Why Parenting Has Too Many Options and Not Enough Rules

My twins are seven. On any given Tuesday I have access to approximately forty-seven competing opinions about what they should eat for lunch, how much screen time is developmentally appropriate, whether I'm damaging them by not doing enough enrichment activities, whether I'm damaging them by doing too many enrichment activities, and — my personal favorite — whether the way I'm responding to their big feelings is producing secure attachment or setting them up for a lifetime of therapy.

I have never been more informed about parenting. I have also never felt less confident about it.

So when I watched David Epstein's hour-long Big Think interview about his new book Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better, I wasn't expecting it to land the way it did. I was expecting a crisp business-y argument about creativity and organizational design. Instead I sat there going: this is the most useful parenting framework I've encountered in seven years, and it has nothing to do with parenting.

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Epstein's central argument is this: freedom doesn't unlock creativity. Constraints do. Given total freedom, our brains don't innovate — they default. As cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham puts it in the interview, your brain isn't really built for thinking. It's built for avoiding thinking whenever possible, because thinking is metabolically expensive. So when you hand someone a blank canvas, they reach for the familiar brushstrokes. When you hand them a haiku form, they find something new.

His exhibit A is a company called General Magic, a late-'80s startup built by former Apple engineers who genuinely saw the future. They were working on concepts that wouldn't become mainstream products for another decade. They had brilliant, visionary people and essentially unlimited freedom to build anything they could imagine. Their CEO called it "heaven for engineers."

It was a disaster. Because they could build anything, they built everything. One engineer's job was simply to create a calendar function. He built one spanning 1904 to 2096 — sensible enough. Then someone said, "What about historical apps?" So he rebuilt it starting from year one. Then someone else said that was an arbitrary religious context, and he should start from the beginning of astronomical time. The calendar function that could have been four lines of code became a sprawling, multi-month project. Epstein says their product eventually shipped with a 200-page user manual and, according to his account, sold around 3,000 units in six months.

I read that calendar story and immediately thought of the time I spent three weeks researching the "right" approach to our kids' bedtime routine. Three weeks. I read sleep studies. I read pediatric sleep consultant websites. I joined a Reddit thread. I listened to a podcast. I triangulated across seven different expert positions. My wife, who had been a functional adult for thirty-five years, pointed out that kids who are tired go to sleep, and that the main thing was probably just to do the same thing every night.

She was right. She was right immediately. I had just built a calendar function that started at the Big Bang.

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Here's where Epstein's framework gets interesting for parents specifically. He draws a contrast between General Magic and Pixar — a company that from the outside looks like pure imagination, but from the inside ran on systematic constraints. Director Ed Catmull required that story pitches come in threes, because a single idea gets anchored too quickly. Story development stayed small and cheap for as long as possible, because complexity only explodes once you hit production. When animators started obsessing over the shading on a background penny, Pixar didn't ban penny-shading — they put popsicle sticks on a wall, one per animator-week, visually allocated across everything that needed doing. If you want to keep shading that penny, fine. But watch which other sticks you're pulling off the wall.

Making the constraint visible solved the problem instantly, Epstein says.

My first thought: I need popsicle sticks for my life.

My second thought: we actually already have them. They're called seven-year-olds.

Kids — at least mine — are remarkably good at making your actual constraints visible. You can spend twenty minutes on the internet researching the ideal protein-to-carb ratio of a school lunch. Or you can make the same three things on rotation because those are the three things two particular humans will eat without complaint, and lunch just... gets solved. The constraint isn't failure. The constraint is the mechanism.

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The section of Epstein's interview that I keep returning to is his riff on what Herbert Simon called "satisficing" — picking something that is good enough rather than endlessly seeking the optimal choice. Simon, who won the Nobel Prize in economics among several other top prizes, applied this principle to his own life relentlessly: same breakfast, same small rotation of clothes, simple decision rules for recurring situations. Epstein calls him "an incorrigible satisficer."

The point Simon made — and that Epstein builds on — is that maximizing isn't just difficult, it's counterproductive. We don't have the cognitive bandwidth to evaluate every option across every dimension and arrive at the objectively best decision. When we try, we end up less satisfied with the choice we make, because our brains are comparison engines. There's always another option we didn't pick.

I've watched parents — myself included — agonize over decisions that any reasonable pre-set criterion would resolve in thirty seconds. Sleep training method. Which preschool. Whether to do the school play or the travel soccer team. We treat these decisions like they require maximum deliberation because the stakes are high, but Epstein's argument (and really Simon's, stretched forward) is that the high stakes make satisficing more important, not less. Set your criteria. Pick the thing that meets them. Move.

The alternative, as Epstein puts it: "It gives you the illusion that you can actually get everything done if you only have the right system. But in fact, what you have to do is face the fact that you're mortal, you're going to die, and ruthlessly prioritize based on that."

That's a bleak framing for a parenting article. But also, accurate?

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There's a bigger structural argument underneath all of this that I think is worth naming directly. Epstein cites sociologist Émile Durkheim's 19th-century finding that anomie — rulelessness, the removal of familiar structures — correlates with anxiety and despair, regardless of whether the disruption is positive or negative. Economic booms caused as much distress as economic busts, if they unmoored people from their identity anchors.

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who Epstein interviewed, makes a related point: "It's not healthy for anyone to have access to everything everywhere all of the time. We are not equipped to have infinite choice because our brains are comparison engines."

Millennial parents grew up being told that more options meant more freedom meant better outcomes. And in some domains that's true. But in parenting — where the options are infinite, the experts contradict each other, and the stakes feel enormous — the effect seems to have been a generation of parents who are more informed, more anxious, more self-critical, and, I'd argue, not meaningfully doing a better job than our parents who had fewer choices and more rules.

We are General Magic. We got to build anything, so we built everything, and now we're shipping a product with a 200-page manual that nobody can actually use.

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What Epstein is describing — the creative and psychological case for constraints — is ultimately an argument for the thing that parenting culture has been quietly eroding for thirty years: rules that are good enough and don't require constant renegotiation. Bedtime is bedtime. Screen time ends at six. We eat dinner together on weeknights. Not because research has confirmed these are the globally optimal choices, but because having a box to work inside is what makes the creative work of actually raising children possible.

Isabel Allende starts every book on January 8th. She lights a candle to start the workday, blows it out to end it. She told Epstein: "Without this structure and this rhythm, I could not do it." The structure isn't the opposite of creativity. It's the container that makes creativity survivable.

I think about that when our bedtime routine runs long and I'm tired and one of the twins is stalling with a question about whether black holes have feelings. The routine is the popsicle stick on the wall. It shows me where to focus, which means it also shows me where to stop.

That's not a low bar. That's the whole thing.

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Marcus Obi is a staff writer at Buzzrag covering parenting, family dynamics, and the impossible standards modern parents face. He is a stay-at-home dad to 7-year-old twins and a former marketing manager.