The best example of leadership in our culture is the one most often ignored; good parenting.
—Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline
EVERY SUMMER since she was born, my daughter Alexis and I have traveled from our home in Seattle to Cape May, a resort town on the southern coast of New Jersey. My parents and nine brothers and sisters rent as many charming Victorian houses as are required to hold all the children, grandchildren, wives, husbands, and significant others for a week-long family reunion. To a worrying father, each new stage in his child’s life holds its own peculiar terrors. This was Alex’s fifth year at the New Jersey shore, so she no longer wanted Dad looking over her shoulder, especially at the beach. I knew my job however: to catalog the smorgasbord of dangers available to my daughter and to prevent her from sampling any of them—especially drowning. As a child, I had spent each summer at the shore with my own family, so I knew them all: rip tides, under-tows, waves too big to handle, and so on. Alex had grown up on Puget Sound, where the water is too bone-chillingly cold to entice a toddler into trouble. Standing in front of our beach blanket on the first day, surveying our stretch of beach, I called Alexis over. She looked up at me with her blue-gray eyes as if to say, “What now, Dad?” “Alex, let me tell you what the rules are, OK?” “OK,” she replied. “When you are in the water you have to stay in front of the lifeguard stand.” She agreed.
“And see those ropes?” I said, pointing. “Don’t go near them, because you might get tangled up.” “Okay,” she said again. “Oh, and one more thing.” “What?” she said, rolling her eyes. “It doesn’t matter how shallow the water is before the wave comes. It matters how deep it is after the wave breaks. It shouldn’t be any deeper than the middle of your chest.” I used my hand to show her where the middle of her chest was. “That’s all. Have fun and don’t throw sand at your cousins.” Then Alex ran into the water to ride the waves and I opened my beach chair and sat down at the water’s edge to read The Philadelphia Inquirer. Occasionally I folded down the corner of my paper to check on her.
Just as I began to dive into the editorial page, one of my sisters put her beach chair next to me along the water’s edge. As we see each other usually just once a year, this was a good time to fill in the blanks on each other’s lives and parenting challenges. My sister has a number of children, and at the time her youngest daughter, Emily, was about the same age as Alexis and so was learning the ropes about beach safety and behavior. As my sister sat down, Emily stood impatiently in front of her as she put her daughter’s hair up in a hair tie. “Hurry Mom!” Emily fussed, eager to plunge into the cold New Jersey waters on this stiflingly hot day. Finally finished, my sister gave Emily a kiss as she broke free, racing into the water. My sister shouted after her, “Have fun in the water and don’t go in too deep!”
We then began to review the events that had happened to our separate worlds since we last saw each other. But it became difficult to have a sustained conversation, as the noise level between my sister and her daughter quickly escalated. Every time my sister noticed that Emily had strayed deeper into the water than she was comfortable, her mother would interrupt our conversation with the phrase, “Just a sec, Steve.” And shouting to Emily, “You are in too deep young lady! Come in! You’re out too far.” The same thing happened when the rip tide pulled Emily closer to the ropes, her mother would yell, “Emily! Get away from the ropes!” And every time Emily did anything her mother disapproved of like throwing sand or shells, her mother would say, “If you don’t stop that, young lady, you are going to sit on the beach blanket for five minutes.”
This made it impossible to have a conversation, so I decided to watch Alex instead. You know how it is—a father can spend hours watching his five-year-old. She was running and diving in the waves, enjoying herself immensely. Soon she and her cousin Emily were playing together. But after a short while, I began to notice something that struck me.
From time to time, Alex would glance back at the lifeguard stand to make sure she was in the right spot. She also kept an eye on the ropes, making sure she wasn’t getting too close. I even saw her intentionally pull Emily and herself safely away from them. And then, much to my surprise and satisfaction, after a wave crested and broke, I saw Alex look down at her chest to see if she was in too deep. She actually held her hand up to her chest to measure a wave.
Then I noticed that Emily wasn’t watching the lifeguard stand, and she wasn’t watching the ropes, and she wasn’t watching how far from the shore she was. Emily was watching her mom. Every time she thought she might be in too deep or doing something wrong, she would look back at her mom to find out if her behavior was OK. Emily was depending on her mom to determine whether she was in the right spot; Alexis was making that determination herself. Alexis knew what she was doing. And at least for now, on this beautiful, sunny morning, she was keeping herself safe.
Fast forward five years when it was my youngest daughter Maddy’s turn to learn the rules of the beach. Just as with Alex, I sat Maddy down to explain the rules including the lifeguard stand, the rope, the waves, and so on. She was eager to get in the water, but I had learned how important this “drill” was in developing a sense of responsibility and letting me relax at the beach.
As I covered the “rules” with Maddy, I felt the stare of my sister, Emily’s mom, on the back of my neck. I could sense that she was both curious and perturbed by what she was seeing. After my lecture was over, I freed Maddy to run into the water and turned to my sister. She had a funny, skeptical look on her face.
“What’s up?” I asked nicely.
In a frustrated and particularly judgmental tone she proclaimed, “You are such a control freak! Honestly. I don’t know how your kids put up with you!”