Preparing my Kids for Counseling

I want to be the cool dad. That's perhaps a shallow goal in life, but one that I should probably confess to my little blog community.

One of the requisite behaviors of a cool dad is that you actually use the word "cool" with your 2-year-old as much as possible as positive reinforcement to a positive category of behaviors. Peas for dinner, picking up toys, fun gifts from grandparents are all cool. Hitting sister and fidgeting around on the changing table while I'm handling five pounds of toxic waste that have overflowed the diaper--not cool.

I've wondered recently what will happen when I no longer have the monopoly on defining the cool categories. In other words, at some point in Davis' (and Zoe's) life, other people--actors and t.v. stars, classmates, dj's on the radio--will use the same word and fill it with all kinds of meanings that I would hope he doesn't buy into. They will attempt to deconstruct my meaning of cool and infuse it with other meanings, ones that I'm not so sure are so cool. Was I setting them up for moral collapse by using a word that would be co-opted by others in the future?

But as I was thinking about this the other day, it dawned on me that this is true of all of the values that I'm teaching my kids. Many of our words are placeholders for deeper things: family, love, country, church, education, faith, wisdom, joy, friends, God. The more important the word, the more "place-holder-ish" the word itself becomes. I will teach and present my kids with the deeper meanings and values that I believe those placeholders represent. Kelly and I will do this both deliberately by explanation and subversively by our family culture.

But at various points and stages along the way, all our definitions will be subject to challenge, revision, and change. And in the end, all I can do is attempt to be faithful to give correct and good and "real" images and meanings to those placeholders in the broader context of loving my kids as best I can. It cannot be about me controlling them. It cannot be about me always being right.

In the end, they have to make their own choices. Cool is just one of many categories that they'll have to ultimately decide to adapt, re-invent, or leave as is.

And really the bottom line on kids is that as parents we're pretty much bound to screw them up somewhere along the way. So parents out there, just go ahead and put aside two savings funds: the college savings fund and the professional counseling savings fund.

Davis and Zoe will probably be talking about how their dad tried too hard to be cool.