Obsolete

I just saw a funny meme on Facebook about a mom teaching her kids to put gas in the car. After the lesson, one kid says, “thanks, but I’m not going to be driving a gas car” and the other kid says, “it’s like that time you taught us how to use a pay phone.”

There was a time when I worried about my kids’ refusal to wear pants with zippers and buttons. They claimed even jeans were too stiff and uncomfortable. They requested only soft pants – sweats, joggers, athleisure wear with elastic waists, poly-cotton or 100% synthetic blends. Despite my worry, that’s what I bought them, because I didn’t want to fight about clothes every morning. I can get them to dress up in clothes with buttons briefly for their piano recitals, but that’s about it. T-shirts and sweats are their uniform.

Then the pandemic hit, and all my work clothes sat in my closet untouched for nearly two years. Even now, with a hybrid work schedule, I hardly need to dress up even for in-person meetings. I, too, can dress for comfort most days. Although the adult work world especially of the white collar kind still has its dress codes, so many expectations have changed or are in the process of being rewritten. It made my kids seem prescient, as if they were already preparing for a world that the rest of us couldn’t have imagined. Or not just preparing for it, but living it.

What are the other soon-to-be obsolete skills and habits, like gassing up the car or maybe even driving one, that we’re trying to teach our kids but maybe don’t need to? Will they need to know cursive if signatures are no longer necessary to verify your identity and consent? What should we be preparing them for? As I wrote last February, there is no “normal” to return to in this post-acute-pandemic world. Mix in a teen and a tween and the way forward is murky at best, terrifyingly unknowable at worst.

The lesson of the leisure pants (and the meme), though, is that on the question of the future and how to live in it, perhaps we, the olds, are not the best authority. I don’t mean that we don’t have anything to teach our kids anymore, but that we have to let them teach us too. If something doesn’t make sense to them, if they balk at some of our ideas about success or sociability or how things are done, maybe there’s good reason.

In more dire terms, the current crisis in youth mental health – the soaring rates of anxiety and depression that were already rising before the pandemic – seems like the kind of warning bells we need to heed. Like seismographs that sense the subterranean cataclysms of our age before the rest of us, our youth are telling us that so much of the world is wrong for them.

Parenting through a global pandemic will make you reevaluate things. I’m still sorting through what’s essential and what’s optional; how to guide, cajole, and support, while trying to help them figure out what’s important to them. I once read advice about not being so consumed with preparing your kids for the future that you forget to enjoy them now, in all their now-ness, in this brief window of time that is closing as soon as it’s opened. If I take care of their present, maybe they’ll be ready for whatever comes and will show me how to live in their future.