The Wisdom of the Skinned Knee

It’s an old and durable lesson about parenting: sometimes when your child gets hurt, the best way to help is to laugh it off, using comedy or surprise or nonchalance, rather than to immediately act worried and concerned. Very often, a minor hurt will be quickly forgotten if the parent acts like it’s not a big deal, modeling resilience and the virtues of moving on and, importantly, of distraction. These are exceptionally important tools for being a human being who experiences pain - knowing when and how not to feel it. For their part, parents seem to absorb the wisdom of this approach over time, leading to the classic scenario of a skinned knee on a first child resulting in parent panic and over-the-top comforting, while a skinned knee on a third child has the parents laughing and pointing their kids towards a shiny object. Because they’ve observed that the overwrought concern in the former instance actually causes more distress than the chill of the latter. This is all true of actual physical bumps and scrapes among young children - I’ve seen parents prevent tears with distraction and smiles many times - but of course I also mean this in a broader sense of all manner of painful moments at any age.

The challenge is knowing when a harm is sufficient that outsized emotional reactions are appropriate because this is, of course, a technique and philosophy that has clear limits. Sometimes kids get hurt badly enough that they need a lot of direct and emotional consoling; sometimes they get hurt badly enough that they need actual medical attention. And you can certainly argue that, in decades past, the average parent erred too far in the other direction. Certainly many people have been legitimately scarred by the seeming indifference of their parents. There’s a measured approach to knowing how much sympathy and concern to show someone when they’re hurt and then there’s neglect, which are very different things. We live in a culture that’s the product of the endless pendulum swings of children growing up to be parents and raising their own kids in defiance of how they were raised themselves. This is probably inevitable. But, as I and many others have said, we seem to have moved to a distant extreme with this issue, as explicitly politicized arguments and the intemperate rhetoric of therapeutic culture have established a clear elite attitude: the appropriate time for a parent to minimize dwelling on a harm and to instead model moving on quickly, with a hurt child, is never.

The past half-century or so has seen a correction, which over time has become an overcorrection, to the point that showering children with worry and concern over every harm, and going to absurd lengths to prevent them from experiencing hardship or defeat, has become something like the default approach to parenting among the educated and affluent. Inevitably, a counternarrative arose, with critics insisting that all of this overprotective helicopter parenting and constant pandering to the immediate emotional whims of children actually hurts those children and society. Because everything is broken and stupid, in the 21st century this has boiled itself down to a simplistic and unhelpful “snowflakes” discourse, with both sides happier to prosecute their part of the culture war than to ask what’s really better for kids and for our culture.

Which is what this is really all about, what’s actually helpful to children, and this is what prompts my deepest frustration. There is something about this that relates to our obligations to others, yes, and there are times for “tough love.” But the wisdom of the skinned knee has nothing to do with tough love; the point is not to force kids to be tough, but to best minimize the harm to the child. A parent laughing when a kid falls on their face, so that the kid laughs and quickly moves on, isn’t tough love. It’s not some lesson in being stoic. It’s meant precisely to make that moment as brief and inconsequential as it can be, and parents for generations have learned that technique precisely out of a concern for their kid. Sometimes, a kid’s really hurt and you have to rush over and console them and soothe them and rock them until they’re finished crying. But sometimes that behavior merely prolongs the pain, makes the hurt a bigger deal than it has to be. And this is what gets to me: the argument for not overdoing every moment of temporary pain and setback in a young person’s life stems first and foremost from the best interests of the child. I asked this in a broader sense about helicopter parenting before - why do so many parents practice a suffocating version of parenting when the harms of that behavior are so obvious for their child? Why has the wisdom in a skinned knee never occurred to the people who believe that they’d do anything at all for their parents? Because it seems like the one thing they’re unwilling to do for their kids is to chill out and do less. 

by Freddie deBoer |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Whenever my son got banged up with a cut or something, I'd ususally say "man, that could leave a really cool scar!". Does wonders for re-directing focus. Maybe that's why he got so many tattoos later in life... ha! Here's a favorite: (via)]