My wife walked up to me, a lovely smile on her face. She had just seen our kid do something that he had thought nothing of but warmed his mother’s heart.
“I caught a glimpse of him showering when I put a fresh towel in the bathroom,” she said. “He does everything you tell him, slowly and thoughtfully. He’s very serious about it.”
There is a delight watching our young children taking on the responsibilities of their own upkeep. Much of this is picked up along the way, as we unknowingly model behaviour for them and they muddle through figuring out schedules, how to wash their hands, how to put away their clothes, how to behave.
But we have to teach them a lot of it, for obvious reasons.
I never thought about any of this until I had to start teaching my kid to start taking care of himself. Showers were one thing, but getting his bag together, getting his homework done, reading the book he was supposed to be reading, doing the odd chore starting adding to the list of things my kid would have to start worrying about as his age flipped from single to double-digits.
There’s no manual for this. Well, there are endless books that speak with authority, but there’s no manual for my kid. I took the situation like the good professional that I am: I started instilling procedures and processes, complete with controls1, hoping it would be a starting point from which he could figure out his own way.
My kid, my sweet, earnest little boy, took a lot of this to heart and took it very seriously. Growing up, bath time became a time for us to socialize and talk, be goofy and even roughhouse a bit. He’d say there was something at the bottom of the tub and I would look closely, and he would push my head down with all his might for a second, and retreat, giggling, to the other side of the bath.
You know what kind of dad I was? I would warm his towel in the dryer before I would wrap him in it after his bath. I would carefully scrub him to make sure he was clean. I took the opportunity to teach him consent by asking if I could clean him his back, his bottom, and by making him clean his private parts himself.
Bath time became class time.2
So naturally, when it came time for him to start dealing with this stuff himself, I laid out a procedure for cleanliness. Shampoo first, with conditioner. Arms first, then torso, making sure to concentrate on underarms, then private parts, then legs and feet, finishing with his face. Rinsing as you went along.
For some reason, this became entrenched in his mind as How To Get Clean, which was not my intention at all. The intention was to set him to do this independently, but the kid took it as gospel. I should’ve known when, in the early days of him cleaning himself, he’d yell for us to come in and check if he had shampooed his hair correctly.
“Is my hair shampooed enough?” he’d ask, leaning out of this shower with a pile of suds on his head.
“You’re fine buddy,” we’d say, out of breath we ran towards the sound of our child yelling for help.
“I’ll do it one more time, just to be sure,” he’d answer, disappearing behind the shower door. So there he goes now, carefully foaming up each part of his body before rinsing it, more concerned about procedure than result.
As long as it is possible, and as long as you can find someone to help you with the biology, anyone can have a kid. This is a wonderful and good thing, don’t get me wrong. People who want children should be able to have them.
But people are having less of them. And no wonder. Between a housing crisis, a debt crisis, stagnating wages for young people, underemployment, climate change, a cultural shift to online life resulting in loneliness, having a kid is incredibly difficult these days.
No one has a chance. The risk of financial difficulties, the sheer work of raising a kid in a world shockingly full of stimuli, the generalized doom and gloom that makes for information really doesn’t speak well for the biological imperative.
Fair enough. I saw the same landscape and decided, with my partner, that we should make a go of it. My decision isn’t noble and had it gone the other way, it wouldn’t have been ignoble.
But there will be consequences. Being unable to replace ourselves will have strange results, as rich, geriatric citizens have trouble getting everything, from their taxes done to their hair cut, done.
Sure, immigration and all that. That is definitely a solution and is the only one saving us right now. But it’s a partial solution.
Do we want our society to have a future? To see where we go with this experiment of ours? I’ll tell you what we shouldn’t be doing. We shouldn’t be defunding programs that make the lives of parents easier. This includes the big ones - education, for goodness’s sake, EDUCATION - and the subtler ones, like city planning, so we have safe neighbourhoods to raise kids, sometimes with other families.
We’re missing the forest for the trees. Our low taxes aren’t free. We’re impoverishing our futures, we’re not investing in our society. We’re failing our place in the world.
Kids are great. They hold our accomplishments and make them endure. They make it so our efforts and a large part of ourselves, were not in vain.
That’s what I think about when I see my kid figuring it out for himself. I see me getting it, far too late in life.
If you were an accountant, this sentence would land very nicely.
Ugh, I just wrote that.