Acceptable risk.

I watched the Black Mirror episode Archangel last night. It’s about the allure and slippery slope of using technology - or anything - to protect your children.

I’m also reading a wonderful and illuminating book called Midlife. There’s a lot of gems buried throughout, but one part stuck out, in light of Black Mirror: the idea of how too much knowledge can add more stress to our lives. Basic concept, simple, well duh kind of thing. But worth considering and reconsidering regularly.

Note: this is a sobering thought in this age for more reasons than the surface. We are in an era of post-knowledge, post-expertise, post-authority where we are constantly challenged to accept multiple viewpoints, perspectives, or opinions as equally valid…and often the implication that this should apply to facts and knowledge. There is often a willful embrace of ignorance, sometimes given in the name of neutrality. “I don’t care about politics, I think both sides are terrible.” But in the end, 99.9% of the time, this statement is the preface to a very specific voting preference. In other words, this era often denigrates or demotes the use of facts or knowledge to explain or understand. I loathe that. I am talking about the amount of knowledge we can handle at a given point - and what sort of thought process is helpful in self-examining the amount we really, truly need at a given point in our lives that’s relevant and beneficial.

Away from culture and politics and back to parenting - here’s a real life relevant example for me :

Our younger boys hammering nails and constructing…stuff.

Why can’t I just walk away and let them figure it out, after I give a basic level of instruction? Hard to do because I think of worse case scenarios. But…what will they learn behind my back, when I’m not trying to protect them from every little injury, scrape, potential circumstance?

It’s hard. It’s not science. You want to know, to KNOW they have the tools and judgment to protect themselves from the bad stuff. But you have to limit your knowledge, your specific knowledge in order not to get wrapped up in the particulars of how they figure it out. I want, I WANT to walk them through again and again, to make sure they learn something well.

But they have to be able to experiment, try, make mistakes of the appropriate level and scale, and fail.

And…get hurt. They have to learn how to get hurt. Not out of a sadistic parental desire to ‘toughen them up.’ Because that is reality. They are going to get hurt at some point. Inevitably. A rich life is made up of challenges, of difficulties, of loss and gain and the inevitable knowledge that at some point we all die. Entropy.

We hold them close by letting them go.

But there’s no specific manual for the rate of letting go. Of course we can study human and child development, and read parenting books and listen to podcasts and soak in our favorite social media experts to confirm what we want. But the reality is that there are almost infinite variables with each child and their surrounding internal and external ecosystems.

So you try the best you can to figure out how to let go at the appropriate rate. And that’s where I think a generation is being failed by us, by us, at a couple things. One of them is helping model and teach our kids how to give attention, how to focus on something, or rather someone in the present. But that’s for other posts.

The other has to do with resilience.

We cannot control everything that is going to hurt our children. But we can affect the steps they take to protect themselves and make good choices, and, and…we can help them learn how to bounce back, how to fight back, how to get on the horse again when things don’t go their way or when they are hurt.

That is resilience. Learning how to survive and thrive again when you’re knocked down.

We can’t instill resilience with a chip or technology or location tracking or internet filters (or friend filters, for that matter). It comes from failing, from making mistakes, and the way you fail and make mistakes is by trying.

It’s hard to watch your child try and fail. Or try and get hurt. That is knowledge, observable knowledge, that is stressful.

And that’s why we, as parents, because we love our kids and care about their future, must do better at walking away.

Not walking away in abandonment or disinterest. Walking away so they can fail. And possibly get hurt. Walking away so they can build independence, and from that testing laboratory will come resilience.

That resilience will carry them through the oceans of life; oceans that we want to be the perfect temperature, always close to the shore, away from deadly predators and riptides and dangerous currents.

But the oceans don’t follow our dictates, and neither will (most of) our children through most of their lives.