My 1-year old started walking less than two months ago. She liked walking for about five minutes, but she grew bored with it fast. She prefers running, arms up, screaming, in a full-on E.T. impersonation. She tears through the world, and I’m constantly having to snatch her up when she gets too close to the road. Last week, she was shrieking with joy down the sidewalk, when she tripped on some uneven pavement. She scraped her knee and had a bump on her forehead. At one year, you know your kid’s cries. There’s the cry when she’s tired. The fake-cry when she wants my attention. And the gut-wrenching cry when she is in pain.
I could have prevented this. I could have kept her on the grass. I could have kept her inside. I could have held her unwilling and independent hand through every step. She wouldn’t be bumped or bruised or bleeding. But she wouldn’t be enjoying the world around her like she should be. Bumps and bruises happen. You get them when you run around like a crate of Pixy Stix in human form. You get them when you’re so overcome with the joy of being a kid that you don’t notice a bump in the ground beneath your unsteady feet.
It feels like we’re getting bombarded lately. Rapists and guns and terrorists and gorillas and alligators. The world feels like an increasingly unsafe place. And it’s natural to see tragedy and look for other ways it could have ended. We don’t want to believe that any of these things could ever happen to us or to the ones we love. We are smart. We are safe. We love our families so much and could never contemplate putting them in harms way. We’re angry, and we’re looking for somewhere to direct that anger.
I look at the hate spewing out of some people. The contempt for parents that dared to walk around without their children strapped to their backs, because that is the reason a child is injured or a child is dead. Disgust for parents who are hating themselves more than any self-righteous jerk on the internet could. Not having eyes in the back of your head and eight arms and the ability to see ten minutes into the future is now a criminal offense. Where did you find the audacity to even have children without these abilities?
We fail to see that the child at the zoo or the child at Disney World could have been any of our children. Our fear turns us into irrational assholes. We are without any memory of a single time we were out with our children and didn’t read a sign carefully or engaged in conversation with another adult. We forget that *gasp* we have looked down at our phone instead of using our eyes to bore a hole into our child. It could never happen to us because we love our kids.
Ours is a society that decries helicopter parenting and the inept weirdos it spawns. But in the next breath will call CPS if we see a nine-year old playing in his own yard without his mom and a medical professional standing by. We need to admit something.
We are all terrible parents.
You hover too much.
You don’t watch your kid closely enough.
You turned on the TV.
You used a toddler-leash.
You’re only teaching your kids to speak one language.
You’ve got your children in too many activities.
You put too much pressure on them.
You’re coddling them.
You aren’t socializing your baby enough.
You breastfed too long.
YOU FED YOUR SNOWFLAKE A GMO??!
You monster.
Today, no matter who you are or how you are raising your children, someone thinks you are doing a shitty job. In ten years, our children are going to be teens and they are going to hate us. They will make us aware of this often and as loud as they can. In twenty years, they will all be in therapy, vowing to never do as we did when they have children. In thirty years, they’re going to do everything wrong in another parent’s eyes.
God forbid any of us have a moment when we weren’t perfect broadcast on national television and dissected by every laptop crusader with the gift of Stellar Parenting. It’s easy to sneer and ridicule another parent when you’ve never been caught showing your own ass.