Before I had kids, I thought I couldn’t comment on parenting. What did I know? Now that I have kids, I often think that it’s a bad idea to comment on parenting. Why? Because it’s nearly impossible to not come off as holier than thou. Parenting is perhaps the most personal thing that parents do, so it’s easy to feel extremely sensitive to judgment.
So let’s start off with a standard disclaimer: I’m likely making a lot of mistakes raising my kids, most of which I am totally blind to. These are the unknown unknowns, in the words of former US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
In a world of unknown unknowns, all you can do is try to understand what you can. So that’s the purpose of this blog, to understand culturally where I’m seeing parenting in my corner of the world. That understanding matters immensely to coaches, people who work with other people’s children and often have parents for customers.
My advice to anyone who finds themselves in frequent disagreement with anyone else is to first seek to understand. Empathize with your opposition, not so that you can unmoor from your own principles, but because it increases your chances of cooperation. It’s almost impossible to accomplish anything entirely on your own.
Therapy Shift
My friend Garrett aptly phrased the shift the two of us have witnessed in our lifetime. We’re two men in our early 40s. He said when we were kids, you hoped your kid didn’t have to go to therapy, because it was an implied failure of you as a parent. Now, we hope our kids aren’t stigmatized into not asking for help when they need it.
Language from the world of various cognitive therapies has penetrated into common usage. When I was a kid, very few people spoke about trauma, or depression, anxiety and anything else you might find defined in the DSM IV. Now, it’s far more normal. It’s on social media ubiquitously, with people offering their “expert” definitions of those terms.
This has had a particular effect on parents, and by parents here I mean people with growing children in the house, most of whom are roughly the same age as me. There is a more awareness about mental illness. There is more information (much of it not so great).
Everyone, including me, you and the rest of the world, simplifies parts of the world into causal relationships. It is not possible to view everything at it’s full complexity. It’s just simply beyond us as human beings. The age of bite size social media plays a peculiar trick on this part of the mind. It offers limitless knowledge, but absolutely no complexity or depth.
The trick then is this: you think you know but you actually are worse off than knowing nothing. Imagine I asked you to judge whether a planet was habitable. I then only allowed you to see a 10x10 space within an active volcano. What would you guess? And yet that is a slice of earth and we’re at 8 billion people and counting.
In the case of diagnoses and parenting, here’s an offering of what social media has offered me in recent times, just what I can remember off the top of my head. I am paraphrasing:
“If you rush your kids you will make them more anxious”
“Kids that want to please their parents are fueled by anxiety”
“Don’t say no to your kids it breaks their will and makes them depressed”
Here is where I will skip to the thesis of this post, and then fill in the rest of the gaps. Your child is not determined. Asking a kid to hurry up repeatedly does not MAKE them anxious. Kids can want to please their parents without anxiety, and saying “no” is just a normal human thing to do.
When I’m out in the wild, I have to admit I’m always a little caught off guard by how little snippets like this become fully formed philosophies. I suppose we were not much better off when people wrote books and got their advice from 300 pages of Dr. Spock, but at least a book probably offers more context than these messages delivered like 2x4s across our collective foreheads.
These ideas are so easy to popularize because left unchecked, pessimism will always run absolutely rampant over optimism. Put another way, it takes great conscious effort to focus on what you can do to proactively influence the future, and it takes no effort at all to run scared from every possible bad outcome that your mind can contain.
Parenting often feels so monumentally overwhelming for most people I know, partly because we can easily slip into fighting a losing battle where our actions actually create a more overwhelming situation every day. In the words of my mother, who would have been 72 years old as I write this. today: “there’s just so much to worry about”.
Swimming Should Never be a Video Game
In sports too, we are increasingly worried about avoiding bad outcomes. I asked USA Swimming’s Joel Shinofield on my podcast last week to define the difference between what the organization is held accountable for, and what they are actually responsible for.
Many coaches are responsible for managing practices and competitions. They may be responsible for other administrative duties, sometimes an evergrowing list. They are increasingly, however, accountable for the overall well being of the people that show up to their practice.
That accountability is, in my mind, not wrongly placed. Coaches can and are incredibly influential in the lives of young people. They offer an opportunity for kids to place their trust in an adult who is not their parents, to explore their potential and confront things that may make them deeply uncomfortable in the moment but more powerful in the long term.
What accountability can too often mean is a long list of bite size proclamations about what a coach cannot do because somehow we “know” that it “makes” something else happen, something bad for the well being of an athlete. I don’t agree. I have started to quibble with language that goes “X happened and it MADE me feel Y”. Nothing makes you feel any which way. Events happen, and you feel a certain way about them. No one compelled that emotion into your mind (including you). It just is.
That may seem like a trifling distinction but it’s not. The statement “makes me feel” denies you the opportunity to find your own agency and influence your future. After all, you are helpless if someone is “making” you feel a certain way.
Breaking free from this determinism means you can see the complexity, as best as anyone can. X never makes Y happen. “Bad” outcomes are not determined by one set of variables. Neither are desirable outcomes. And if you spend most of your time trying to avoid the bad two things are likely. One is that bad things will happen anyway and you’ll feel like a failure. The other is you’ll be so focused on running scared from bad outcomes that you’ll miss most of the opportunities to positively influence the future.
So what can you do? You can try to get organized around making the best of the opportunity you have. I know there are probably other ways but the best way I know how is coaching. I coach people because I know for myself, without someone else checking my work I can easily start chasing my own negativity to increasingly greater depths. I want to get better, and I know I get better faster with someone training me than going alone.
Interested in coaching from Chris DeSantis? Reach out!