I remember realizing more or less to the day when my son had hit the age where he has discovered that his dad isn't the hero he thought he was when he was little. My younger two are there now, too. They’ve been around long enough to know that any adult, at any time, can let them down and do so catastrophically. It’s ultimately good that they do this. But it’s also sad.
I saw a viral video about a dad whose daughter said once that she likes Orange Fanta. For years since, he has brought her one every day when he came home from work and she started capturing this beautiful beaming man as he presents the cold can. I don’t do anything like that. I know it’s just a soda. And a daily Fanta is not a replacement for decades of always being around and making dinners and bringing home something fun from work trips and going to all the martial arts belt ceremonies and plays and games, but here’s a question for modern parents: what am I doing that’s like viral video cute? Is it too late?
My kids see me lose my temper while playing video games and get tired and yell at them when it's bed time. When she herself was 8, my youngest wanted to sit by me while I was hacking away at my old blog and I said, "I'm sorry, I can't write with someone sitting right here." She wanted to know if I would play a video game instead and she could just watch, but I was like, "no the fans need a blog post.”
There were no fans and life would have gone on just fine sans said blog post, but also writing them was and is something I do for me and sometimes a dad needs to do something for him. That's what I tell myself, but it's a bad look. If I saw it from the outside in a TV show I would know I’m looking at a dad who needs some character growth. I'm not proud of it. I'm not proud of how many times I've been reading or watching Rube Goldberg machines on YouTube and one of my kids has sweetly asked if I want to play a game and I say "can I just sit still for a minute because I'm exhausted."
I finished the post and later read Ramona and Her Mother to my daughter and all this crystalized into some thoughts I wrote down at the time and am now revisiting. I've loved Beverly Cleary since reading Dear Mr. Henshaw in elementary school, but I didn't read Ramona books because duh, I was a boy. It did not seem weird to me that girls were expected to read and love and relate to a book about hobbits and wizards and warriors with fewer named women characters than words in the title, but how was I supposed to relate to someone with a bob haircut who wore dresses? Absurd. I fixed that much later in life. During that lovely little period when I read them to my kids I found that they are wonderful and I cried always.
Ramona's mom and dad get angry sometimes, and it really affects her. While I was reading, my wife would come in and out of the room, and afterwards she'd tell me how the book made her feel when she read it as a child. One part she remembered perfectly: it's when Ramona's mom and dad get into a fight and go to bed angry. Ramona can't sleep, so she climbs into bed with her unfortunately nicknamed sister Beezus and they wonder aloud if their parents are getting a divorce. That's heavy stuff for a little girl and it's heavy stuff for adults, too.
Even with their fights, though, her dad is clearly a better dad than I am. The book was written in 1979, and it's clear that he does as much housework as her mom does. That's pretty remarkable for the time and according to a recent study, leads to ambitious daughters. He is "cross" sometimes (I wish we'd bring back the word cross), but soon is ready to laugh things off again. He doesn't like his job, but he leaves his work at work and is ready to love his kids. I often felt bad reading it to my little girl who just wanted to sit with her dad while he wrote or played Stardew Valley.
She’s much more grown up now and hanging out with friends and working and not asking to play games with her dad anymore and just as I’d been warned, I look back on every single time I turned her or her siblings away when all they wanted was to spend time with me. I sing "The Cats in the Cradle," and I cry like I just read a Ramona book. I definitely do not look back and say, "but that blog post was pure fire," because it’s lost to time or somewhere in a poorly-lit Latvian server farm, memorialized anonymously on the Wayback machine.
Ramona could not understand why grown-ups always talked about how quickly children grew up. Ramona thought growing up was the slowest thing there was, slower even than waiting for Christmas to come. She had been waiting years just to get to kindergarten, and the last half hour was the slowest part of all. - Ramona the Pest
That's something that happens with parents and kids, we know that. Some kids idolize their parents even though their parents are demonstrable garbage piles, will seize on even the smallest amount of affection, and spend the rest of their lives trying to love them again in spite of it. On the other end of the spectrum there are kids whose parents are driven and disciplined and cultivating overachievers and maybe pushed too hard on violin or sports or whatever and that was hard but later their adult kids look back in awe at everything they did for them.
And then there's the ones in the middle. Kids of parents who most of the time are doing their best but blow it as often as they don't. These kids promise that they will never make the same mistakes their folks' made, but at some point in their own parenting hope that they can do at least as well with their own kids. At some point most of us look back on our lives in amazement that we survived and that we are as happy as we are, whatever level of happy that is. Not because our parents were flawed but because this world is a meat grinder and it will tear you to pieces and we look around and see the casualties every day.
As a dad all I want is my kids to do better than me. I want them to know at a young age the things it took me a life to try to figure out, and like scientists taking over for the generations before them, build on it and do even more. If that means they look back on what I did and critique it honestly and find me wanting and make some changes and unlock more secrets to living a happy life, I'm glad they're doing it differently if that's what it takes.
This used to be what everyone wants, and most people achieved at least that. But it’s strange out there now. Jobs aren’t the same. Housing costs certainly are not the same. Things that used to seem simple aren’t anymore. No parent in history has ever not had these worries. I have to remind myself that I’m not raising kids to live in the world I grew up in; I’m raising them to live in one I don’t understand but hopefully they will.
In spite of all the obstacles that face our kids and their kids and (hopefully) etc. etc., I’m so hopeful for them as generations. In my job sometimes I get to work with high schoolers and young college students. They don't know a lot, but that doesn't mean they can't discover something that's never been discovered before. I saw a presentation this year by a kid who frickin' blew the roof off of badger behavior and got worldwide attention. He didn't know that's what he was looking for, but recognized it when he found it and advanced science.
We spend all of our time wringing our hands about how the next generation is making our world uncomfortable for us, but never stop to think about the world they are inheriting. It's a different place, and the kids who are growing up on smart phones and unpaid internships and fidget spinners and racism didn't invent those things, the generations before them did. They're just stuck with them.
The most boring thing you can say is that young people's adaptations to a world we created but are rapidly losing touch with are wrong. For example:
Books are scary!
The free access which many young people have to romances, novels, and plays has poisoned the mind and corrupted the morals of many a promising youth; and prevented others from improving their minds in useful knowledge. Parents take care to feed their children with wholesome diet; and yet how unconcerned about the provision for the mind, whether they are furnished with salutary food, or with trash, chaff, or poison? - Reverend Enos Hitchcock, 1790
How about chess?
A pernicious excitement to learn and play chess has spread all over the country, and numerous clubs for practicing this game have been formed in cities and villages...chess is a mere amusement of a very inferior character, which robs the mind of valuable time that might be devoted to nobler acquirements, while it affords no benefit whatever to the body. Chess has acquired a high reputation as being a means to discipline the mind, but persons engaged in sedentary occupations should never practice this cheerless game; they require out-door exercises--not this sort of mental gladiatorship. - Scientific American, 1859
Here's the thing: we complain all day about how kids are so cynical but don't take any credit for the cynicism. This isn’t new. We could argue that our entire nation is still recovering from the 70s, when a president hired criminals to break into the opponent’s office while kids who should be in college or learning how to be carpenters or artists or whatever were dying in jungles and there were less than 500 bald eagles left in the United States. Even Captain America was so disgruntled he gave up the costume for a while.
Just in my lifetime I've seen a presidency where 138 members of his team were investigated, indicted, or convicted for various scandals and his administration thought that the AIDS epidemic was funny. Then we got a president who appoints a sex-offender to the Supreme Court (by which I mean the first time one did that), then a president who commits adultery and lies about it, and has been accused multiple times of rape, then we get one who attacks a country in response to a terrorist attack that country had nothing to do with, then a president who ramped up US drone programs responsible for killing somewhere between 400 and 800 civilians. And those are the ones we considered capable and normal. We didn’t know what was coming.
If our government officials were (heaven forbid) our parents—and we the kids—we'd have plenty to complain about. We could probably successfully lobby to be removed from the metaphorical home. The signs of abuse are all there. The effects of trauma last generations. And we have the right to want something better for the future. It is a house out of order. But sure, let's blame the historic amounts of marches and protests on the fact that millennials want free stuff. That works, too, I guess.
Ramona Quimby isn't a real person, but I still think she turned into a great woman because her parents were doing their best. They're always poor and Ramona has to spend time being babysat by the neighbor and her pill of a granddaughter and sometimes the family gets cross and fights. But they love her and they're good examples. Her mom gets a job because the family needs it, but stays at the job because she loves it. Her dad scrubs the bathroom after work. They are just barely making it, and I know as a parent that they want their kids' life to be easier and better and more fulfilling and sacrifice to get there.
Every generation overstays its welcome and gets real sad about it. The new music isn’t “real music,” tik tok dances are destroying the fabric of society, the voting age should be raised to 40. Those already absurdly cold takes freeze and shatter when you spend time working or volunteering alongside actual young people. They’re not like us. But maybe they aren't like us because we were wrong. And they're figuring out how to be right.
Mr. and Mrs. Quimby are definitely my parenting role models for all the reasons you state! However, when my kids and I listened to these books on audio a decade or so agony I was shocked at how much smoking there was - not so much shocked that Mr. Quimby smoked, since it was normal at the time, but that I had zero recollection of that from when I read as the books as a kid. I’m sure it’s because as a kid I focused on the kids in books I read, and now the adults. Also I probably saw a lot of adults smoking in the 80s? My kids will surely be planning to do everything differently than their parents did and I wish them all the success ☺️