Hardest Difficulty

There's two things people say to parents like it's a law of nature. I've heard both a hundred times, and both of them are bullshit.

“Boys will be boys.”

The hardest difficulty doesn't come with a pause menu.

No. Kids act how they're raised. All children act the same depending on how they're raised — that's it, that's the whole thing. A little girl with three older brothers is going to climb, wrestle, get loud, and get into everything, because that's the house she lives in. Not because of anything she was born with. It's the environment, not the gender.

“Boys will be boys” is a cop-out. It's what you say when you don't want to actually parent the kid standing in front of you. You shrug, you laugh it off, you let it go — and the kid learns the rules don't apply to him. He carries that into growing up thinking he can do whatever he wants because he's a boy, and that messes with his head in ways that take years to undo.

And it's not just the boys it hurts. It teaches the girls the rough stuff isn't for them, and the boys the soft stuff isn't for them. Both of those are lies too.

“It gets easier.”

This one's worse, because it sounds like encouragement. Somebody says it with a smile while you're drowning in diapers and tantrums and homework battles, like there's a finish line coming. There isn't. It doesn't get easier. It gets harder. Every age has its own chaos — the baby stuff, the little-kid stuff, the teenager stuff — and when you've got all of them at the same time, it's the ultimate patience test. It will test your patience the hardest it can possibly test it.

Don't get me wrong, there's good stuff in it. There's a lot of good stuff. But every age has its own pros and its own cons, and doing all of them at once is really fucking hard.

I used to joke that I always played my video games on the hardest difficulty. This is the epitome of that. This is the hardest difficulty there is — each kid in their own age gap, all at once, every day. No save points. No pause menu.

So if someone tells you it gets easier, they're either lying or they forgot. And if someone tells you boys will be boys, ask them what they're actually excusing. The truth isn't as comforting, but at least it's honest: it's hard, it stays hard, and you're not doing it wrong just because it feels that way.

— Bradley Creek