Wednesday, December 5, 2018

The Kids Are All Right, I

All my life, I have dreamed of being a mother. My life experiences as a big sister, babysitter, camp counselor, nanny, and mentor all gave me a taste of what I longed for—being a parent, a teacher, a confidante, being the first one to open a young human’s eyes and ears to our beautiful world, being the one whose “you can do it” rings so powerfully that the child can, in fact, do it.

To me, one of the greatest miracles we can perform as humans is to lend another our belief in them until they find belief in themselves. From the first moment a baby fusses, stirring restlessly, seeking a solution to whatever bothers them—whether they’re wet, cold, lonely, gassy, or hungry—we have a chance to share our confidence in them. As we soothe them with our voices while changing, swaddling, cuddling, rubbing, and feeding them, we say, “You’ve got this. You can hang on. You can speak up and be heard. You can get what you need.” Eventually, they believe us.

The miracle, though never more fundamental, grows and grows with each child. I’ve often said that I love beautiful new infant skin, so free of scars and marks, but I also love toddler shins with all those first bumps, bug bites, and booboos. The toddler skin belongs to someone who is out trying things, running and falling, reaching and slipping, stepping in things that they’ve never stepped in before. That skin belongs to a scientist, an inventor, an explorer.

I love my children. I’d cheerfully sacrifice any body part to save them from harm. I love my children. I want them to embrace the world and their abilities. I want to say, “You can do it!” until they learn to say, “I can do it!” Those two priorities take balancing. So, as our children and their miraculous explorations have grown, I’ve had to redefine the concept of “harm.”

You see, I’m a resilient person. No brag; it’s just my go-to answer for that eternal interview question, “What’s your greatest strength and weakness?” I can handle anything. That’s great in natural disasters; not so great when you put up with unnecessarily difficult human BS because you’re too busy getting stuff done to notice that your life is getting worse and worse. But that’s a blog for another time.

It’s not a stretch to say that my experiences as a child and young adult honed whatever innate resilience I had; tough times made me tough. So here lay a huge stumbling block for me as a mother: how would my beloved children grow to be resilient without encountering some really shitty things in life? How shitty do things have to be to create resilience? Do I have to seek those things out or will they just come along in the course of life?

And that’s why I thought long and hard before intentionally picking a definition of “harm.” I decided that I would protect my children from permanent harm as much as possible. If they took a risk that might lead to reparable harm, I’d offer suggestions but not veto their choice. So, in playground terms, that meant if they could break their necks, crush their skulls, or die, I would not let them climb there, try that, or hang on it. If they might break their arms, I’d offer advice for being safe, I’d keep a (subtle, distant) eye on them, but I’d leave it up to them.

This seems to have worked for us. S got to climb almost as much as she wanted and Little A got to “try” almost as many crazy things as he wanted. We worked it out. But, like any other parent in the new millennium, my biggest parenting challenges have come from the outside.

I’ve been fortunate not to have any major confrontations or, thank goodness, actual legal issues, but I’ve had my fair share of parents calling from across the park, “Is this your little girl over here on the jungle gym?” Though harmless enough in print, that question always carries heavy criticism. If so, why are you over there? I’m here minding my child. Yours is unattended. Yours is climbing without an adult standing in arm’s reach.

When the kids were younger—and by that I mean that S did not look like an adult or even a teen—I would not leave them alone in the car at our local grocery store. Now, we’ve shopped there forever, the staff all know the kids and recognize our car, it’s an incredibly safe area, we usually see someone we know in the parking lot, and I can usually park within three spaces of the door. So, one day, when they whined about wanting to stay, I was honest with them.

“Listen, I know you can stay here and be safe. You’re plenty old enough. But. I also don’t want to have to deal with a stranger calling the police because that stranger thinks you’ve been abandoned in a car. I just want to get some cereal and go home, so you’re coming in with me.”

That little speech became a point of pride with them. They’d laugh about it and show off by repeating it for family friends. Clearly, my spur-of-the-moment, honest answer to their whining gave them confidence. I had no idea how happy I would be that I’d made that speech, but, from then on, I referred to it every time I asked them to come in the store. It’s fallen out of use lately; S has gotten taller than me and Little A has about two inches to go. Now I’m *almost* certain no one would call child services on me for leaving them. Almost.

I recently read this article, full of stories where someone did call the police. It makes me sad, not just because the stories illustrate the reasons behind my decisions not to leave my children
alone in a safe parking lot, but also because they define the cause of the extremely fragile mental state of many rising and young adults today.

I’ll never forget seeing a work-study student in the costume shop of a prestigious private college burst into inconsolable tears after sewing a seam wrong. Anyone who sews has done it—many, many times. Seams go wrong. The bobbin runs out or the tension’s wrong, another piece of fabric gets pulled in or you just don’t end up where you need to be. It’s just thread. You rip the seam and sew it again. Yes, it’s frustrating and it can be the icing on a crappy-day cake, but if you’re a twenty-year-old who has been sewing several days a week for a whole school year, sobbing seems like a reaction out of proportion to the problem.

That happened twenty years ago. I won’t even try to link to all the articles about lack of resilience in college or the workplace since then. They are ubiquitous and depressing. Young adults don’t know how to get to work or class on time, speak to a professor or boss, talk to a roommate, handle constructive criticism—it’s almost like they’ve never developed the skills to handle life alone.

Notice that phrase I used above. I wrote “don’t know how to” rather than “can’t” because they can. They’ve just never done it. They’ve never done anything alone. No one ever said, “You can do it.” No one believed in them, over and over, until they did do it, until they could say, “I can do it!”

Believe me, I have more to say on letting kids do stuff alone--look for Part II soon--but I still can't really explain how this works. I just hope folks out there will consider believing in others, especially children. It's hard to imagine in this world, but sometimes believing makes it real.

Sure the tree would fall, I said nothing. And she did it!

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