Your Children Are Not Your Children

One Thing I Hope You Learned from Your Parents

When my son was five and my daughter three, we arrived at my son’s best friend’s birthday party only to bump into Coco the Clown schlepping his clown kit down the driveway.

“Are you done?” the kids’ mother asked.

“Yes,” Coco replied, “the show ended a few minutes ago.”

We were late. The kids didn’t seem to mind too much—clowns were meh to my son and substandard Disney princesses to my daughter.

Their mom reached into her purse.

“If I give you this”—she held out a couple of $20 bills—“can you stay for another thirty minutes for my kids?”

“Er, sure,” said Coco.

This is a particular approach to parenting. Not entitled, necessarily, but extremely proactive. You reach in and take every single step you can think of to get your kids what they just might want.

Thinking back on those years, the image I have of so many parents around me is of superstar Pac-Man players. They had a grip on the joystick, and as they surveyed the field of play, they could somehow see further and faster than anyone else. They would sense opportunity or danger, jerk the joystick this way and that, and their children would move safely forward, darting around corners, the danger averted. With these parents at the helm, the kids made it through, level after level, eating the fruit, munching the ghosts, racing to the next level and the next, and still with all their lives intact.

And who can fault parents for grabbing the joystick so tightly? If you don’t have kids, you might not quite understand this, but all parents know the feeling that their child is as vulnerable as a heart outside the body. You can see it beating, you know you must do everything in your power to protect it, and yet there it is, completely exposed to all the abuse the world can throw at it. If it gets hurt, you will die. It is your heart.

And so it’s hardly surprising that, when shown a way to control the world, a way that can protect your heart, you grab on and try to maneuver the world so that your child emerges unscathed.

In the face of this always-on joystick jerking—perhaps by disposition, perhaps as a reverse overreaction—I found myself stepping back. Not, I confess, as a result of some carefully considered parenting strategy, but more because I couldn’t find my place in a world of so many furiously skilled Pac-Man players.

The fact that, during my daughter’s first afternoon nap at home, I managed to roll her out of the Moses basket onto the brick steps in our backyard, or that I once slipped down our stairs carrying my two-year-old son and broke his leg in two places, I took to be a sign that my stepping back was sensible.

But regardless of my rationalizations, I never tried to take the joystick. I didn’t find the right way to label the game unhealthy, to point out that the joystick wasn’t connected to anything real, that the figures dashing through the maze weren’t our kids, at least not the best versions of them. I didn’t do any of these things.

In the days that followed their mom’s arrest, I found myself lurching from self-recrimination for not prying the joystick loose, to shock at how quickly the world can reach in and harm my kids, and then, always, to anger. It would start small and sad, doused with tears, but then the tears would dry, I’d reread the FBI documents, trying to imagine how and why and what the hell, and the fire would rage out of control. I’d pace the bedroom at all hours of the night, banging my fists against the wall as I tried to imagine how this could have happened to my son.

And in the end, the anger spent, the self-pity done with, the traffic rumbling to life on a bright new day in LA, my only guide for how to move forward was the memory of my own mom and dad. Over the years I had rushed hither and yon—to school, to university, to a job in the US—and hadn’t given their approach to parenting much thought. Now, I found myself returning to them again and again.

I’ll share with you one aspect of what they did. Not because they were perfect parents—none are.

Not because the data necessarily supports their approach—I’m not aware of any longitudinal study either supporting or contradicting what they did.

I’m sharing it simply because, when the refining fire of this intense period in my and my kids’ lives had done its work, this one crystalline insight was all that remained. It will be what I take with me for all the years I have left as a parent.

I hope it helps you as much as it has me.

Graeme + Jo

My dad, Graeme, was the first in our family to attend college. He was an empiricist, grounded in the belief that, though faith had its place, the only way to move through the world was to do credible research and to trust the results, even if, at first, you don’t agree with them. On his deathbed, I remember, he complained bitterly that what he called “the medical profession” knew nothing about his condition.

“Marcus, the medical profession say I’ve only got a few months to live, but where’s their research on that? Where’s their research?!”

I can still hear the outrage through his plummy home counties accent.

My mom, Jo, saw life differently. She was from tough North Yorkshire stock—three generations of coal miners—but her grandmother was a faith healer, who took people into the terraced house she shared with my mom’s family, laid hands on them each morning, and then six months later the “house guest” would walk out cured. My mom inherited her faith, and her gift, and now spends her days—she’s eighty going on sixty—healing the scars and souls of her patients.

So, yes, Graeme and Jo were very different, but they did share this deep-seated belief that love-making is space-making. To love your children is to see your children, and you can’t see your children if you don’t leave them the space to make their own choices.

They played out this belief with my younger sister and elder brother, but I felt it so intimately on account of my stammer.

The perverse thing about a stammer is not only that there’s nothing anyone else can do about it, but also that the more they try, the worse it gets—the perfect metaphor for everything we do as parents.

Initially, Graeme and Jo took me to a speech pathologist to try to fix me, where I had to learn set phrases and repeat them ad infinitum—as though after the thousandth “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers” my mouth muscles would form memory, strengthen and sharpen, and I would burst through the dam.

This never happened. My mind-mouth connection would break under the pressure to perform, spasms of something other than speech would spurt from my mouth, which, upon hearing it, would scare me, stop me, and I would shut my mouth and shut down.

As all parents would be, Graeme and Jo must have been in despair to see their child suffer, and I know they would have done anything to free me of my misfiring synapses. And yet, when they saw that their interventions actually increased my disfluency, when they saw their well-intended efforts actually hurt me, they were wise and loving enough to stop.

Instead, they just let me be. They surrounded me with a bubble of love and then gave me space to bounce around within it. After the first try, they never again took me to a pathologist. Yes, they sent me to a smaller grade school than my elder brother attended, but then they left me alone to bump into my world. The love bubble would catch me if I fell and bounce me right back up again. I was a stuttering, stammering Weeble. Wobbly, but well loved.

This well-loved space they created was not just laissez-faire in parenting. It was a deliberate strategy—the sort that led to my dad sending me off to an internship in the US for the summer, telling me he would splurge for a one-way plane ticket to Chicago and a Greyhound bus pass to Nebraska, and that it was up to me, at sixteen, to figure out how to earn enough money to buy my return ticket home. They were, I now realize, inordinately comfortable with space—my elder brother and his friends cycled round France when they were fifteen; my younger sister moved to live in Munich at sixteen.

I never had the opportunity to share my realizations with Dad. He died from an “unresearched” condition on October 31, 2017, only one day after we shared a Scotch in his little flat.

I wish I could now look straight into those stern, soft blue eyes and say, “Thank you, Dad. I am only able to do the work that I do today, work that I so hope benefits the world, because of the space you gave, that one-way Greyhound bus ticket.” I wish I could rewind the tape and share with him what happened that morning when my stammer went away.

On the day itself I kept what happened to myself; didn’t want to jinx it by naming it. Though by that time I had figured out how to limit the damage of my stammer—keep conversations short, never try to tell a joke because the stammer will kill the punch line, avoid introducing myself to people—it was still the dominant force in my life. The night before the chapel reading I wrote about in chapter 8, I walked into the dark, cold chapel with my headmaster, Mr. Pratt, and he attempted to coax me through the piece. The place was empty, the glossy wood of the pews reflecting the candle light back to me as I stood at the lectern and tried to cajole the words out. They stuttered out unbalanced, one staccato moment bumping into another, each phase freakishly elongated.

I held in my tears and my anger while explaining all this to Graeme and Jo over dinner. I didn’t say it, but I thought and hoped that one of them would take up my cause, and reach out, and fix it, and call Mr. Pratt and tell him to not humiliate their son in this way. I mean, who wouldn’t do that? What parent wouldn’t call up the school and do everything in their power to stop the pain and suffering of their child?

Certainly all those Pac-Man parents would.

How I wished for one of those that evening.

But no, my parents weren’t Pac-Man players. Jo didn’t pick up the phone. What she did was say: “That’s just lovely, Poppet, what fun that will be!” Poppet, Flugelhorn, Sausage—all loving pet names from Mom. I didn’t eat a thing and barely slept the night.

The next morning, cycling the three miles to school, I pedaled extra hard, thinking that if I was exhausted from the ride I might trick my mind into being too tired to stammer. Once at school, I watched all the students walk up the hill and file in as usual. I took my place in the choir next to my friends. The chaplain began the service, and I waited for the inevitable.

And then the inevitable turned out not to be. The faces of the many sparked something in my brain, my synapses fired as they should, and my disfluency vanished. I felt the energy of the eyes staring at me, their attention was my unlocking, and I was cured.

How could Graeme and Jo have predicted all this? How could they have maneuvered me into a scenario where a stammerer’s greatest fear became his greatest unlock?

Well, they couldn’t. And they knew they couldn’t. Instead, though they couldn’t possibly have predicted it that June morning, they had proceeded nonetheless with their love-bubble space-making approach to parenting. They were smart enough to know the power of space and love, but also know that, inside this space, they knew virtually nothing.

It all sounds so predictable, even clichéd, forty years on, but can you imagine what Graeme and Jo must have been thinking that morning? Every parental instinct must have been pulling them toward that phone and yet they knew that, though calling the headmaster would serve them, it would not serve me. They didn’t know what would happen that morning, but they did know that reaching in to fix it for me would limit the space in my world, and that a world with less space was, for me, a lesser world.

Looking back, I am astounded at their resolve. I get panicked to think of what would have happened if they had given in to the temptation to make the call. I wouldn’t have had to speak in chapel. And so I wouldn’t have stood up there and seen all those faces. I wouldn’t have felt what I felt. I wouldn’t have learned what I learned. And today I might not be doing what I am doing.

Such was the strength of their love for me. They put their own fears aside, and allowed me all the space I needed to act, to choose, to learn, and to strengthen my agency in the world. I was the beneficiary of two parents who had long ago released the joystick and realized that choice—my choice—is the fuel for learning.

In his poem “On Children,” Kahlil Gibran writes this:

Your children are not your children.

They are sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.

They come through you but not from you,

And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.

The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.

Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;

For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He also loves the bow that is stable.1

My children are not my children. Yours are not yours. We are parents, and so we are the bow, drawing our children close to us, only to then let them fly far on their own. Our role is not to direct the arrow in flight, nor to catch it when it falls, but is merely to be stable, to draw back our bowstring, and let the arrow fly into the space ahead.

Graeme and Jo allowed me this space. If you want to truly see your children, you can do the same for your kids. You can become the most intelligent, the most resolved, the most loving space-maker.

I hope that you stop looking at yourself—your parental fears and ambitions—and start seeing your kids. My son is not my daughter and never will be. His humor is dry, hers joyous. He shies away from the limelight, whereas she comes alive in its glare. Self-deprecation is his charm, while hers is exuberance. Both are loyal to a fault, both are each other’s first call in times of stress, but only one of them loves to travel, while the other detests it.

Faced with this weird combination of loves and loathes, my only job as a parent is to see each for who they are, and to help them channel their loves intelligently, morally, and, in the end, productively.

Our kids, they show us who they are every day, with their thousands upon thousands of reactions, interactions, choices, and outcomes. And yet, apparently, many of us parents do not see them. We cover them in shiny tinfoil to protect them from the world, and then, when we look at them all wrapped up in foil, all we see is ourselves reflected back.

They don’t need the tinfoil. They don’t need the protection.

They need to be seen.

As do we all.