Project: Nonfiction Parenting Book

Introduction

It’s four o’clock in the morning. I’m wide awake, staring out at the darkness, and my heart is racing. The image that woke me? My son, Henry, falling off a cliff.

This isn’t as far-fetched as it might seem. Henry is a climber, and any mother who imagines her son climbing is going to imagine him falling as well. But this dream didn’t just have to do with mountains; Henry was getting ready to graduate from high school and would soon be leaving home for the first time. It had suddenly occurred to me that there were a lot of symbolic mountains in the world for him to fall off of.

We know that one of a parent’s most important jobs is to prepare children to leave the nest, and yet a lot of parents don’t actually address it deliberately, head-on, or with concrete plans. In fact, I couldn’t find anybooks that told me adequately how to prepare Henry and his younger brother, George, for going out on their own! This was in stark contrast to the dozens of books that over the years had told me how to toilet-train them, prepare them for the first day of school, and handle adolescent outbursts. The literature was strangely silent on the topic of leaving home.

Maybe there’s a reason for that. Maybe a lot of parents are in denial about their children leaving. Maybe parents dread losing control. Maybe they don’t trust their children to do the right thing, or maybe they doubt their children’s ability to make a life for themselves once they’re out on their own.

Whatever the reason, or reasons, I knew one thing for sure: I wasn’t the only one who was lying wide awake and worrying in bed at four in the morning.

***

Henry is 17 years old and, it has to be said, fairly clueless about life. He is smart, don’t get me wrong—smart bordering on brilliant. He’s insanely bright about the things that he’s interested in.

But at time there seems to be a large gulf between his brains and his common sense. Or lack thereof.

Here’s an example. Last summer he went to a leadership camp in Washington D.C., and he took a class on national security at American University, and he excelled at each, earning a perfect 4.0 and college credit for the class. While he was there, I flew out to see him, and we visited both American and Georgetown. 

We both fell in love with Georgetown. Now, the truth is that Georgetown’s a reach for anyone, probably for most people—its acceptance rate is around 13%. But that fact actually provided great motivation for Henry because Georgetown has an amazing school for foreign affairs, and that’s what he planned to study.

We went back home, and he started filling out his application. He had to stop because he was due at work, so off he went in the car, and soon thereafter I got a phone call. Henry was panicking. “Mom, you have to come here immediately!”

I knew that Henry tends to overreact, so I told him to calm down and explain what was going on. He was at the self-serve gas pump. “This doesn’t work,” he told me. “The pump doesn’t work and I’ve already put my card in! You need to come here! It’s not working!”

My brilliant son, who was applying to an extraordinarily competitive college, was in a panic because he couldn’t figure out how to make a gas pump work. It didn’t work the way he wanted it to work, the way he thought it should, and so he gave up, freaked out, and called me.

I talked him through it, of course— “Squeeze the handle slowly,” I said, “if it clicks you’re going too fast”—but all I could think was, this is why you’re calling me? What’s going to happen when a real problem comes up?

Yet another reason to be awake at four o’clock in the morning.

It’s not just feeling impatience about handling situations like pumping gas, though. It’s everything. Somehow, we seem to think that kids learn things by osmosis, by watching how we handle situations, by just using their common sense. We don’t realize that much of this has to be taught.

Time management is an example of something we have to teach. The gas pump incident prompted more middle-of-the-night questions for me. Will Henry be able to manage his time? Will he keep up with his college classes, and the commitments he makes? Will he be able to plan?

To be honest, I don’t personally understand Henry’s issues with time management and planning—I’m absolutely religious about keeping my calendar. Everything goes in it. If I ever lost my phone I wouldn’t know what I had to do next. But Henry never used the calendar function on his phone, and the planners that the school sent home with him stayed in his backpack. It was only recently that his father and I mandated he use something to keep track of his responsibilities and commitments. We ended up buying him a large-size day planner and we’ve had to make sure he writes everything down in it. 

I get it that everyone’s different, but there are some skills everybody needs to have. It will be interesting to see what happens next year when Henry’s at college. We’re not going to be there to make him keep a written calendar, so he’s going to have to figure it out on his own. Hopefully he’ll do so without some disaster forcing his hand. 

But here’s the lesson for kids getting ready to leave home: if you miss something now, the consequence isn’t necessarily that dire, because you’ve got backup—your parents. But if you miss a class or a test in college, you don’t get a chance to do it over again. Nobody’s going to be as forgiving as we are.

And keeping a calendar is just a small part of it. There are so many things that seem completely obvious to adults that simply aren’t a part of a kid’s way of thinking. Kids are going to need to make a fast transition from having their parents to fall back on, to being responsible for themselves. As parents, we need to be willing to help our kids prepare. 

Part of that preparation is realizing how quickly situations can get serious. As adults, we imagine that kids will know how to behave in an emergency, but they don’t. A few years ago, a high school student in our community died of an overdose. Her friends didn’t know what to do, so they left her in a driveway—and that was where she died. That was another time that I popped out of bed, shaking, at four in the morning, imagining my kid in that situation. 

The next day, I took the direct approach and asked Henry what he would do if one of his friends overdosed.

“Aren’t you supposed to drop them off at the front door of the hospital so you can get them help?” he asked.

I looked at him in horror and quickly realized that I was going to need to be very specific here. “If this happens, here’s what you do,” I said. “Even if you think you’re going to get in trouble, you dial 911. You deal with the rest of it later.” And it wasn’t just about dealing with the emergency of an overdose. I was finally getting it, that everything had to be spelled out to him. “If you’ve been drinking, you call me,” I told my son. “If you can’t get me, you call Uber. The questions can come later. You won’t be in trouble. What will get you in trouble is not doing those things. The consequences will be far worse if you don’t.”

I imagine some parents think that if they talk to their kids about what to do in the case of an overdose, or of some equally terrible event, then they’re tacitly giving the kids permission to do drugs, to be around overdoses. But the truth is that your child is going to do make mistakes, and some kids are going to do those things anyway. Parents are kidding themselves if they think that their child isn’t ever going to have a drink or go to a party. Hopefully they’re not going to be out doing any drugs, much less heroin or ecstasy or anything else that’s dangerous, but it’s quite likely that they’re going to find themselves in a situation in which someone is. What do they do? I don’t like to think about Henry being anywhere near someone who is overdosing, but I would rather have him know what to do than not. Having a plan in place that you reiterate more than once—dial 911 if someone is in trouble, call Uber if you’ve been drinking—doesn’t mean that a disaster will happen, but it does mean that your child will be prepared for it if it should. It’s important to get them thinking about what could happen in advance so that they’re not just reacting to what is going on around them.

These are situations that would be frightening for anyone, and no one is at their best in a frightening situation. But by talking about situations like these ahead of time, your child gets a chance to consider what their decision might be. If a situation does arise, then, hopefully, their instincts will kick in and they’ll think, “Okay, I remember, we talked about this.” 

My nephew has a baseball scholarship at Wisconsin Lutheran College in Milwaukee, and midway through his freshman year, his roommate—also on a baseball scholarship—suddenly moved out of the dorm. At first we had no idea why. It turned out that the roommate and his friend were driving around one night and decided it would be fun to catch some air coming up over a big hill. They did—and collided with another car, injuring an entire family. No one died, thankfully, but there were serious consequences. The roommate lost his scholarship, had to leave school, and even went to jail for a time. This kid was 18 years old, and suddenly the rest of his life was affected by a split-second decision he’d made to do something he perceived as all fun and games. Now, instead of playing baseball in college, he was suddenly in jail. In just a moment he’d gotten himself a mark on his life that will last forever. Knowing that small decisions can have a big effect is a lesson we can all use, but it’s especially true for kids, who pretty much think that they’re invulnerable. 

The point here is that parenting isn’t always about allowing your kids to make mistakes on their own and learn from them. We have some responsibility to prepare our children for possible consequences of their actions as much as we reasonably can. What’s obvious to us is very definitely not obvious to them! And preparing them (and ourselves) for independence isn’t obvious, either.

Be Yourself 

One of the ways you can prepare your kids is by being yourself and letting them see that. When your kids experience difficulties, let them see that nothing is easy or automatic for you, either. Let them see you stress out over a problem. If they think that you’re perfect, then they’ll feel they can never live up to those standards. Showing them that life can throw you curveballs and letting them see how you confront those problems will help them understand that everyone deals with difficulties, every day.

I’ve certainly had more than one opportunity to show my boys that navigating life situations isn’t always easy. My life became a financial nightmare after my divorce. I hadn’t asked for anything monetary when we separated. We both just walked away and we had no nest egg to fall back on. I assumed that I’d be able to make things work. And then the stress of my situation distracted me so much that I couldn’t work, couldn’t produce results—I’m a Realtor, and my income went from about $180,000 a year to $40,000 in one fell swoop. Suddenly we had no money. We had to sell our house, and that was a tremendous blow, because we were friends with everyone on the block, and they’d been a tremendous emotional support for me and the boys. Thankfully, we eventually found ourselves a nice little place. My parents bought it, and I rented it from them. But that didn’t solve everything.

I sold half of my personal possessions to try to make ends meet. I sold my bicycle, my camera. I just kept looking for things I could sell to get it all together, to make it through. I borrowed money from my parents. I remember thinking, Well, I guess I could always be a stripper—oh, wait, I can’t, my boobs aren’t big enough! When you’re trying to support two children, you don’t even know what you’re doing sometimes. You grasp at straws, you imagine the unimaginable. It was an insane time. I would never want to go back to that moment. For about two years it was a struggle, and that struggle took me to some pretty dark places.

At some point, I just made a command decision that I was done. That was it. I just couldn’t be there in that space anymore. I couldn’t bear it for one minute longer. Several things happened that accelerated my decision. My dad was diagnosed with cancer, so we had to sell that house, and then one of my friends committed suicide. There were so many bad things going on. 

I saw it all as a sign that I had to make a change, so I just worked hard—incredibly hard—and then suddenly my business went crazy (in a good way). Within a year I ended up being the number-one producer in the office. Thankfully, finally, my financial troubles went out the door, taking a good deal of my stress with them. We’d never gone on a family vacation, so I made it a priority in my business plan that the kids and I would go on vacation every year. That year, I took them away on a fabulous vacation for the first time to celebrate. 

That started me thinking. What else could I do with the kids that I’d never been able to do in back when I was married? What did I want to show them while we were living together? I hated thinking that the only thing I was showing them was this weird upheaval in their lives, these stressful situations. 

I wanted to make sure that they had a better picture of how to live, so I started being much more deliberate about how to make decisions and how to communicate. 

Of course, that doesn’t mean I always get it right. There have been a lot of times when I’ve wondered exactly what it is that I’ve been teaching them, and times when I feel like I have it all wrong. But that’s a teaching tool, too. Now I remember to say I’m sorry when I get it wrong, so they can see that I make mistakes and that I own those mistakes. There isn’t just one “right” way to do everything—or, in fact, anything. We try things, and sometimes they work, and sometimes they don’t, and we learn all this as we go along.

Choices Have Consequences

Every decision carries a consequence with it. You hope that your kids will never make choices that will lead to bad outcomes, but my feeling is that in general you need to deal with things head-on, talk about them, acknowledge that they’re there.

Some things are difficult to talk about. As I said, you hope that your kids will never have to make choices that lead to bad outcomes. But the only way that they can make good choices is if you discuss those options with them, show them your take on the issue, and encourage them to think it through rather than pretend that it doesn’t exist. I think that they’re a lot less likely to be in those situations if you do talk about them. Your way of solving a problem might be different from theirs, or even mine for that matter. But giving them one way to deal with it is better than not acknowledging it at all. 

Acknowledging that there are a myriad of choices, decisions, and problems ahead, and talking about how to confront them, is what’s at the heart of this book. So, welcome to my world. We’re going to look at ways that you can help your kid—and yourself—navigate this very tricky time, this time when they’re getting ready to leave your home, and at the end of it for everyone to be all right. No; at the end of it, I want you and your child to be better than all right.

And maybe talking about what’s to come for you and your child will keep you away from those lonely four o’clock mornings!