The story below is from our July/August 2020 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!
They can solve their own problems, if we step back and let them try.
It’s amazing how quickly you can get used to things. Homeschooling, wearing a mask at the grocery store—things that were unimaginable only weeks ago now seem routine, though we’re a long ways away from normal. In all of this COVID chaos, I see a thin silver lining from the parenting realm, and here’s why.
Like many of you, I spent a lot of time chauffeuring my kids to the activity du jour. With four of them, we have more trips to make than some, but I would say most families I know are rowing along beside us in the same boat—burning up the roads, keeping complicated color-coded calendars on the fridge, and generally burning out.
In the 1950s and ‘60s, when my parents were growing up, things were very different. My father’s mother, my grandma Joyce, would chase her five boys out of the house and say, “See you at dinnertime.”
Their adventures were the stuff of family legend, and made for some great bedtime stories. Lighting cattails on fire, and traipsing through the sewers, popping up manhole covers on streets they didn’t know (streets they didn’t know!) and finding the way home. My dad and my uncles gained independence in that time away, solving their own problems. My mom’s stories are different, but she was allowed enough freedom in her West Virginia mining town to get into a bit of good-natured trouble.
Christy Rippel
As parenting evolved from the hands-off-hand-me-another-cocktail mode, it became an endeavor that moms and dads poured their time and resources into, convinced it would grant their offspring an edge. As each generation of parents upped the ante (Mandarin lessons, kids?) we’ve now landed in a vicious cycle—overscheduling, mitigating risk, mowing down discomfort and obstacles at every turn for our precious babes.
In the book “How To Raise an Adult,” Julie Lythcott-Haims talks about how the over-scheduled, over-parented kids drifting into college are ill-prepared for the curve balls that life away from mom and dad throws at them. Lythcott-Haims should know—she was Stanford University’s dean of freshmen for a decade. Her book feels eerily familiar, even though I’ve tried to keep my kids accountable and independent. The societal pull to manage and shape and overreach is strong, and the reigning parenting belief is that if you’re lucky enough to be middle class or beyond, you should be doing all you can for your offspring. It’s just that doing all we can for them might actually mean doing less than we’re doing. Doing less than I’m doing, if I’m honest. Less oversight, less “no!”, less rescuing.
This time at home has given me space to ponder, and I’ve let my kids do things the old me never would have done, like take a pile of scrap wood into the trees behind our house to build a fort (Nails! A 10-year-old wielding a drill!). But my husband taught our kids how to use these things safely, in the many projects they’ve tackled together. I tried to remind myself of this while I watched from the upstairs window, thinking about how I’d explain myself in the ER. “Well, yes doctor, I did let them borrow the drill,” sounds...insane.
But no one got hurt. My kids nailed and screwed some wood to a tree, and built their “fort.” As usual, my imagined worst case scenario didn’t come true, but something good happened—they learned that they were capable of doing things alone, without an adult peering over their shoulders. They emerged from the woods like men, and a woman, returning from battle. That moment was worth the risk, which I sometimes forget is necessary for reward.
How will we be different, in a world that will no doubt be different living with and through COVID-19? We’re all re-evaluating priorities, expenses, goals—and parenting. I’m thinking about how we can find more white space on the calendar. And how I can back off more, and give my kids a longer leash to solve their own problems.
I’ll try to resist hiding the drill.
To read more from our July/August 2020 issue, Subscribe Today. Thank you for supporting local journalism!