“Dad the TV doesn’t work!”
“Did it just turn off? Did you check the plug?”
“No, it’s still on. There’s just a big black circle in the middle of the screen.”
I think every parent has a moment where they feel completely inadequate because the kid has just done something so pointlessly destructive you feel that any halfway competent adult could’ve prevented it. This moment was one of those times for me.
I went upstairs to check the alleged malfunctioning TV and there was, in fact, a big black circle about 3 inches across right in the middle of the screen, like a black hole halfway through devouring Clifford and pals. This was not the way a television looks because of an electrical malfunction; this is the way a TV looks because it has been hit by something.
For Christmas that year, Sloan had received a kit for making blanket forts. It’s a great toy: a mix of 18” plastic sticks and balls full of holes that the sticks fit into, like gigantic Tinker Toys. Combine them the right way and you can make the framework for the kind of epic blanket forts that the kids go crazy for. Each of the joints is a little smaller than a baseball, or, coincidentally, about the size of the big black spot sitting at the center of my television.
Sloan had taken a single stick and ball from the fort building kit and cobbled them into something resembling a medieval mace. She hadn’t even bothered to set it down before calling me upstairs, and was fidgeting with her makeshift TV destroyer as she claimed complete ignorance of how the damage had occurred.
The perfect toy for destroying electronics and/or reenacting the Battle of Hastings.
“So you have NO IDEA what happened to this TV?”
“No. None. It just stopped working.”
I honestly couldn’t decide whether to be angry or impressed with the sheer audacity. She must’ve known that I knew what had happened. This had all the gall of somebody visiting a police station to report their spouse missing while still soaked in blood and clutching a shovel.
“Sloan, I think you took that mace you’re holding and hit the TV with it.”
“OKAY BUT IT WAS AN ACCIDENT!!!”
Honestly, I wasn’t really all that upset about the broken TV. It was a Walmart clearance set that was already crumby when I’d bought it a decade before and got hot enough to toast a marshmallow if you left it on for more than an hour. I wasn’t gonna mourn its loss.
Even the lie didn’t bother me all that much. We expect a lot of honesty from kids that we don’t from other adults. I might have panicked and claimed ignorance, too. Most people don’t learn crucial life skills like “Hide the mace!” from a childhood marked by excessive honesty.
What really bothered me was the fact that the whole event made me feel completely incompetent.
Occasionally videos of stuff like this happening go viral. Some kids are running around and they knock over a TV or break a window, and the commenters all immediately shout the same conclusion: “BAD PARENTING!”
I try not to respond when I see videos like that, mainly because nothing riles up the angry internet hate machine quite like videos of unsupervised kids behaving badly and I don’t want a thousand angry replies, but also because you can’t do parenting forensics from 30 seconds of nanny-cam video. I yearn to get into one of those comments sections and scream “Maybe mom had to go take a dump!! Does that make her a bad parent? Did she not have YOUR PERMISSION to take a dump?!”
There’s this spreading narrative that responsible parenting means constant, round the clock vigilance and I don’t know how anyone doesn’t immediately see the logical flaw in that. Any accident, injury, or chaos, no matter how minor, must be the result of lax parenting to satisfy the narrative.
There must always be blame; nothing just happens.
A favorite chestnut of back-seat caregivers is “If mom would just put down her phone, then [destructive childhood behavior #47381] wouldn’t have happened!” Does she also need to put down her toothbrush? That’s 9 minutes per day of split attention. Does she need to put down her lunch? Should she put down the soap and comb? Does she need to put down the toilet paper and just hold it all day to appease you, internet?! At what point is a parent allowed 4 minutes to meet their own basic needs without gaining your ire?!
Sorry: I got a little hot there. That paragraph had been fermenting for a while.
The overall point I’m clumsily stumbling towards is that tireless supervision is probably impossible (especially in an era of increasing at-home work) and I think parents are carrying a lot of guilt over it.
Broken TV? Guilt, even if you were busy doing something responsible at the time (for example, doing the dishes, like I was when Sloan destroyed the set). Child hurt themself? Guilt, even if your attention was only split because you were remotely working to try and keep a roof over the kid’s head. God forbid they break something while you were taking a moment to relax. Guilt for days even if you fully understand that time to rest is critical to your health and sanity.
I guess my big takeaway is that there’s no real point to feeling guilt over all the chaos kids create because their chaos is unavoidable to a degree we’re uncomfortable admitting. I don’t know that it’s helpful to you or them to carry every chipped tooth and broken knick-knack as a badge of shame.
…What I do know is helpful, however, is getting one of those TV mounting kits and putting it out of reach of any improvised battle clubs. Possibly behind a sheet of inch-thick lucite; you know kids.
Feel free to buy me a cup of coffee at paypal.me/inessentialreading if you enjoyed the column.
Inessential Reading 