I like it when the kids critique my parenting skills...

Every so often, the kids tell me how I screwed up as a father, and I’ve actually been enjoying the conversations.

Partly, it’s because am comforted by the certainty that they are 150% wrong. I was the perfect father who never made a single mistake in all my years of dad-dom. They are terribly mistaken when they think I might have committed even the slightest error, but I have decided to forgive them for their grievous misjudgments, because that’s what perfect fathers do.

More important, we end up in these conversations over lunch, where one or both of them might decide to pick up the check, and not in front of a judge or a desk sergeant or, worst of all, a live studio audience. Nobody needs to ask the waiter to remove the knives from the table when the conversation turns to their incredibly faulty memories about growing up, and I am always able to clear up their misperceptions before dessert. (NB: My daughters might have a different perception of how our conversations end, but they are flawed humans and this is my blog, not theirs.) 

The conversations are especially enjoyable because they have kids of their own now and our discussions about the past will sometimes be connected to their choices about how they want to handle their parenting decisions. Their descriptions make me smile, most of the time, and for a few very important reasons:

First, it’s good to know they have made conscious choices to guide their actions in raising their children. Comedian Josh Johnson notes that there are people who are parents…and there are people with kids. The two are not the same, and the daughters have decided to be parents. That choice, alone, is a reason to smile, but it makes me almost giddy when I see how often their choices resemble my own perfect actions as a dad. Of course, being perfect, I do not take credit for the things they do right, nor assign blame for their terrible failures.  

Second, and even more fun, I’m envisioning the conversations they’ll end up having with their kids, maybe 30 years from now, when their then-adult offspring recount all the mistakes they’ve made along the way. If they’re lucky, they’ll find out how they screwed up in a restaurant, not in front of a judge, and they’ll suddenly realize how wrong they were to ever criticize a single thing I did.

I won’t be around to witness their epiphanies, of course, but I am comforted by the absolute knowledge it will happen. In fact, I’ve already prepared a list of items for each grandchild to mention when they get together for lunch in 2056. They’ll probably have lists of their own by then, but why take the chance they might leave something out?

 

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