Raising Children, a Cycle of Effort and Ease

We go through these cycles, don’t we, in raising children. The particular one I’m thinking of is a wheel of effort and ease.

Infant

Effort

There’s the incredible effort just to get him into this world. It wasn’t as easy to get pregnant as I was led to believe and hanging on to him for nine months was even tougher. If we succeed we’re rewarded with labor which I hear is hard on a woman’s body. We get him home and we freak out because he needs us so much all of the time. We are constantly hovering over him, afraid he’ll break from the air molecules bouncing off the soft spot on his head.

Ease

After he’s a couple of months old, we slip into a groove. We realize if we lay him down in the middle of the living room, we can go to the kitchen for a moment with some confidence he will be in the same spot when we come back. We realize he won’t break as easily as we thought. Plenty of accidents and mishaps have proven that to us.

Toddler

Effort

Then he begins to crawl and we struggle to keep up with him. His hands get in the DVD player and the planter and the dog dishes. Once, when my brother was about two years old, he walked into the room with what I hoped was milk chocolate all over his face. It wasn’t.

Soon he’ll start walking and the effort of watching over him ramps up. We go through another round of baby-proofing the house. We have to worry about curling irons and scissors. He becomes just the right height to knock his head on the kitchen counter.

Ease

But then he’ll learn things, like he’s not allowed to eat leaves from the fern. He shouldn’t stick his fingers into electrical outlets. We can leave him in the middle of the living room because he’s playing with blocks. Besides he realizes with reasonable confidence that we’re just in the kitchen for a moment.

Adolescence

Effort

When he’s in school it gets even easier (as far as supervision and making sure he’ll stay alive). It’s easier until middle school when he’s old enough to be left without adult supervision for a time, but also old enough to know some things that I’m not sure he’s going to know what to do with. Then our worry will be who he’s with and what potential trouble their getting into.

Ease

He’s also at an age where our ability to reason with one another increases. Maybe we won’t see eye to eye every time. And maybe I’ll have long forgotten how to be cool and will not know exactly how to communicate effectively. But this is better than when he was two and didn’t know not to run into traffic. No matter how many times I explained it to him.

Teen

Effort and Ease

It’s probably enough to say that this is a weekly cycle of ease and effort. We’ll give him some freedom, he’ll act mature and responsible. He’ll make a mistake; we’ll reign him in. Effort and ease. Lather, rinse, repeat.

I Can Stop Worrying… Now

When my wife was pregnant with Mateo, we were thrilled when we passed the critical first trimester. The chances of carrying the baby to term increase dramatically after the first twelve weeks, but there’s still a chance of a miscarriage or something else going wrong. If we can just make it to the delivery, I thought, and he’s physically in our world, then I can relax. Then I realized he’ll just be a tiny person and he’ll need us so much all the time. So much can still go wrong.

I told my dad about this death spiral of worry I was in. I said, “So, when he’s eighteen—that’s when I’ll be out of the woods and I can stop worrying about him, right?”

“No,” he said, “not even then.”