Perhaps the biggest criticism I have of the way my parents raised me isn’t that they coddled me—far from it. It’s that they didn’t prepare me for how cruel people can be, or what the real world was actually like. In their defense, I suppose it’s extremely difficult to prepare someone for how cold a total stranger they just met is going to be.
This isn’t to say that my parents were naïve. Maybe they just assumed it was an understood fact that people were going to be self-centered, heartless, and sometimes cruel. Maybe I was the naïve one, just by virtue of the fact that I didn’t know any better.
Growing up, my parents rarely gave absolute answers. Their version of a “yes” was usually an indifferent “I don’t care,” and a “no” was typically “I don’t think that’s a good idea.” I never really thought they were indifferent; I think they just didn’t believe in absolutes. They made me face the music when I did stupid shit, but they sent me out into the world with a map of a place that didn’t actually exist.
It’s odd because I’ve been talking to a few of my contemporaries about this, and we’ve all kind of admitted that we’re definitely more of helicopter parents than our parents were to us growing up. I mean, I’m Gen X—all that stuff about drinking out of the garden hoses, not coming home until the streetlights came on, and network television running ads in the 70s that asked, “It’s 10 PM. Do you know where your children are?” We were really the first latchkey generation.
Because we grew up so fiercely independent, we developed a unique kind of toughness. But maybe because we weren’t handled with the same kind of kid gloves that I admittedly handle my kids with, I just wasn’t equipped for the emotional reality of the world. And part of the reason I lean more toward being a helicopter dad is simply because modern society expects and demands it of us.
Plus, just because we have access to more information and news media than ever before, we hear about a lot more horrible stuff happening, so we’re kind of programmed to think it’s a much more dangerous place.
I like to think I’m trying to do a little bit more to prepare my sons for how tough the world can be. The fact of the matter is, I don’t see them every day, so I don’t really have as much influence on them—at least not as much as I would like.
But I think in a way, without even really realizing I did it, I feel like I certainly influenced Kid 1 to be a little bit more independent. Of course, being on the autism spectrum, Kid 2 has different needs than Kid 1 did at the same age. I think I probably tried to shield Kid 2 from a lot of the evilness in the world more than I did with Kid 1, but as he gets older, I think he is becoming more aware of it and wise to the world himself.
Still, Kid 2 is hitting that age where he’s going to realize, sooner rather than later, that the world doesn’t always function the way mom and dad told him it was supposed to. I know in my case, I always felt a little bit betrayed by my parents in that regard.
And I know it’s because they loved me, wanted to look out for me, and wanted to protect me as much as they could. But sometimes I wonder if I had taken a few more metaphorical ass-kickings in life, I would’ve become more independent at an earlier age, and if I’d be a more self-sufficient human being today than I am even now.
Rebuilding a life takes grit, consistency, and a lot of ‘Option C’ thinking. Having crossed the 1,000-day milestone, I’m now charting the territory beyond. The mission remains the same: No glitz. Just the work. New to the blog? Start your journey here to see the blueprint and the ‘Tricorder’ perspective behind the rebuild.
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The article “What My Parents Didn’t Teach Me “first appeared on Rebuilding Rob
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