For parents of sleepless young ones, the cultural footprint of author Adam Mansbach is hard to overstate. Bleary-eyed and occasionally bordering on despair, parents everywhere often experience a sense of quiet transcendence the first time they crack open his infamous 2011 bestseller, Go the Fck to Sleep*. The irreverent, profanity-laced picture book perfectly captured the complex, overwhelming emotional landscape that comes with raising toddlers—that unique sensation of being trapped in an exhausting, simmering pot of deep cuddles, total dependence, heart-melting sweetness, and white-hot frustration. Mansbach allowed all of those contradictory emotions to boil completely over, providing an exhausted generation of parents with a long-overdue, deeply cathartic laugh.
Now, fifteen years later, Mansbach is tapping into an entirely new phase of the parenting journey: the impossible, heart-wrenching feelings experienced by mothers and fathers who are about to send their children, now teenagers, out into the wider world of higher education. His new book, Go the Fck to College*, is available everywhere books are sold, and it matches its predecessor in being just as sweet, sardonic, and endearingly cathartic. Even for parents who are currently navigating the turbulent waters of pre-adolescence, the book serves as a wonderful, grounding reminder that the overall parenting journey is long, fraught, difficult, and profoundly beautiful—and that it does everyone a world of good to find a little bit of humor in the chaos.
In a recent essay reflecting on this milestone, Mansbach trades away some of the heavy profanity and visual illustrations of his earlier works to examine the swirling state of mind he finds himself in as he grapples with just how ready his child is to finally embark on their own path into the world.
A Crucial Text Message and an April Fool’s Reality Check
A few weeks ago, as he sat quietly at his desk ordering a traditional cap and gown for his graduating high school senior, the teenager in question sent a sudden, anxiety-inducing text message: Do I really have to go to college?
Mansbach’s heart rate immediately soared as he raced to type out a reassuring answer: I mean, we already bought the sweatshirts. Those specific sweatshirts bore the name of Bard College—his child Vivien’s dream school, to which they had been accepted months earlier, leading the family to stock up on roughly a dozen pieces of campus apparel.
But you know I’m in favor of a gap year, Mansbach quickly added, attempting to mask his sudden panic. What are you thinking?
I just want to live at home. I could be a barista, Vivien replied.
Fine with me, the author said, trying his best to play it cool.
Maybe sell weed? Vivien wrote back.
Market’s kind of saturated, Mansbach replied, leaning into the banter. You’d be better off selling tomatoes.
Sorry Papa, April Fool’s.
Hahahahahahaha, Mansbach texted back, noting privately that he was not, in fact, laughing.
Thank you for being so supportive, Vivien wrote. That was heartwarming. Ur fcking lying, bro.*
The underlying truth, Mansbach admits, is that he actually wasn’t lying. He genuinely wished he had been, but his sudden excitement, his racing heart, and his entirely fake nonchalance all stemmed from a true and deeply embarrassing internal reaction: Yesssssss! They’re not leaving! Everything can stay the same forever! In that precise moment, he found himself perfectly willing to trade the genuine exultation he felt when contemplating how beautifully large Vivien’s world was about to expand for something safe, familiar, and the promise of unlimited free lattes at home.
It served as a powerful, timely reminder that the core of parenting is all about embracing paradox. If a parent cannot learn to hold completely opposite, contradictory ideas in their mind at the exact same time, they might very well lose their sanity.
When children are small, these paradoxes tend to be relatively simple—such as being consumed by a blinding wave of rage when a toddler’s flat refusal to go to sleep leaves a parent trapped in a grueling two-hour snuggle session with the person they love most in the entire world, a dynamic Mansbach famously immortalized in Go the Fck to Sleep*.
A decade later, the paradox transforms into wrapping your head around the reality that a twelve-year-old child is sometimes emotionally eighteen and other times functionally six—or, as a friend of Mansbach neatly summarized the middle school parenting experience, fck you, tuck me in.* By the time high school rolls around, the paradox morphs once again into the agonizing realization that the only thing more infuriating than seeing your teenager completely lost inside their smartphone is texting them and failing to receive a reply within four nanoseconds.
The Ultimate Paradox: Wanting to Parent Most When Least Needed
As the clock inexorably ticks down toward high school graduation, legal adulthood, and true independence, those inherent paradoxes only grow thornier. For Mansbach, looking past the complex interplay of exultation and melancholy that turned an April Fool’s joke inside out, or the humorous contradiction of letting his kid know they can always return home while simultaneously announcing plans to convert their empty bedroom into a home gym, the single biggest paradox is wanting to perform the most active parenting precisely when the least amount of parenting is actually needed.
The exact moment he realized he could no longer wave a magic wand and solve all of Vivien’s problems stands out vividly in his memory. It occurred back in fourth grade, when the child’s favorite teacher announced she was leaving the school. Vivien felt deeply betrayed and thoroughly crushed. Because Mansbach was utterly powerless to alter the situation, he was forced to do something he finds substantially more difficult than problem-solving: he had to simply sit down, listen, and walk through the emotional pain right alongside them.
However, because he is naturally solution-oriented—or perhaps just a bit of a knucklehead who genuinely hates to see his children suffer—the lesson didn’t entirely stick the first time. Year after year, he continued to err on the side of offering unsolicited instructions like here’s what you need to do instead of adopting the much harder stance of acknowledging that sounds hard and I’m sure you’ll figure it out.
Eventually, he did get a little better at stepping back. And Vivien turned out capable, resilient, and resourceful anyway—not least because Mansbach had spent years teaching them how to stand up to overbearing authority figures, a category that he jokingly admits mostly included himself. But now, with the looming reality of college just around the corner, he finds himself frantically scrambling to impart all the hard-earned wisdom he has finally grown wise enough to keep to himself.
The underlying problem with this eleventh-hour wisdom dump is that it usually falls into one of three categories: either it is stuff they already know quite well, such as basic safety reminders like avoiding unregulated pills and powders; it consists of precious nuggets of advice that instantly reveal themselves to be utterly idiotic the exact second they are spoken aloud, such as telling an 18-year-old to take classes about things you think are interesting!; or it is comprised of profound life jewels whose sheer importance is rivaled only by the total impossibility of turning them into practical, prescriptive advice. An example of the latter, Mansbach notes, is trying to tell a young adult to learn to quickly discern who is a trustworthy friend who will push you to be the best version of yourself and who is drawn to you because they’re an emotional vampire and you’re an emotional blood source!
Despite these overwhelming temptations to deliver a final, comprehensive crash course in life before drop-off day, Mansbach recognizes the futility of the effort. These final months before college are simply no time to suddenly establish a rigorous new family exercise routine or attempt to teach basic automobile maintenance; instead, they are meant for enjoying each other’s company and purchasing copious amounts of dorm room bedding. College itself will serve as the ultimate crash course in everything, and nobody is ever a finished product on day one—not an 18-year-old Vivien, and certainly not a 49-year-old father.
Ultimately, perhaps the most important paradox of all is realizing that your child remains your child even when they are living completely on their own. Or perhaps it is understanding that human beings truly grow from the inside out. Above all else, Mansbach hopes Vivien will hold tightly to their enduring kidness—the natural wonder, the silliness, and the simple yet beautiful moral code they picked up way back in preschool—as they take those monumental first hesitant steps into the broader world of adulthood.
Besides, as Mansbach dryly notes, someone else down at Bard College will probably know how to change a tire anyway.