What NOT to say to the parents of the crying kid at the grocery store.

If you must say something, it would be helpful if it's not this.

We’ve all been there. If you’re a parent and your kids are older maybe it’s been a while but think back with me. Your child is lying on the ground throwing a fit right in the middle of the bakery section of your local grocer. . You try not to look around so you don’t have to receive in fullness the piercing judgmental glares from the other grocery patrons. At least that’s what we all assume you’ll receive if we look into the eyes of the other customers. You’re in the middle of a full on terrorist negotiation situation. You have only two bad options:

 Option A:  You can appease the child by giving them what they want to keep them quiet and in doing so teach them that THIS is how to succeed in life: Yell and scream and you get what you want.

or

Option B:  You can hold firm and teach them that whining is in fact not how we get to bring donuts home to mom, but in doing so you risk minutes (occasionally hours) of embarrassing childhood explosions that threaten to blow up the entire grocery mission. 

We've all been there. Sometimes skillful parental negotiation can successfully diffuse the situation to form a win-win solution, but this is only sometimes. Just go with me for a second. I’m setting the stage for a moment that can be much more damaging long term to the parental psyche. 

(Side note: I’ve learned that most of the time, people aren’t actually judging you like you’d think in this situation. They're typically either feeling bad and wishing they could do something to help, or not thinking about you at all. Most often people are much more concerned with their own to-do list than whatever is going on around them.) 

It’s at this moment that some apparently well meaning onlooker steps in to share a tid bit of “encouragement.” 

Here are my top two discouraging remarks I’ve received in recent years:

“Cherish these moments because this is as good as it gets.”

Well crap. If this is as good as it gets, I don’t want to keep going. I think what you’re trying to say is that when you look back at your kids in their younger years, you wish you were able to capture how special these moments were. They go by fast when you’re looking backward. I get it, but that sure doesn't make me feel any better when it takes every ounce of energy I have to do this well right now. 

“If you think this is hard, wait until she’s a teenager.”

Thanks pal. We cry a lot right now. We’re aware that this next season of life will have completely new problems, but isn’t it nice that your teenager can wipe their own butt and that you get to have a few moments to yourself every now and then? Of course it’s a different level of hard to control your teenager as it is my toddler but can’t we agree that probably every season of parenting is hard in its own way? 

We remember things better than they were and future looks hard

There’s a phenomenon in the human brain called rosy retrospection. When we look at our own past experiences, we tend to underestimate how difficult the challenges we’ve overcome felt at the time. Likewise we tend to overestimate the challenges that lay ahead of us. I came across a NY Times article recently explaining why we tend to romanticize the past. This phenomenon is almost universally true. Think for a moment back to your school-aged years and consider the social pressures, homework load, maybe preparations that were required for a sports game or other extracurricular activity. These things seemed entirely overwhelming at the time. But as I look back on them, it’s easy for me to discount the difficulty of that season of life because now I have “real” challenges. It’s tempting to look at our young people going through those challenges in real time and condescendingly reassure them that everything is going to be okay without validating the real challenges that they’re facing at the moment. Of course there’s a place for older adults to reassure the students in our lives that things do tend to work out, that the challenges they're facing now will be building blocks for greater joy, accomplishment, and larger challenges later in life but we need to do this while validating the current comment. These school aged issues are the biggest problems this school-aged person has ever faced.

The same is true for young parents. 

There’s a tendency for experienced parents, and I’m catching myself doing this often, to talk to parents of younger children with more than a bit of condescension. This is not what they need. The challenges of the younger years are real. Postpartum depression and sleep deprivation that can last for years, multiplied by however many kids you have can take a real toll on a human spirit. Toddlers are unreasonable. You literally can’t reason with them: they haven’t yet developed that skill. That can and arguably should drive you nuts. It might look cute when this isn’t your current reality, but when it’s your whole life, it’s a lot.

But this is just a season. 

Kids grow, they learn to sleep, they develop the ability to reason, and we encounter new seasons with a set of new joys, heartaches, and challenges that we’ve never faced before. Our troublesome mountains in the past look like mere speed bumps in the rearview mirror and the obstacles ahead appear to be the real insurmountable summits of life. We forget how those speed bumps looked when in the windshield. 

Marissa and I have been developing a goal of journaling to catalog the depth of the heartache of this current season. Right now our kids are 1, 3, 5, and 8. We’ve been doing this long enough to begin to see the other side but have kids young enough really feel what’s hard about these younger years. We have a goal of actually seeing the young parents around us, even when our kids are older. Even when they’re (hopefully) out of the house. We want to remember that just because things tend to work out and though these moments tend to feel long while you’re in them, they look short in retrospect and that it really helps to feel validated by someone who’s been there.