October 1987: an unattended 18 month old girl falls down an uncovered well in her aunt’s backyard. The nation is captivated and rescuers spend 58 hours freeing her. The nation rejoices, rightfully calls the responders heroes, the girl is returned to her parents, and everyone lives happily ever after.
June 2016: a 2 year old boy visits Disney with his parents. While holding his father’s hand, he is pulled into the water at their hotel by an alligator and drowned. The nation’s response? They crucify the parents, calling them every name under the sun, saying they deserve a dead kid because a family from Nebraska should know that a man-made lake outside a hotel is teaming with deadly wildlife despite no official warnings as such. No one thanks the responders who went out to find the child, and only a small minority empathize with the parents. The rest are out for their blood.
I’m 2000% over parents being vilified for doing our best every single freaking day. We are criticized as helicopter parents for trying to keep our children safe–“kids these days! Back in my day we played until the streetlights came on and were miles away from home!” Yet when a parent today allows their child to even take a margin of risk–the risk that we seem so nostalgic for–we are instantly called neglectful, lazy, indulgent. We are literally damned if we do and damned if we don’t.
A few weeks ago at the playground, I was sitting in the shade with some other mamas as our kids played on the playset. I saw J approaching a ladder that he is physically too small to climb alone. I started to get up to help him, but saw that another caregiver was nearby and had reached out to help. So I stayed seated and watched her get J to the top. J slid down the slide and the woman came over to me. Before I could say, “thanks for helping my son,” she said, “is this your kid?” I said yes. She said, “your kid could have fallen off that ladder and died, but he didn’t because I helped him. He is too little to play here, this playground is too big for three year olds. You need to watch him better.” And she huffed off before I could respond.
The next time we went back to that same playground, I stayed closer, paranoid that someone would see J go up that ladder and decide I was too unfit to parent. As I helped him climb, I heard a man mutter to another that, “special snowflake kids today will neverlearn anything on their own because their parents keep suffocating them.”
I cannot win. I cannot do it right. Parenting is hard AF y’all. It literally takes a village–people caring about other people–to do it. Our village is broken. We place blame before using our ears. We push away instead of opening up. We need to take the time to understand and empathize — even with strangers, even with people who are different from us, even when it is inconvenient, or when it is uncomfortable. Sometimes accidents are just accidents. I promise you that modern parents are not lazy. They aren’t neglectful. They are just as hard-working and flawed as the generation that came before. And they love their children just as much.
If you have been a parent of a past generation, know that you raised adults who are now more open to creating relationships with their children, more sensitive to their children’s autonomy, and more understanding of the need to balance safety and risk. You did that. In the 70s, 80s, and 90s–you did a great job! Now, please, help the parents of today do the same. Build them up. Give them a hand. Know that they are just as nervous and excited as you were. Be the village. Mourn with them, celebrate with them. Love them. ✌
Momentary Lapse Of Sanity 