I don’t get many late-night calls from my children. I don’t get many calls from them at all, really: they’re pretty independent, and they’ve put up with years of me talking to them and at them. I can forgive them for not wanting to volunteer for yet another lecture on whatever political or cultural issue is my current obsession. (Having put up with me for years, many of you can probably relate to that.)
Parents understandably dread the late-night call. So when my 19 year old daughter, my youngest child, called me from college an hour ago, my first words upon answering were “is everything okay?”
Everything was fine. More than fine: this was one of those rare and delightful moments of parental affirmation, when your kid decides that maybe you were right all along.
She was walking home from a guest lecture by Jonathan Haidt. His topics were largely those covered in his latest book, The Coddling of the American Mind: the social justice movement and the related and debilitating hypersensitivities of gen-Z (or whatever we’re calling the current crop of college students), the negative impact of safe spaces and social media, and the way our obsession with safety has created fragile, vulnerable young people unable to deal with conflict or consider alternative views.
She enjoyed the lecture, which she says was well received, and she stayed on the phone for almost an hour telling me about it — and this a girl from whom I’m lucky to get three texts a week.
But what I loved best was when she told me, in her characteristically frank, even blunt way, that the speaker said the things she’d heard from me for years, and that it felt good to her to hear them affirmed by someone of his stature and reputation — in short, that maybe Dad wasn’t as crazy as she and her brothers had always agreed he was.
Ah, sweet vindication.
Steve Racette says:
Wow! Congratulations on the late night phone call. It is great to get unsolicited but still welcome affirmation.