High-wire Parenting

I love being a parent, but sometimes I think it doesn’t pay as well as it should.

Especially with all of this inflation, wages going up, Walmart greeters making $20 an hour, and we parents are still stuck at zero point zero. 

All things being equal, I wouldn’t be making a big deal out of this, but, as you and I both know, it is precarious work.

When I say precarious, I am thinking of the great writer Sebastian Junger. Before his massive success with the Perfect Storm, Junger earned a living doing tree work—scaling trees with a chain saw and cutting limbs. Until the day he made a momentary mental lapse, sent the saw into his own limb, and suddenly he could see his achilles tendon exposed on the back of his leg.

That kind of precarious.

I am kidding about the expecting pay for parenting (though to be serious for a moment, I would appreciate if someone would occasionally drop a buck in the dusty tip bowl I have sitting on the kitchen counter).

But the hazardous nature—like scaling a tree with a racing chainsaw—that part is no joke. Fellow parents, you know what I’m talking about.

As I take a more active role in educating my kids and their development in general, I suspect that the precarious of the work is going to be exposed. Instead of a vicious cut to the back of the ankle, parental injury may take a comparably painful form: kid tears.

It is still earliest days of my efforts to supplement their education, but, without getting too personal, it is fair to say that I have encountered a tear or two, as an unsuspecting child struggles to understand why daddy’s busting out math sheets on a summer day. Tears. Which can feel like a racing chainsaw to the parental heart.

This is one of the hardest parts of being an active, involved parent—the fact that in coaching our kids, providing them with feedback, correcting them, possibly challenging them, the efforts can cause kid emotional pain to the point of tears welling up and the streaming. Brutal.

Or, if not tears, it may come out as emotional pain expressed in anger.

The precariousness of our job has to do with the Jedi master challenge of communicating two simultaneous seemingly contradictory messages: We parents loves you unconditionally with that you-could-be-a-serial-killer-and-we’d-still-love-you kind of love, and we still have to challenge you to help you grow and achieve your destiny.

Unfortunately for kids, anything shy of the messages of unconditional love can suddenly feel like ultimate evolutionary danger: parental rejection. Which of course, back in the early days of man, meant death.

When I was living in Los Angeles trying to get started as a writer, I, like every other struggling writer in Los Angeles, would visit a therapist once a week. It always amazed me that seemingly 90 percent of the issues I might bring up in a session could be traced back to my primal need to please my parents, my need to make them happy and thus be assured of their love.

In the therapist’s office, I would wonder why a mediocre day or writing could have me feeling so intensely off, only to have my therapist once more explain how my own wires had gotten crossed, and I was interpreting the success of my writing performance on that one day as some monumental indicator of my worth and lovability as a person.

When the two had nothing to do with each other.

As I step up my engagement in educating the kids, I am reminding myself of all of this. For the most part, it is all going smoothly, but there are those moments, those flickers, when it becomes clear that there is a level of peril to learning from a parent that isn’t there when it is a designated, official teacher.

One minute everything is fine. You are excited by how well it is all going. And the next—their little internal alarms are sounding, red lights flashing in their minds, sirens blaring, as some reptilian region of the brain mis-interprets the signal, sends up the flares: danger, you are not being lovable! Danger!

I think I do a decent job of talking about all of this dynamic with the kids. We talk about daddy’s (and mommy’s) unconditional crazy love for them (without getting into the whole serial killer thing), and how coexists with the precarious part of parenting—the need to push them.

It is a tricky balancing act. You’re 100 percent lovable as you are. But being given the gift of life means you have a near endless opportunity grow and evolve and become a more amazing version of yourself.

Truly, we parents truly aren’t paid enough.

Now, let’s go learn some algebra.