Dumb things we say to kids

Toddlers, teenagers, and midlife

I suppose it’s just all-around hard to be optimistic these days, but we’ve gotta stop saying dumb things to kids if we want to inspire something better than cynicism.

On a Friday at volleyball practice, I reassure the overly stressed senior girls: This is not the last “best time” of your life! and they don’t quite believe me. They are emotional about the milestones they’re passing, maybe a little bit excited but also fretful about the future, and weighted with worry, in general. They’ve been told to enjoy it while it lasts because after this year you’ll be an adult, responsible for everything, and you won’t ever have as much freedom as you do now.

Imagine being full of stress and anxiety and emotions, and being told that this is the best time of your life?

They’ve been told by their older friends and family that the high school years were the best years; that the happiest times of their life were the ones before they reached adulthood, with all its responsibilities. We have hyped up their senior year, their last first day of school, their last volleyball game, their last homecoming dance, last day of high school…without giving them any firsts to look forward to.

You’d better enjoy it now because being an adult sucks and you’re about to grow up and learn it for yourself.

The next morning I scramble a few eggs for my grandson and I. He is two years old and has never been a big eater, so I go easy and only put a little bit of scrambled egg on his plate, just half a banana, half a piece of toast slathered with marionberry jam. I give him a target he can conceivably reach—he doesn’t have to clean his plate but he does have to eat some protein before anything else.

I help him sit up on his knees at the table so he can lean over his plate as he takes a bite, and I say what a big boy you are! when the whole forkful lands in his mouth. He is a strong boy already, but it is ingrained in us to tell toddlers they will grow big and strong if they eat good food. Bigger and stronger is the goal—the end all, be all—and we want our kids and grandkids to be big enough to help themselves, strong enough to help others.

We want them to grow, but as they do what is natural and grow to be toddlers, we load their parents with baggage about the “terrible twos”. We tell ten year olds not to be in a rush to grow up, except when it comes to remembering their homework and their chores and their hygiene. We prepare for preteens like we are going into battle, and as they become teenagers on the verge of adulthood, we finally pass the baton of worry off to the kids and saddle them with our burdened way of thinking about aging.

It almost seems vengeful to me—this miserable forecasting of their adulthood.

Why would any child want to grow “big and strong” if being a teenager is so horrible; if being an adult is miserable; if parenting a toddler or a teenager is a nightmare; if turning 50 is the end of possibility? Is there any perfect age, and what do we do once we’ve passed that number?

We simultaneously tell kids to grow up and that growing up is miserable, and I want to be a better advertisement for aging.

Woman Before the Setting Sun, Caspar David Friedrich

I tell the volleyball team that I would much rather be 48 than 18, not because being 18 was miserable, but because 48 is good. My body is certainly different and I wouldn’t mind the strength and lack of aches from my 18 year old self, but there are so many other ways to be strong, other ways to grow mentally and spiritually and emotionally. “I am still every age that I have been,”¹ and I want these young women to see how good that is, to see a layer of years as something to be cherished, not fought against or covered up.

I am guilty of asking the easiest dumb question: What are you going to do after high school? I hear the answers they give, the ones they dream to be true, the answers they’ve been trained to recite back to adults who don't know how to ask something better, like: What are you looking forward to this month? What are you worried about most? What are you passionate about right now, at 18?

Maybe adults don’t know how to let 18 year olds give small, short-term answers. Maybe we project our regrets, throwing back our should-haves onto the shoulders of the haven’t-yets.

I have loved parts of every stage of life—mine and my children’s, and now my grandchildren’s. Sure, parts of each year have had their struggle and misery and heartache. But how I talk about my life and aging makes a difference, I think. It matters, how I tell myself the story of my life.

The last few volleyball seasons we have talked about being “wise women who build our house,”² in relation to encouraging those around us, doing the things that make a team or a class, a friend group or a home, stronger. So much strength depends on the encouragement of others, yet adults, who should know better, are often the discouraging ones, tearing down the fragile constructs of young adulthood with our own bitter wisdom.

How we tell the story matters.

So Lord, forgive me for the dumb things I will continue to say, even as I try to do better. Let me be brightly optimistic as I age. Let me throw back joy and hope to the younger kids, all of us children still, learning still, messing up always. Let me be every age I have ever been, with all the grace I can ever have, and let me tell the other kids how much they have to look forward to.

And forgive me for groaning every time sit down, and again when I stand up.

1. Madeleine L’Engle, Circle of Quiet

2. “The wise woman builds her house, but the foolish pulls it down with her own hands.” Proverbs 14:1