What the Gracie Abrams Nepo Baby Drama Taught Me About Parenting

I was sitting in the driver's seat of my Subaru in the Target parking lot at roughly 4:15 PM on a Tuesday, wearing gray sweatpants that had an unidentified—and honestly, highly suspicious—stain on the left knee. It was like 84 degrees outside, but I was aggressively drinking my third iced coffee of the day anyway. Maya, who's seven and possesses the conversational timing of a seasoned prosecuting attorney, was in the backseat scrolling through some YouTube Shorts on my husband's old iPad.

"Mom," she said, kicking the back of my seat with her muddy sneaker. "What's a nepotism baby? People keep saying the girl who sings with Taylor Swift is one."

I almost inhaled an ice cube. She was talking about the singer who opens the Eras Tour. And like, I was completely unprepared for this conversation because I thought we were still in our strictly Disney soundtracks phase, but apparently, the internet had other plans.

I panicked. I literally went full TED Talk mode in the front seat of the car. I started trying to explain to my second-grader the complex socio-economic realities of the entertainment industry, going on this wild tangent about J.J. Abrams—who she assumes is just the guy who works at the Lego store at the mall—and systemic privilege and how hard work doesn't always equal success but you've to work hard anyway.

Maya just stared at me in the rearview mirror with absolutely blank eyes. I had completely lost her.

The absolute worst way to explain celebrity privilege

Here's what I learned that afternoon: lecturing a child about the unfairness of Hollywood when they just want to know why people on the internet are mad at a pop star is a terrible strategy.

I went home and immediately started doom-scrolling about the whole Gracie Abrams being a nepo baby discourse, reading all these think-pieces about how she had invisible advantages because her parents run a massive production company. And my brain, which is permanently rewired by parenting anxiety, instantly made it about my own kids. I started spiraling. Are my kids privileged? Are they going to be entitled? Am I ruining them by letting them have an iPad in the Target parking lot?

Oh god, the pressure we put on kids right now is LITERALLY suffocating. I'm constantly terrified that if Maya isn't fluent in Mandarin and playing Mozart on the piano by age nine, she's going to fall behind in life. We live in this culture where every child is expected to be some kind of prodigy, and social media makes it look like every other mom has a kid who's launching a startup out of their playroom.

We're just drowning in this toxic expectation of exceptionalism where hobbies aren't allowed to just be hobbies anymore, they've to be stepping stones to a career. It makes me want to scream into a pillow.

But honestly? Who actually cares if some famous director's kid gets a record deal, the entertainment industry has literally operated like that since the dawn of time.

Anyway, the point is, Dan—my husband, who has the incredibly annoying habit of being completely rational when I'm having a minor breakdown—walked into the kitchen while I was stress-eating a piece of string cheese. He told me I was projecting my own weird millennial insecurities onto a 25-year-old singer I don't even know.

Can two things be true at once

He was right. Crap.

I called my pediatrician later that week for Leo's four-year well-check, and I somehow brought this up to Dr. Lin. She told me that kids' brains are like, literally incapable of grasping complex systemic inequality until they're way older, or at least their frontal lobes are too mushy for the kind of nuanced lecture I was giving in the Subaru. She said they just understand basic fairness.

So if you're going to talk about it with your kids, you basically have to throw out the complicated script and just sit with the uncomfortable reality that life isn't perfectly fair and maybe just try to listen to what they're actually asking.

I realized I needed to focus on the one thing that actually matters here: process over product. I read in an interview that before she ever recorded a song, this girl started out by just journaling in her bedroom when she was eight years old. She was just doing the thing because she liked it, not because she was trying to win a Grammy.

That whole process over product thing

This has become my entire parenting philosophy lately, especially with Leo (4). Leo is a perfectionist. If he's building a tower and one block falls out of alignment, he completely loses his mind. Total meltdown.

I finally got him the Gentle Baby Building Block Set from Kianao, and honestly, this is my favorite thing we own right now. Not because it has little numbers and animal symbols on it for early education—though that's nice—but because the blocks are made of this squishy soft rubber.

When Leo inevitably rages because his architectural masterpiece isn't perfectly symmetrical and he decides to chuck a block across the living room, it literally just bounces off the drywall instead of leaving a permanent dent in my house. It has saved my sanity. But more importantly, it's letting me teach him that the fun part is the building, not just having a finished tower. We knock them down on purpose now. We celebrate the mess.

God, it was so much easier when they were tiny babies. Back then, "success" was just keeping them from choking on a piece of lint. When Maya was a baby and she was teething, I didn't worry about her work ethic. I'd just shove a Panda Teether Silicone Baby Bamboo Chew Toy in her mouth and we’d both just stare at the ceiling in a state of exhausted bliss. That teether was great because it was flat enough for her little hands, but mostly I just loved it because I could throw it in the dishwasher when it inevitably got covered in dog hair.

Now? Now I've to genuinely parent their minds and shape their worldviews and it's EXHAUSTING.

If you're also drowning in the pressure to buy the perfect developmental toys that will supposedly make your kid a genius, check out Kianao's play collection. It's just simple, sustainable stuff that seriously lets kids be kids.

Stuff that looked good on instagram but didn't fix my anxiety

Because I definitely used to be that mom. I remember buying the Wooden Baby Gym | Rainbow Play Gym Set with Animal Toys when Leo was a newborn.

It's a totally fine play gym. It really is. It looked absolutely beautiful in my living room, way better than the neon plastic singing monstrosity I had for Maya that played the same jarring electronic tune until I wanted to throw it out a window.

But I think I secretly convinced myself that if Leo stared at those aesthetically pleasing, responsibly sourced wooden shapes long enough, he'd absorb some kind of accelerated cognitive ability. I thought buying the "right" organic toys would somehow insulate him from the messy realities of the world. Spoiler alert: it doesn't. He just chewed on the wooden elephant for a few months and then grew out of it, like all babies do.

We can't buy our way out of having hard conversations with our kids. We can't shield them from the fact that some people are born with a massive head start.

Redoing the target parking lot conversation

So, a few days later, I tried again with Maya. I didn't use big words. I didn't talk about Hollywood infrastructure.

I just said, "Yeah, her parents are super famous, so it was probably a lot easier for her to get people to listen to her music. That's a huge advantage. But she still has to honestly sing the songs and practice her guitar, right? Two things can be true. You can have a lucky start, and you can still work really hard."

Maya thought about this for exactly three seconds.

"Okay," she said. "Can I've a snack?"

Parenting, man. You agonize over these massive cultural moments and your kid just wants a handful of Cheez-Its.

I think we just have to let them figure out their own identities, entirely separate from whatever weird expectations we've for them. Let them write messy journals. Let them build wobbly towers that fall down. Let them like the pop music they like without turning it into a college sociology lecture.

If you're looking for ways to build that kind of independent, low-pressure play without filling your house with plastic junk, explore Kianao's collection of sustainable toys before you lose your mind.

My messy, overly honest answers to your questions

How do I explain privilege to a little kid without sounding like a college professor?
Oh god, don't do what I did. Don't use words like "systemic." Keep it super local to their world. My pediatrician basically told me to relate it to a footrace where someone gets to start halfway down the track. It's not fair that they started closer to the finish line, but they still had to run. Keep it brief. They literally don't have the attention span for anything longer than a TikTok.

Should I care if my kid's idols are "nepo babies"?
Honestly, no. It's exhausting to police everything. If the music is catchy and the celebrity isn't doing anything horribly toxic, just let them like the music. We all liked bands in the 90s that were probably industry plants anyway, we just didn't have the internet to tell us about it constantly.

How do I get my kid to focus on the "process" instead of being perfect?
You have to model it, which sucks because I'm a total perfectionist. When Leo builds with his soft blocks, I literally force myself to praise how hard he worked on balancing them, not how tall the tower is. And when he messes up, I try to say "Oops, let's try again!" instead of rushing to fix it for him. It's so hard to bite my tongue, but it helps.

Are wooden and silicone toys honestly better, or just prettier?
Look, they're definitely prettier, and my mental health is absolutely better when my living room doesn't look like a plastic explosion. But practically? Soft silicone blocks don't dent my walls when they get thrown, and wooden toys don't have batteries that die and start making demonic dying-robot noises in the middle of the night. So yes, they're better for your sanity.

What if my kid just wants to watch YouTube instead of playing independently?
Welcome to the club, we meet on Tuesdays. Don't beat yourself up. Sometimes you just need 20 minutes to drink your coffee in peace. I try to leave open-ended toys out on the rug—like the blocks—and just wait for them to get bored enough to pick them up. Sometimes it works, sometimes Maya just watches kids unbox toys on the iPad. We're all just surviving here.