Maybe your kid is a little weird. Maybe they do stuff that you don’t get. Maybe they do stuff that makes other people, other kids, look at them strangely. The kind of stuff that would have gotten you bullied when you were at school, that you remember judging other kids for.
This worries you. That’s reasonable. We want our kids to be safe. We want them to be accepted.
But you know what else we have to want for them? We have to want them to be themselves. We want them to be brave enough to be themselves.
We talked recently about Michael Chabon and his son Abe (it’s also a story we tell in the June 17 entry in The Daily Dad book). His son became obsessed with fashion. It became his thing, in a way that stood out quite a bit in the town they lived in. As parents, they supported this, but it also concerned them. “I couldn’t fathom the impulse driving my kid to expose himself, every day, to mockery and verbal abuse at school,” Chabon writes. That’s why we worry, that’s why we want to tell them to tone it down, to be “normal.”
But this isn’t what Chabon did. “I admired him for not surrendering,” Chabon writes. Isn’t that a nice way to think about it? To consider how much bravery it takes for them to pursue their interests and to be themselves? Isn’t that what we should encourage, what will serve them well in life? And then Chabon started pulling strings to take his sons to fashion shows (getting the double benefit of writing some articles about it) and helping him ‘find his people’ as we talked about in The Daily Dad book.
THAT, as we’ve said, is our role. Our job isn’t to help our kids fit in. It’s not to crush their earnest enthusiasm with our fears and cynicism. It is to encourage and cheer, to get behind, to admire and respect. It’s to help them become who they are.
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