Our Parents Are Our Future

Meg Harkins recommends this delightful essay in the New Yorker by Cora Frazier reminding us that there are helicopter children hovering nearby at times. Sometimes they need to just let go!

“People often ask me: How can we make sure our loved ones are prepared for life’s joys and challenges? And my answer is always the same: You, the child, have to step back.

You have to let go. You have to allow your parent to make mistakes—that’s the only way he or she will learn. You have to let your parent get her heart broken by a man in her assisted-living facility who she thinks is Warren Beatty. You have to let your parent slip and fall on the playground when he is wandering there, lost, after setting out on an errand he can’t recall. You have to let your parent give the wrong answer, because otherwise how will he or she ever really learn who Ariana Grande is?

You don’t want to smother your parent. She may be calling you several times a day, but, trust me, if you don’t pick up she’ll figure it out. He’ll remember the nine-digit numerical passcode to the Wi-Fi network your brother installed. Or find a way to stop the home stairlift from going up and down the stairs, over and over, while he is sitting in it. She is perfectly capable of turning off an accidentally triggered burglar alarm herself, or with the help of the police, when they arrive.

Many people think hovering and love are one and the same. That’s just not true. There’s a difference between inserting oneself and offering encouragement. There’s a difference between setting up a LinkedIn account for your parent and suggesting, “You should get on LinkedIn, Dad. No, not Linked_On_. Did you seriously think it was called LinkedOn? Ha ha ha, wait one sec—I have to text that to Emily.”

Many of us have unrealistic—or downright impossible—standards. What are you going to do, spend every waking hour with your parent? Acquiesce to his request to see you in some form twice a year? Reply to her e-mails when she sends articles that are related to your profession or long-held interests? You have to be practical about what you can do for a loved one.

You can’t micromanage your parent. You have to sit back and let her file two tax returns for the same year because she forgot she already filed one back in March. You can’t intervene every time your parent plants the entire bag of expensive chia seeds you gave her in her flower garden. You can’t constantly stand over your parent’s shoulder, preventing her from sending poop emojis to acquaintances with the message “Hi from a smiling gingerbread guy!” If you rush to your parent’s side every time he breaks his hip, how will he learn that there are consequences to breaking a hip?

And both of you will see benefits. Be honest—it wouldn’t be so bad if the hour you spend every two weeks speaking to a parent could be redirected toward a more fulfilling hobby, like rewatching “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” episodes while scrolling through a work spreadsheet while scrolling through videos that acquaintances took of themselves in cabs.

Some of my readers have written in to say that, if they adopted this approach, they would feel like “bad children.” Let’s ease up on the shaming language! The only truly “bad child” is one who shelters a parent from important truths—for example, that the parent has a hormone patch on her face, or that the mailman’s name is nothing like Roger.

I know children who have devoted years of their lives to managing every single detail of their parents’ care. And what happened to those parents? They died.

When I’m feeling down, I like to stop by the shuffleboard court at my local park. I watch the people playing there, making slow, deliberate movements with the use of walkers or canes, staring down at the board for minutes on end, seemingly without comprehension, saying loudly to one another, “What?! What?!” I look at them and think, The whole world is at their wrinkled fingertips! Then the sun appears through the clouds, the players aren’t sure whose turn it is, and I smile sadly, but proudly, knowing that, one day, they won’t need us anymore. They won’t need us to explain the concept of “polyamory,” or to read faraway wall menus to them. A man on the shuffleboard court high-fives another—or maybe he is leaning on him, for support—and I think, We millennials may have messed up. But, God willing, they won’t. And at the end of my life, if there’s some sort of final judgment, I will look back and say, “Hey, if nothing else, I raised two adults who grew all the way into feeble-bodied octogenarians.” ♦