In this conversation, Ivana shares the journey of her ambition in law and in the home while also caretaking for several elders and community-building. Her path there is highly entangled with her current professional role, where she writes and researches on the complicated role of modern day stay-at-home parents: anyone caring full-time for a child under the age of 12, even if they also work for pay. Ivana explains how current policy could better support stay-at-home parents, in their widely varying situations. She also gives tips to keep a family and community on the rails — mealtime, hiring, and keeping bulk snack-packs in stock to make your home a de facto gathering place for years to come.

I’ve previously chatted with Ivana on her Substack, The Home Front, about ambition and the household. Read all the way to the bottom for a small announcement.

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Ivana: For the first couple years of our lives, my husband and I actually lived a couple of blocks away from each other in Washington Heights, New York. Then my parents moved across the bridge into northern New Jersey.

I went to public school K-12. I went to college in Maryland at Johns Hopkins, got my master’s degree in Paris, and then went to law school at Harvard.

I have one brother, so I don’t come from a big family, but my family growing up was always very tight. I have a very large extended family, and so family has always been really important to me. I also grew up Catholic and I had many friends who were Catholic and who were also part of larger extended families. That did definitely shape my opinion about the importance of family and the importance of children.

My husband and I got engaged when I was in law school, but we didn’t get married until after I graduated. I had thought I’d be a federal prosecutor, so I went and clerked for one judge and then another judge.

Then my husband got a job at Yale University. He’s a philosophy professor, and so we moved up here in 2014 and I started working for a law firm in New Haven right after we moved up here.

The Full Circle of Life: Ambition in Law and at Home

Nicole: You and I have talked about how ambition often overlaps in the domestic realm and also in the career realm. How did that take shape for you? Did you look at law as the peak of ambition? Were you thinking about starting a family? How did those two things begin to entangle?

Ivana: I had my first child not long after I started at the law firm, and even before that my dad had gotten quite sick with cancer. When my dad got sick, I was really involved in helping him. He died shortly after my first son was born.

I always knew I wanted to have kids, but I can’t quite remember exactly how I thought that would work in law school. I probably thought I’ll put my kids in daycare and focus on my career, but there wasn’t a point in my life where I’ve ever been just 100% focused on my paid job.

Nicole: How did you navigate beginning to take care of your dad, having a newborn, and being at a law firm? I really like that you focus on caretaking for elders as a common part of stay-at-home parenthood broadly.

Ivana: The law firm that I worked with was very flexible with me and I did many different work arrangements for them — I worked full-time, I worked part-time, worked on an hourly basis, I was on leave. They were very accommodating, but it was still very difficult.

I don’t know that I have advice to offer other than you really can only take it day by day. It’s very hard to have a grand plan about how that will go when someone’s got really serious health problems and you also have a little baby.

My dad passed away when my oldest son was eight months old. I was down there while he was dying, and I remember I was holding his hand with one of my hands and I was nursing the baby with the other hand. And it was just — here is the full circle of life.

My son’s middle name is the same as my father’s first name. It was one of those experiences that are really difficult, but also very beautiful. It really was just a question of taking everything one day at a time.

The False Dichotomy of Working vs Stay at Home Parent

Nicole: You also research and write about policy related to homemakers, mothers, children, and family.

Ivana: I research through a think tank, Capita, and we have done a bunch of independent research into families that have a parent at home — and we define that more broadly than some other places.

Capita’s scope of study: Families where a parent is caring for a child under the age of 12, full-time at home. They do not exclude people who work for pay alongside that.

That means that we talk to a lot of people who are taking care of their kids at home. Some are just at home with their kids, but others successfully combine work and keeping their kids at home. For example, I’ve talked to parents who are homeschooling, but then also have paid jobs that they do, whether they do that remotely or they do that in the evening after the kids are in bed.

Parents that combine home and work in this way make up a group of people that is both pretty common nowadays, but also often not recognized by policymakers. There are a lot of families that don’t fall into neat buckets.

Nicole: When you mention “families that don’t fall into neat buckets,” or even “the false divide between working and stay-at-home parents,” are there specific outliers you’re thinking of?

Ivana: One example is a nurse I talked to, who works a night shift three days a week, and then she homeschools her kids during the day. Her husband lets her sleep in when she comes home from the night shift and then he goes off to work. When she wakes up, she takes over caring for the kids. This family has personal goals for why they want to homeschool their kids, and they’ve taken advantage of flexible work options to make that work.

Nicole: I want to talk about stay-at-home parents and equal pay. In response to a recent Twitter debate, you wrote:

“If you want families to feel comfortable having a parent at home — I do — I believe conservatives must create a positive, pro-woman, pro-family vision of what that looks like.

Rolling back the legal rights of women to work or advocating for male heads of household to be paid more than their female counterparts is a political non-starter. Indeed, it is deeply counterproductive because it is alienating.

Happily, there is another way. It starts with recognizing that the work of the home is (as it has always been) critical to the flourishing of families and societies. Thus, those who do it should be protected and encouraged.

This means reforming the complex framework that governs our health and retirement benefits so homemakers are protected. It means making it easier for homemakers to move in and out of the workforce according to family needs.

It means also avoiding the twin traps of the 19th century (which said homemakers could not be fully equal because they were inherently lesser) and the 20th century (which said homemakers could not be fully equal because vindicating those rights required being in the paid workforce).

I hope in the 21st century we can propose a different message: the work of the home is something that is valuable, and those who do it are fully equal to someone in the paid workforce because of how valuable homemaking is.”

Could you expand on how to protect homemakers? And how we can make it easier for homemakers to move in and out of the workforce according to family needs?

Ivana: In the United States, you really have to look at the welfare benefit system provided by both the government and private employers if you want to understand how people live their lives. So when you look at those two systems, you start to get the sense that they are reasonably well set up for a traditional homemaker-breadwinner division of labor where the wife never works and the husband has a full-time career his entire life, and they’re also set up for a two-career couple where both spouses work full-time for the entirety of their career.

But they are not well set up for couples where maybe Mom is doing the vast amount of childcare, but she still does some amount of paid work. Or maybe Mom is at home for a few years, then she goes back into the workforce for a few years, then maybe she comes back out of the workforce when an older parent starts needing significant help.

Those kinds of people who don’t fit into neat buckets are not well served by our system. I’m interested in reforms that make things easier for these people who are doing really valuable and important work and are slipping through our safety and welfare benefit nets.

Nicole: What are some of the most compelling changes that you think are possible in the immediate future? Or levers that we can pull to serve this group of families better?

Ivana: One of the most obvious is that with the Social Security system, if you are working full-time and you become disabled, you are entitled to Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI), which is calculated based on how many years you have worked.

However, if you are a wife who started her career in the paid workforce, but then dropped out to take care of little kids — if you stay out too long, you are no longer eligible for SSDI. Even if you’ve paid into it for a decade, as long as your separation from the workforce is long enough, you’re not going to be eligible for it.

You also won’t have disability insurance through your job because you don’t have a job. And you also will probably not be able to collect the failsafe safety net, which is Social Security Insurance, which is for people who are very poor. If you’re married, your assets are probably too large to qualify for that.

That is a narrow sliver of people, because there are not that many homemakers who become permanently disabled after having paid significant amounts into the Social Security system. But it is a real problem for those that do. And it is indicative of the way that the Social Security credit system is not well set up to deal with people who are moving in and out of the workforce.

Nicole: What change would you recommend to work on this?

Ivana: With Social Security, the fix is conceptually very easy.

We would need to assign some period in which the government gives what are called “caregiver credits.” So you would still get credit in the Social Security system, even if you step out of the workforce to care for small children for some period of time. Many other countries have this setup where they’ll credit three years to your Social Security calculation if you step out of the workforce for three years to care for kids.

I’ll be candid with you and say that I don’t think it’s likely. The Social Security Trust Fund is under a lot of pressure right now. To the extent it’s being changed, they’re likely to make things less generous.

But that is, in theory, a fix which is conceptually very clear and would make a big difference for people.

The US considered caregiver credits at different points, but it never got the political backing to pass. At this point it’s probably too late because of the pressures on the Social Security Trust Fund right now. The places that did adopt Social Security credits often did it for explicitly pronatalist reasons — they were concerned about dropping birth rates — so they were trying to come up with different ways to make it easier for women to have children.

That was a motivating factor, at least in some places that have adopted these caregiver credits, that has never been particularly persuasive, at least not to date, for U.S. policymakers. There has not really been the same political push in the United States to adopt those kinds of measures.

Nicole: You’ve said with regard to a policy pitch by now-Vice President Vance:

“One of the most important ways to help address childcare costs is to help address supply problems: which means making it easier for small community providers, relatives, and parents to care for kids (if desired) rather than just subsidizing demand.”

Can you expand on that?

Ivana: There’s a lot of churn in the United States right now about how to do childcare policy well, where to direct resources, and where to think about reforming regulations. One of the avenues that I think is very promising is to make it easier for people to use what’s called friends, family, and neighbor care (FFN Care) as a source of childcare.

One reason why this is attractive is that in many places, the large daycare model is not well suited for many reasons. In rural areas, there just may not be enough children in a specific geographic location to make such a center really viable. Among communities that have strong cultural or religious traditions … it may be really important to them that their child is cared for by someone of the same background as them. Or if you are going to work and you have a toddler at home, you may just prefer it if your mom is able to take care of your toddler.

It’s a weird juxtaposition because there’s all this stuff in the news right now about how this might possibly be an avenue for fraud. And of course, fraud should always be taken seriously. But I do think these kinds of more flexible childcare arrangements are – for many people – what they would consider ideal childcare for their young children.

* FFN: Friends, Family, and Neighbor care refers to informal, flexible childcare arrangements outside of licensed centers, like a neighbor who watches kids in her home alongside her own. It’s distinguished from large center-based programs like Head Start. Whether FFN caregivers can receive payment through federal childcare subsidies like CCDF vouchers varies significantly by state.

Nicole: NYC has made the news recently because of mayor Zohran Mamdani’s proposal for universal childcare expansion — a plan that aims to make childcare free for all children from six weeks to five years old, funded by a proposed tax on millionaires and corporations, starting with an expansion of free 2-K seats this fall in partnership with Governor Hochul.

A concern of mine is that if mothers want to stay at home but are in a place where every dollar matters, financial support for licensed childcare facilities alone tilts the scales in favor of one kind of family setup, rather than providing pluralistic policy that also supports stay-at-home parents.

Your work highlights that a) parents who are the primary care providers may also often be working, and b) they may have more complex motivations for staying home than policymakers often give them credit for — such as carrying for a medically needy child, accommodating complex learning disabilities, or doing additional care work for another elderly or sick family member.

Your recent report in Desert says:

“Our research found that a majority of parents with children under the age of 12, whether or not they are stay-at-home parents — and including close to half of Republicans — would be more likely to support child care legislation if it both strengthened families with stay-at-home parents and those that use licensed child care programs.”

Do you have recommendations on how Mamdani’s universal childcare proposal could be modified to strengthen families with stay-at-home parents as well?

In general, I believe childcare policy should be as pluralistic as possible. Good government policies should empower parents to make the choices that work for their own families, rather than slotting them into one lifestyle or another. I’m not super familiar with Mamdani’s proposal, but in general many childcare proposals are not universal at all. They only provide support for families where the parents want to work full time, and offer nothing to families with a stay-at-home parent. Often, the rationale is explicitly economic; there’s frequently discussion of boosting the GDP by making it cheaper for moms to work, or something along those lines.

Nicole: You’ve seen both full-time salaried motherhood (while working as a litigator) to more stay-at-home motherhood, mixed with elder caretaking, and homeschooling.

Again, I really appreciate your voice of reason in online discourse, having done the full gamut and having kids that are a bit older. What have you learned from seeing both sides of “working” and stay-at-home motherhood and what do people get wrong about this?

Ivana: I don’t think that there is “one path” or a perfect solution here. It is so family-specific, what combination of outside care, home care, et cetera, is the right call and will work best for that family. So I get aggravated when I see the discussion being framed as a very black-and-white thing.

‘Obviously it’s better for mom to work full-time and the kids to be in daycare.’ I get irritated by that, but I also get irritated by people who say, ‘No, the only right thing to do is to have the child home with mom all the time, and you should homeschool all the way through to when the child leaves the house.’ I don’t think that’s right either.

To the extent I have a strong opinion, it’s little babies. I don’t think it’s ideal if they’re in daycare. I don’t know exactly what the cutoff is, but I don’t want to see a six-week-old in daycare. I would like it if our society could make changes so that no one has to be freshly postpartum and send their six-week-old baby to daycare and go to work.

Nicole: To move into your household and family rituals: I’ve really enjoyed your dispatches from homeschooling and kid-rearing that you share on Twitter and Substack. What is a day in the life of Ivana Greco?

Ivana: My faith is really important to me, and my children are being brought up in the church. That’s a real source of connection and meaning for us. Although my husband is an atheist and he doesn’t share my religious beliefs, he’s very sweet about coming to Mass with us and really respectful of all the different parts of my religion.

We love books, so we’re always at the library. My kids probably check out two milk crates full of books every week.

Dinner is really important to us. We always try to gather around the dinner table and my husband’s home by then. To have us all in the same place is a cementing factor in our day and a lot of really important conversations happen at dinner. And then the big kids and I watch Star Trek every night — we actually have a lot of really good conversations about that.

Nicole: That is very sweet. How do you guys handle meals as a family of six? Do you have recommendations on just maintaining this habit over time?

Ivana: I’m not a very elaborate cook at this point in my life. I have a few standard meals that I rotate through: burrito night, pasta with meatballs night, breakfast for dinner night. My cooking right now is not very creative. I have to come up with something that all of the kids will eat and the adults will find palatable.

Nicole: This has already been a theme with the people I’ve talked to. When I chatted with Wilson Cusack for Third Oikos recently, he said the same. They also have four kids. Having a theme and structure for days of the week was immensely helpful in setting kids’ expectations, scheduling, and getting everyone on board. So I’m going to have to try this.

Ivana: Yeah, I don’t know about you, but I don’t like wasting food. I find it much more helpful to have the things I know for a fact that we eat and just buy those things over and over again, rather than being like, ‘Oh yeah, that recipe in the New York Times looks really interesting, I’ll give that a try.’ That may be for once the kids are older or move out of the house. But for right now, I have my pantry staples, which I buy on repeat, and then I basically just cook the same things over and over again.

Nicole: I also like cooking within my wheelhouse, whereas my husband is a much more creative cook — he’s energized by the challenge. I’ve been trying to figure out how to use Claude Code to order our regular Costco ingredient staples, then make the meal plan based off of that, because it’s comforting to me to just have the same set of ingredients in the fridge and be able to work from there.

Ivana: Especially with little kids, you have to do what works. It reduces the stress around mealtime, which makes the mealtime itself more open to creativity because we know what we’re going to eat so that stress is removed. The meal can be warmer, more connected, and more pleasant rather than fighting with a kid about eating asparagus that’s been cooked with Parmesan cheese on top.

Comfort with Chaos in Litigation and in Parenting

Nicole: That reminds me of some of the other tweets of yours about the managerial aspect of stay-at-home motherhood, and how you develop “Standard Operating Procedures” for certain situations.

“Having a protocol means you don’t have to reinvent the wheel for each predictable problem. There’s already plenty to think about, and so every place you can avoid additional decision-making is helpful. The incredibly useful Lazy Genius podcast calls this concept “decide once.” Instead of making a new decision each time, just make one decision, and stick with it until it no longer works. In my head, this logic means I have a series of “best practices” or “protocols” to address common problems.”

You mention these different axes where you’re thinking about the kids’ wellbeing, but also stretching the kids, but also making sure everybody gets fed, but also your wellbeing, and sometimes the bigger goal of just sitting down at a dinner that feels pleasant and connecting to everybody.

I like your orientation towards triaging priorities: asking what the primary goal coming out of a meal is, and then thinking about adding other goals where possible.

Ivana: The other thing that I would say is that if you want to be a homemaker, and especially if you want to homeschool your kids, it is really important to take care of yourself, because it is a big job.

I really try to prioritize that because I know that if I don’t, if I’m not functioning well, the rest of the family is just going to fall apart because I wear so many hats. I’m the source of the food, the house being clean, the education. My husband also makes it a priority that I’m able to get regular exercise, eat reasonably healthy food, and am able to get a good night’s sleep because those are the non-negotiables for me in order to be able to wear all the hats that I do.

Nicole: I loved the piece you wrote about stay-at-home mom burnout broadly, but you also tweeted,

”With a doctor who is burning out, we don’t (hopefully) tell him/her to suck it up, but rather to work with a trusted mentor on identifying and addressing pain points and searching for opportunities for genuine care of self. A wise SAHM thinks about this too!”

Do you have other recommendations on that note? I’m also interested in whether you have takeaways from managing yourself in your legal career, and how you brought that into the household, parenting, homeschooling, homemaking, and caretaking.

Ivana: There certainly are a lot of overlapping skill sets. As a lawyer, you have to be organized, have good attention to detail, and have to know how to work a calendar really well. I was a litigator and so you also have to be comfortable with chaos.

It’s very similar to being at home with your kids. You are going into a high-pressure, high-stress field. You have to be comfortable with tolerating some degree of chaos and things you don’t control. There are a lot of different fields like this, like working in the ER or doing litigation.

I think the same is true of being a homemaker — you just have to understand your kids’ attitudes are not really within your control and you should not pay attention to people who say that they are. If you have a bunch of kids in your house, there’s going to be a low level of chaos all the time. That is just the deal.

Part of being a stay-at-home mom is just acknowledging to yourself, “I’m in the ocean right now. The waves are moving around me. I’m not dictating where they go.” Your kids are really their own beings and so you don’t move them around like a marionette or a puppet. I think that’s really important to internalize.

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Household Management

Nicole: I like that a lot — the comfort with chaos.

On a practical level, how do you deal with house cleaning and maintenance, and how has that evolved over time? What do you and your husband, children, other family, friends, or other people do to maintain your space?

Ivana: The most important thing is being really realistic about what you are able to do.

I’ve had more and less help at different periods in my life. I have a cleaning lady who comes and has been cleaning our house for 11 years and is great. When I quit my job as a lawyer, I was determined not to lose her, so we’ve always found money to keep her coming.

When I’m postpartum, I always send the sheets out to a laundromat nearby that does pickup and delivery, which is really helpful when I’m recovering from having a baby.

At one point my older kids were going to a babysitter one morning a week when I was postpartum, and right now I have a mother’s helper come on days when I have to do Zoom calls or other occasions where I need the kids not to interrupt too much.

It is not a static thing. I’m always sitting down and thinking, ‘Am I postpartum with a new baby? What is going on in the paid work realm? Based on the paid work that I’m doing, how much money do we have to dedicate towards hiring help?’ I think that the really important thing is not to be fooled by Instagram or what other people are doing, and to just ask, ‘What is really realistic here in terms of what I need help with?’

My kids do regular chores around the house: vacuum the dining room, that kind of thing — but I don’t have set chores for them. If there’s a bigger project I need done, I’m happy to pay my older kids to do it. For example, I was bugged by the lack of organization in our books. We don’t have a particularly extensive home library because we live in a small house, but we certainly have plenty of books. I told them, if you organize these books and put them into some kind of system, I’ll buy you a new video game. That went over really well.

Nicole: I remember being very motivated by getting paid every now and then to wash and clean out our car.

Ivana: Yeah, and I feel like it’s fair — they are really doing work. I’m not saying that all families have to do this, but yes. I want you to vacuum because you’re part of the family. If you’re going to spend a couple hours doing something for me, I usually feel like, yes, it’s fair for me to give you something for that.

Hiring & Relationships in the Home

Nicole: Asking partially for myself: how did you find a mother’s helper specifically? I loved being a mother’s helper so much when I was a teenager, so I’m excited to find someone. How do you think about finding and hiring people you have a longer relationship with?

Ivana: Our cleaning lady was a recommendation from a friend and she’s been with us for 11 years, through all four babies. She came anywhere from once a week to once a month depending on the season. Even postpartum, when it’s hard to have somebody in the house, I knew she would just shove the junk into a corner and vacuum. She’s really been very important.

Babysitters are a different story — they’re not static. I’ve hired neighborhood teens, posted on the local Facebook babysitting page, and gotten recommendations from friends. One of our best babysitters was the wife of a colleague of my husband’s. The challenge is that babysitters often can’t stay long-term: teens go to college, and what works for older women one year doesn’t the next. A full-time nanny can stretch years, but babysitters and mother’s helpers usually don’t.

Nicole: That rings very true. I had the realization a few weeks ago that all of our babysitters were all simultaneously moving out of a season of being able to help as much. I suddenly realized it would be a real functional constraint to our household and that I needed to bring in more people..

Homeschooling

What does homeschooling look like for you right now? What has that journey been like?

Homeschooling is the big thing keeping me at home, and it’s turned out to be really wonderful and important for our family, although also somewhat unexpected.

We moved to the neighborhood we’re in because they have an excellent public school, and we thought that we would put our kids in that school and that would be the end of it. But my oldest son started kindergarten during COVID and kindergarten was remote so that wasn’t a particularly positive experience.

He didn’t really seem very happy in school. When he was going into second grade, we decided we should try and see if he would like to be homeschooled. That was right after I had quit my job at a law firm. It just went really well. He was really happy, and we just saw him blossom outwards after that. We decided to bring my second son home and try it out and see if that went well too, and it did.

Like many homeschooling families, it’s always a year-by-year, child-by-child decision. We didn’t go into it thinking homeschooling is the only way to go: it was a more organic process.

Community Building

Nicole: What does your broader community look like?

I’m wondering if you have examples for both young families and even single people of how to build an active, broader community around them. And thoughts on how you and your family invest in your broader community today and how they support you.

So we live in a small house for a family of six. We live in 1,300 square feet — this is not a large house. The reason why we stay here is that we have many wonderful neighbors and we live in a neighborhood with sidewalks and there’s a lot of young kids around. And one of the nice things for me as a homeschooler is that once the public school kids are out of school, my older sons are not in the house much — they’re out in the neighborhood playing with their friends.

It’s very important to them and it’s very important to me also that they have a chance to go out, be independent, and have all these friendships. It sounds so trite, but the main thing is we just didn’t move. We bought this house in 2015 and we just stayed.

And we are close with many of our neighbors. We’ve been with them through their life circumstances, they’ve been with us through ours. And I think this is where time and openness makes things happen.

The neighborhood kids are always in my house and my opinion is, my door’s always open to you. Come in and play with my kids, eat the many kids snacks that I have in the house (I go to the grocery store and buy granola bars and snack packs of chips), and I think that’s the kind of way to do it. It’s not more complex than having a door that’s open and staying put in the same place for us.

Nicole: Do you have recommendations for people who don’t have kids? What are the first steps that you could take to get to know those neighbors?

Being outside is the big one. Our neighborhood comes alive in spring and summer. The neighbors I know who don’t have kids are the ones who put chairs on their front lawn, or who are out watering their gardens. I stop and chat, or they ask how I’m doing as I walk by.

Nicole: How do you and your husband balance work and career? Have you turned down specific roles or locations or projects because you knew they’d be less conducive to family or marital flourishing, or negotiated differently because of that?

One thing that I’ve been observing is that in our newer job economy, there are more and more micro career decisions that are being made all the time and there’s a lot of advice online about how to maximize work scope, title, pay, and status, and a lot less advice on how to maintain ambition or corporate learnings and growth and competitiveness, but still prioritize relationships like family outside of the workplace during this career and during a deep investment you’re making in your marriage and your children.

I’ve been really grateful that I had 10 years of work experience before I left full-time, paid work to be with my kids.

Because that opened up different doors for me that wouldn’t otherwise have been available. I’m really glad that we both saved as much as we could into our retirement accounts while we were both working full time. We were never going to be rich, but that has made retirement look a lot less scary because we put all that money away when we were young and now we have compound interest working for us.

Where I am now is not where I was envisioning when I was 19, but in many ways it’s better than I could have envisioned for myself when I was 19.

Nicole: I feel very similarly. I’m not as far along as you, but yeah, life feels better than I could have ever envisioned for myself. God is very gracious.

Life in the Third Oikos

Technology in the household is another area I appreciate your measured opinions on. This series is predicated on the belief that we’re entering into a new era for the household: post-COVID, post-remote work, post-LLM — the third oikos.

Are there modern technologies that enable your way of living or that you take a particularly novel approach to?

Ivana: Absolutely. There’s no way that I could do everything I do without a cell phone, the internet, and the computer. The revolution in remote technologies has just been incredible to witness, and I think that is just going to grow in scope as we get more technologically advanced. I don’t know when the Star Trek type holographic projection devices are coming, but I’m very optimistic about the power of technology to make it easier for people to meld family life and work life.

For homeschooling, there’s now so much available online, especially for older kids. If you are a student who wants to study zoology, you can find a really excellent remote class that will let you do that. It’s an area that just has tons of promise.

Of course there are no upsides without downsides. I worry sometimes about younger people being alone in their apartment and not leaving because they can do everything over the internet. But I think that if you already have a strong community and if you have a family and those things are in place for you, I think the internet and technology can just be an incredible force for good. And I look forward to seeing how that will continue to develop.

Nicole: Star Trek with my parents growing up was also a formative sci-fi reference for my life.

LLMs for the Household Operations

Nicole: Do you have any interesting LLM (ChatGPT, Claude) use cases for homemaking or household operations?

Ivana: Yes, all the time. Often I’ll have a leftover night in the meals rotation. You can plug in your leftover ingredients into ChatGPT and ask it to come up with a meal for you and it will do very well.

I use it to make maintenance lists. We live in an old home so it can be a helpful jumping-off point for lots of seasonal maintenance you forget.

It can be really good at setting you up well to talk to your kids’ pediatrician. Both about what questions to ask generally or you can give it different symptoms and it can give you different options.

And I have not found that it is a good idea to say, ‘ChatGPT told me this,” …. most doctors really don’t like that. Rather you can sort of prompt ChatGPT to help you to ask the different relevant questions to your child’s condition in a way that I’ve found really helpful.

Nicole: ChatGPT was very helpful for us when our toddler had a really bad skin infection. We had called in twice to our pediatrician’s weekend help line and they said, ‘We think it’s fine, just keep monitoring him.’ But it was really escalating and ChatGPT suggested we take him to the hospital because of the possibility it was cellulitis after we prompted it with timestamped photos of the rash progression on his face. Sure enough, it was a very severe cellulitis infection, close to his eye, with potential to also progress to his brain, and it progressed pretty intensely over a week until the doctors found antibiotics that worked.

So I was very glad that we had a ChatGPT second opinion when I believe our pediatrician was not as present as they probably should have been.

On another note, if you had to pick one under-discussed policy change that would most materially improve family formation in the next decade, what would it be?

Ivana: Workplace flexibility, and there are two sides to that. There’s the flexibility of the employer, and then the way the government relates to the employer through regulations and encouragement. A lot of policy in this country isn’t a statute being passed, but general pressure put on employers to change how they do things.

When I talk to families, one of the biggest things they want is more flexibility in a very broad way. For example, if you work part-time, you usually can’t get healthcare benefits or matching retirement contributions from an employer.

I think it’s actually in employers’ best interests to move toward more flexible options. Having a good employee who you keep through all the different stages of their life is often more valuable than employers recognize, and our regulations aren’t well designed to support that either. That’s the place I think would have the biggest impact in the United States.

Nicole: That makes a lot of sense.

Be Really Ambitious about Love

My last question is: What advice would you give to people who are trying to square ambition in their career with considerations of family?

Ivana: Be really ambitious about love, which is the single most powerful force in the universe. There are so many things that distract us from that. When it comes down to the nuts and bolts, that’s what really matters. And so you need to have your priorities straight.

Work is great. Work is really important, but that is not the primary motivating force in our lives, and I would encourage people to just think really hard about whether they’re putting first things first. That certainly doesn’t mean you have to get married. It doesn’t mean you have to have kids. Those are very individual, very personal decisions, but I think if you orient your life around what really should be your priority - being ambitious about love–everything kind of falls into place behind that.

This is the first in an ongoing series of interviews with flourishing family and community builders. Within, they share what the good life looks like when technology is reshaping the household. If you have someone who who may be a good interviewee - please reach out.

This interview series is made possible by the Foundation for American Innovation and the Institute for Family Studies.

In related news, I had my second baby, Lucía - since I last wrote. We feel incredibly blessed. I remain convinced that we all need to Log Some More Hours Holding Babies and am overjoyed I have a new one to lend out <3

But I realized the best part of my day was the 45 minutes I let myself go downstairs and play with these kids. And I knew then that my family would be the greatest source of joy in my life after God.

I’d really liked growing up in a big family. I remember when I was a kid, praying to have a big family. But I definitely lost that at some point. I thought, “I’ll have a big career, and I’ll start a family maybe like when I’m 28 or something.” I ended up having kids at 22.”

In my time talking to Wilson Cusack, 32-year-old father expecting his fifth child, and Head of Product of Base Chain at Coinbase (the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the U.S., the most common way Americans buy & sell Bitcoin and other digital currencies), two things really stood out to me. One is how he spoke about shaping ambition within his professional career and balancing it with his ambition for marriage, family, and growing towards God. The other is his realization that preserving optionality in life wasn’t something that he wanted or that was good for him.

You Can Just Do Things: Ambition Across Life

Wilson grew up in Michigan, the second youngest of seven children in a devout Protestant household. He was homeschooled until middle school. His parents’ approach wasn’t rigid or classical, but was more of, as he put it, a “complete your tasks, then you have free rein” approach. His parents didn’t manage him tightly but they did support his passions. His mom dropped him off at a stranger’s home studio downtown when he planned to record a CD for the band he started while in middle school.

This core sense that you can simply do things continued throughout college.

Wilson: At the end of college I was starting a company in Africa and received a grant from the Gates Foundation to do it. I had an easier time than many friends believing that I could do whatever I set my mind to. Friends who I felt were much more brilliant than myself often relayed a feeling of, “I didn’t realize that you could just do that.”

Nicole: I’ve noticed a pattern with people who end up welcoming children as they come, especially in earlier stages of life: they often have unique visions about career as a whole. They have a sense that they can pursue the priorities that they have for their work and it’ll work out fine. They don’t feel they necessarily have to approach the sequencing of their life in a very formalized way.

W: Instead of going to college right after high school, I had applied to this gap year program Nick Kristof ran, because I’d had this idea I should apply to good colleges but I got rejected from Stanford and MIT. Then I realized the program was for post-grad people, not for me. Then he promoted this other program where they put a gap year together for you. I applied to that, got in, but it was $20,000, and I wondered why I was going to pay these people $20,000 to facilitate me living in poverty.

So I put together my own gap year, convinced my parents to let me go, and went to Guatemala, and had a very intense three and a half months living in the communities around the garbage dump there. I spent days across different parts of a Christian organization: going around with a microfinance guy collecting loans and spending days with the marketing people, helping them make marketing materials to the U.S.

I also taught English, but I’d thought I’d be an assistant, and when I got there nobody spoke English. I was like, ‘Do you have a book that I can teach from or something?’ They did not. I tried to do my best, but yeah, that was very hard. I had these big dreams and visions for myself and was very humbled.

All my friends were having a great time at college, and I remember thinking “Why am I here? What made me do this?” Then I went to India and I was going to work with the same organization I had worked with in Guatemala. And I ended up working with a guy who had randomly come into my dad’s office. We previously had only one phone call.

What is Important in Life?

I was terrified when I got there, wondering if anyone’s going to be at the airport. I ended up spending five months in India — for the first three months I lived with him, his wife, and his five kids. The oldest was 15, the youngest was 2. And it was a different perspective on my own family because I had been the youngest.

So having this older sibling perspective, I got very close with the kids, especially the 2-year-old. And in Tamil, they have this sweet term “anna” which is like “older brother.” And they would call me Wilson-anna. Actually the parents took their first trip ever away from the kids. They went to Israel while I was there and that was the first time the mom had ever been away from the kids overnight.

N: They really trusted you.

W: I was very integrated. They had all kinds of aunties and housekeepers around, so I was by no means the only help, but there was some comfort that they had that I was there.

N: So you were in India, realizing that productivity didn’t always make you happy. In an essay detailing this story, you say, “This sounds so esoteric, but practically beginning and ending a process of reflection is an act of the will and is beyond rationality.” Would you expand on that?

W: It’s a line cribbed from Kierkegaard. He makes fun of Hegel’s system where you have this infinite dialectic, these infinite mirrors that go on forever, and there could always be one more fact or one more piece of information that’s about to hit. So you have to decide, he has this essay, “Either/Or” — it’s not both, you have decided you are embarked. His point is that belief is always supernatural because at some point you have to just stop reflecting. You’re no longer gathering facts; you’re going to make a decision. And that is your will imposing itself on these facts.

I thank God that these choices were forced on me. For example, getting married was a pressing choice because I was going to move abroad to start this company, so it was either break up or get married. There was no way to preserve optionality and date long distance — we just weren’t going to do that. And so I was like, okay, let’s get married. And then, our first child (and niece) was adopted because my wife’s brother died. Okay, we have kids now.

Then our first two pregnancies were unplanned. It’s okay. All of these things I feel so grateful for because I do not trust myself to make good decisions.

So much of my prayer now is, I just want to be simple. I don’t want to be smart. I want to be simple. I read about these saints who are so simple and love God so much and God did so much in their life and I just want to be with them. Of course, we’re compelled to use the rational gifts that God has given us, but there are these ways in which we tangle ourselves in knots.

In our modern era, having kids is now more of a choice than ever. This shift to deciding to have kids makes all the difference in the world. Because now it’s a choice, and choices take months and years. And it could always be, versus just accepting what’s given.

N: I love all of that. Your essay also reminded me of the feeling I was completely overwhelmed with in the first two years of having a kid, which was the slow, unavoidable process of sanctification (the process of being transformed by God, community, and circumstance into who you were made to be) in a way that you can’t choose.

Our friends got married this weekend and they had this great passage from Dostoevsky in their program:

“Active love is a harsh and fearful thing compared with the love in dreams. Love in dreams thirsts for immediate action, quickly performed, and with everyone watching. Indeed, it will go as far as the giving even of one’s life, provided it does not take long but is soon over, as on stage, and everyone is looking on and praising. Whereas active love is labor and persistence, and for some people, perhaps, a whole science.”

W: Yes, and the important caveat is I have given a hundredth of what my wife gave. She gave up everything and it was very hard for her and continues to be very challenging and rewarding.

If there’s a reader reading this thinking like, “Wait, doesn’t this guy have a career and all this stuff?” Yes, you’re right. I have barely sacrificed in comparison to most.

Child-Rearing Philosophies

N: What was your early vision for family life and how has that changed? What parts about your childhood did you know you wanted to replicate versus things you didn’t want to?

W: I’m an optimist and I have a tendency to believe that criticizing something can dredge up negative feelings that aren’t necessarily sincere. So I had a great childhood and my default was to do it again. My wife also thought a lot more from first principles on “How do I want to parent my children?” And it was hard for me to accept, since some of these things were not what I did.

Hannah really wanted to have a big family and also wanted to homeschool. I don’t really remember her saying, “I want to be a full-time mom.” It wasn’t, “I definitely don’t want to,” but I think there was an assumption that she would have a career first and then do motherhood, which wasn’t the case, because she ended up first having to work to pay her way through college — she was working babysitting jobs and at the Apple Store. Then immediately after we graduated, she wanted to do an MFA program, and then we adopted our first, Asher. I definitely learned a lot from her. We both changed a bunch. We have made every mistake possible. And the things that you do with one kid versus four kids is quite different.

I developed a bit of humility about the idea that kids are innately good. Kids also have passions in them that need to be curbed and they can turn into tyrants if you let them. And so we got very into RIE, or “Resources for Infant Educarers,” and the book No Bad Kids by Janet Lansbury and her podcast. It was helpful to us to have a parenting philosophy that we could talk about, like a third person in the room. So instead of arguing against each other, we would be like, “I think the RIE approach would handle it like this.”

RIE is about treating kids as individuals and respecting them, but also realizing that they are literally mentally impaired. So you cannot expect your child to make a rational choice about whether or not they should put their jacket on.

Sometimes you have to say, “I hear you don’t want to put this on, I’m going to put it on you, even if you’re screaming and crying.” That was helpful, and actually similar to a lot of Orthodox ideas about respecting children as icons of Christ.

There are passions inside of you that need to be conquered. You have to go to war with yourself and you need to teach your kids to struggle and to go to war with themselves, or they will be conquered by their own passions.

N: One thing I’m interested in within The Third Oikos is this broader cultural reaction to technology, this idea that friction is not always bad. How do you feel that you handle that with kids in a very modern era where it is easy to eliminate friction across life? Do you feel a tension in introducing it thoughtfully and intentionally?

W: I think the first thing is that this phrase that I think about often is, “I am also the project.” It’s not that I am perfected, and therefore now my job is to perfect this little child.

I am barely started. I’m like a teenager. I just finished, that’s one of the interesting things about historically how young you have kids, you’re a kid and then you have kids.

Which is actually helpful for re-parenting yourself and processing your childhood and developing appreciation for your parents — and so God is using my kids to sanctify me.

The Discipline of Parenting

One feeling I have after four kids is that there are no small things. I think it’s similar to being good in a professional environment, which is that you have to show up every day ready to go to war. If you want to work in a place where quality matters, you have to show up every day to go to war for quality. Because today might be the day when people are like, ah, it’s good enough, it’s fine. We don’t need to do it. Or yeah, we usually do it that way, but we don’t need to do it today. And the only way, it’s just total insistence. And it’s the same with kids. Like your kids are waiting for you to have an off day and be weak.

I think we should be forgiving of ourselves to some extent. And they have long lives, and we’re never going to be perfect, but it is a battle. I show up every day. I get so much joy and love for my kids, but that’s not what I show up expecting. I show up thinking, ‘Okay, I have to go to war.’ I have to be vigilant and ready to combat whatever new thing they’re going to be going through and whatever it is I’m going through to make sure it doesn’t impair them. (Wilson notes that when he says ‘go to war’ he means showing up with care, resilience, and attentiveness: not staring at his phone and tuning out his kids, not making an exception to a rule just because he’s tired and it’s hard).

Setting Family Culture

N: It does feel like that’s such a stark departure from the default modern question, which is simply, “Why do that?” If there’s a cascade of easier options and you don’t even have to choose the worst one, you could choose the slightly easier one and you continue down that path for a long time until you don’t like the spot you’ve gotten to, but it feels easier.

Why struggle when you don’t need to? Is there anything really worth struggling for? Especially if there’s not an immediate forcing function.

W: And it is so gratifying. We are very poor parents in many respects and have a long way to go. But having a 10-year-old, 7-year-old, and a 6-year-old — man, you fight for so long and then you start to get a family culture and the kids get it and they’re helping you. They’re on your team.

Now — I think this is the striking thing that a lot of parents talk about — my mom who had seven said three was the hardest, you hear this a lot in the book Hannah’s Children (a series of interviews with college-educated American women who choose to have five or more children, defying declining birth rates). I think for us three was certainly hardest. We also had a hard third baby.

You’re fighting on all fronts. You have a 6-year-old and a 3-year-old and a newborn and nobody gets it yet. You have to go to war with everybody. When you fight and you fight and then you have your kids, (it’s rare, of course, my kids also fight and try to kill each other) but you finally have your kids playing pretend with each other for two hours or like putting their own snowsuits on and going down to the snow or doing projects and you’re like, ah.

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Work-Life Balance in the Third Oikos

N: I believe there’s a bit of a gulf perhaps between our and our parents’ generation because of how different the average job is. Especially in tech, it seems as though there are a lot more places to slightly increase work scope, title, pay, and status, and less advice on how to maintain ambition, corporate learnings, growth, and competitiveness — but still prioritize other relationships, especially family, outside of the workplace and what it looks like to really like actively face these decisions super often.

How have you chosen past positions based on family? Whether you’ve turned down specific roles because you knew they’d be less conducive to family and marital flourishing, or negotiated differently because of that.

W: Coinbase has been very good to me family-wise. I sometimes have to be mindful of trying not to have too many work trips. But — shutting down the company in Ghana was something I would not have done without my family, and it was very painful. It was a big part of my identity and my ego, and so many people suffered, and it felt so dumb that it was just going to all be over without hitting this outcome that we wanted.

But, when we came back to New York to have our second kid, (the idea was just being back for the last trimester), I could see that my wife was a different person. She had been a zombie in Ghana. Then, you have a tiny baby and you’re looking at them like, ‘I can’t take this baby on a plane. I can’t take this baby for eight hours. I can’t take this baby to another continent.’

I realized we couldn’t go back. There was a bit more questioning of whether I could run the company from the U.S. and have a U.S. office, but running a company from somewhere else never works.

I remember towards the end of this, looking into the life and business strategist Tony Robbins and thinking, ‘I need to motivate myself and get vision.’

He has this “morning and evening visioning” where you think of these things you’re grateful for and then you imagine the future thing that you’re excited about and try to imagine it as viscerally as possible. I wanted to imagine the success of this company, but my mind was just imagining my family in the woods — I was like, ‘No, don’t do that!’ But it was clear where my inclinations were.

Then, at the end of the company, I had a big network in San Francisco. I had offers to join some other companies out there. And if it were up to me, I would’ve moved to San Francisco. But my wife really did not like San Francisco for a number of reasons. So yes, thinking about family changed my world.

Crypto Visions

During 2019, I was really into crypto while I was running this company in Africa. Maybe I drank too much crypto Kool-Aid. I needed to take a break, and I worked on this app for parents to keep track of stuff they did with their kids. I launched it in 2020 and it got featured in the App Store and so on. But my brother worked at Coinbase and was like, “Would you want to come?” I was interviewing for this role that was time-sensitive, and the world was starting to fall apart with COVID. I needed some stability.

At the same time, I had helped put the team together to start WorldCoin, and I thought about working with them, but I decided on Coinbase: It was very much chosen for stability, the expected outcome, healthcare benefits, and paternity leave.

Then I accidentally started another company while I was at Coinbase, and so I left Coinbase with a team of three other people and Coinbase’s funding to work on it. And then I worked on that for a bit over a year and then they recruited me back to come and work on Base (Base is a faster, cheaper version of the Ethereum blockchain network that Coinbase built and runs).

Although we had plenty of money at that company, and we could have tried multiple other things, I really liked Coinbase. I had a feeling that working on Base would be a career highlight and I also had all of these family considerations. This house wasn’t working for us, we wanted to have another baby and so we needed to be able to move, we needed to be able to afford the mortgage. I needed to be able to take paternity leave.

My wife sometimes apologizes that she’s killed my career like five times by saying that we can’t move to this place, can’t take this position. But I don’t feel that way. If anything, working on this company in Ghana was interesting because it was very morally, rationally driven by the question, ‘What’s the best thing I can do for the world? The poorest people in the world are farmers, how can I help farmers? More efficient markets…’

I don’t think that’s bad. I think that people should ask how they can do good for the world, but it was a humbling moment of, ‘Okay, is this really good for these people? I’m an outsider. I don’t know their culture. What am I trying to get them? Am I trying to get them suburbs and a Walmart or something?’

I think you could be a bit too negative. It is important to try to do morally important work, but it definitely heightened my feeling that the most important work of my life is my kids. That is how I can really leave a legacy in the world.

I had this feeling — you talk to somebody for two minutes, they remember you for two minutes. You talk to somebody for a year, they remember you for a year. Your kids are these things that we have been given and if stewarded well, it’s the exponential impact of their kids and their kids and their kids.

N: On a smaller scale, I had a similar philosophical question about working in venture capital. I feel like I was given license to invest in companies that are good for the world, and I was working with a boss who felt strongly about the same and who allowed me to turn down investments that I thought were morally questionable.

For a long time I had a lot of pride about this work and how I was spending my time — that these are the best things that I can be investing in for the world but over time I wondered if I could guarantee that? There’s just such scale and what are the tertiary effects? And what about these friends that are near me that I don’t have time to care for sufficiently because of this job that I work? And then, getting married and thinking about my husband and then getting pregnant and thinking about my kid, and it just all totally reshaped how I thought about caring for people. It just humbled me a ton and reshaped that broader architecture in my mind.

W: I had the feeling that if you squint, everything becomes about ‘number go up*.’ And it was like, does it really matter?

I don’t want to be too morally ambiguous — the work you choose to do does matter. But I think there is a way of doing it that can crush your soul. I think it humbled my view of work because I realized what actually felt like the morally important thing here is my relationship with my team and the people I spend time with in the office and how am I to them. And then, yeah. And then you’re like, okay, who else am I spending time with? My wife and my kids.

*”Number go up” is a popular phrase in the cryptocurrency / online trading world that jokingly refers to the idea that the singular (optimistic and perhaps naive) focus of these communities is the price of a currency increasing and everyone gaining wealth.

Hard Work

N: As a dad who’s providing financially for the family: how do you manage being extremely family-oriented, but also having a career that is providing some insulation for being open to kids at any time.

W: I’m really grateful for my work. In fact, one thing that some of the Orthodox writings have helped me with is appreciating the value of hard work. You can become too negative on it. And there are a lot of ways that work can corrupt us.

The teaching of the desert fathers (important figures in Orthodox Christianity) is that it’s important to work hard. And there’s this story of these monks in the desert. I think it’s St. John the Short. He’s like, “Why are we making these baskets? I just want to pray all the time. I’m going to go to the desert and pray,” and he leaves the cell and goes to the desert to pray, ’I want to be like the angels.’ And comes back, three days later and he is banging on the door and he says, ‘Let me in!’

And they’re like, ‘Who are you?’ He says, ‘I’m John’. They say, ‘No, John wanted to be with the angels.’ The takeaway is, ‘Hey — if you’re going to be here, you have got to work.” That’s one learning I’ve had of appreciating work and not having too low a view of it. But of course, yes, you can have too high of a view of it as well.

I saw my dad make those decisions. I remember he was working for a bank, he had an exciting opportunity to open their first office in China, and he turned it down. He said, ‘I don’t want to do that, I like to wake up and go for a run or a bike ride and then go to work. I won’t be able to do any of that in a city in China in the same way I could in Michigan.’

If anything, I worry about my kids not understanding that I work at home and they don’t know what real work is like. Most people leave early, get back late and clock in, clock out. They don’t see their kids much. When I go on a trip, they’re devastated, which is very sweet, but they’re totally spoiled and I do think it’s good for them to see me working and to know that work is important.

As for the kid part, every kid was different. You get humbled very quickly. “I’m going to have a big family.” And then you have one and you’re like, oh, this is in fact hard. But, we’re having a baby in June, so this will be number five. I hope that for people who see me with five kids, it helps them realize that it’s not a different sort of person that has these kids. One kid was hard for us. Two kids was also hard for us. We didn’t know if we’d make it to three, and we didn’t know if we’d make it to four.

N: I like that. It’s easy to see people at a given life stage as, in some ways, at the point of arrival. “Okay, that’s a very different person than who I am now.” rather than look at the journey and ask about the trajectory and realize, oh, you became a person who can have these children, but you’re a person just like me and there’s people around the world who are coming from every different position, then kids shape you, but you literally figure it out one at a time.

People keep asking my husband, Santi, “What number of kids do you want?” He says, “The good thing is that they come one at a time.” Generally speaking, you just figure it out as you go. That’s comforting.

Household Finances and Giving

How do you think about family, household finances, and budgeting in a way that makes your life possible? Anything that’s particularly novel? Do you run any businesses for passive income?

W: We have had different periods of being very tight and having more. When I lived in Ghana I paid myself $30,000 a year. When I came back and shut down the company, we had no income for a year and were just living off savings.

Recently we use software called Envelope, which is a YC (Y Combinator, a well-known startup accelerator) company. It’s a digital version of the money envelope system. And so we’re very big believers in saving and we’re definitely not credit card point maxis, we’re peace of mind maxis, and so we try and only spend the money we have.

My parents are also very generous people who give a lot of their money away. And so that was a big part of my childhood, and an example I aspire to follow. It’s funny, I think a lot of secular people just don’t realize how much the average Christian gives away.

I think giving your money away is really important. As an ascetic discipline of not letting your money rule over you and to live on less than your means intentionally. I find the most satisfying way to give money away is to just give it to people directly. Of course there are causes that are helpful, but if you have the opportunity to give money specifically to somebody in your life, you can really change their life, which is very special.

As to side businesses, for better or worse, I’ve tried to learn to rein myself in from doing too many things. Especially after my last paternity leave, my kids are very aware of the working hours of the day. They’re like, ‘Hey, why are you working? You’re supposed to be done working,’ so I’ve been getting better. I used to do a lot of working late at night, working on Saturdays, and stealing in time all these places, but now I’m getting better at trying to do less and do it better.

Household Rituals and Telos

N: You had this tweet joking about modern discipline guys, Goggins and the rest, being secular ascetics with a different telos. What’s the telos of a household for you? What sort of practices daily or weekly do you aim at, or more broadly, what household habits and rituals do you and your wife find important and have chosen pretty intentionally?

W: Yeah. So one piece of advice I have for parents is: if something is like a fight, just give it a day or a schedule. You’re arguing over when you can watch TV? So we have a special movie night and that’s like when the kids watch a movie and then it’s like, Hey, can we watch? Is it special movie night? No. We also added an iPad night, and you could do a dessert night, etc. Those rituals have been helpful to us.

Another thing that we’re trying to do more is morning and evening prayers as a family. A lot of Orthodox prayer books will have morning and evening prayers, so we light a candle and stand in front of the icons and say a prayer together and mention people that we’re thinking of, things that we’re excited about or worried about, and try to pray for all those things.

N: That’s great. What do you guys do for meals? When you’re at home, how do you set expectations? Do you guys have a rhythm of cooking and how you think about the energy you put into this as a family and where to expend energy and where to save it?

W: Food is a big part of our life; we definitely have challenges with our kids. We have one very picky eater and a couple of okay eaters. Ten years ago I would never force my kid to eat anything they don’t like. And now I’m like, okay, sit and eat that. You can finish those two bites. You have it in you, you need this protein, you’re going to do it.

My wife has also been pregnant or nursing for the last long while and I’ve pretty much been handling mornings with the other kids for the last 10 years or so. I really like to be up before the kids. I pray, make food, then the kids come down and I make food for them.

The Breakfast Schedule

We made a breakfast schedule on a two-week rotation. It includes what we’re having every day, and if you don’t want it you can have peanut butter toast and that’s it. Ten years ago we thought, why don’t you have 10 different breakfasts over the course of two hours? Whatever. It’s too fancy.

Now, we aim for breakfast hour from 8:00-9:00. And if you missed it, sorry. Dinner is almost always cooked by my wife. Especially so on weekdays, especially in the winter because it gets dark so early, and we’re eating at five, so I have no chance to cook after work. But in the summer we have longer days and so I really like to cook.

N: What are some of your breakfast staples?

W: For a long time it was waffles every day. And we would put peanut butter on them to add a little protein. It’s the New York Times waffle recipe and I can make it from memory in about 10 minutes.

So I make the batter for waffles and then pancakes if they want them. Beyond that, it’s very tough. It’s mainly peanut butter toast. They pretty much do not like eggs. Some of them will eat bacon, some of them will eat sausage - so those are classic and then toast. We have Freezer Friday, and so we have frozen smoothies or a frozen English muffin and oatmeal. A few of us like oatmeal.

Homeschooling

N: You talked about Hannah’s interest in homeschooling, but I also saw some of your tweets about getting to spend a little bit more time involved in homeschooling on paternity leave. I would love to hear about that experience.

You talk a little bit also about meeting Stephen Wolfram (a legend in the mathematics world, the CEO of the software company Wolfram Research, which includes Mathematica and the Wolfram Alpha answer engine), which is pretty sick, and talking to him about math education. And of course, the most pressing question is Singapore Math, Saxon Math, or Beast Academy?

W: I think Beast Academy is great but I also like the math Olympiad book, particularly just talking about the different problems the book presents. If you look at natural math it’s pretty different than Math Circle, which I like.

I really don’t do as much as I would like to. My daughter was 2 years old and I was doing these math explorations with her. There are a couple videos of these explorations YouTube. Wilson and Asher do math. I was very into it then.

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Math Curriculum & Recommendations

• For the very young ages: this book called Mobius Noodles by naturalmath.com is great.

• For 3-7 years old: Math from Three to Seven is a great book by this Russian mathematician who ran a math group or “math circle” for his son and his friends.

  • On math circles: The idea of a math circle is a mixed age group of people that are interested in math topics and they’re taking things in as general problems and not neatly written problems already within the math domain. I think doing that kind of open-ended problem solving is ideal!

  • So, you might have a problem that has an algebraic solution and a geometric solution and you’re not learning one of those, but you’re talking about all those. Of course it’s a Soviet thing and it’s been Americanized and has also become a bit of a high achieving thing. It is now also mostly age-level uniform.

  • I volunteered in the Math Circle in New York City and got into math circles and I did one for Asher and her friends at one point. I’m trying to do another one this year!

  • For 5 & 6 year olds: Breaking Numbers Into Parts is the first one by Dr. Oleg Gleizer, Dr. Olga Radko. They have some good stuff.

    • For ages 6-9 from the same author, there’s a book called Math Adventures

  • For elementary & middle schoolers: The Champions Guide to Math Olympiad

More generally, my wife is into the Ambleside online curriculum and the Charlotte Mason curriculum. We also read a lot with them. I feel like there was a time where my 5-year-old was reading 20 books a day or something.

Parenting hack: Most people don’t realize that when you go to a library, you should probably check out 40 books if you want to give them a weeks’ worth of reading. I was coming back with one or two books and I was like, they’re going to look at these for two minutes and then be done.

I’m sure we have various debts to libraries across the country. But yes, they’re getting into older books and we have a ridiculously long nighttime routine where every child gets their own book read to them, and it’s fun.

Life in the Third Oikos

Technology in the Household

N: You mentioned making every mistake with respect to technology in the household — are there specifics that you want to delve into and advice you would have looking backwards?

W: I think as any parent knows, it differs by kid. For our first kid, having screen time could ruin a day. We were using it at first when we needed to brush her hair because otherwise she wouldn’t sit still. Then she was waking up so tired, but dragging herself out of bed because she’s desperate to watch something. I was also really into learning apps, like Khan Academy. I would give this app to my kid and then they would come off of it and be extremely miserable and miserable to be around.

I also listen to a lot of stuff. I think listening to books is important for aural processing, but I also think there can be too much of it. My kids at certain times have gotten very into certain things and they’re just spending four hours laying on the couch and you think, “oh, why not? They’re obsessed with the book.” But there is some sort of passivity to it that is proximate to watching TV or zoning out. Even though it’s slightly better. So yes, we had probably three years where we were no screens ever — iPads were put away permanently and we started doing our once a week family movie night, and that was it.

N: One thing I am interested in is just this growing sense from everyone, especially technologists, that you have to prioritize and cascade the types of screen time that you think is good - both for you and for your kid.

And tiers of — listening to books might be a little bit passive — it’s not screen time exactly — but it’s a technologically facilitated thing. But for us, that’s the highest quality way to use technology in our household versus I don’t know, introducing the AI slop passive scrolling.

AI & Children’s Media

W: It’s sad that when LLMs came out I was so excited for my kids to use them. I thought, ‘They’ll get so smart!’ Then I realized maybe they’ll get really dumb because they won’t know how to do things. There’s a big challenge to be figured out of how, specifically, do we harness these things?

One of my biggest interests right now is children’s content. If I had money to retire today, I would work on making kids’ content because what’s out there is just very, very depressing and would be astonishing to somebody 20 years ago. And there’s been a normalization of slop, and all these adult themes in kids movies.

N: Completely agree. We end up watching a lot of older stuff when we’re watching movies because the level of vocabulary and the complexity of the characters’ moral journeys is completely different.

Closing question: what would your advice be to people who are considering family? Across getting married, how to approach finding a life partner, having kids. Is there any advice to people who are thinking about their scope of ambition in the realm of what I would call the Third Oikos broadly?

W: As we say online, “Find God.” That would be my main advice.

N: How do you find God?

W: A seeking heart, a heart yearning for truth. A discerning openness. I think those who seek will find.

Everybody is so different and so I don’t feel that I can give advice. I can only say that I’m extremely grateful that I got married so young and have kids so young, and I don’t really credit myself for making the choice. I find it hard to talk about publicly because there’s so many different situations and some people want to be married and aren’t married, and some people want to have kids and can’t have kids.

But it does seem that there’s a preponderance of people who are not sure if they want to get married, not sure if they want to have kids, and I can’t know their situation, but I can just say that it’s been very good for me and possibly saved my life. I would be in a very dark place without my family. I think I would just work myself to a corpse and burnout.

N: What is your advice to younger Wilson?

W: I’m generally an optimist, so I look back and think things happened the way they were supposed to, but I wish I had found the Orthodox Church much sooner. Because it helped me to see myself in a mirror and has given me a path that I think I can follow to the end of my life.

N: That’s very beautiful. Anything else you want to say?

No, just aside, but I’m sure I said stupid things and things I’ll probably disagree with in a couple years. If people read it and think I’m dumb, they’re probably right.

This is the second in an ongoing series of interviews with flourishing family and community builders. Within, they share what the good life looks like when technology is reshaping the household. If you have someone who who may be a good interviewee - please reach out.

This interview series is made possible by the Foundation for American Innovation and the Institute for Family Studies.

Culture in the Third Oikos

• Community & Atomization: Always Go to The Funeral (Deirdre Sullivan, 8.8.05 for NPR)

  • On what it takes to fight atomization:

    “’Always go to the funeral’ means that I have to do the right thing when I really, really don’t feel like it. I have to remind myself of it when I could make some small gesture, but I don’t really have to and I definitely don’t want to. I’m talking about those things that represent only inconvenience to me, but the world to the other guy. You know, the painfully under-attended birthday party. The hospital visit during happy hour. The Shiva call for one of my ex’s uncles. In my humdrum life, the daily battle hasn’t been good versus evil. It’s hardly so epic. Most days, my real battle is doing good versus doing nothing. In going to funerals, I’ve come to believe that while I wait to make a grand heroic gesture, I should just stick to the small inconveniences that let me share in life’s inevitable, occasional calamity.”

• Technology & Society: Identifying Negative Externalities of Technology for Society ( , 11.10.25 for TBPN)

  • Great to see technology insiders advocating for nuanced critique of emerging technology, particularly of the social downsides:

    ‘You need to understand moral discernment, AI safety - these things are linked but not exactly the same. Last year there was the big debate about fast-takeoffs, AI doom, paperclipping scenarios but this year I feel like we’ve been much more focused on much less sci-fi, doomsday scenarios. So: GPT Psychosis drives a friend crazy? That’s real. “Romantic companions” crashing the birth rate? That feels like something we should have a discussion about. Infinite scroll vertical AI? It’s brain-rotting children… Those are all real problems, they deserve both discussion in the public square and also real work inside the AI labs, and I don’t think we should throw [the label] “decel” at someone who is identifying a negative externality of a new technology.

• Technology & Society: On Friction-Maxxing ( , 1.8.26 for The Cut)

  • While the narrativization of this essay is dramatized (I don’t think people should stop using LLMs), I do think intentionally choosing where to maintain friction as it gets easier to avoid, will be the theme of the next decade. In an era of infinitely generative tools (ahem, Claude Code), choosing our tools and their affordances intentionally will be a high value skill.

  • And some suggestions for general life, and building community:

    “Are you ready for more friction? Invite people over to your house without cleaning it all the way up. Babysit for someone who needs a night out — convince this person, who will surely resist for friction-aversion reasons, to let you come over and chill at their house for a few hours. If you have kids, bring them with you. Send your kids to run small errands for you, comfortable in the knowledge that they will probably do a bad or incomplete job.”

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Data on the Third Oikos

• Commutes & Childcare: Why Commuting is Uniquely Challenging for Moms (, 12.6.25 in The Atlantic)

  • In which Stephanie makes the point that historically women gravitated towards jobs that made them compatible with childcare, and that “In postindustrial societies, many of the requirements Brown cited for making work compatible with child-rearing have become less relevant … Distance from home—which of course affects commute time—may play a larger role in employment-based gender inequality than ever.”

  • I noted in the definitional Third Oikos essay that remote work’s availability to parents is one of the defining traits of the Third Oikos, perhaps the interesting inverse is that in light of more abundant jobs with no commute, there is a higher penalty for those that still do have a commute.

• Fertility Rates, Motherhood, & Work Status: Married Women Have More Children, Part-Time Moms & Stay at Home Moms Especially ( Brad Wilcox, Maria Baer, & , 12.29.25 for The Institute for Family Studies)

  

• Fertility Rates & Housing: Family-Friendly Apartments ( Bobby Fijan & , 9.25.25 for The Institute for Family Studies)

  • An detailed report on all number of details about state of apartments for young families, and what young families desire in housing including that, “apartments are a growing share of new housing but are getting less family friendly: smaller, with fewer bedrooms,”

  • and “Family-friendly units are more cost-effective than developers and investors realize. One reason these units are underprovided is that developers use erroneous assumptions about vacancy rates that ignore the fact that smaller units have higher vacancy rates, higher turnover, and higher rates of budget-constrained residents who may miss payments.”

    

Tips from the Third Oikos -

• LLMS & Household Operations: I’m very interested in the highest yield general applications of LLMs, and more recently, Claude Code (a new AI tool release that is able to coordinate tasks between all of the apps on your computer) and use cases for homemaking and household operations. Some interesting early adoptions I’ve seen:

  • of The Argument, details creating a home-brew educational phonics app for her kids

  • Claude used to automate pattern planning, colorwork placement, and automatic size scaling for a complex sweater one woman hand knit (”It’s scaled down two days of work!”)

  • Creating a daily brief via info from iMessage, Whatsapp, Gmail, and GCal

  • And , a father who often works from home doing web development, noting that the nature of Claude Code helps him utilize the frequent, small blocks of time he has while working from home to do his digital work more effectively.

Bonus Round:

• Community & Hospitality: Benjamin Laufer is building a restaurant in Brooklyn focused on getting strangers to eat together, called Garnet, opening in early 2026.

  • I am eternally encouraged by the ways I see young people looking to intentionally change the culture around community and hospitality, often seeking to move their relationship building offline, or creatively transition online friendships to deeper, in person ones. Benjamin is building a restaurant in Brooklyn that’s focused on getting strangers to eat together. I was privileged to eat one of Ben’s excellent home cooked meals at a dinner in 2021, so I’m excited to try more of his food!

I hope you enjoyed this digest & please do send examples in the comments of the Third Oikos you see out in the wild.

I’ve been stewing on the idea of “ambitious homemaking.” I see it as overlapping with parenting, but a different discipline. When I was 18, I worked in various people’s households. The people I worked for that I admired the most were very intentional in pulling me into their household. They understood that this relationship was a good thing for me too; a two-way street, not just a financial transaction. They celebrated my birthday and talked through my life problems with me at the same time as they asked if I could possibly drive their 8-year-old to school.

They saw my need and recognized it. They understood that their household was a type of real wealth that, wielded correctly, was a landing place for so many people. A place of wisdom, comfort, and community. In turn, their household being a landing place for so many meant they also had extra hands around — to read to a child, to drive someone somewhere, to do all the constant one-off tasks that households need to survive.

Historically, it seems to me that we understood this about households much more instinctively. That investing in maintaining the social fabric around us, in our neighborhoods, our homes, our families, was an ambitious discipline worthy of cultivation and intellectual focus. I’m not sure where this went, but we are endeavoring to do all of these things in a uniquely challenging social and technological time.

In this project, I want to study ambitious modern homemakers and community builders, so I gave Jesse Genet a call. Before I had any conception of this interview series, several people mentioned I should chat with her. Jesse’s past isn’t necessarily what comes to mind as the stereotype of a traditional homemaker. She founded several companies starting at the age of 16, went off to design school against her family’s wishes, and ultimately took one company, Lumi, through the startup accelerator Y-Combinator, and Lumi was acquired later on. While raising 5 children, she was still working at her acquirer’s company full time. Today she’s expecting their 7th, homeschools, manages several small family businesses, and supports her husband’s nascent startup. Today, Jesse sees her large, blended family as another ambitious project — an evolution of the same drive that fueled her companies.

The Identity Shift: Ambitious Parenting and Homemaking

Jesse: I had this identity attribute of “I am an entrepreneur, this is what I do.” Self-identifying what I do as an ambitious, crazy thing. I think that a key shift for me was that having 5, 6, 7 kids is also an ambitious, crazy thing. There was a morphing of the way that I view myself.

I’m not working full-time professionally on anything right now. I always dabble in some side projects, but being pregnant with my fourth, number 7 total, I feel very comfortable with saying I’m not starting a new company tomorrow. Maybe sometime in the future. But it took me a little while to get to that place. So the biggest change has been being comfortable letting go of who I am as this nonstop entrepreneur person, because that was part of my identity for so long.

But at the same time, I’ve managed to do the mental gymnastics of, “I’m still the exact same person.” We’re homeschooling the little kids, and we do a lot of very intensive things that take a lot of my mental and intellectual efforts. It actually feels quite similar to me on a daily basis at this point. Socially, it’s different. Socially… it’s quite different.

Tips for corporate and household management

It’s hard for me to imagine being a housewife or stay-at-home mom without my entrepreneurial background. I’m using these skills day in and day out.

Nicole: I like to joke on Twitter that you can transfer a lot of VC ideas about ambition to the household. Specifically, your “customer relationship management (CRM) software” can be used instead to get to know your neighbors, remember their names, and what’s going on in their life. What overlaps do you see from managing a company and those mental frameworks? Organizational systems, hiring, people management?

J: We’re fortunate enough to be able to afford to live on this little ranch. It’s really horse property near LA, for people’s imaginations. Things here are constantly in need of maintenance and we’re trying to grow this huge garden. My mom lives here, there’s this micro community here, and a lot of people are involved. I need to hire and fire folks to help with all the things that we do. Tending to different animals, gardening, landscaping, working with the electrician, the plumber, and all sorts of different crazy maintenance stuff. And we’re on our own, almost completely off-grid, so we have to do things like haul our own trash out.

Spotting talent

We’re very lucky to have one full-time household helper: you could call her a nanny, but she does a lot of other things. She helps with grocery shopping, running the household while I’m homeschooling, putting in other loads of laundry, and on-going maintenance issues. We have a whole shared document to track ongoing issues we’re working on together in the household.

She was actually previously an office manager at my past company, and we had to let her go from the company because that job was completely gone in Covid, but I really enjoyed working with her, so I offered her work in our house. Around the time I gave birth to my first baby, she naturally became so helpful with the baby that she became a full-time part of our household.

N: That’s so interesting. One of the skills I admired in women who are managing a bigger household is how they find and identify talent. Specifically, how they find people around them who have a moment of flexibility or an interest in taking on more work, and how these women identify and invite in people who have a few extra hours and happen to really like doing X or Y in the household. When I’ve observed this, these people share some level of trust, knowledge, and work style. Then sometimes it expands to people who will help with kid logistics in a very big household with small children. [I’ve interviewed my mother-in-law about finding homeschool tutors in day-to-day life.]

It seems like spotting talent and being a good manager of people at home is a key to scaling family life.

J: Something I pull from my entrepreneurial experience is the mental flexibility of spotting talent, and being a good manager of other human beings, which is a big deal, because it’s hard to run a household where you don’t scale past just being one node, yourself. Some women just do everything themselves (and I have immense respect for that), but usually there’s some need to scale various parts — even if it’s very part-time workers or babysitters, etc.

You do need to manage people. That means setting expectations with them. Weekly, I create a spreadsheet of our calendar, note all of the pieces that change, and each of the needs such as rides or other logistics. I then communicate to our nanny, the kids, and homeschool parents, what the needs are for the week and what everyone’s schedules are so I’m able to begin to plan on a more granular level.

N: And you mentioned you also have an art teacher who used to be your nanny - how did you find and hire her?

J: She’s the only person I found more traditionally — I posted an ad for someone to work with babies on care.com. After working with her for a little, I realized she loves art. Over time, she moved into doing art with all the homeschool co-op kids after we finish our lessons, as well as helping with the toddler during lessons if she needs a nap. I’ll often text her what I’m teaching them in science and she incorporates that into her art. But she’s not an art teacher, she’s just a person who has this talent!

N: Yes, totally, this is one of the main things I’ve heard from women beyond me in life that I’m always trying to contextualize for my own friends. It’s hard to find childcare, especially if you’re looking for a full-time nanny who has full-time context on your household operations, or if you pay full benefits.

But, the people I’ve seen that scale families really well, and have the bandwidth to help others have this constant mental Rolodex/CRM, in the background. They’re thinking of everyone’s needs and skills — the 16-year-old who has free time and could be a mother’s helper, and the Latin teacher who feels bored at their high school or college and wants to teach a fun, less structured co-op class.

I chatted with a friend recently who mentioned she wanted to host a 3-day long event with her friends that she’d been hosting since before her or her friends had kids. Now, they needed some childcare for everyone to be able to attend, so they hired a neighborhood girl who was a great babysitter, but they also paid her to “project manage” and hire several other babysitters, so they didn’t have to think about it. I think that’s such a beautiful skill — and this ability to spot talent, to spot needs, and to hire and manage effectively in a flexible and creative way is such an important skill for household management.

J: Yes, this is a skill that you must have as an entrepreneur. You must be willing to go out and say we need funding or I know I have zero customers now, but I need you to be customer number one, and here’s why that’s going to work. There’s this brazenness you get from living that life that I’ve taken into motherhood.

One example is that there’s a website for finding adult tutors and coaches, especially for adult professionals. I thought it would be cool to do a gymnastics class at our house, so I went on this site and messaged them, “I have a 2- and 3-year-old, will you come to my house?” We were definitely not the target customer, but a woman who does college level gymnastics at USC took us up on it.

It ended up being this fun break in her week and a convenient commute, and the whole thing was hilarious to her. So many parents are boxed in mentally to, “I want to do preschool for my kids,” and simply Google “preschool,” and the few preschools in their area come up. But the fact that I asked her, I made the pitch, she never posted, “I’m teaching a toddler gymnastics class” was a big breakthrough mentally, as well as realizing that I have a lot to impart to my children.

I don’t know where and when we decided that we aren’t supposed to teach our children. Yeah. And that teachers are supposed to teach our children. But if I, if there’s one thing I could rectify in like the minds of other moms, it would be like, where did you get that idea? These are your kids. You can teach them anything you want.

N: I 1000% agree. Even if it’s just hiring one person in your life to like, engage with your kid on something that they really enjoy or not even hire, you could provide them like a tea set and invite them over to talk about their undergraduate thesis on a book that your kid really loves or whatever else it may be.

J: I’m very non-dogmatic about “homeschool.” I’d love a larger brainstorm at some point about other terms for it, because “homeschool” does make it sound like you’re keeping your kid at home and there’s some divide between your family and like the rest of the world. Some people out there may do it that way, but I don’t think the majority of homeschoolers do. The closest thing I’ve come up with is “parent-driven education”: effectively a mindset that I’m gonna drive the education for them. That doesn’t mean I’ll do it all. If they have a subject they’re really interested in, I’ll find a solution for them to learn about that, or a workshop for them to attend. We probably won’t go full-time to another school environment; that’s all it means to me.

The concept that you’re not qualified to teach your own kid feels like a mind virus. Across political lines, most parents look at their child and go “this kid needs a teacher,” they don’t look at themselves in the mirror and go, “it could be me.” It’s a crisis of confidence: you have so much to give your child, and you’re the one who loves them the most. You have so much vested interest in what they know and what their value system is, so it feels squandered to act like, “I’m not a teacher, so I’ll need to leave it to the professionals.”

This is another good corollary to entrepreneur life. The weakest entrepreneurs are saying, “We’re trying to figure out a strategy, so we hired McKinsey to help us figure it out.” It’s the same thing. You couldn’t decide, you couldn’t take ownership over your choices, because when you take ownership, sometimes it goes poorly and you have to own this is the result I got, and you have to pivot or change.

But the same type of person who would hire a consultant to tell them what to do next in their startup is saying that they need an expert teacher to teach their child.

N: I think this is my broader parenting thesis: all of parenting is making choices about risk trade-offs. Avoiding all the risk is never an option on the table.

I did realize recently that I wouldn’t be qualified to teach daycare in DC because I don’t have a college degree.

J: I’m a college dropout too. Isn’t that so funny and also so irrelevant. I’m sure there are people out there who believe I’m going to create these ignorant children.

A day in Jesse’s life

A peek into the schedule and household management

• 6–7 AM: Wake-Up and Early Morning Prep

I wake up whenever the first child does: between 6 and 7 AM, unless things went wrong and it’s earlier. The morning is full of bathroom trips and endless snacks!

• 9:30 AM – 2:30 PM: Homeschool Co-op at Home

Other kids arrive around 9:30 AM. I teach lessons for the first two hours, and the co-op runs through 2:30 PM. It’s just two families; our 1.5-year-old sometimes joins, and our nanny helps with the baby if needed.

• 2:30 PM – 3:30 PM: Afternoon Arts and Learning

After lessons, our part-time sitter, who’s very artistic, leads art time.

• 3:30 PM – 5 PM: Family Admin and Reset

Once the co-op wraps, I tackle lingering tasks. I manage our finances, manage a few small family ventures, and tackle household maintenance.

• 5 PM – Evening: Dinner and Homekeeping

Dinner is simple: usually grilled chicken or steak and one vegetable from the garden. Grilling outside means fewer dishes, and the kids love picking what they grew.

• Throughout the Day: Laundry and Systems

Our household runs nonstop: two dishwashers, two laundry stacks. Ingrid, our helper, runs loads all day. The kids handle their own clothes: even our 1.5-year-old puts her dish in the dishwasher. The younger ones have drawers right in the laundry room and get dressed there.

The craft blanket

There’s always some point in the day where the kids are entertained by crafts but not directed by anyone. There’s a cabinet where we have scissors and all this stuff, and then I have a picnic blanket I pull out. The kids know that they’re only allowed to use markers and glue and things that can get really hairy on the picnic blanket. And this is so trained, they never take things off the picnic blanket — even the 1.5-year-old knows. I can just scoop it up and shake it out. But they’re probably doing picnic blanket crafting 1-2 hours a day as a way of keeping entertained when we’re making dinner or whatever else.

N: I bet the older kids habituating the 1.5-year-old helps a lot, she’s just brought into seeing what they’re doing.

J: Yes. And kids love being tyrants. If she tries to take a marker away, they’re like, you can’t do that.

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Life in the third oikos

N: You think a lot about our modern technological environment. There’s pre-industrial revolution, post-industrial revolution, and now — a new era for the household, household economies, and social norms — post-COVID, post- remote work, post-LLM — the third oikos.

How do you think technological change forms your family? Even as you were mentioning your property, and family farming, I was thinking of a friend, Mackenzie Burnett, who founded this company, Ambrook, which builds farm accounting tools. Smaller family farms take advantage of all sorts of tax subsidies with modern accounting techniques and modern software. Ambrook has an excellent publication called Offrange that in part details how some of these farms, such old, timeless businesses use such modern technology, and how they’re adopting it.

How do you feel about the current technological era that your family is in? Have there been any specific changes related to remote work or Zoom norms?

Starlink

We’re out here, in the mountains, on a starlink connection which is the only way we can have internet. In a way, technology has empowered us to live physically further from society, which is a benefit people don’t think about as much.

Ryan doesn’t work fully remotely, he has a physical office, but there are some days where he’s here all day working and primarily having meetings, but the kids know he’s here and they love to see him and sit on his lap at lunch time. This type of family experience is definitely ideal for me, in a world where I’d otherwise feel very isolated out here without internet. To live a much more bucolic existence, where the kids are able to spend a certain quantity, even the majority, of their day outside is very ideal, and uniquely powered by the newer technology we have right now.

Household administration and financial management

In a world where I’m not working full-time at another job, I spend a minimum of a few hours a day on administrative things for our household.

We have several small businesses functioning out of the ranch. That may not be normal to everyone else. We have an admin layer, like an external part-time bookkeeper accounting firm, that I work with. Many families have an accounting firm to do their tax at the end of the year: we’re just in more regular contact with that person.

We do some different rentals of a couple things that we own; there are two or three small businesses that are part of our daily lives. They don’t take full-time effort, but someone needs to stay on top of them. And my husband has a full-time career as a startup CEO, running a company that he started a year and half ago. I try to let him focus on that versus our household businesses.

Bringing financial infrastructure into the home

There’s accounting, bookkeeping, paying bills, and I maintain SLAs (service level agreements) — this is where my entrepreneur starts showing. I firmly believe you get great results from people when you pay promptly. You get more TLC from vendors, it’s just human nature, and you’re going to have to pay anyway. These are lessons entrepreneur Jesse learned.

So in family life, I have SLAs, and we try to pay every bill within 24 hours. You gotta have all your payment methods queued up like Venmo, Zelle, PayPal, so I manage our banking and everything as a family. And that, for us, gets pretty complicated pretty fast.

iPad kids

When I get really into homeschooling rabbit holes, there’s some really cool tools that are digitally/iPad-based. I like some of these tools and love the creators behind them. But then I see our 3-year-old boy has a hangover after doing it for 30 minutes. I wouldn’t have expected to be as against technology for the little kids as I ended up being. But if I don’t introduce the iPad in a whole day, he never thinks about it. He ends up playing with the hose, or engineering a little boat out of wine corks.

When the iPad’s introduced to do 30 minutes of an educational thing, there’s a whole hangover period where he doesn’t wanna go outside and he’s debating it and asking for the iPad back. It does feel like the longer you can go before these tools become essential, the better. I love his physicality, he’s jumping and running around, and I feel like I’m interrupting the stream, I’m throwing a rock in that river.

Restricting it does make my homeschooling journey harder. Instead of using the app to teach a math lesson, I just have to teach the math lesson. I would’ve preferred to be a little bit “lazy.”

There’s probably a tipping point around seven or eight where you can have a more rational conversation. Maybe we’re going to do this for an hour a day. We’re also not totally screen free: the kids watch movies and I think a lot about content diet. I’m pretty much against individual screens for little kids. When we watch things, we watch as a family.

N: I read a great book called Habits of the Household: they introduce the idea that the bigger the screen is, the more it leads to community consumption. And especially when you’re trying to apprentice young children into good uses of technology, into consuming media, into discussing it all — that big screen is going to be the most structurally helpful, because it invites people to watch and listen together. The bigger screen does feel more conducive to watching together and discussing.

J: …and their behavior is totally different around it! With a little screen, they shut down and get tunnel vision. With the big screen, they ask questions, they’re laughing, they’re coming up with their own storylines on the side.

When you have the pleasure of being able to spend lots of hours with your kids, I think you see it more poignantly: here’s how they are without screens, and here’s how they are with them. It makes me more willing to accept the difficulty of it.

I joked with someone that it’s not cheaper to have kids off screens! The amount of tape I go through is equal to the cost of an iPad per week. Or something. In a low-tech environment, I’m setting up these activity stations, and then wasting a roll of tape, and then going outside with a shovel. But the overall experience of their childhood and their brain developing feels worth it. Even if sometimes that was a lot of tape.

The third oikos and work

N: I’m curious specifically about the different businesses that you mentioned your family is running, and how you think about your and your husband’s work. There’s this throughline I see in big, beautiful families historically, where they see family business as one family enterprise that is everyone’s project in some way or another. Setups along those lines also seem to offer opportunities for kids or extended family members to be involved in the family’s work and day to day living in really purposeful, lovely ways.

J: In my social circles, many of my female friends are entrepreneurs or executives, it can be jarring to them that I would consider my husband’s work important to me. In this modern cultural framework, it’s supposed to be totally siloed. I’m supposed to care about my career and he’s supposed to care about his career. And the only overlap is that he’s in my house and so I ask him about work once in a while.

That’s strange if you think about it, and it really creates a weird culture for the children, and that wouldn’t have been my default anyways. It does take effort and creativity to think about the more expansive view of this. Ryan is the CEO of another young startup, and there’s all sorts of things we can do as a family to support him.

For example, we hosted a team retreat for Ryan’s whole company here at our house. It saved his company a ton of money rather than going to hotels. We had 30 people in and out of our house, staying in these glamping tents and we put on this really cool event. The kids and I prepped for this event, blew up these glamping tents, did all of these little things, and they had such a ball with all of that. They knew we’re all hosting something for daddy’s company. So I think this is an example where you can utilize whatever assets you have as a family to help your husband’s career.

The company still paid for all sorts of little things — I wasn’t making everyone home-cooked meals, we catered things. But I put on this event, did lots of “unpaid labor,” meaning the company didn’t contract me. I wanted to do this. We worked together. It took a lot of my skills as an entrepreneur. You have to be organized to put on a great event!

But the beautiful part was involving all the kids. All of these colleagues and teammates came to our home and saw him as a dad. The kids were sitting on his knee during dinner. All of that to me is how life could be. And it was very helpful to his company to host this offsite, it saved them tens of thousands of dollars in bills compared to hosting a similar event elsewhere.

That, to me, is how life should be. We are a team. Right now, the income-producing thing that this team is doing is mainly related to Ryan’s career.

I try to involve the kids in seeing that their dad has a career that I think is important, and that we as a family can also do things to support it. This is the mindset to be in: “We are supporting dad’s career.” Even in a modern career! Like, Ryan and I aren’t out there running a family farm right now; he’s building a startup.

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Advice

N: “What would your advice be to people who are considering family? On getting married, how to approach finding a life partner, having kids — any advice to people who are thinking about their scope of ambition, in the realm of the Oikos broadly?

J: Life gets deeper and more purposeful and richer with more complexity. I would preach against the mindset that we’re always trying to simplify and find balance. I think that’s leading people to be overwhelmed by the question “Do I have space in my life for a partner? Do I have space in my life for kids?”

They’re thinking of this space as a pie, and there are slices being cut out. Work is a slice, working out is a slice. I’ve seen TikTok videos of people saying if you add up all these hours in a day — how am I supposed to work out and do this?

The reality is that framework will always lead to you deciding that you do not have time to have another human being like a partner to be added meaningfully to your life, and certainly not children. It just seems like the complexity is building to an unreachable height. I would just throw all of it out the window.

Consider: There is no perfect day

My background as an entrepreneur helped me see that there is no perfect day. There’s no day where you feel as though you achieved everything you wanted to, but the journey and doing something so hard: that is the meat of life. That is the fun part.

In that framework, more human complexity creates richness and you fill to meet it. Your ambition level literally blossoms with that complexity — you realize how much you can handle and it’s way more than you thought.

“I’m striving for simplicity. I’m cutting complexity outta my life.” To me, that mindset, at its most extreme, leads to you sitting in a perfectly clean one-bedroom apartment watching Netflix at night because you’ve cleaned everything else out. You finished the checklist, you’re done.

You can simplify your life into that, but I wouldn’t advise it.

N: I love and resonate with that so much. I’m hearing a little bit of “scale fast and see what breaks.” There’s a podcast I love that’s always echoing this — as a homemaker especially, you will never fully have arrived. But that also comes with the fact that your life just gets richer and deeper the whole time.

J: People think that personal growth will come from their wellbeing, which will arrive at the other end of simplifying and focusing on self, reading one more self-help book about clearing the clutter out of their lives, and cutting people out.

The true wellbeing is always in the additions. Yes, there’s chaos. I’m not perfectly organized. All these additions and the children and the family and the husband with other kids, so much mess, right? But for me, the wellbeing is on the other side of that.

N: Have you read Hannah’s Children? It’s an academic study of women with 5 or more children, about why they made that choice. The author, Catherine Pakaluk, is also a Harvard economist with 14 kids, some of whom are step-children. Another ambitious woman with a mixed family and a lot of children

J: Reading Hannah’s Children, there was something that’s striking to me. I grew up Methodist, Christian values, but mild religion. I didn’t attend church on my own accord as a young adult or anything like this.

All these interviews were women finding their peace and connection to humanity through having larger families from many different religious backgrounds. I would even throw my own hat into the ring and say, from a more a-religious background, you can find yourself in this path, that it is there, because I actually think some people view it as a religious choice. That: by definition having a lot of children is a religious choice.

N: Yes, I really appreciate Catherine’s methodology and her academic approach in this book and saying, “No, seriously, please tell me, how did you arrive here?” and studying, without the implicit assumptions, women’s reasoning.

Even when you ask my brilliant mother-in-law, who is religious, about a lot of her life choices as a mother of 5 and a homemaker, it’s “I found it deeply fulfilling” before anything else, and people want you to give another answer first.

J: I’ve been pulled aside and quizzed. People are like, ‘But maybe you’re Mormon?” I’ve been asked that upfront by a couple women. They’re like, ‘But secretly it’s a religious choice, right?’ And I’m like, “No!” I’ve been asked, in a hushed way, ‘Is Ryan basically making you have all these children? In order to be his wife you have to keep doing this?’ Or, ‘Are you actually way more religious in a closeted way and you’re just not telling people?’

They’re looking for the reason why I’m having these children — it can’t possibly be because I enjoy it. I just want to say, it actually is that enjoyable and that fun! You actually can do it just because it’s such a fulfilling path, not because a book somewhere told you to do it. There’s a parting thought: having all of these children really is a choice I am enjoying.

This is the first in an ongoing series of interviews with flourishing family and community builders. Within, they share what the good life looks like when technology is reshaping the household. If you have someone who who may be a good interviewee - please reach out.

This interview series is made possible by the Foundation for American Innovation and the Institute for Family Studies.

What are we talking about?

Oikos is a Greek term that means house, household, or family. The management of household work — oikonomia — is where we get the word “economy.” This project came from an essay by Jon Askonas and Michael Toscano in National Affairs; they argued that history has been dominated by two main forms of household organization and production. But, almost without noticing, we’ve passed into a third form.

• The first oikos was the household until the Industrial Revolution. Before that shift, the household was the central hub of economic production, and production was ordered by the needs of the household. In different societies, men and women had different roles, but “work” was something that both sexes did.

• The second oikos came with the Industrial Revolution. Society centered on rational or scientific production, which moved outside of the household. In this period, productivity shifted to larger scale enterprises: the factory and the office. In the West, male and female spheres became more sharply delineated. As production moved to corporate settings, the home went from a site of both consumption and production to one of mere consumption. Many of our ideas about domesticity are rooted not in age-old norms, but in the modern split between the worlds of consumption and production.

• But perhaps since the digital revolution, and surely since COVID, we’ve entered the third oikos. Technological developments have reshaped what a “household” is to a degree not seen since the Industrial Revolution. The digital revolution made economic production possible outside of the office, and a raft of even newer shifts — COVID, LLMs, and smaller automated machines among them — has accelerated the move away from traditional corporate forms. At the same time, those technological shifts toward digital existence have heightened isolation and polarization.

The result is a mix of opportunities and challenges for households. On the one hand, there are signs that production is returning to the household. Both white collar Zoom work and more hands-on production techniques are increasingly possible within family life, not just outside the home. There will be opportunities to retrieve ways of ordering a household that were impossible a generation ago.

On the other hand, the challenges to communal and family life are real: social isolation, a massive spike in gender polarization, a massive drop-off in pairing off, a dramatically increased cost of living, and a plummeting fertility rate look like parts of a vicious cycle. “How do I live a good life?” is an eternal human question, but it can feel like a completely new challenge today. We can no longer take for granted basic facts about friendship, neighborhood, community, and family.

Each month, I’m going to interview flourishing family and community builders. I’ll try to understand their ambitions, and identify the practical techniques they use to make their households functional and beautiful. I’m hoping to draw out how individuals and families have adapted to the new technological environment they find themselves in: how they are protecting against new challenges to family life, and taking advantage of new opportunities for flourishing.

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Why this newsletter exists

I’m interested in finding and telling stories of working households because I benefited from them. As a child, I had a rocky relationship with my family of origin, and I experienced just how isolating contemporary suburban life can be. When I started college, the loneliness didn’t go away, and I wasn’t getting an education worth what I was paying for. I dropped out, but couldn’t pay for the other schools I was admitted to. Instead, I found myself on an unorthodox path: a software internship, enrollment in online community college, studying on buses and the metro on my way to my new 9-5. As my friends began their college lives, I didn’t know where to find community.

In this precarious state, I was welcomed into multiple households: a place to crash for months from a high school friend’s family, and a long-term home from another family, who I met through my now-husband’s family. What characterized these households was their entrenchment and investment in a broader community. They were committed to raising children together, even if it took living in the same cul-de-sac. In each home, both parents were intentional about building a culture of hospitality in their household, which they passed down to their children.

In these experiences, I saw firsthand the benefits of family as a social safety net, even though the families in question weren’t my own. There were pockets of the social fabric that were thriving, I learned, that protected me from adverse life circumstances. More than that, I saw other visions of what the good life could look like — not perfect, but beautiful, compelling visions that opened up my mind to a world of possibilities.

In the following years, I entered the world of investing in new technologies through working in venture capital, where I paid close attention to a set of technological trends that further expanded my sense of what was possible:

• Digitization and modularization in healthcare and medical diagnostics is allowing more care to happen while patients remain at home.

• Just-in-time logistics is allowing all sorts of niche expertise to be supported by materials shipped from around the world and cultivated through online learning.

• Digital infrastructure and low earth orbit satellites mean homes anywhere could have a high-speed internet connection.

• Instant payments, global banking, remote fundraising, and digital identity/KYC allows all manner of business, building financial transactions straight from the home.

My experiences with the strengths and weaknesses of our modern social fabric, particularly in family life and my close professional attention to technological trends meant I was compelled by a question Askonas and Toscano posed:

“The family as an institution is amenable to many different kinds of social organization and technologies of production, but not every kind. What must society’s underlying technological order feature for the family to survive? What kinds of technologies are conducive to its flourishing?”

They argued that new technological forms — high-speed internet, information technology, COVID, remote work, ubiquitous LLMs, and the broader acceleration of digital life — were driving huge economic shifts and reweaving our social fabric.

Technological changes

The ubiquity of smartphones since the early 2010s was already fully in motion, but COVID provided an additional push for all parts of daily life to be taken online. Whether it’s digital check-in stations at doctors appointments, check-out processes at grocery stores and restaurants or check-in processes at hotels; online religious services, telehealth and teletherapy appointments, or dating. Suddenly most institutions that involved a social aspect were forced to consider if they should replace it with a digital mode. The attention economies of social media also mean that our lives are punctuated by reminders that it would be easier to get cheap hits of dopamine by picking up a device, rather than more aversive and more meaningful physical tasks before us.

As large language models such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini come into mass public usage, outsourcing to the digital is accelerating. Around half of the population has used an LLM (as of July 2025, according to Rethink Priorities), and one third of that population uses LLMs daily (Elon University). Next to the benefits of these models, it’s hard not to notice that massive amounts of logical and social processing are assisted by — if not outsourced to — LLMs, across writing, intrapersonal navigation (apologies, love letters, etc.), professional negotiation, therapy, and more.

We’ve also hit other momentous technological inflection points. Reusable, low-cost rocket launch (SpaceX Falcon 9) means satellite launch costs are dropped by an order of magnitude and software-managed coverage allocation means low earth orbit of these satellites can provide high-speed internet almost anywhere. During COVID, millions of Americans fled cities but still needed modern connectivity that would enable online school, video calls, and remote work. Starlink meant that SpaceX was able to meet this demand relatively easily — no digging fiber-optic connections. It’s a thoroughly modern re-domestication of infrastructure.

The nature of technology is that it is always shifting, but our last 20 years or so have been marked by a complete digital transformation of society.

Social changes

Technological changes in both the second and third oikoi have led to massive social change. People are more lonely and more isolated. They have fewer close friends, spend less time socializing, and are invested less in community organizations like churches, unions, and hobbyist groups. Work norms have shifted toward decentralized, always-on models. People also struggle to begin family life: we’re more polarized by gender, go on fewer dates, get married later, have fewer children than we desire, and so on. We’re less invested in and supported by extended family, or other forms of community. An increasingly large swathe of social life is now facilitated through the digital, and all of these changes were rapidly accelerated by the pandemic.

98% of Americans own a cellphone, and about 9 in 10 Americans own a smartphone (Pew). As work moves to the digital, always-on norm, the friction to answering one more work email is significantly lower. As engaging in the digital world has atrophied social skills, slipping into spending a few more hours on salaried digital work feels like an easier choice than putting ourselves out there socially — going on a date, attending a new social group, or having a less than perfect catchup call with an extended family member.

Partially as a result, we’re experiencing a friendship recession. The percentage of US adults who report having no close friends has quadrupled to 12% since 1990). People are less involved in their local communities. Access to social life is also intensified by socioeconomic status, with lower and middle class people spending less time in community organizations. People are more transient on average, and invest less in social watering holes where they historically met neighbors, friends, and spouses (offices, religious community, and community spaces like parks or libraries).

Dating has also become harder as people move around more often, and apps encourage a market-like mentality around potential romantic partners, as well as social life as a whole. People are also having less sex, especially young people, which researchers tie to the decline in the percentage of partnered people (married or living together) in this age cohort.

Families are challenged by a lack of tight-knit communities that can help them share childcare, share in discipline and in joy, and pick up slack when families face tragedy. Moreover, as spaces are designed by and presided over by a population with fewer children, and less proximity to children - more of daily life becomes needlessly frictional or even hostile to families, mothers, and children (You should hold more babies.)

Economically, family life has been strained by an increased cost of living — housing, healthcare, and childcare in particular — and higher-than-ever cultural standards for family life. Millennials can no longer expect a better life than their parents, and therefore struggle to expect a better one for their children. Without progress further along a perceived “adulting” path, they feel they can’t expect to build a family.

The positives of digital life

Now, I will be the first to say that the shifts of the third oikos have brought benefits as well as costs. The Twitter habit I developed in the first year of college, which started because I felt intellectually isolated in my physical environment, contributed to me landing both a job and a husband, as well as several people I count as close friends. In a world without “learning in public” online, I would have missed out on some of the best things in my life. Additionally, many parents are able to spend more time with their children because of remote work, and we’ve also seen a fertility boost for married women and men who work from home and already have children. In many ways the digital can allows production and social life to re-localize, if we properly harness it to do so.

And if there’s one lesson I take from Askonas and Toscano’s essay defining the third oikos, it’s not to glamorize the recent past. The 1950s were not the peak of domesticity, or societal ideals, and many of the ideas we have about domesticity simply were not built to survive economic and technological change. It’s often easy to fixate on ideals that were made possible by a very specific moment in time. A flourishing social fabric of community and families in the moment we live in will look fundamentally different in many ways.

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Where we’re going

The world needs families for many reasons, not least as a social structure that absorbs and insulates many people from the downsides of life. And families are often made of and supported by many more people than just our nuclear and biological families. As my church says, our family is meant to “Multiply each other’s joy and divide each other’s sorrows.” But what those families look like — how they’re formed, who works, where, and how, how kids are educated, how they’re cared for — is likely to change. As the media scholar Marshall McLuhan argued, “Every medium or technology enhances some human function, obsolesces some older form, retrieves some previously obsolesced form, and when pushed to its limits, reverses into its opposite.” To thrive in the third oikos, we may have to look back to ways of living before the second oikos.

We’ll also have to look ahead, and think proactively about the technologies we’re building. As Askonas and Toscano argue, “We must reassert the authority of families and local communities over the technologies that shape their everyday lives… restoring power and responsibility to local actors. Doing so will require favoring technology that enhances local and familial autonomy.” Some technologies, like those that enable remote work, may be a great boon to families, even as social media may be a harm.

What does the good life look like in the third oikos? I don’t exactly know yet, but join me and let’s figure it out.

This interview series is made possible by the Foundation for American Innovation and the Institute for Family Studies.