Welcome back to Minor Dilemmas, where a member of Defector's Parents Council will answer your questions on surviving family life. Have a question? Email us at minordilemmas@defector.com.
This week, Albert answers a question about a kid who might be a little bit of a mess.
Jason:
I have two kids. They're great. They're smart, and beautiful and—as older teenagers—are oozing into adulthood as (mostly) thinking beings with interiority and new ideas and new identities they want to try out, etc. From a family standpoint, I'm convinced that these are the Good Old Days.
... and yet.
My oldest is about to go off to college. She's really into the arts, and will be pursuing a(n apparently quite challenging) BFA in her field. I think she's incredibly talented, and she's had some early success. But she doesn't have the sense God gave a goose. If you ask her to do something she hasn't done a million times already, she'll have no idea how to do it. If you ask her "Do you have any ideas about how you could find that out?" (ex: a quick Google search), she'll legitimately have no idea. Despite her mother and I really pulling back hard from the helicopter parent thing in high school, she's 100-percent convinced that things will be fine. Math final tomorrow? Oh, I had no idea but I'm sure it will be fine (it was not fine). What do you mean, I made enough from my job to owe taxes this year? I don't know how to do that, so I'm sure it'll be fine (very unlikely to be fine).
At the same time, any setback leaves her utterly wrecked. Tears. Sobs. Genuine heartbreak. It kills me—I want her to be happy and for things to work out, but I need her to learn how to be an independent adult. We try hard to give her all the support she could ever want, while also giving her achievable goals to help her ... you know ... grow up. And when anything does go wrong—at home, at school, with her art, with friends—she's devastated.
Wife and I are both bog-standard GenX. Latchkey, make your own snack, do your own homework, only time we got "feedback" was when mom and dad were getting divorced, blah blah blah. We tried hard to give our kids as much of the good parts of that as possible while still giving them just enough of a safety net.
How on Earth did I raise such a fragile child, and what can I possibly do about it from here?
Here is a story. It is partially about fragility, and it is also about the challenge, for a parent, of making sense of your child. Of, I guess, the importance of figuring out where to stand to see them most clearly.
My eldest is an older teen now. He has a job, and a girlfriend he adores, and the next thing he wants is a car. He's saving up for one. This has been a bit of a headache for me and my wife, and so for him. Right now we are not really equipped to offer more than token financial help with this, for one thing; for another, he and I have very different ideas about what type of car he should be looking for. He does not want a beater. He wants something that he will be excited to have gotten for himself.
He listens patiently to all of our advice about the smart way to go about all of this, and then he says some calm variation of "It's not that I don't believe you, but I would rather try it this way, and learn for myself." And then, inside of myself, I scream, Then what the fuck good has my entire life been.
A couple of weeks ago I was thinking about this strong preference of his, not just concerning his first car but about basically everything. He is open and receptive to advice, but he only acts on the advice that seems sound to him. Ultimately he wants to try to do things the way that he thinks is best, and find out for himself whether he can make it work. And a couple of things occurred to me.
The first and most obvious is that when I was his age, I too insisted on not taking adults' word for most things. In silhouette, at least, that is a very normal way for a teenager to be. The second, though, is the difference in our respective reasons for it. This is much more important.
All of my teenaged reasons for refusing to heed the advice of adults came from bad stuff—bad experiences, bad ideas, apocalyptic self-image, fear. I didn't trust the adults around me; I didn't believe what they were saying, but also I didn't believe that I could rely on them to catch me if I fucked things up. And I had no faith that I could follow their advice without fucking things up. I was afraid to try to do things their way because then there would be some standard they could compare me to, which would reveal what a piece of shit I was, and they would pounce on that and make me feel even more worthless.
And it's not like I did things my own way as an alternative. I didn't do things at all. I don't know if this amounted to me being fragile, but it certainly amounted to me believing that I was, and despising myself for it.
None of that applies to my kid. His reasons for rejecting advice come from a good place. He has confidence. Not (most of the time) the reckless arrogance of the doofus, but simple and healthy self-belief. He has not had ground out of him the idea that anything good can come from setting goals and pursuing them. He is capable of trusting his own judgment. Much, much, much more importantly, he feels safe. He is not terrified into paralysis by the possibility that he might try something—either our way or his own—and fail where anybody can see it. He takes failure hard, sure, but he also trusts that the people who love him will be there to catch him if he falls and help him back to his feet.
It took me a long time to recognize this, because, at the risk of sounding maudlin, it is deeply alien to my experience. But I think it is in broad strokes the way a person should be. I have no idea at all how my kid came to be this way, and I assume it must be a confluence of happy accidents. At any rate I am very glad not to have averted them.
Fragility can refer to a few different things, I think, and they're worth disentangling.
One of them is OK to think of, for the purposes of whatever argument I eventually stagger my way into making, as emotional fragility. Your daughter (I'm talking to Jason now) is "utterly wrecked" by setbacks; she sobs and is heartbroken and "devastated" when things go wrong. Well. You have raised a sensitive and emotionally expressive artist. And she's pursuing a BFA! Sounds like she's pointed in the right direction. That's good. The stoic artists are the ones who end up drinking themselves to death.
More importantly: What is the cost of this kind of fragility, that would make it a bad thing? After all, it's not as though taciturn Russians and schizoid mathematicians are immune to disappointment and grief and sadness; a person can fall into a genuinely life-threatening depressive hole without ever shedding any tears over it. Back to me: I did not really cry at all when I was your daughter's age; I absorbed failures calmly, having expected them, numbly consoled by the idea that I would kill myself before I reached 30. Consider the possibility that what you perceive as your daughter's fragility in this regard might just as legibly be read as the shape that her resilience takes.
She does not bottle up her sadness and heartbreak for later, or numb herself, or insist upon a psychotic optimism in the face of hard times. She is not a grindset lunatic hell-bent on turning her haters into waiters or whatever. She does not (so far as your letter indicates) transform grief or fear into self-destruction or cruelty toward others. She goes right ahead and feels the shit, deeply and intensely. She cries.
That's what crying is for, my man. That is what you are supposed to do when you are sad, or hurt, or heartbroken. Moreover, crying is a communicative response. The whole reason we humans have it is because it signals need to others. Not so they can treat the crying as a problem—Why is she so fragile and how can we fix it?—but so they might be moved to help with whatever is causing it.
And like ... what is that? You write that your daughter struggles with planning and preparation, and seems clueless about how to learn stuff she hasn't already mastered. I submit to you that her life does not have to be ruined by these things.
Everyone—everyone everyone everyone!—brings shit with them into adulthood that adds difficulty to their life. Maybe they are emotionally unavailable in ways that will undermine their relationships; maybe they are selfish; maybe they are lousy at advocating for themselves; maybe they belt everything they say in full-blown opera voice. Maybe they are an ignoramus, a blowhard, a habitual liar, a Sacramento Kings fan. Maybe they, like me, are "comprehensively unsuited to existence."
If the worst that your "great," "smart," "beautiful," and "incredibly talented" daughter—for real, your love of this kid really comes through, and she's very lucky to have a dad like you—brings with her into adulthood is sketchy executive functioning, that does not mean she won't ever figure it out for herself. Remind yourself of the thing that every parent must learn who struggles with the potty-training part of raising a toddler: Your child is not going to be a 24-year-old who has never figured out how to use a toilet. Similarly, your daughter is not going to be a 35-year-old who never figured out some way or another of getting herself over minor humps in life.
You ask "How did I raise such a fragile child?" and you're asking it like What did I do to make her this way. But reframe it. Stand over here and look at it this way. This is who your daughter is: someone who struggles in ways that can seem baffling to you, who is vulnerable, who feels things very deeply. How did you raise such a fragile child? Successfully. She knows what she loves. She is going for it, man. She is a hero. It doesn't have to make sense to you. Maybe it is just a confluence of happy accidents you failed to avert.
So I guess where I turn out to have been going with all of this is here: There is not some right way that you need your daughter to be. Strong or fragile, level-headed or loopy, good or bad at remembering to add "/reddit" to the end of her Google searches. There is only who she is, and what each of you believes she can be. Maybe what she needs from her parents, more than their sincere worry on her behalf, is for them to be delighted by her; to be amazed by her bravery in pursuing art while she can; and to communicate to her in as many ways as they can their serene bedrock confidence that, although she is for sure a huge goofball, she has with her all that she will need to find her way in the world. Including, most especially, people who love her and will catch her when she falls.
Life is long, kids are resilient, artists cry a lot, and people take care of each other. She's gonna be OK.
