“You’ll be an old grandpa. And I’m going to be a daddy.”
– James Walsh, age 3, imagining the whole game.
This post is about taking the long view and, thus, is the natural follow up to #5: Catch the Ball. In Catch the Ball we talked about the need to focus first on our loved one’s emotions, before responding or reacting.
I propose taking the long view second because that’s exactly how our brains and nervous systems work:
- emotion first
- reason second (or in the case of certain people, not at all).
And also because we can’t just stay in the present moment forever. At some point we must to take what we feel right now and use it in order to make a good decision about what to do next. That involves foresight and imagination.
That involves imagining the whole game, or at least the whole inning.
Catching the ball is one play in a long game.
And though this is an ability that comes naturally to the vast majority of people, including my three year old (see above), it disappears when are stressed out. It is a skill that needs modelling and lots of practice.
Case in point:
Imagine it’s time to take your child to school or daycare.[1] You have exactly 30 seconds to get your offspring’s shoes on. And you have to be at work in 1/2 an hour.
Parent: “Come, put on your shoes.”
Child: “No.”
Parent: “Right now!”
Child: “Uh-uh. Later. My Little Ponies are racing.”
At this point something happens in the parental brain. It starts sliding away from the present moment and down a long, slippery slope.
It catastrophizes.
It worst-case-scenarios.
When faced with the fear of not getting to school/work on time, parents imagine the worst. Their imaginations race forward to a time when their jobs have been lost, and their children have flunked out of school. Soup kitchen line-ups appear, nebulously, in the minds eye.
All things good will cease because Marnie won’t be a good girl and come put her shoes on!
I’ve been there.
Now that you are good and afraid that your little girl will have to live – and race her My Little Ponies – out of a shopping cart on Main Street, you may do something really, really stupid. You might yell at our child. Or you might grab her, hurl the My Little Ponies out the window (which, by the way, should be an Olympic sport), and cram her Dora the Explorer shoes onto her feet.
And why do people do this? We do this because we are afraid of being bad parents. And because we are afraid of getting in trouble at work for being late as the result of our bad parenting. And also because fear puts distorted images of “good parenting” in our brains.
You caught that:Fear of being bad parents makes us forget what we already do when we are being the parents we want to be.
Fear of being bad parents makes us forget what we do when we are being the parents we want to be. Click To TweetFear makes the world worse than it actually is and diminishes our ability to be who we actually are.
Once on that slippery slope, we stop thinking about the whole scene and focus solely on the time and the lack of child cooperation.
We also begin to assume that everything we do in the next fifty seocnds will make or break our child’s future.
In short, we stop seeing the whole game, and we put all our energy into the next pitch.
And, we forget that we are not actually pitching to strike-out our child, but rather pitching for them to hit homeruns.
The good news is that unless you have a Bengal tiger in your living room[2], what you do in the next few minutes isn’t actually all that important.
I promise that you will have lots of time in the future to screw up your kid, whether you do it now or not.
And, even then they will probably turn out to be ok.
All the data shows that kids today are really not any worse than kids were one or two-hundred years ago. And the world around them certainly isn’t any worse. Earth is just a different place in 2016, and there are a lot more people around.
What is not different at all, is the resilience kids have in the face of adult screw-ups. Kid’s have always come ready and equipped to deal with all sorts of adult failings and lunacy.
So, please forgive me for saying, that our children and grand children will probably turn out to be perfectly fine even if you never do learn how to be peaceable in the morning.
In summation:
Fear helps if you have a Bengal tiger in your living room that will eat your child for breakfast.
Fear does not help if you don’t, because it narrows your view and limits your understanding.
So, what do we do about that fear? How do we transform panic into a useful kick in our parenting pants?
One thing to do is to try to imagine the whole game, all the way through. Just for a second, imagine your youngster at the age of 15 or 30 or 80.
Kind of neat, isn’t it!
You’ll notice that the slippery slope flattens out and gains traction. No longer do you imagine that you are destined to fail at getting Marnie’s shoes on unless you become a Terminator; no longer does this lead to financial and academic ruin.
In fact, everything seems sort of all right.
And when you’re lying in bed at night, reviewing your day, take your imagination back in time. What would your grandmother have done if your dad would’ve refused to put on his shoes? What would your great grandfather have done?
Do you think they did a better job of it, or did they just wollop their kids on their backsides? You’ll never know, but what you will know, as clearly as you know that you are safe in your bed, is that somehow your parent survived. And somehow the universe got around to making you, and even to creating your beautiful child.
I don’t know if my wife and I will grow up to be old grandparents, or if our delightful child will ever become a daddy. I’ll leave that in God’s hands. What I do know is that when I imagine a brilliant future for my family, we are assured a pretty brilliant present.
[1] I used this kids-and-shoes example before in a post called ‘Precious-Mind-Precious-Child’. I re-use it here because getting kids out the door plays out like a Greek Tragedy in lots of houses. Go to the Precious-Mind blog post – lots of ideas for how to structure the morning routine.
[2] Shout out to Richard Parker!
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