Dad’S Lessons Learned

Today’s column is aimed at all overly obsessive young parents, or to put it another way, all young parents.

I want to impart a few child-rearing lessons I learned the usual way, which is, “too late.”

However, maybe it won’t be too late for you. Read and learn:

Our 20-year-old son, Mike, was home from college this week. During one of our Christmas week dinners, the conversation turned toward the subject of his childhood and what he remembered about it. This was one of the earliest things he remembered:

“You had this dumb rule that I couldn’t watch cartoons in the morning. The only thing I could watch was `Captain Kangaroo.”’

Well, yes, I said, somewhat defensively, that’s because I loved “Captain Kangaroo” when I was a child and I wanted you to have the same warm memories of the Captain, Mr. Greenjeans and …

“Yes, but I thought `Captain Kangaroo’ was lame,” he said.

Lesson No. 1: Don’t assume that your own childhood can be surgically transplanted onto that of your children.

Yes, I said, but at least you weren’t watching those violent and crude “He-Man” cartoons. Didn’t “Captain Kangaroo” fill you with warm, fuzzy feelings of happiness and … “No,” he said laughing. “I just remember being angry that I lived in a world where I couldn’t watch cartoons in the morning.”

Lesson No. 2: Your best-intentioned rules can backfire in ways that you can never imagine.

Then we started talking about other things that he remembered from his earliest childhood. He remembered many good things, of course: The woods he played in, the friends he played with, the family games we loved. But he also remembered one other thing:

“I remember when you took my pacifier away from me,” he said.

What? He was only 2 or 3. How could he remember that?

Lesson No. 3: Little kids can have long, long memories, especially about things you wish they would forget.

My wife and I shot each other looks of horror. Of all of the things we wish he had forgotten, that was at the top of the list. Some parents have toilet-training trauma. Others have favorite-blankie trauma. We had pacifier trauma.

Today, this sounds silly, because parents seem to have more sensible attitudes about pacifiers. They believe that pacifiers don’t really hurt a kid in any important way, and seem to make them happy. Little kids aren’t skilled at too many things, so why not let them do what they’re good at? And sucking is one skill they master early.

Unfortunately, when we were raising children, the fashion among child-rearing experts was to look down upon pacifiers. They believed that prolonged pacifier abuse could cause a child’s teeth to emerge deformed. They also believed that the pacifier was a harmful psychological “crutch,” which, if not dealt with harshly, would eventually result in millions of addicted young Americans sucking on pacifiers all the way through their undergraduate years in college.

Lesson No. 4: Ignore all childrearing experts.

So we, new parents that we were, dealt with the pacifier issue in classic fashion: We let him have one, but felt guilty about it.

This was a recipe for disaster. On the one hand, we depended on the pacifier as a calming aid. On the other hand, we felt somehow … weak … about using it and were terrified that other parents would see us as deficient.

Lesson No. 5: Don’t worry about what other parents think. They’re probably just as clueless as you are.

So one day we decided that he had become too old for the pacifier. We followed some expert’s advice on how to quit a pacifier, cold-turkey. We made little Mike put his beloved “Pete” in a plastic bag, then we made him solemnly carry it out to the garbage can, and then we made him watch as the garbage man took his pacifier away FOREVER.

Tears flowed, and not just his.

Lesson No. 6: Any child-rearing advice that seems just plain ridiculous probably is.

Fortunately, Mike said he didn’t think this incident damaged his psyche as severely as it evidently damaged ours. And, as it turned out, Mike has developed into a fine young man despite a childhood full of well-meaning parental blunders.

Lesson No. 7: No matter how many things you do wrong, your child may very well turn out fine anyway.

I think I speak for all parents when I say that this is the most comforting lesson of all.