Abby Roth

Follow along at thefirstgensahm.substack.com and watch the full video on YouTube.com/classicallyabby 🧡

Do it. Have the big family. Devote your life to raising them well. This the dream and we are so lucky to be living it. ❤️

It's the phones. It's the phones for a hundred reasons. Here are a few: 1) Male consumption of porn reduces marriage (for like 10 reasons) 2) Because of time-wasting college kids and 20-somethings just socialize less, reducing marriage. 3) The dating apps ruin dating (for 10 reasons) 4) Social media gives us a false anthropology, which makes us too individualistic and too averse to connection and commitment. 5) The phones make us sad and make us hate ourselves. If we hate ourselves we don't want more of us.

I've talked about this for a long time. "Women working" has never been a new thing. The 1950s homemaker was an aberration. What is new is women working OUTSIDE the home for a different man. This was stuff generally only tolerated by the lower classes in the form of maids etc. Wives always did their part on the family farm or business historically. They had different jobs than the men, but they did more than raise kids. This is one of the reasons I've never been a big fan of the phrase "retiring your wife." Smart women get bored and want to do more than menial tasks to feel useful. It's much wiser for men to try to simply bring them back under their roof, leverage their mind and energy in more entrepreneurial ways for the family.

Happy 8th anniversary to the best husband, father, friend, and man I know! 3 kids and please God more in the future 🙏 Love this life we are building together, @RothThePatriot ❤️

“Enact the role of strong Jew, and you will become a strong Jew.” Jacob William Roth (@RothThePatriot), grew up in New York with a Jewish father and a mother who had a Reform conversion. He was a libertarian atheist with a very negative world view. He thought he knew it all. Then, he began to study the works of Thomas Sowell, Jordan Peterson, and other scholars who were not Jewish... and it ultimately led him back to Judaism. In college, Jacob was inspired by what he was learning and Judaism and decided to do a formal conversion. During the process, he met @classicallyabby, who grew up observant. They fell in love after spending time together on a road trip, and Jacob completed his conversion before they got married. Today, Jacob is a proud Orthodox Jew, husband, father, powerhouse attorney, and advocate for the Jewish community. He deals with antisemitism on a regular basis (his brother is Ben Shapiro, after all, and they target him and Ben's sister, Abby, constantly), but he isn't afraid to stand up for what he believes in. My conversation with Jacob was fascinating, enlightening, and inspiring. All the things! Take a listen to the full episode. Link below.

My homeschool mom friend told me when we decided to homeschool not to get too wrapped up in the "beauty of homeschooling." Are kids self-motivated? Yes. But there are times that they aren't and they still have to sit down and learn to read just because it's important they do so. That helped me a lot and gave me some much needed perspective when focusing on learning wasn't always my son's first priority.

Noticing a distinct and necessary change in homeschool mom content lately. For a long time, it’s been sliding because of aesthetics / social media towards delight learning, without any semblance of rigor. Content creators are starting to message differently lately. Good.

Don't tell me there hasn't been a war on femininity, just look at living rooms in the 1980s and 90s vs now. Women used to design lovely, cozy rooms that in no way looked like the workplace, museums or medical offices. Men were grateful, though they'd never pick these designs themselves. Now? Homes are supposed to look like sterile hellscapes that offer no escape, no nurturing comfort. Everything is flattened, it all looks the same and there's no unique style or special touch to any of it. That 3rd house? Could be a podcast set, a waiting room, but not the warm comfort women used to be proud to put together.

Had the best Mother's Day ever! Breakfast with the family, then pedicure and shopping with the baby while Daddy took the older two to buy presents, then swimming as a family and dinner with my parents. What a perfect way to celebrate! Happy Mother's Day! ❤️

Can we please for the love of God and all that is holy (literally) stop talking about what grown women want and start talking about what children need? Anytime we have a discussion about motherhood, it’s about the wants of an adult woman and never about the needs of children.

This is so true and nobody talks about it honestly. Breastfeeding hurts in the first two weeks for most women, even with a perfect latch. Your nipples are not used to that level of friction and suction and they need time to toughen up. I have heard moms with 4+ kids say it still hurts at the beginning with every single baby and then goes away. The standard advice that "breastfeeding should never hurt if the latch is correct" makes women think something is wrong when the pain is actually a normal part of the adjustment. Yes, a bad latch can cause pain. But so can a brand new nipple being used 10+ times a day for the first time. Those are two very different things and they get lumped together in a way that confuses new moms and sometimes causes them to give up early. It gets better. Usually by week 2 or 3 the pain fades. Push through those first couple weeks if you can.

@chlosiphus Yes, it's really annoying. The best libraries keep the computers to the side and have a login so the younger kids don't get distracted.

Do all libraries have video games and computers these days btw bc I was thinking earlier how it’s kind of fucking annoying

I was out with my three kids (4, 2.5, and 8 months) this morning eating breakfast and reading books aloud to them. Three separate people came up to us to compliment our family and the fact that we were reading aloud together. Intentional parenting is the best way to put a positive image of large families in the world. P.S. I don't think 3 kids is a large family. But it's a good start. P.P.S. Not every morning looks perfect, even as intentional parents. But it's definitely more frequent when you put in the effort.

I just hate the discourse surrounding - your body is disgusting now - and - you will be hotter than ever. At the end of the day, your body will look different, but if you lose the babyweight and work out it will still look fine, especially in clothes. Loose skin and stretchmarks are genetic and look worse than not having them. But who is going to be seeing them unless your sole concern is wearing a bikini? I don't think most women will look hotter after having kids and guess what? That's not the point. If vanity is your main concern for why NOT to have babies, we have a bigger problem.

Maybe I’m in a bubble but I can’t think of a single one of my friends who have become mothers who after a year or so pp, looks noticeably different than she did before. I’m sure we all have our little changes here or there that we ourselves notice or are only visible without clothes, but I feel like both sides of this snap back debate are exaggerating mightily.

For the women concerned about their bodies changing after babies and for the women saying it won't change at all: I have had three babies. I have stretch marks and loose skin across my belly, but I am not over my pre-pregnancy weight. Is my body unmarred? No. Does it matter? Literally not one iota. I carried three humans and nourished them using only my body. The only person who will see what my body looks like now is the man who is helping raise these precious children. And you know what? We want more. Because my body being strong and healthy and fit has always mattered more than stretch marks and loose skin. But sometimes it takes having babies to realize that.

Lol that this has become a discussion of the problem with libraries becoming woke. Totally fair. My point was that there are parents who won't bring their children to the library because their kids are too wild, and if you can't bring your kids to civilized places (even for a short while) maybe you need to work on discipline.

I believe that being able to bring your children to the library (where there are toys and activities available) is a litmus test for your parenting.

@Romy_Holland Really recommend Siblings Without Rivalry. It's a great book.

sibling rivalry seems inevitable and a small amount is probably a positive, but it was such a damaging part of my family's culture that I really want to find a way to minimize it among my kids. I think two of my siblings internalized a sense of competition so deeply that they're now actively rooting for the rest of us to fail so that they'll feel better about themselves. the idea my kids would end up like this horrifies me, but I'm not sure the best way to avoid it. one idea is to reward the entire family when anyone succeeds, but I wonder if this would backfire somehow. maybe I'm overthinking it and in the absence of explicitly bad messaging the natural dynamic would be fine?

Motherhood is a full-time job. Especially with children under five. Even more so with babies under two. It requires your attention 24/7 no matter how badly people want this not to be the case. If you want to choose your job and outsource motherhood, just be honest about it.

Look, I am old-fashioned when it comes to Passover. We cook with matzah meal. This almond flour nonsense is not my speed. 😂

If you've never had a kid it's almost impossible to understand this, but there is nothing you can offer me that's better than pushing my three year old daughter in a swing at the park just before lunchtime and then swinging through the McDonalds drive thru to grab a Happy Meal and then stopping at the gas station to get a slurpee and some M&Ms, because why not, and pretending to race the other cars on the way home just to make her laugh and all the while she's asking questions about everything she sees and I'm smiling to myself because it's forcing me to come to terms with the fact I don't know how to explain even the most basic fundamentals of life. And I like that. I like feeling like the world still contains infinitudes as of yet unknown to me. I used to think it was cope when parents talked about this, because I was stupid and I wanted to enjoy my parties and my drugs and my affairs and my long nights out and my wine and my time to myself and my melodramatic crying fits and my hallucinations and my self-destructive spirals and the fact I had nobody to answer to. The happiness you get from raising a child is not the cheap dopamine hit of an easy pleasure, bought and paid for. It's the kind of happiness that you only get from choosing to undertake an adventure, and the colossal responsibility that comes with it, so that in moments stripped away, inch by inch, the new world you decided to brave and explore is revealed to you.