Parenting ad cautelam
Ex abundante adcautelam,” patiently explained the lawyer to me. My ignorance of fancy Latin phrases reminded me once again how much I had missed as a result of passing up on the chance of becoming a lawyer. I really should have taken up law. Everyone I knew thought that I had the aptitude for it. My high school buddy and I had even already narrowed down the possible names of the law fraternity that we would have founded: It was either going to be the scholarly Kappa Pi Pi (Sinipon!) or the more menacing Beta(kbo)! Alas, I was in a hurry for my then girlfriend, now my dear wife, to legitimately bear me my children (or at least for us to have the license to start with the, ahem, effort). I was therefore not crazy about spending an additional four years in law school. And so I chose to take up instead what others call the “dismal science” — Economics. The funny thing is that we didn’t marry until I was almost 30 and then we had to wait another five to six years before our first child was born. Perhaps this is why I ended up with a fathering style which can ironically be called as parenting ad cautelam.
Ad cautelam, my dear compañeros and compañeras, means “with caution” or “for safety’s sake.” It’s normally used in pleadings by lawyers for documents they claim are not needed, but which they submit anyway, just to be on the safe side and without waiving their original position that they’re not necessary. In other words, it’s a legal maneuver that lawyers employ when they want to be segurista. And if parenting was a court of law, I would probably be cited for contempt by the judge for always wanting to treat my kids ad cautelam. I admit that I am guilty as charged. I do have the tendency to be an over-protective parent. One of my sisters-in-law joked that my favorite word must be delikado (dangerous). On the other hand, the defense attorney in me would also like to object and say that I haven’t really been that bad. On many occasions, I’ve managed to restrain myself and just let my kids be. But it always takes a lot of effort for me to back off. It’s curious why I am this way when my parents gave me generous amounts of freedom and autonomy when I was growing up. They just modeled the right standards and behaviors and then basically left it to me to see things through by myself. Yes, I did get into my share of scrapes, but I managed to learn to pick myself up most of the time and make do with the imperfect world that I had to live in. And I’m pretty proud of that, too. Why do I then seem to want a “sanitized” childhood for my kids? A perfect world, perhaps, where there are no wants, disappointments, scrapes, and even germs.
I suppose it’s not just me. Modern society has really done a good job of scaring the hell out of all of us. The world is a jungle. It’s no longer safe. It’s no longer kind. And so we over-compensate and end up being overly protective parents. As in one of those vitamin C commercials, we are not satisfied unless we put our children inside the body armor of a medieval knight so that nothing can hurt them. And this over-protectiveness extends to their intellectual and emotional well-being as well. Mass media has also brainwashed us into thinking that our children should and can be perfect. Something must be wrong with us as parents if our kids are not beautiful, tall, smart, and popular. The resulting feelings of guilt and inadequacy then drive us to further micromanage their lives.
Yet, ironically, by over-protecting and over-monitoring our children, we may end up stunting their growth and making them more fragile and stress-prone instead. Psychology Today editor-at-large Hara Estroff Marano bluntly asserts that we’re turning our children into “wimps.” Instead of learning how to manage things by themselves, our children are increasingly becoming trapped in a perpetual state of dependency. This, in turn, increases the risk of children developing anxiety disorders as they are deprived of “opportunities to master their innate shyness and become more comfortable in the world.” In many ways, over-protecting our kids is harmful to us parents, too. Aside from getting exhausted from all the man-to-man guarding, it really makes parenting less enjoyable than it can and should be.
Ultimately, experts say that the goal of parenting ought to be to produce independent human beings. Or as the Waldorf school that my children go to puts it, “to produce independent and free thinking individuals who can, in and of themselves, impart meaning to their lives.” If we are to achieve this goal, they claim, sooner or later we need to let go and allow our children to grow up by themselves. It does not mean that we abandon them completely. We just need to give them some space and also forego the notion of giving them “perfect” lives. Only they have the chance of giving themselves that. Well, I’m not sure if the experts are right or wrong about this. Children, in any case, also seem to have the inborn ability to eventually “right” themselves regardless of how we parent them anyway. Nevertheless, I shall try to lessen the way I overly control my children’s lives from time to time, just to be on the safe side, or ad cautelam!
* * *
Please e-mail your reactions to kindergartendad@yahoo.com.
