Parenthood: Week 273 – Not Your Fault

We’ve all been there. Sometimes it’s at a party, other times it’s at a park or a playdate. You are standing around usually talking to someone or on your phone half-watching your kid, and you see your kid misbehave. Even if it’s something minor, your brain goes into overdrive. Maybe you should see how this plays out. There’s a chance that your kid will apologize and make it right (yeah, and monkeys might fly out of...). Maybe you should intervene, but you hesitate thinking that you don’t want to be a “helicopter parent” (a term older generations use to criticize younger generations of parents, whose insecurities they don’t understand, and fail to validate). A greater part of this hesitation is embarrassment.

As much as I want to admit that I’m one of those parents who doesn’t care what other people think when my child is throwing a tantrum in the middle of Target, and walking away, in reality, I’m like every other parent.  I'm deeply insecure, and doing the best that I can with the stress of parenthood in an society that whose appearance of valuing the role of parents more often than not, fails to go beyond lip service (yeah, I’m kind of on a soap box today with a chip on my shoulder, today, I’ll try to keep it at bay. If you don’t understand why, get out from under that rock).

It takes a lot of confidence, determination, and guts to let your child’s tantrum explode while you just stand there, do what’s right, and not comfort them allowing the scene to only get bigger and draw more attention.

The same tension exists in a social situation when your kid is doing something wrong. And it always seems in that moment that other kids are also misbehaving and other parents are doing nothing. So you’re like the person starting the buffet or open bar at a wedding. Someone’s got to start but you don’t want to look like too much of a glutton or a drunk, and in the social situation, you don’t want to look like the overly strict parent.

More often than not, I’m the person who starts the buffet, and the line at the open bar. I blow through the embarrassment like jumping into the deep end of the pool. I don't blend in at social situations, at all, EVER. I’m short, Asian, but clearly not from the homeland, I’m in an interracial marriage, my kids are mixed, and I write a blog where I overshare. For me, embarrassment is about unwanted attention, and well, in some ways I’ve always lived with this.

So yeah, I don’t usually hesitate to call my kid out when he’s playing with a group of kids and he missteps. Do I probably correct him too early? Yes. Am I too loud about it? Most of the time. I usually yell as opposed to take him aside. Look, it’s hard enough to figure out a place to stand amongst the parents in the periphery. I don’t want to lose my spot. Does this make me a superior parent? Not by a long shot, just one with less shame.

What gets me through these moments more than anything else is the advice that I got years ago from teacher who was talking about her own students misbehaving in an assembly:

Yes, it’s embarrassing and annoying when my students misbehave in assemblies. Everyone knows they are my students. But here’s the thing you got to remember: They are separate human beings, they aren’t me. I don’t make them make misbehave. They make this choice on their own. It’s not my fault. Now, they are my responsibility when they are at school, so I have to do something when they slip up.

This applies to parenting. Out children’s actions aren’t our fault, however they are always our responsibility. Children need to apologize for their own actions (if they are of an age, that they can understand their actions, I'm not talking about babies here), that’s not our job. We only need to apologize if we do nothing about our children’s behavior.