[This post is my attempt to make sense of, and reflect upon, the many conversations I have had with parents recently. Some of those conversations left me deeply at a loss for words, and the best I felt I could do was to show a parent how much I love the person their child was that day.]
Not surprisingly, I’ve had roughly 37,000 conversations with kids over the years about parents. Teenagers often talk about how their parents don’t understand them, and even more often, teenagers talk about how parents let them do what they want to do or overreact when the kids make mistakes.
What I try to explain to students is this, that as much as one would think that the number one emotion is love, it often times is not. It’s fear. Before I was a parent, little scared me. The world seemed to make sense, and I thought that I could exert a fair amount of control on my universe.
Then I became a father.
And the world terrified me. Every car that drove down our street became a threat. Every situation had to be examined for potential dangers.
It is my life’s goal not to pass that fear onto Jakob and Theo, and so far so good, I think. But it’s hard.
That fear is probably the thing I was least expecting about being a parent. It is the thing that is hardest to deal with, and while I know it comes from deep and profound love that I have for my children, I struggle with it. And I know many others who do as well.
So when students come to me and ask why their parents act the way they do, why they react so strongly, I say simply,
Because you used to fit in the crook of our arms. And every parent I have ever known remembers that feeling. Our bodies remember that, and there is no way to make it make sense to you, not now, not yet, Not until you become a parent too. But you used to fit in the crook of our arms. And every parent remembers that And remembers thinking, "I will keep you safe."
And I try to remember that when I work with parents, especially when I am the bearer of bad news. The young adult in front of me used to fit in the crook of that parent’s arms, that parent has promised to keep them safe, they got them to SLA, and they still worry and fear for all of pain the world can inflict on their child.
In our best moments as schools, we can help parents build that vision of their children for the wonderful, amazing young adults they are. We can help parents understand who their children are today and see that person they are today as part of the continuum from birth to adulthood. We can help parents see that children take what they need up their parent’s dreams and use them, add to them, change them to build their own. And in our hardest moments, we have to comfort parents and understand them when circumstances arise such that that fear that every parent knows is given cause to rise to the surface.