How to Be a Family: The Year I Dragged My Kids Around the World to Find a New Way to Be Together by Dan Kois


How to Be a Family: The Year I Dragged My Kids Around the World to Find a New Way to Be Together
Title : How to Be a Family: The Year I Dragged My Kids Around the World to Find a New Way to Be Together
Author :
Rating :
ISBN : 0316552623
ISBN-10 : 9780316552622
Format Type : Hardcover
Number of Pages : 336
Publication : First published September 17, 2019

In this "refreshingly relatable" (Outside) memoir, perfect for the self-isolating family, Slate editor Dan Kois sets out with his family on a journey around the world to change their lives together.
What happens when one frustrated dad turns his kids' lives upside down in search of a new way to be a family?

Dan Kois and his wife always did their best for their kids. Busy professionals living in the D.C. suburbs, they scheduled their children's time wisely, and when they weren't arguing over screen time, the Kois family-Dan, his wife Alia, and their two pre-teen daughters-could each be found searching for their own happiness. But aren't families supposed to achieve happiness together?

In this eye-opening, heartwarming, and very funny family memoir, the fractious, loving Kois' go in search of other places on the map that might offer them the chance to live away from home-but closer together. Over a year the family lands in New Zealand, the Netherlands, Costa Rica, and small-town Kansas. The goal? To get out of their rut of busyness and distractedness and to see how other families live outside the East Coast parenting bubble.

HOW TO BE A FAMILY brings readers along as the Kois girls-witty, solitary, extremely online Lyra and goofy, sensitive, social butterfly Harper-like through the Kiwi bush, ride bikes to a Dutch school in the pouring rain, battle iguanas in their Costa Rican kitchen, and learn to love a town where everyone knows your name. Meanwhile, Dan interviews neighbors, public officials, and scholars to learn why each of these places work the way they do. Will this trip change the Kois family's lives? Or do families take their problems and conflicts with them wherever we go?

A journalistic memoir filled with heart, empathy, and lots of whining, HOW TO BE A FAMILY will make readers dream about the amazing adventures their own families might take.


How to Be a Family: The Year I Dragged My Kids Around the World to Find a New Way to Be Together Reviews


  • Jeanette

    I probably should have quit this book 1/2 way through. But I didn't. I wanted to get to Kansas- that's why.

    Honestly I don't think I have ever read a memoir or travelogue of such wordiness verbosity smugness. And this man thinks he is "kind". LOL! It's beyond belief that they used the word "refreshing" to describe in the trailer.

    The places they lived for each 3 month period were more interesting than the writer. That's for sure. And his wife and girls? Well, there's too much arrogant, elitist Dan think overview to really fully understand any of their deepest or varied opinions/ positions. And generally few insights or anything essential. Except perhaps occasionally minutia tidbits which occurred from general reflections of the topics he inquired (or choose for them like the God belief one)- for them to "answer".

    The next time I come across any non-fiction with the types of condescending commentary to or about fellow Americans that appeared in the first few chapters of this one, I won't continue. Because the read isn't worth it. He didn't learn much either for his "widening" year, because he was just as insufferable in his commentary about "other" at the end as he was at the beginning.

  • Kat

    More like 4 stars, but giving an extra star to combat those leaving 1 star reviews because Kois dares to question whether or not America is the best place to raise a family.

  • Tish

    I like the premise.....

    But I see no way to truly integrate into communities and learn from their different parenting styles in 12 weeks.

    I guess I should be talking to my neighbors who moved to Scotland for a year so the husband could continue his education. Or my college friend who packed up her kids, quit her job, and is living in Germany for two years. Those people have had time to integrate and learn from the culture they're living in. This author and his family spent a college quarter in each place. That's hardly enough time to figure out where your sociology class is, much less figure out how this new culture can improve your parenting skills and revolutionize your family.

    I like the premise, but not the product.

  • Melanie

    I thought the concept was interesting, however, I do not believe the Kois family spent enough time in any place to really determine the best way of life. Many reviews talked about the author being elite and smug, and it really seemed like the only take-away from his year away from the Beltway was riding his bike like a Dutchman and letting the kids have a bit of say in the travel agenda. Kois seems to be somewhat out of touch with his daughters, and not allowing them time to do something they would enjoy on a family vacation explains much of their friction. At least he was able to see himself in many of Lyra's actions, however, it reads that Harper is the favorite child. I'm a bit surprised that this made it on the Kansas Notable Book list for 2020.

  • Laura Dye

    Had no intention of reading, much less buying, this book until I heard the author read a chapter aloud on one of my favorite podcasts. (Mom and dad are fighting) The existential crisises he spoke about were so relatable that I immediately bought the book. Loved it. Smart and funny, shares the kids perspective, honest about the struggles and the joys. I very much relate to how he thinks about parenting, and I appreciate that.

  • Michelle Ule

    This got rave reviews and so I put it on hold at the library.

    I read the whole thing, half the time wondering why.

    It would have been improved with fewer complaints about the teenage daughter. :-(

  • Katelyn

    Dan Kois and his wife Alia Smith realized their lives in Arlington, VA were overworked and over stressed. Both worked long hours, their kids attended a high achieving/high pressure school and they battled about screen time. They decided to take a year and live in different places to see how others lived. They spent a few months each in different countries--New Zealand, the Netherlands, Costa Rica--ending in an area of America very different from their home: rural Kansas.

    I enjoyed seeing what aspects of each area they liked best (ex: the extremely bike friendly structure of the Netherlands). Kois's writing is enjoyable to read and I appreciated his honest style. There's no holier than thou parenting advice here. This is how his family truly is.

    I empathized with Lyra, his then 11 year old daughter, who instead of trekking around the world and seeking adventure and the outdoors, just wanted to be left alone to read. It was especially painful to read about her experience in the Dutch school, where they prize normality and couldn't abide by the idea that she would voice a dissenting opinion.

    As someone who lives in rural Minnesota, I'll admit I was rooting for them to settle down in Kansas. Kois talks about many of the benefits of this lifestyle: no traffic, cheap housing, free evenings (not overworked), friendly people, a sense of community and the ability to start programs etc where you see something lacking. I loved Kois' description of the Hays Public Library and the awesome librarians that work there. It reminded me of the public library where I work :D.

    In the end Kois avoids taking an even higher stress job in Silicon Valley. It was painful to read the salary he could have had ($750,000 dollars--I didn't even know this was a thing), but redeeming that his family realized their original complaints (stress, long hours, etc) would have only been exasperated with this lifestyle change.

    Recommended for parents who like to read memoirs or about travel or parenting.

  • Misty

    Well I always call Dan Kois my favorite Slate person. I know him from the Mom and Dad Are Fighting podcast, so I am predisposed to like his book. I like his voice and his point and view, and I relate to what he values in life: adventure, kindness, community and saying yes. He just makes me laugh and smile. My hopes for this book were met, given my affection for good ‘ol Dan. It was really readable, insightful and fun, like the author. I also have done a round the world trip, so I related to his insights on this supposedly life-changing experience - the loneliness of being away and the way life returned seamlessly to normal. Wherever you are, you are still you, and your family is still what it is. The setting doesn’t change those essential things. But through his determination to be together as a family, warts and all, Dan has made me think about meaningful ways to be with my family too.

  • Mark

    Other than the spates of arrogant, elitist smugness that permeated the family's year long examination of family, parenting and children in four geographic areas outside the Smith-Kois insular bubble of Eastern pretentiousness, I had an enjoyable read...But, the insistent disdain for elements of "lives of the Deplorables," rankled...Upon closer examination, I saw that Dan Kois is an editor for the on-line magazine Slate, so I'm not shocked in the least...Basically, the family spent three months each in New Zealand, the Netherlands, Costa Rica and "Flyover" Hays, Kansas, escaping from their overworked and over stressed lives of both the adults and 2 young daughters...Good read and food for thought!!!

  • Kelsey

    Loved this audiobook — honest, funny, insightful. I know of the author from the podcast Mom And Dad Are Fighting and like his podcast enjoyed the balance of thoughtfulness and irreverence. Highly recommend to all parents.

  • Claire Vola

    Had to force myself to finish reading it only because I was just over halfway through, and felt I needed to. I was excited to learn about living in different countries, however I felt a lot of the book was complaining about how different it was from the US, how annoying his daughters were, and complaining about politics.

  • theStorykeeper

    DNF @ 37%

    Couldn't stand how the dad kept disregarding his daughter's feelings as her being a moody teenager. They didn't even ask their kids before deciding to go on this trip! What awful parents. They had already started carelessly smoking weed before even getting to Amsterdam, too.

  • Gretchen Rubin

    I'm a big fan of the podcast Mom and Dad Are Fighting, which was co-hosted for many years by Dan Kois, and I knew that Dan and I would both be at the Iceland Writers Retreat, so I wanted to read his memoir. Funny, thought-provoking.

  • Kathleen Kirchner

    I really wanted to like this but the author came off as obnoxious a lot.

  • Gail

    When I heard that Dan Kois, Slate’s parenting editor and co-host of the parenting advice podcast “Mom and Dad Are Fighting,” had written a book, I assumed it would be about parenting, and it kinda is, sorta. Kois and his wife decided to take their two kids on a four-country tour over the course of a year as “a chance to control-alt-delete the life we’d trapped ourselves in,” one characterized by a disappointing squeeze play: not getting enough time together and then struggling to fight off screens and connect in what little they did. How To Be a Family is the resulting memoir-slash-travelogue. Like their trip, it’s glorious in parts but disappointingly uneven—and it just ends, without any life-altering insight. That doesn't mean the endeavor lacks value, quite the contrary.

    First, the good parts.

    Kois is almost unerringly self-aware and unabashed about both his personal failings and structural ones from which his family benefits (e.g., “It didn’t escape my notice that we were avidly seeking international diversity after making a set of educational and lifestyle choices that had mostly eliminated diversity from our American lives”). That makes for plenty of refreshing and relatable mea culpas (e.g., “We paid our wonderful babysitter ... hundreds of extra dollars,” to watch the kids during snow days, he writes, “just so we could do distracted, not-very-good work during the day and then yell at our children after she left”). 

    He has a related knack for producing every-man imagery, evocative metaphors without the taint of writerly pretension: “The bays carved out of the land like bites from an apple,” he writes in describing New Zealand . There, Kois and his family saw hikers with infants in front-packs and toddlers in backpacks: “One poor bastard had one of each, both of them squealing and waving their arms about; he looked like a stormtrooper being brought down by rowdy Ewoks,” he writes. In Costa Rica they encountered “[b]ig fat flies, electric blue, that hover in front of your face like Snitches” and a “beautiful purple-and-blue butterfly with the same wingspan as a mass-market paperback.”

    You can see in these descriptions the magically dry wit that Kois seems to have tucked away in his pocket, choosing to sprinkle it throughout his writing and IRL conversations like fairy dust. When it comes to physique, he says, “Dutch people like to credit the sneaky healthiness of their cuisine and all their bike riding; those of us who rode bikes around Holland for three months and did not lose any weight might also gently suggest there may be a genetic component.” And then there’s the time Kois deadpans, “Quiet reflection in nature is for Thoreau, because he is childless and dead.”

    Packaged thusly, Kois delivers interesting, nuanced observations about parents in New Zealand fostering independence and the Dutch making consensus-based family decisions. He reports on “a public policy in New Zealand that had a concrete effect on the way parents parent. Personal-injury lawsuits are essentially nonexistent [thanks to] a government-run scheme that pays for any injury stemming from an accident, no matter whose fault it is.” And he delves into why it’s possible in the Netherlands for bikers to safely be “helmetless, unprotected from cars except by custom, respect, and the forethought that comes from [a driver] being able to think like a cyclist.”

    Pieces of chapters read like thoroughly reported articles. Other chunks, most notably “The Dance Recital,” could stand alone as expertly crafted essays. But large parts are loose, and the book’s shifting style feels unsettling. The Contributions from Kois’s wife and girls didn’t do much for me, seeming more like page filler than anything else. The same thing goes for tangents that the editor in Kois must have known needed cutting. These weren’t the only aspects of How To Be a Family that felt schticky: both the captain’s log and the Cosmo-style "I tried it for a month" bits fell flat. And while some chapters worked others felt more like a first draft with excessive road marks, dicey pacing, and trouble discerning what details hold universal appeal.

    I suspect it’s because Kois slam-dunked so many aspects of the book that I felt disappointed by the parts that air balled. But at the end of the day, we get a good deal of this guy, and for that How To Be a Family is worth reading:

    "Thank God for cards. One problem with spending time with your children, Alia and I have discovered in this year of spending time with our children, is that a lot of the stuff you can do with children is just awful…. [But then there’s a variation of the card game a$$hole.] I can’t think of another activity in which adults can play at the peak of their abilities and kids can still prevail. Limbo, I guess. Now, as a grown man, do I actually care whether I win or lose at cards with my loving family? Of course I do. I want to win. If I must lose, I at least want my wife to also lose. But I admit that the seductiveness of card-playing with my kids goes beyond the pleasure of ascending to kingship …. It has to do with my desire, so often thwarted these days, to look at them. Back when they were babies, we could look at them all the time. There were years of my life when I felt I did nothing but look at my children, afraid that if I looked away for even one second, they would be eaten by tigers. But now they disappear into screens and schools, behind closed doors, or out in the world. Even when they’re around, I find it difficult to cadge a good long look; it is the plight of the parent of tweens to desire nothing more than to look at his kids in peace and to be rebuffed most of the time by his kids saying, correctly, 'Stop staring at me, that’s weird.' But around the table, playing cabbages and kings, they’re concerned with how to get rid of that solitary six or when to spring the triple fours. They don’t notice that I am drinking in the way their faces resemble their cousins’, the ways they express exasperation, their glee at unexpected windfalls…. the game that gets all four of us around the table and, briefly, off one another’s nerves."

  • Kathy KS

    I enjoyed hearing about the various areas the Kois family lived in and how everyone adapted. Since I'm from small town Kansas, I found the part about their living three months in Hays, Kansas, interesting. I actually found it nice to see that they enjoyed their time in Hays. Although, if they really wanted to see a small town environment I would think that one with a population between 1500-4500 might have been more representative. But I'm not sure how it might have changed their perspectives. Many of the comments about life in Hays and the people might have still been similar. But, those of us that have lived around actual small town Kansas consider Hays as one of the bigger towns! (Those of us outside the metro areas and Lawrence).

    I realize that for people that have always lived in sizable cities (New York, Arlington, etc., in this case) consider pretty much all Kansas communities as "small".

    Especially interesting was Dan's comments about Kansas being a red state and discovering the people he met didn't fit his pre-conceived ideas about what that might mean. Growing up with a grandmother in Kansas Democratic politics and definitely leaning further left than right, I never saw anything odd about many (most) of our neighbors and friends being Republicans. It didn't matter so much. It's sad that the current political climate tries to draw a line between people this way... But it was interesting that Kois noticed that politics in Kansas doesn't necessarily have to divide people. We've elected quite a few Democratic governors for a "red state."

    I'm not sure the parenting aspect was this book's strength; but as a memoir of their year travelling/living around the world it worked.

  • Dave Allen

    As a dad and overall family man with an interest in international travel and having seen the author's promotion of the book on Twitter, I was looking forward to this for a while, and I read with a mix of envy, fascination, disbelief and vicarious embarrassment: Such a cool project! Seems both aspirational and necessary! But also really difficult! And, wow, really a lot of detail - finances, laundry, arguments, the works! The previous section brought to you as a reflection of the volume of exclamation points in this book, which reminded me of The Awl and overall web writing circa early 2010's but even more so! It's a lot. I admire Dan's family's willingness to be chronicled in this way (especially his daughters, around whom so much of the activity centers), and I liked their periodic commentaries, though, looking back, I feel like his wife only had one or, in any case, should have had more. I read this right after my wife and we both said we should come up with our own lists of four places where we'd live if we were to recreate this ourselves - still haven't done it, but I'd like to!

  • Jana Botkin

    What a disappointing book. I read the New Zealand section and skipped to Kansas, and then skimmed it with the hope that the author would climb down off his pedestal of arrogance.

    This family only sought out communities of people who were just like them, economically, politically and educationally. They trashed and apologized for the USA and President Trump wherever they went. Even in Kansas, where 70% of the small town had voted for Trump, they held themselves above the locals, using the progressive university as a way to find folks good enough, and to feel better about being in an area of such ignorant rubes, where everyone, horror of horrors with a huge dose of disbelief, actually went to church regularly.

    Do people who do adventuresome things like this have the ability to write from a neutral political viewpoint? Why the continual need to bash President Trump? Are neutrals, much less conservatives even able to find publishers?

  • Genesis Hansen

    Oh, gosh, this book is parenting writ large: reconciling your fierce optimism and hopes for your family with the disappointing realities of daily life and the realization of the impossibility of the task you’ve set for yourself and still finding both the absurdity and beauty therein. If you know Dan’s voice from the Mom and Dad Are Fighting podcast, you will find the tone of this book very familiar.

  • Tatiana

    Dan is so much fun as a podcaster, but as a parenting writer - yawn.

  • Katie

    Inspiring, entertaining, refreshingly honest.

  • Meg

    No one ever prepares you for how much of adulthood is just googling "how to immigrate to New Zealand"

  • Agnes

    With writing that is sharp and funny, this memoir was a pleasure to read. I deeply felt at one with Dan Kois’s feelings of failure as a parent in the honest vignettes he details in the book and enjoyed the conclusions that he drew from his family’s round-the-world year: the trip didn’t change their life - the trip was their life and it remains their life forevermore. The fact that they were all in it together the entire year was what made the difference, not the actual places or different parenting philosophies they tried on for size. That being said, the varying approaches to raising kids and interpersonal relationships in general in the four places they lived was really interesting.