How to Be a Family

July 22, 2019
Kois, a parenting podcaster and editor at Slate, believed that he, his wife, and two daughters “were doing being a family wrong” and tells of his radical step to rectify their situation. He decided they should spend 2017 living in new locations far from their Arlington, Va., home, spending three months in each location. The experiment’s results are varied and delightful to read about: their happy idyll in beautiful Wellington, New Zealand, is packed with friendly neighborhood barbecues and a rejection of American helicopter parenting. The Dutch in Delft, in the Netherlands, seem a cooler lot and obsessed with “normalcy,” though Kois—a serial enthusiast—is entranced by their social cohesion and bicycles. Bug-infested Samara, Costa Rica, is appealingly laid-back, though its roughness starts straining family ties. Back in the vaunted “Real America” of Trump-voting Hays in western Kansas, Kois is as intrigued by the close-knit religious town as he is with the locales abroad. He fills his narrative with both ironic, self-deprecating humor and earnest soul-searching (“A place never solves anything”) as he comes to the realization that “you can’t actually change your kids but your kids change nonetheless.” This “foolhardy jaunt” into experimental family life–hacking consistently pleases and surprises.

August 15, 2019
Slate editor Kois (Facing Future, 2009, etc.) looks for a little quality time with the family, finding it in adventures and misadventures around the world. "Above all," writes the author near the beginning, "our life as a family felt as though it were flying past in a blur of petty arguments, overworked days, exhausted nights, an inchoate longing for some kind of existence that made more sense." The answer: Uproot. Move. Go see what the rest of the world looks like while the kids are still young. Kois and his family embarked on a journey that took them from Northern Virginia to New Zealand, the Netherlands, Costa Rica, Kansas, and back again in a whirlwind year. The book doesn't have much of a thesis, but its slightly melancholy ending might remind cinema-minded readers of the end of Bill Forsyth's 1983 film Local Hero. There are a few set pieces and clichés but also some nicely tuned-in observations befitting a keen-eyed journalist. For example, the author writes about how in Holland, speed laws for motor vehicles are set at 30 kilometers per hour because anything more would likely doom a pedestrian or cyclist to death. So it is that people survive such collisions in Holland, which puts a nation assured of good odds on two wheels, which, thus applied to children, "helps create the kind of independence that Dutch parents prize." The America of red-state Kansas proved more fearful but not without civic virtues; refreshingly, Kois doesn't hammer too hard on politics even though it's clear where his views lie. Overall, the book is a minor contribution to the literature of family (and travel, for that matter), but it's a pleasant narrative that makes few demands on readers. Slack moments aside, this memoir of travel with a family in need of change has its pleasures.

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September 15, 2019
Journalist Kois' first book looks back with dry humor on the year his family spent away from their Arlington, Virginia home. In 2017, Kois and his attorney wife, Alia, uprooted their two daughters, introverted 11-year-old Lyra and extroverted 9-year-old Harper, to spend three months each in New Zealand, the Netherlands, Costa Rica, and Hayes, Kansas. Sick of the routines of suburban East Coast living, Kois wanted to investigate whether other places had figured out family life better than his neighborhood had. Yes and no, he discovered. The kids enjoyed running around unsupervised in New Zealand and savored slow Saturdays in Hayes, but Lyra suffered under a restrictive school system in the Netherlands, and nobody liked the bugs in Costa Rica. Their family bond became closer, but perhaps mainly because of their enforced closeness and the fact that the parents were only working part-time. While only a qualified success as an experiment, the project makes for diverting reading, with occasional asides from Kois' wife and daughters adding varied perspectives(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)