“WHY?!” screamed my five-year-old from his bed. “WHY ARE YOU IN CHARGE OF ME?! WHY IS THAT YOUR JOB?!”
I smiled sadly at his little body, watching it shake with rage at being confined to such a terrible thing as bed at such a unjust moment as bedtime, and I said to him, “I have two jobs as a parent: to make sure that you don’t hurt yourself, and to make sure you don’t hurt anybody else. If you don’t get enough sleep, your body will not be rested. It will hurt you. And you will be grumpy and exhausted, and you might go out and hurt somebody else. So yes, I am your father, and right now my job is to get you to go to sleep. Sorry.”
He didn’t like this answer, but I could tell he was thinking about it. He was thinking about it so much, that it made me start to think about it too. As a parent, I often pull half-formed wisdom out of my butt and hand it to my kids as if it were gospel. Is anything I tell them actually true or helpful? Was this thing I just said to him correct? Yeah. You know, I think that it is correct. But the more I thought about it, the sadder I became, because I knew that I was going to fail in my only two jobs.
I knew I was going to fail because every parent fails. As I stood there telling him that he needed sleep, I knew that I myself do not get enough sleep, and that it is not good for me. I am hurting myself, in a way, by staying up too late. Didn’t my parents ever tell me that I needed sleep? Didn’t they make me go to bed on time? Of course they did. But now I have things to do, and not enough time to do them. Now I am an adult, and I get to make my own stupid decisions, and to hell with what my parents said, right? And so no matter what I say to him, I know that he will, in some way, go out into the world and hurt himself. Maybe he will hurt himself socially, or financially, or even physically, but I know it is going to happen. It doesn’t matter how hard I try; he is going to hurt. He is human, and this is life.
And even worse than whatever boneheaded thing he might do to screw up his own self, I know that he is going to hurt other people. I know this, because I hurt other people. He will let a careless word fly from his lips, or he will smack someone on the playground, or he will let someone take the blame for something he did. He will break someone’s heart. He will let someone down. And nothing I can teach him can ever prevent this. I have only two parental assignments, and I am not going to get an A+ on either of them.
I suppose all I can really do is to somehow help him to learn to recognize when he has hurt someone, or when he is hurting himself, and then to try to heal the hurt. And maybe that’s the third thing. Maybe life isn’t all preventative. It’s active. It’s reactive. We know we can’t get through life without causing some destruction, but at least we can learn to be destruction neutral. There’s a reason the inventor of dynamite went on to create the Nobel Peace Prize.
So I am not failing after all. I just didn’t have my wisdom straight, which is often the case. Parents should have three goals for their children: to minimize the hurt they cause themselves, to minimize the hurt they cause to others, and to teach them to recognize and repair any hurts that they see in the world, whether or not they caused them. If we could all do just these three things, think of what a world we might live in. Parents, please, teach your children.
Oh, and it’s not too late for you either.