I've Got You

What we do for our kids

It was spitting rain on the day of the World Pipe Band Championships, so the pipers didn’t bring their bagpipes out to warm up and tune until 90 minutes before they were scheduled to play. Everyone was on the bus, pulling instruments out of cases and shoving drone swabs in the tops of their kilt hose when my son came up to me and said, with a stricken face, “Mom, can I talk to you?”

I knew that face, nearly bloodless and so solemn it made my heart hurt.

“I left my band chanter in my dorm,” he said in a tight voice.

Instantly, my brain catalogued every possible option for getting that chanter, from calling his older sibling, still at the dorm, to running the 15 minutes uphill myself. “Give me your key fob,” I said, “I’ll get it.”

This is not a story about my resourcefulness, although I was exceptionally resourceful in the face of a malfunctioning Uber app and the fact that I hadn’t actually run for fitness since I was in college. This is a story about the lengths parents go to help their kids and the lessons we teach them when we do.

Obviously, everything has the potential to be a learning experience, and the consequences for actions do have value in the formation of a responsible human, but there are times in our lives when consequences are not the most valuable lesson.

I told the chanter story to my mom friends, and every one of them had their own stories of dramatic rescues, and by rescues, I mean forgotten uniform pieces, a calculator for a major test, several school IDs and pieces of homework, various books, countless lunches, permission slips, and signatures on various forms. The rescues come in all sizes and degrees of importance – some are mere inconveniences, while others stretch resources and ingenuity to their limits – but in that moment, no matter what it is, that thing your kid needs from you is vital.

As parents, our natural inclination is to fix the mistakes, repair the breaks, and generally smooth the way so our kids’ can experiences all that life has to offer. So, what are we teaching our kids when we rescue them from their own mistakes?

My husband and I had this conversation over coffee one morning, and he recalled working on gold mines, behind the cameraman who was filming the miners’ operations. Every once in a while his film crew could see something that was about to go wrong – a clogged washplant, or a broken piece of machinery – and he had to decide, in that moment, “is this a good story?” If the thing that was about to happen could be made into a complete story, with a beginning, middle, and end, and it didn’t endanger either the crew or the miners, he might be inclined to say nothing and let the mistake happen. But if the mistake was likely to put his crew into overtime, or impact something more important or timely that needed to be done, he would alert the miners before it became a problem.

I see the parallels to our parenting as well. If a kid’s mistake is merely inconvenient or uncomfortable, I am much more likely to let the kid deal with – and learn from - the consequences. But if it impacts me or other people around us, or makes life more difficult or unsafe, I step in without a second thought.

There were a few lessons my kid learned on the day he forgot his band chanter in his dorm room on the day of the biggest competition of his life. The first, and most obvious, was to always make sure you have all your stuff with you, and double, triple, and idiot check everything. The second lesson was a surprising one that really resonated with him – the coach who was working with the band is a world class piper with a huge reputation. He went to Logan and told him that he, too, had once forgotten a chanter at a big competition, and the most important thing was to not let it get into his head. Everything could be fixed with a conversation and some ingenuity, but none of those fixes would matter if Logan let the mistake take away his confidence. It was the kind of lesson a kid won’t usually internalize if a parent says it, so I was immensely grateful to the coach for having done so.

The lesson that mattered most to me in that moment was that my kid knew he could count on me to have his back. He didn’t have to solve a problem alone, and he had someone in his corner to support him. There was no lecture about what he’d done, or about not doing it again, and no demand for repayment of the massive tip my Uber driver got for waiting outside the dorm and returning me and the chanter back to Glasgow Green. There was a quiet, heartfelt “thank you, Mom,” and an equally heartfelt, “you’re welcome,” and then he went on to play the best MSR of his life.

When I hear about kids who don’t tell their parents who they are, or how they feel, or what they’re afraid of, it makes me wonder how the mistakes were handled. Because mistakes inevitably happen – and how we’re made to feel when they do can have a big impact on whether we trust others enough to ask for help. Life is full of lessons to learn, and sure, we could be really self-sufficient and learn them alone, but which lessons are we really learning then? That we can’t count on other people? That we’ll be judged and punished and shamed for our mistakes? Or is a more valuable lesson the one that shows us that our mistakes do not define us, that we are worthy of love even when we screw up, and that we can trust people to choose us no matter what?

I know which lessons I choose to teach, and I hope my kids are learning that no matter what they do, who they are, who they love, or how they feel, we will always have their backs.