, for whatever reason, know this: I can’t promise you that feeling will change, but I can say it might. It did for me. I thought I’d need time alone forever —it truly felt like a black hole of need, one I’d never be able to satisfy. But just as my tiny son in his once-big bed has become a massive boy who makes that same bed look small, perspectives shift. The fact that my perspective on parenting has been able to shift in this fundamental, liberating way is such a surprise, and I wish it for anyone else hissing and hiding under a bed. In fact, I hope this year you’ll join me in imagining that maybe, we can be both mothers, and free.

Kathleen Donahoe writes free funny essays at alittlelaugh.substack.com and is working on a novel.

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11 Healthy Make-Ahead Soups You Can Freeze For Future Dinners

It’s soup season. And I don’t mean “ooh it’s cold outside, so it’s time for soup,” I mean it’s dark and it’s dreary and it’s freezing and who can even think about actually making something for dinner when you just want to sit in your couch cocoon? That’s why it’s soup season and it’s a specifically good time to make a bunch of healthy soups to freeze for future evenings when you simply can not.

The word “healthy” is a spectrum, so don’t let that word make you think this is a list of slightly flavored waters with spinach in them. These freezable soups are hearty, savory, full of your favorite things, and perfect for making in big batches. You could make a double batch tonight, eat a few bowls, save some for lunches, and then freeze the rest and future you will be so grateful. There are also plenty of soups to make ahead here that are a hit with families and kids, which is a must when you just need to feed the people so you can get the people in baths and to bed and you can retreat back to your couch cocoon.

So grab yourself some freezer bags or some of those fancy silicone cubes for freezing soup and spend an hour or so in your kitchen. With all the double chopping and boiling, it really won’t take long to make a bunch of healthy soups for your freezer and your family.

The Best Lentil Soup

Cookie & Kate

Any recipe with the word “best” in the title is a must to try, right? This lentil soup recipe from Cookie & Kate is full of bright flavors like lemon, collard greens, and curry powder, and freezes beautifully. Prep it in advance and defrost it in no time for a great healthy lunch or easy dinner.

Instant Pot Butternut Squash Soup

Damn Delicious

Is there anything more I’ve-got-my-life-togetherthan making a soup in your Instant Pot and then freezing to enjoy later? This Instant Pot butternut squash soup from Damn Delicious is so easy and good, and after thawing it out, all you have to do is top it with some bacon and chives for a gorgeous bowl of soup.

Chicken Tortilla Soup

Spend With Pennies

Chicken tortilla soup is always a classic, and this recipe from Spend with Pennies is super easy and has lots of vibrant flavors. You can customize with the amount of heat from the jalapeños, as well as the toppings you choose, from cilantro and avocado to tortilla strips. You can even freeze this soup for up to three months, so go ahead and make a few batches to last you the rest of the cold months.

Freezer Meal Wild Rice Soup

Pinch of Yum

OK, this is a freezer soup with a bit of a twist— you freeze all the ingredients beforehand (for up to three months) and then you dump it in the Instant Pot when you’re ready to eat. This freezer meal wild soup from Pinch of Yum is earthy, savory, and totally customizable.

French Onion Soup

Spend With Pennies

Does it get any cozier than French onion soup? While this soup isn’t always considered a “healthy” option, it’s only because of the bread and cheese, which you can absolutely customize to your liking. Cook the onions and broth, let them cool and then freeze. You can add the rest when you thaw it to eat. So perfect.

Sausage & Kale Soup

A Spicy Perspective

I love a soup with kale and this sausage and kalesoup recipe from A Spicy Perspective is just so good. It’s hearty, it’s cozy, it’s everything you want in a soup. But to freeze this recipe, leave out the heavy cream and stir it in after it thaws.

Beef Barley Soup

The Cozy Apron

A nice rustic, hearty soup that freezes well? Why yes please. This beef barley soup from The Cozy Apron is full of veggies and big hunks of rib-eye, and it’s the ultimate comfort food. Prep it as the recipe says, but save the barley and add it in when you thaw it out.

Stuffed Pepper Soup

Cooking Classy

This stuffed pepper soup from Cooking Classy is such a hearty option for lunch or dinner, and it’s a great one to make ahead. It does have rice in it, so go ahead and make the soup without the rice and then freeze so that it doesn’t get too mushy when you thaw everything together.

Egg Roll Soup

Gimme Some Oven

Want a comfort food but in a healthy, make-ahead soup version? Obviously, you want this egg roll soup from Gimme Some Oven. It’s hearty and lovely and has all those egg roll flavors you love so much and can be frozen for up to three months.

Creamy Tomato Soup

Inside BruCrew Life

Tomato soup is always a family favorite, and this recipe for creamy tomato soup from Inside BruCrew Life is only seven ingredients and 25 minutes until it’s on the table. It freezes beautifully — you can even freeze it in single servings — and you can top it off with plenty of fresh ground pepper and croutons after it’s warmed up.

Creamy Sweet Potato Chicken Soup

Averie Cooks

This delicious sweet potato chicken soup from Averie Cooks is so easy, and you can make it even easier by using rotisserie chicken if you don’t want to shred your own. Loaded with spinach, mushrooms, and sweet potatoes, this is a super filling and healthy soup, and the entire thing freezes like a dream.

These soups are perfect for freezing so you always have a delicious meal ready for a cozy night, and they also make great, easy lunches.

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