The uncomfortable truth about tipping, explained with stick figures

It’s about time we got to the bottom of this.

Dec 7, 2017

Tipping isn’t about gratitude for good service – Photo credit: Photo by Sam Dan Truong on Unsplash

This post was originally published on Wait But Why.

Tipping is not about generosity.

Tipping isn’t about gratitude for good service. And tipping certainly isn’t about doing what’s right and fair for your fellow man.

Tipping is about making sure you don’t mess up what you’re supposed to do.

In my case, the story goes like this: In college, I was a waiter at a weird restaurant called Fire and Ice. This is the front page of their website (FYI: those lame word labels are on the site, not added by me):

All photos are from the original WaitButWhy post and used with permission.

That sad guy in the back is one of the waiters. He’s sad because he gets no salary and relies on tips like every other waiter, but people undertip him because at this restaurant they get their own food so they think he’s not a real waiter even though he has to bring them all their drinks and side dishes and give them a full tour of the restaurant and tell them how it works like a clown and then bus the table because they have no busboys at the restaurant and just when the last thing he needs is for the managers to be mean and powerful middle-aged women who are mean to him, that’s what also happens.

Bad life experiences aside, the larger point here is that I came out of my time as a waiter as a really good tipper, like all people who have ever worked in a job that involves tipping. And friends of mine would sometimes notice this and say sentences like, “Tim is a really good tipper.”

My ego took a liking to these sentences, and now 10 years later, I’ve positioned myself right in the “good but not ridiculously good tipper” category.

So anytime a tipping situation arises, all I’m thinking is, “What would a good but not ridiculously good tipper do here?”

Sometimes I know exactly what the answer to that question is, and things run smoothly. But other times, I find myself in the dreaded Ambiguous Tipping Situation.

Ambiguous Tipping Situations can lead to a variety of disasters:

1. The Inadvertent Undertip

2. The Inadvertent Overtip

3. The “Shit Am I Supposed To Tip Or Not?” Horror Moment

I don’t want to live this way anymore. So , I decided to do something about it.

I put on my Weird But Earnest Guy Doing a Survey About Something hat and hit the streets, interviewing 123 people working in New York jobs that involve tipping. My interviews included waiters, bartenders, baristas, manicurists, barbers, busboys, bellhops, valets, attendants, cab drivers, restaurant delivery people, and even some people who don’t get tipped but I’m not sure why, like acupuncturists and dental hygienists.

I covered a bunch of different areas in New York, including SoHo, the Lower East Side, Harlem, the Upper East Side, and the Financial District, and I tried to capture a wide range, from the fanciest places to the dive-iest.

About 10% of the interviews ended after seven seconds when people were displeased by my presence and I’d slowly back out of the room, but for the most part, people were happy to talk to me about tipping — how much they received, how often, how it varied among customer demographics, how large a portion of their income tipping made up, etc. And it turns out that service industry workers have a lot to say on the topic.

I supplemented my findings with the help of a bunch of readers who wrote with detailed information about their own experiences and with a large amount of research, especially from the website of Wm. Michael Lynn, a leading tipping expert.

So I know stuff about this now. Here’s what you need to know before you tip someone.

1. The stats.

The most critical step in avoiding Ambiguous Tipping Situations is just knowing what you’re supposed to do. I took all the stats that seem to have a broad consensus on them and put them into this table:

This table nicely fills in key gaps in my previous knowledge. The basic idea with the low/average/high tipping levels used above is that if you’re in the average range, you’re fine and forgotten. If you’re in the low or high range, you’re noticed and remembered. And service workers have memories like elephants.

2. What tipping well (or not well) means for your budget.

Since tipping is such a large part of life, it seems like we should stop to actually understand what being a low, average, or high tipper means for our budget.

Looking at it simply, you can do some quick math and figure out one portion of your budget. For example, maybe you think you have 100 restaurant meals a year at about $25/meal — so according to the above chart, being a low, average, and high restaurant tipper all year will cost you $350 (14% tips), $450 (18% tips), and $550 (22% tips) a year. In this example, it costs a low tipper $100/year to become an average tipper and an average tipper $100/year to become a high tipper.

I got a little more comprehensive and came up with three rough profiles: Low Spender, Mid Spender, and High Spender. These vary both in the frequency of times they go to a restaurant or bar or hotel, etc., and the fanciness of the services they go to — i.e., High Spender goes to fancy restaurants and does so often and Low Spender goes out to eat less often and goes to cheaper places. I did this to cover the extremes and the middle; you’re probably somewhere in between.

3. Other factors that should influence specific tipping decisions.

One thing my interviews made clear is that there’s this whole group of situation-related factors that service industry workers think are super relevant to the amount you should tip — it’s just that customers never got the memo. Most customers have their standard tip amount in mind and don’t really think about it much beyond that.

Here’s what service workers want you to consider when you tip them:

Time matters. Sometimes a bartender cracks open eight bottles of beer, which takes 12 seconds, and sometimes she makes eight multi-ingredient cocktails with olives and a whole umbrella scene on each, which takes four minutes, and those two orders should not be tipped equally, even though they might cost the same amount.

Effort matters. Food delivery guys are undertipped. They’re like a waiter, except your table is on the other side of the city. $2 really isn’t a sufficient tip (and one delivery guy I talked to said 20% of people tip nothing). $3 or $4 is much better. And when it’s storming outside? The delivery guys I talked to all said the tips don’t change in bad weather — that’s not logical. Likewise, while tipping on takeout orders is nice but not necessary, one restaurant manager complained to me about Citibank ordering 35 lunches to go every week, which takes a long time for some waiter to package (with the soup wrapped carefully, coffees rubber-banded, dressings and condiments put in side containers) and never tipping. Effort matters and that deserves a tip.

Their salary matters. It might not make sense that in the U.S. we’ve somewhat arbitrarily deemed certain professions as “tipped professions” whereby the customers are in charge of paying the professional’s salary instead of their employer, but that’s the way it is. And as such, you have some real responsibility when being served by a tipped professional that you don’t have when being served by someone else.

It’s nice to give a coffee barista a tip, but you’re not a horrible person if you don’t because at least they’re getting paid without you. Waiters and bartenders, on the other hand, receive somewhere between $2 and $5/hour (usually closer to $2), and this part of their check usually goes entirely to taxes. Your tips are literally their only income. They also have to “tip out” the other staff, so when you tip a waiter, you’re also tipping the busboy, bartender, and others. For these reasons, it’s never acceptable to tip under 15%, even if you hate the service. The way to handle terrible service is to complain to the manager like you would in a non-tipping situation. You’re not allowed to stiff on the tip and make them work for free.

Service matters. It seems silly to put this in because it seems obvious, and yet, Michael Lynn’s research shows the amount that people tip barely correlates at all to the quality of service they receive. So while stiffing isn’t OK, it’s good to have a range in mind, not a set percentage, since good service should be tipped better than bad service.

I also discovered some other interesting (and weird) findings and facts about tipping.

1. Different demographics absolutely do tip differently

“Do any demographics of people — age, gender, race, nationality, sexual orientation, religion, profession — tend to tip differently than others?” ran away with the “Most Uncomfortable Question to Ask or Answer” award during my interviews, but it yielded some pretty interesting info. I only took seriously a viewpoint I heard at least three times, and in this post, I’m only including those viewpoints that were backed up by my online research and Lynn’s statistical studies.

Here’s the overview, which is a visualization of the results of Lynn’s polling of over 1,000 waiters. Below, each category of customer is placed at their average rating over the 1,000+ waiter surveys in the study:

Fascinating and awkward. Throughout my interviews, I heard a lot of opinions reinforcing what’s on that chart and almost none that contradicted it. The easiest one for people to focus on was foreigners being bad tippers because, first, it’s not really a demographic so it’s less awkward, and second, people could blame it on them “not knowing,” if they didn’t want to be mean. Others, though, scoffed at that, saying, “Oh they know…” As far as foreigners go, the French have the worst reputation.

People also consistently said those who act “entitled” or “fussy” or “like the world’s out to get them” are usually terrible tippers.

On the good-tipping side, people who are vacationing or drunk (or both) tip well, as do “regulars” who get to know the staff, and of course, the group of people everyone agrees are the best tippers are those who also work in the service industry (which, frankly, creeped me out by the end — they’re pretty cultish and weird about how they feel about tipping each other well).

2. Here are six proven ways for waiters to increase their tips:

Be the opposite gender of your customer
Introduce yourself by name
Sit at the table or squat next to it when taking the order
Touch the customer, in a non-creepy way
Give the customer candy when you bring the check

Of course those things work. Humans are simple.

3. A few different people said that when a tip is low, they assume the customer is cheap or hurting for money.

But when it’s high, they assume it’s because they did a great job serving the customer or because they’re likable (not that the customer is generous).

4. When a guy tips an attractive female an exorbitant amount, it doesn’t make her think he’s rich or generous or a big shot — it makes her think he’s trying to impress her.

Very transparent and ineffective, but she’s pleased to have the extra money.

5. Don’t put a zero in the tip box if it’s a situation when you’re not tipping — it apparently comes off as mean and unnecessary.

Just leave it blank and write in the total.

6. According to valets and bellhops, when people hand them a tip, they almost always do the “double fold” where they fold the bills in half twice and hand it to them with the numbers facing down so the amount of the tip is hidden.

However, when someone’s giving a really great tip, they usually hand them the bills unfolded and with the amount showing.

7. Some notes about other tipping professions I didn’t mention above:

Apparently no one tips flight attendants, and if you do, you’ll probably receive free drinks thereafter.
Golf caddies say that golfers tip better when they play better, but they always tip the best when it’s happening in front of clients.
Tattoo artists expect $10-20 on a $100 job and $40-60 on a $400 job, but they get nothing from 30% of people.
A massage therapist expects a $15-20 tip and receives one 95% of the time — about half of a massage therapist’s income is tips.
A whitewater rafting guide said he always got the best tips after a raft flipped over or something happened where people felt in danger.
Strippers not only usually receive no salary, they often receive a negative salary, i.e. they need to pay the club a fee in order to work there.

8. According to Lynn, tips in the U.S. add up to over $40 billion each year.

This is more than double NASA’s budget.

9. The U.S. is the most tip-crazed country in the world, but there’s a wide variety of tipping customs in other countries.

Tipping expert Magnus Thor Torfason’s research shows that 31 service professions involve tipping in the U.S. That number is 27 in Canada, 27 in India, 15 in the Netherlands, 5-10 throughout Scandinavia, 4 in Japan, and 0 in Iceland.

10. The amount of tipping in a country tends to correlate with the amount of corruption in the country.

This is true even after controlling for factors like national GDP and crime levels. The theory is that the same norms that encourage tipping end up leaking over into other forms of exchange. The U.S. doesn’t contribute to this general correlation, with relatively low corruption levels.

11. Celebrities should tip well because the person they tip will tell everyone they know about it forever, and everyone they tell will tell everyone they know about it forever.

For example: A friend of mine served Arnold Schwarzenegger and his family at a fancy lunch place in Santa Monica called Cafe Montana. Since he was the governor, they comped him the meal. And he left a $5 bill as the tip. I’ve told that story to a lot of people.

Celebrities known to tip well (these are the names that come up again and again in articles about this): Johnny Depp, Charles Barkley, David Letterman, Bill Murray, Charlie Sheen, Drew Barrymore
Celebrities known to tip badly: Tiger Woods, Mariah Carey, LeBron James, Heidi Klum, Bill Cosby, Madonna, Barbara Streisand, Rachael Ray, Sean Penn, Usher

I’ll finish off by saying that digging into this has made it pretty clear that it’s bad to be a bad tipper.

Don’t be a bad tipper.

As far as average versus high, that’s a personal choice and just a matter of where you want to dedicate whatever charity dollars you have to give to the world.

There’s no shame in being an average tipper and saving the generosity for other places, but I’d argue that the $200 or $500 or $1,500 per year it takes (depending on your level of spending) to become a high tipper is a pretty good use of money. Every dollar means a ton in the world of tips.

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“I’m a residential plumber and I’ve had an absolutely horrible day on a work shift that’s lasted 13 hours and even after crawling through human poop all day this made me smile laugh and giggle like a small baby.”

Believe it or not, it’s not autotuned or pitch-shifted. Those notes are all baby.

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Psychiatrist, author, and dad of seven Richard Wadsworth recently went viral after showing his own personal strategy for getting his kids to do something other than scrolling.

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In the clip, we first see Wadsworth’s tween son doing deltoid exercises with dumbbells. Which he apparently got up at 6:30 am to do. What could possibly incentivize practically anyone, let alone a preteen to wake up at the crack of dawn to lift weights? Was his dad forcing him to exercise?

@doctorwadsworth
#greenscreen #parenting #parentingtips
♬ original sound – Richard Wadsworth

No. Wadsworth went on to show a typed out list of various tasks that must be performed before his kids even think about setting eyes on a phone or tablet. The list included a short workout in the form of one mile on the treadmill or 20 minutes of another exercise.

Wadsworth explained that rather than enforcing strict rules, this method provides necessary structure without taking away choice.

“I’m not forcing my son to exercise every day, but I am setting rules and boundaries around his screen time,” he said. “He decided he wanted to have more time after school to play with his friend. And so in order to do that, he realized that he’d need to wake up a little bit earlier and exercise in the morning.”

In addition to exercise, the list included domestic chores like cleaning the bedroom and shared areas, finishing homework, doing laundry, preparing for the next day…and, perhaps most importantly…making sure the toilet is flushed. (Not cleaned, just flushed. Parents everywhere can relate.)

“We have all of their screens locked away. And if they want access to any of them, they need to come ask us and we’ll go through the list together. And they’re not getting their screens until the list is done,” Wadsworth continued.

He also drew a comparison between screen time and sugary sweets, noting how most parents probably wouldn’t routinely allow kids to eat dessert before a nutritious meal, but instead allow it to be a treat.

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“Just as you would hopefully have your kids eat dinner before they had their dessert, you should probably be having them do something positive…before they get on their screens.” Hence why he tries to get his kids to complete their list before going to the phone.

And in case you’re wondering how Wadsworth’s son feels about all this, he reported having “so much energy for school” feeling “so much better” since his dad introduced the to-do list.

Bottom line: kids need guidance from their parents. And Wadsworth recommends clear cut boundaries to help them develop good habits, “because if you don’t do it, nobody else is.”

Wadsworth’s parenting hack was well received, with quite a few grown adults saying they could benefit from this type of boundary-setting in their own life.

“Even I’m addicted to this screen. I have to tell myself to put it down all the time and I’m a grown adult. Kids definitely need this!” one user wrote.

Another added, “I need someone to do this for me (I’m 28).” To which Wadsworth replied, “we all need parents sometimes.”

“We implemented a similar plan, and I was surprised at how easy they took to it. It’s almost like kids need structure. What a concept!” another user remarked.

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3/25/2026
A single door can open up a world of endless possibilities. For homeowners, the front door of their house is a gateway to financial stability, job security, and better health. Yet for many, that door remains closed. Due to the rising costs of housing, 1 in 3 people around the world wake up without the security of safe, affordable housing.

Since 1976, Habitat for Humanity has made it their mission to unlock and open the door to opportunity for families everywhere, and their efforts have paid off in a big way. Through their work over the past 50 years, more than 65 million people have gained access to new or improved housing, and the movement continues to gain momentum. Since 2011 alone, Habitat for Humanity has expanded access to affordable housing by a hundredfold.

A world where everyone has access to a decent home is becoming a reality, but there’s still much to do. As they celebrate 50 years of building, Habitat for Humanity is inviting people of all backgrounds and talents to be part of what comes next through Let’s Open the Door, a global campaign that builds on this momentum and encourages people everywhere to help expand access to safe, affordable housing for those who need it most. Here’s how the foundation to a better world starts with housing, and how everyone can pitch in to make it happen.

Volunteers raise a wall for the framework of a new home during the first day of building at Habitat for Humanity’s 2025 Carter Work Project.

Globally, almost 3 billion people, including 1 in 6 U.S. families, struggle with high costs and other challenges related to housing. A crisis in itself, this also creates larger problems that affect families and communities in unexpected ways. People who lack affordable, stable housing are also more likely to experience financial hardship in other areas of their lives, since a larger share of their income often goes toward rent, utilities, and frequent moves. They are also more likely to experience health problems due to chronic stress or environmental factors, such as mold. Housing insecurity also goes hand-in-hand with unstable employment, since people may need to move further from their jobs or switch jobs altogether to offset the cost of housing.

Affordable homeownership creates a stable foundation for families to thrive, reducing stress and increasing the likelihood for good health and stable employment. Habitat for Humanity builds and repairs homes with individual families, but it also strengthens entire communities as well. The MicroBuild® Initiative, for example, strengthens communities by increasing access to loans for low-income families seeking to build or repair their homes. Habitat ReStore locations provide affordable appliances and building materials to local communities, in addition to creating job and volunteer opportunities that support neighborhood growth.

Marsha and her son pose for a photo while building their future home with Southern Crescent Habitat for Humanity in Georgia.

Everyone can play a part in the fight for housing equity and the pursuit of a better world. Over the past 50 years, Habitat for Humanity has become a leader in global housing thanks to an engaged network of volunteers—but you don’t need to be skilled with a hammer to make a meaningful impact. Building an equitable future means calling on a wide range of people and talents.

Here’s how you can get involved in the global housing movement:
- Speaking up on social media about the growing housing crisis
- Volunteering on a Habitat for Humanity build in your local community
- Travel and build with Habitat in the U.S. or in one of 60+ countries where we work around the globe
- Join the Let’s Open the Door movement and, when you donate, you can create your own personalized door
- Shop or donate at your local Habitat ReStore
Every action, big and small, drives a global movement toward a better future. A safe home unlocks opportunity for families and communities alike, but it’s volunteers and other supporters, working together with a shared vision, who can open the door for everyone.

Visit habitat.org/open-door to learn more and get involved today.
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A family happily eating dinner. – Photo credit: Canva

Family, Modern Families

Parents experiment with 4 p.m. dinners and are blown away by the results

“The most underrated hack for a smoother evening.”

Heather Wake

3/24/2026

Can having an early family dinner really be the key ingredient to a smooth evening? According to one family, the answer is a resolute yes.

In a now-viral Instagram reel, a mom of two named Lexi Poer films her husband, Jordan, making their kiddos a delicious meal—set to be served at 4 p.m. on the dot, apparently.

4 p.m. dinners: The ultimate energy boost

Poer told Newsweek that when dinner was typically served at the more conventional time of 6:30 or 7 p.m., her two daughters would have “meltdowns,” leaving her feeling like “we were failing at something that was supposed to be the centerpiece of family connection.”

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However, after accidentally serving dinner early one day and noticing a huge difference, the couple wondered what might happen if the change became a permanent routine. The rest is history. Now, she calls 4 p.m. dinners “the most underrated hack for a smoother evening.”

Why it works

In her caption, Poer explains why she thinks it works.

For one, kids “walk through the door starving.” When given a proper meal, they’re less likely to need a snack and have the energy to do their homework and extracurricular activities.

Second, it leaves more time for “winding down” with showers, books, and simply “being” without having to do anything.

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Poer has noticed that both of these factors have led to her two daughters being “genuinely nicer.” “A well-fed kid is a completely different kid,” she said.

Earlier dinners have spared the couple from standing over a stove when the entire household is, as she put it, “overstimulated and hangry.” Everybody wins.

In the comments, other parents agreed that early dinners were transformative

“We’ve started doing this for the last 8 months. It’s definitely a game changer and takes off tension to ease into bedtime.”

“We’ve been doing 430p dinners since our little one was 1 (she’s now almost 4) and it’s been the best. Dinner and then time to still go out to the beach or skate park before coming home for bath and bed. Bellies full and a cleaner home.”

“This is so funny, we automatically do this anyway and then find we’re not hungry at 6-7 pm. It works well!”

“Yes! I served dinner at 4 pm for years. The kids just couldn’t hold on any longer. A lot of meltdowns quelled due to changing the time of dinner (they got off the bus at 4-4:30)”

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Of course, even Poer acknowledged that for many working parents, this simply isn’t feasible—especially when the goal is to eat together as a family. Even her own household doesn’t do it every day. The fact that society generally doesn’t support a lifestyle where families can do this sort of thing, no matter how beneficial it may be, is a separate conversation. Still, the principle behind her idea remains: to experiment with “getting ahead of the hunger spiral,” as she told Newsweek.

It works even if that means serving dinner a few minutes before your normal time. You can certainly reconsider a 6 or 7 p.m. dinner if the only reason you’re doing it is because it seems “normal” or traditional. One size doesn’t have to fit all, so by all means, do whatever brings a bit more peace to your home.

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A child thinking and holding his chin. – Photo credit: Canva

Family, Kids

Toddler uses lawyer-like logic to make the case for taking candy from strangers

His mom’s attempts to teach “stranger danger” backfired.

Tod Perry

3/24/2026

Teaching children about “stranger danger” is a tough paradox. On one hand, you want your child to be comfortable and friendly around others—after all, a lot of folks we end up calling friends started out as strangers. On the other hand, they need to be careful not to interact with those who may seek to harm them.

An easier lesson to teach is not to take candy from strangers. You can be friendly with some strangers, but never take candy from them under any circumstances.

A young child on TikTok named Hudson, the son of pediatrician Megan Hall, is going viral for the lawyer-like way he responds when his mother tells him to stop taking candy from strangers. His logic: If you know someone’s name, they aren’t a stranger.

@hall_fam_
Long video but trying to teach my #toddler about taking #candy from strangers at the park. #toddlersoftiktok #fyp #funny
♬ original sound – Hall Fam

It all began when Hudson took a gummy candy from a child at the park and put it in his mouth. “You can’t keep taking snacks from strangers at the park,” Hall told her son. But Hudson wanted a clearer definition of what “stranger” actually meant. “There are no strangers here,” Hudson calmly responded, adding that he knew the name of the child who gave him the candy.

Then Hudson tried to flip the script on his mother, questioning the very nature of what it means to be a stranger. “Are you a stranger?” he asked his mom, who gave a prompt no. “But my dad tries to be a stranger to me,” Hudson said, ending the debate.

Three gummy bears. Photo credit: Canva

Hudson is friends with everyone when he’s at the park

Based on what Hall told People, it looks like she’ll be having this debate for quite some time—and may need to take extra-special care at the park.

“He has always been a really friendly and social child who genuinely believes everyone is—or should be—his friend,” she told People. “We jokingly refer to him as the mayor because he likes to talk to everyone, anywhere we go.”

A commenter wrote, “His logic he met them, exchanged names, and played w the kids = no longer strangers.”

“He’s about to be real confused on the rules come Halloween,” another added.

Another loved his nonchalant nature: “The fact that he’s still tasting every ingredient in the candy while you’re warning him.”

Kids playing at the park. Photo credit: Canva

How should parents discuss stranger danger with their children?

“The phrase ‘stranger danger’ can be misleading. While it’s true that we need to teach our children to be cautious around people they don’t know, the reality is that not all strangers are harmful. Labeling all unfamiliar people as dangerous can create unnecessary fear and confusion,” Nature Therapy, a family therapy practice based in Illinois, wrote on its blog. “Statistically, most child abuse cases involve someone the child already knows. This is where the concept of ‘tricky people’ becomes more effective. It shifts the focus from fearing all strangers to identifying behaviors that are inappropriate or unsafe, regardless of whether the person is a stranger or someone familiar.”

The debate may have been about the nuances of stranger danger, but it’s also a great example of how open-minded and kind-hearted young kids can be.

“Children are innocent, hate is taught,” Hall said. “Children see the best in people and never think anyone would do something to harm them, and I wish this were true.”

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A baby strapped into the car seat – Photo credit: Canva

Family, Parenting

She “nagged” her husband about the car seat. Moments later, he called her from a crash.

She calls it her “annoying nagging mom voice” and it’s a real life-saver.

Adam Albright-Hanna

3/21/2026

On her first day back at work after maternity leave, Rebecca Tafaro Boyer wasn’t ready to be apart from her 3-month-old. She asked her husband David to send her hourly updates on how baby William was doing without her.

David was a good sport about it. He texted throughout the day, including a photo of William buckled into his Britax car seat as they headed out to Walgreens. Rebecca looked at the photo and immediately texted back. The straps were too loose. The chest clip was too low. “And because I know my husband,” she later wrote on Facebook, “I’m sure that he laughed at me and rolled his eyes before tightening the car seat and fixing the chest clip.”

Fifteen minutes later, her phone rang.

“Honey, we had a car wreck. We are fine, but the car is going to be totaled.”

Less than three miles from their Memphis home, another driver had pulled into traffic to turn left and David hadn’t had time to stop. He hit the front passenger side door at nearly 50 miles per hour. David ended up on crutches with three shattered bones in his foot and three dislocated toes. The car was a total loss.

William didn’t even wake up.

“My precious little bundle of joy was so well restrained in his car seat THAT HE DIDN’T EVEN WAKE UP,” Boyer wrote. “Even with the impact of the two cars, William only received a minor jolt — so insignificant that he was able to continue on with his nap, and then spend the next two hours flirting with nurses in the Le Bonheur ED.”

Boyer posted the story on Facebook at a friend’s request, expecting it to stay within her circle. She was stunned when it was shared more than 45,000 times. She told TODAY that her goal was simple: car seats save lives, and the difference between a properly secured infant and a loosely buckled one can be the difference between a nap and a tragedy.

“I truly believe that the reason my family is at home sitting on the couch with a pair of crutches instead of down at the hospital is because of my annoying nagging mom voice,” she wrote.

When readers identified the Britax BSafe 35 as the seat that protected William, the company reached out to offer a free replacement — once a car seat has been in a crash, it can’t be used again. Boyer and David had already replaced it through insurance, so she asked Britax to donate a seat to the Forrest Spence Fund, a Memphis nonprofit that helps families of critically ill children with everyday needs. Their original seat went to the NICU at Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital to be used in car seat safety education for new parents.

As for David: “My husband says, ‘I’m never going to live this down, am I?’” Boyer said, laughing.

He is correct.

This article originally appeared four years ago.

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Were medieval parents less attached to their children? – Photo credit: Living History by Dr Julia Martins/YouTube

Family, Parenting

Historian debunks the notion that grief in ‘Hamnet’ was portrayed unrealistically for the time

Knowing you were likely to lose a child didn’t make it any easier.

Annie Reneau

3/20/2026

The majority of parents today have never known the pain of losing a child. Sadly, that was not the case throughout history. Before the 20th century, many parents could expect one or more of their children to die before reaching adulthood, usually due to infectious disease.

As in the book it was based on, the film adaptation of Hamnet centers on parental grief. Even if you haven’t seen the movie, there’s a good chance you’ve seen the tear-streaked aftermath of others who have.

Jessie Buckley’s Oscar-winning performance as a grieving mother wrecked audiences far and wide. Her improvised, guttural scream after her child’s death went straight to the heart. Her calling the scream “ancient” couldn’t feel more accurate.

@screenplayed
Jessie Buckley talks about this moment in Hamnet wasn’t in the script. It came up on the day. Buckley is nominated for an Academy Award for her performance. What do you think of the film? 🎥 #hamnet #jessiebuckley #academyawards #oscars #filmtok
♬ original sound – Screenplayed

However, some people have questioned whether the film’s intense portrayal of grief is realistic for the time period. Naturally, we would expect a child’s death to devastate a parent today. But was that the case historically? Did parents mourn the loss of a child as hard or as long when nearly half of children died? Would knowing you were likely to lose a child, or multiple children, make their deaths easier to handle?

The idea that parents hundreds of years ago weren’t as emotionally attached to their kids isn’t new, even in academic circles. Dr. Julia Martins, a historian, explored the debate in a YouTube video titled “Did They Love Their Children? The History of Grief.”

It began with French historian Philippe Ariès, who published a book in 1960 about childhood through the centuries.

“Ariès argued that the concept of childhood as a distinct, protected phase of life is a modern invention that only emerged around the 17th century,” Martins said. “Children were understood as mini adults and, from the time they were around seven, they mixed with the adult world. He suggested that, because of the incredibly high infant mortality, parents were forced to be emotionally distant and not get too attached to their children, who might not live to see their first birthday. This indifference would be a defense mechanism. Expecting to lose half the children you had would make you not as emotionally invested in them.”

In his 1977 book The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800, historian Lawrence Stone also posited that colder, more pragmatic family relationships were the norm. In his assessment, the affectionate, loving bonds we associate with family today developed late in our history.

‘Hail! Potita was the sweetest and most gentle child. She lived 3 years.’

(Ave Potita dulcissima et humanissima annorum III )

Gravestone of a young girl named Potita, 1st-2nd century AD pic.twitter.com/mGPpFgO7E0
— Gareth Harney (@OptimoPrincipi) February 28, 2025

However, by the 1980s, historians began to question this idea. Martins pointed out that Ariès relied on paintings from the past to draw his conclusions.

For her 1983 book Forgotten Children, historian Linda Pollock focused her research on diaries and autobiographies from the 16th to 19th centuries. She argued that parents have always had intense love for their children and felt a deep sense of loss when they died.

Martins’ own examination of the historical record has led her to the same conclusion. The difference, she suggested, lies in how parents coped with the pain of losing a child.

“We forget how deeply religious early modern Europe was,” Martins said. “Could this indifference be religious resignation, instead of lack of affection? In a world where people understood death as God’s will, parents might console themselves thinking things like ‘The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away.’ That doesn’t mean they weren’t grieving, but rather that they were focusing on the child being in heaven and accepting God’s will. Ariès interpreted this as a lack of feeling. But you could argue that this was a coping strategy for deep pain. The grief was real; the cultural script for expressing it was different.”

Hamnet is a tidal wave of grief and beauty at its stillest. There’s something enchanting in how stories transcend time, finding us in loss to anchor us in the present. A lush world inviting cathartic release, where emotion flows deep, asking you to surrender to feel it all pic.twitter.com/GQc9MlOiuT
— Jillian (@JillianChili) October 6, 2025

And of course, grief is and has always been an individual experience. Even in Hamnet, the parents express their grief differently, despite losing the same child.

People in the comments on Martins’ video reiterated how historical artifacts demonstrate expressions of parental grief:

“Sometimes I find myself thinking of the skull of the ancient Greek child with the crown of painted ceramic flowers on her head. Someone loved that child to the point that they couldn’t bear the thought of those flowers wilting.”

“Whenever I hear the claim that people didn’t grieve their children, I think of the ancient graves we find where children are so carefully prepared for burial, with a toy (obviously made by hand, so carrying a time cost and not quickly replaceable) buried with them. That doesn’t seem like the actions of a parent who doesn’t care.”

“My favorite example about children always being children are ancient Egyptian ‘hot wheels’: toys shaped like a tiny chariot or wagon with wheels on it, and holes to put a string through… I can’t erase the mental image I got of an ancient Egyptian child thousands of years ago running around lugging A TOY CAR around, forgetting or breaking it and crying to parents, or being happy about getting a new one as a holiday gift, nothing really changed.”

“Cicero was inconsolable when his daughter Tullia died. Julius Caesar, who had also lost his daughter Julia, his only child, wrote to him to offer sympathy. They had a whole correspondence on grief. Cicero built a temple (lost today) to the memory of his daughter. The idea that parents from the past did not care is ludicrous.”

“It always felt to me so strange to figure that people in the past ‘wouldn’t care so much’ for their kids because a lot of children died. Two things can be true at the same time. People surely knew that lots of people died in a very early age AND that doesn’t diminish any kind of bond or attachment. Ironically, it’s this theory itself that IS detached (from reality): humans are social creatures!”

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A child with glasses laughing. – Photo credit: Canva

Family, Kids

‘Old soul’ kid chooses his own name, then cracks himself up for a full minute

“His little laugh gets me every time.”

Cecily Knobler

3/20/2026

Donna Whelan describes her young son, Jacob, as an “old soul,” and well over a million people on social media seem to agree. She shares many adorable clips of him online, but one recent video of Jacob choosing his own name might just take the cake.

In a clip from Donna’s Instagram page, she begins to ask Jacob a question: “Right, if you could choose a name for yourself…” She doesn’t even have a chance to finish before he confidently answers, “Roberto,” playing with a small lock of hair behind his ear. Just as quickly, he bursts into laughter and can’t seem to stop. “Didn’t even finish the sentence, and I gave ya an answer. Roberto!”

View this post on Instagram

Donna asks, “Do you like that name?” It’s now time for Jacob to get serious. “Yeah. Roberto is my favorite name.” He puts his hands into a pyramid, not unlike a politician or a TED Talk speaker. “When you think of… say Roberto slowly, though. Ro-bert-to. Ro-ber-toe. Rubber toe.” The laughing fit continues, his cheeks turning pink beneath his thick glasses.

“Why does that name make you laugh so much?” Donna asks. Jacob immediately dissolves into giggles once again. “It’s just a funny name! Rubber toe!” It’s clear he’s not mocking it in any way, but simply delighted by his quick reaction and the joke.

The laugh is truly infectious. Nearly 75,000 likes and over 3,500 comments (and counting) just heap love onto this child.

One commenter says, “His little laugh gets me every time.” Another adds, “I actually laughed out loud too when he said ROBERTO😂😂 We never know what he’s going to say next.”

And of course, a few “Robertos” chime in. “My name is Roberto,” one person says. “What’s so funny about being called Roberto? 😂” Another commenter adds, “Ya gotta say it slowly, though. Then it’s funny, haha.”

View this post on Instagram

Another Instagrammer shares that their son wanted to change his name when he was young: “My son wanted to change his name to Fun because he just wanted to have fun. His name is Benjamin or Ben. We call him Funjamin or Fun to this day, and he’s 29 years old!”

This isn’t uncommon. In a piece I wrote for Upworthy a few months ago, I explored a popular parenting Reddit thread where people discussed their kids choosing new names, or even wanting to reinvent themselves.

“For what it’s worth, I wanted to change my name a million times growing up,” one person confessed. “First, I wanted Dawn, then Angel, and lord knows what after that. I’m sure I went by Lilith during high school for a moment. My parents were so blasé about it. I never did change my name.”

Another joked, “My son went by Spider-Man for almost a year at age 4. He’s 23 now and happy with his given name.”

View this post on Instagram

As for Jacob and his mom, who have more than 4 million followers on social media, they continue to delight the Internet with little Jacob-isms. In another popular clip, Jacob shares that he has “had about a million lives.” When Donna asks, “Would you like me to be your mum in every life?” Jacob slyly smiles, nods, and gives a resounding “Yes.”

In a book by Donna and Jacob, The World According to Jacob: Hilarious Words of Wisdom From a Little Old Soul, they reveal that “Jacob has captured millions of hearts around the world with his infectious sense of humour, his fun, and his cheeky smile.”

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