Kids and Bubble Wrap (Preventing the Cheese Touch)

Your children cannot live in bubble wrap. 

They will suffocate and die.  It’s a fact, look it up.

When raising kids, you want to do your best to set them on a healthy course for success and growth.  You want their accomplishments to eclipse anything you have ever done in life and above all, you don’t want to screw them up.  Need an example?  Google “keeping your daughter off the pole”.  That should help!

Your shortcomings or the obstacles you faced in your life should not get in the way of properly raising your kids.  Just because you spent every day of grade school getting a wedgie, swirly, or stuffed in a locker, doesn’t mean they will suffer the same fate.  You are going to want to overcompensate for your emotional, and sometimes physical, scars and do your damndest to ensure that your children don’t experience that same fate.  Yet, at the end of the day, it’s either going to happen or it’s not.  No amount of road blocking or bubble wrap will prevent the inevitable. 

Feeling powerless yet?  Have I pissed you off yet?  Keep reading.

You put them in private schools to prevent them from getting bullied.  Bullies don’t exist in private school, so they should be “safe” right?  Whatever.  We all know that rich kids aren’t bullies and it sure is a good thing that bullies don’t exist in life outside of school!  You keep them away from little league, so they don’t know what it feels like to experience letdowns or losses in life.  Yeah, that’s healthy?  God forbid a baseball hit them or they skin a knee and they are left with a scar on their once perfect skin.  We all know that scars don’t make for great stories or serve as badges of honor.  Scars are bad!  No kid EVER brags about scars.  Nope.  Never.

Kids are meant to be loved.  By loving them, you need to expose them to some of the bad in this world.  Certainly not all at once, but it’s necessary that they consume and experience some bad stuff.  If they don’t, they won’t know how to navigate through the tough times and bumps along the way.  You owe it to them.  If you shield your children from all of your personal baggage, they may be forced to repeat the same things you did.  They will potentially have a worse experience than yours and you may have to come to grips with the fact that you, because you sucked at dealing with it when you were experiencing it, are the worst judge of what to do and how to react during these events.  That might sting a little, but you know it’s true.

Your baggage doesn’t have to become their baggage. 

In all honesty, I probably grew up too fast.  I have accepted and come to terms with this.  You know the song “Name” from The Goo Goo Dolls?  The line “You grew up way too fast, now there’s nothing to believe” resonates with me.  Having a younger brother die when I was 11 and being exposed to death and the gravity of mortality at an early age will force you to come to terms with life lessons faster than most.  I do feel that this event in my life changed me for the worse and for the good.  Obviously, I do not want my kids to experience the loss of a sibling, so that they have to come to grips with mortality prematurely like I did, but there is nothing I can do to prevent it if something terrible like that were to happen. 

You can’t keep your children in bubble wrap.

On my birthday weekend, on our way back home from lunch, we stopped by the cemetery where both of my brothers are buried.  If you recall, we lost my older brother Michael last year.  My wife and kids had not been to the gravesite since they placed the headstone for Michael’s grave.  Erin, my 7 year old, started to cry and, out of nowhere, began to pray for both of them.  I think she had a moment where she fully realized that both of daddy’s brothers were dead.  I was initially taken back by the moment and her sensitivity to my, for lack of a better word, “struggle” in life.  To put that information together and understand the gravity of the moment as an adult is one thing.  To do it at the age of 7 is quite eye opening. 

If you have ever met Erin, you would agree that she carries herself like a 12 year old.  She is very emotionally mature and intelligent for her age.  I have always said that she looks like her momma, but thinks like me.  I have never once forced her into experiences or needlessly shielded her from the world that comes with being 7.  As mature as she is, I do not want to warp her innocence or thrust her into certain life lessons too soon.  Yet, it’s going to happen.  Kids are more perceptive than you know and they process information quicker than we expect…unless it comes to chores-then maybe not so much. It would have done her no justice in life had I told her that I didn’t have any brothers growing up or dodge telling stories about the tough parts of my childhood.  Shielding for the sake of shielding will cause more damage than telling the truth.  It was a challenge for me, but my wife and I handled the questions that followed and the overall situation as best we could.  Perhaps, at another time, I will share with you what was said.  That is for another time and another blog perhaps. 

You can’t raise a wimpy kid.  You have to let them experience things.  You can’t deny them good or bad experiences because you handled them poorly when you were their age.  You cannot hold them responsible and accountable for your shortcomings in life and assume that they too will have negative results.  You have to allow your children that “at bat” and see if they are the ones who can break the cycle or see the angles you didn’t.  Your terrible experience with that issue doesn’t mean that you have to shield them from that same type of event or moment.  Instead, use your experience to catch them if they fall.  Give them the confidence that they will survive and move on from that moment and handle it better than you did. 

Save the bubble wrap.