Shift in the Parental Paradigm…

There are a few slides at the pool where we go.

At the beginning of the summer, I asked Tonka to go down the medium sized one at least once before the end of July.

Paco has been going down these slides since before he was 3, so I know someone of her age can handle it.

She said she would.

Somehow, July came and went and I never called her on it.

Until last week.

It’s not so much that I want her to go down the slide per se, it’s that I want her to learn the lesson that we need to stand up to our fears and confront them. Obviously, if safety is an issue, your fear is right, but you have to have the judgment that a slide at a public pool with hundreds of kids going down it each day without incident is indeed safe.

I know I’m more risk-tolerant than many, but I also know that total risk-aversion is something that I want my daughter to avoid.

So, at first, I pushed…pretty hard. I threatened. I punished.

Not because she wouldn’t go down the slide, but because she had broken her promise to me.

She was in tears.

I was angry and upset.

Two days later, we were back at the pool.

I tried a different approach.

Admittedly, I should have tried it before, but hey, I’m doing this for the first time, so cut me some slack.

Told her it was ok to be afraid. Offered assistance in a number of ways, as did Paco.

Failure.

Now, I wasn’t angry, I was saddened.

Call me melodramatic, but I envisioned a teenager, or college student, or a middle aged woman who was paralyzed by fear and unable to overcome it to take that next step of growth and worried that that woman was my daughter…and it was a result of my failure to help her understand why she needed to do this.

We were both upset by the situation (she didn’t go down the slide) and she was acting out a bit in the car ride home.

It was at that moment that I knew the paradigm for her had shifted.

I couldn’t just tell her what to do and have her listen to me simply because I am her father. That era, for her, at least, had passed.

Call it fate, but later that night, while giving Gianni a bath, I was reading Harold Kushner’s book When All You Ever Wanted Isn’t Enough and the

chapter talked about the difference between “power” and “love.”

I won’t go into all of it, but suffice it to say, it gave me some ideas.

And it also helped me recognize that this was a pivotal moment for her as well as for me.

We needed to focus on the nature of our relationship.

So, I took her to the couch and we hugged each other. We chatted about what happened and we tried to reach an understanding.

I don’t know if we achieved the specific objective, but I do think she got the meta-message…that I love her.

I suppose that is the most important thing here and, if she knows that, perhaps it will make it easier to take those leaps of faith that childhood require.

 

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