When my son was a toddler, he liked to run in our driveway until he fell. He would then turn to me to see if he was hurt. If my face betrayed worry or if I audibly gasped, he would wail. If I maintained equanimity, he would brush himself off and get back to running. Learning that I could so powerfully influence his mental state was a revelation.
One night while doing homework, my son told me about a classmate who had been unkind to him. My first instinct was to rush to fix it-email the parents, call the school, demand action. But instead of reacting, I paused. "That sounds hard. What did you do?" This crystallized for me an important truth: Sometimes, the best thing a parent can do is nothing at all.
Parents of any age can conjure up the feeling they had when they first held their child and thought, Oh. Here you are, this person whom I'm in charge of. Parenting is joyous and challenging and sometimes stressful.
A recent advisory from the surgeon general argues that parenting is hazardous to people's mental health, citing the complexities of social media and worries about children's safety.
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