Random Thoughts from a Restless Mind

In an airport, once again, traveling between friends and family, family and friends. Sadly, I’m on my own for these couple of legs. This “sandwich generation” stuff is getting harder by the day. MCO to BOS this morning as I travel from the funeral of my best friend’s Dad to what looks like an abridged version of the annual White Family Cape Cod adventure. We are down one parent, too, and the next generation is in the early stages of careers and families of their own which makes it difficult to get away for a week on the beach. My journey is solo as Mrs. bingo awaits the arrival of the Man Cub’s little sister who begins her own journey any day now.

In the middle of the sandwich, where we welcome babies into the family as we say goodbye to parents who leave, we hopefully share this stage with at least one good friend, and hopefully for our longevity three or more (turns out that’s a magic number). In addition to a brother with whom I cannot be closer and my darling bride with whom I could not be more in love, my journey has been blessed with a best friend who has ridden shotgun or been my driver for 40 years now. We have taken turns carrying each other whenever one of us needed the lift. Mostly we’ve just walked side by side, as friends do..

Friendship is on my mind quite often. I ponder it as I think about friends old and new. My 35th college reunion was a month or so ago, and I am pleasantly surprised at the number of old friends and friendly acquaintances who are emerging from the mists of my past. Misplaced, lost, or cast aside, the skeletons of friendships past walk with me, still.

We are blessed, fortunate beyond measure, if we can count among the masses a single friend. One to whom we can always turn, from whom we withhold nothing, who will give to us everything. To have more than one friend such as this is to have a kind of wealth that beggars description. My parents gave one in 1961; Rob, the friend who just lost his Dad, showed up in 1978, and Bill came along in 1982.

If we are lucky enough to have such friends they are joined in the garden of our lives by that next best thing, friendly acquaintances, and these in turn are surrounded by acquaintances. The entire garden is encircled by farmland that lies, for the moment at least, unexplored. The enterprising gardener is always on alert for new seedlings out there to plant in that garden of friendship.

The garden analogy is an apt one for friendship. A garden requires tending and so, too, does a friendship. Left untended, left to chance, it is certainly possible for a garden to flourish. All too often both gardens and friendships ignored too long have a beauty that is but a cherished memory, seen only with the mind’s eye.

Friendship, like a garden, grows best when exposed to both sun AND rain, albeit for different reasons. A friendship that has known only sunny days may weather that first storm; a friendship that has known both sun and rain is steeled against any and all weather, especially if we gardeners were active in the tending despite the elements. So it has been for my friends and me.

Who is your friend? Who is there for you in both sunshine and rain? From whom do you wish only friendship, and who asks only the same from you? Have you done your part? Have you tended your garden in both sunshine AND rain?

I am in an airport, leaving my friend and headed toward my brother. It’s raining; we are all missing our Dad. But we have tended these gardens for decades. The sun will come out soon enough.

A couple of weeks ago Beth and I were invited to spend a little time with the VP of Development for the health sciences departments at the university where Beth got a BsRN and I got my MD. “Development” is a coy term that non-profits of all types use to describe asking people to donate money to whatever the cause may be. Mark, the VP who invited us out, is a delightful guy only slightly younger than we are. We danced around his core purpose for “discovering” that the unofficial class agent for the Class of ’86 lived 40 minutes from where he and his partner were visiting friends, and enjoyed a very nice couple of hours sitting at the bar of one of our favorite restaurants.

After a short time exchanging standard issue “elevator” origin stories Mark asked if I’d been the student speaker at my graduation ceremony. Mind you, my graduation from med school was 40 years ago, but I’m pretty sure that no one from my class spoke, and that we weren’t addressed by anyone other than a dean or two at graduation. No invited speaker, no University or department luminary, and certainly neither I nor any of my classmates were handed a microphone and a spot on stage. At some time over the years graduation has come to include not only speakers at the university-wide ceremony, but also at the smaller ceremonies for specialty programs such as medicine. Those invited typically have a connection to the school, and are often alums.

I am in love with the sound of my own voice, and so I immediately told Mark that I would jump at the chance to give the graduation speech at the University of Vermont Lerner College of Medicine.

To be sure, this is an entirely fanciful proposition. Not that I don’t have anything worth saying, or worth hearing by any college or grad school graduating class, it’s just that in the big old world in which we all live I am honestly and truly exactly who and how I have long described myself, a C-list celebrity with B-list aspirations. There are literally thousands of “known” entities higher on every university’s list of potential speakers, hundreds and hundreds on whatever list UVM might have, of folks with even the most tenuous thread of a connection than yours truly. I’m kinda like the guy in “Spill the Wine” by War singing about his unlikely casting in a movie, overfed long-haired leaping gnome, now skinny-fat and earthbound. Calling this a long-shot is exaggerating the possibility.

And yet, I really have something to say to a class of graduating doctors, or for that matter a class of graduating college seniors. I am, after all, a doctor; we are in many ways little more than paid observers (HT: WJP). I have willed myself to be a writer, an interpreter of what it is that I have observed. Now and again it all spontaneously distills itself into a package that occupies a little corner of the “restless mind” and like the rest of my random thoughts, seeks a way out into the world.

Herewith, then, is my graduation speech, this version tailored to my med school alma mater, that I will likely never give there, or anywhere else:

Dean Page, esteemed faculty, friends and family members, and my newest colleagues and fellow alums of the Lerner College of Medicine, thank you for this wonderful invitation. It’s been 40 years since I last graced this stage. A short walk that begin a long and wonderful journey. You know, I honestly don’t remember any speakers at our graduation ceremony in 1986. Certainly none from our class. What a cool thing, to be elected to speak to your classmates, the 140 or so folks who’ve walked the same walk and talked the same talk as you have. Maybe Dean Luginbuhl spoke. Honestly, I can’t really remember. The highlight was seeing my classmate Mike Philips receive his diploma from his Mom, the chairperson of pediatrics, while his Dad sat on stage with the rest of the faculty.

That was cool.

So what have I done to merit this invitation? What’s so interesting, unique, or special about my career or my life that makes me someone who would show up on a list of characters who get invited to address a graduating class of doctors? Honestly? Nothing, really. I grew up, went to school and made my childhood dream of becoming a doctor a reality. Like the majority of my classmates I have been a clinician in the community, in my case as an ophthalmologist in private practice just outside a mid-sized city in middle America. Back in the day UVM was known as a school that created the doctors who left school and training and headed off to a lifetime of taking care of patients. Again, nothing unique or special.

If anything has brought me here today it’s probably the stuff that doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with medicine, but rather what I’ve learned from the other thing that I’ve become over my lifetime, a writer. I have willed myself to become a writer, albeit one with only the tiniest of followings, none of which are likely represented here today. My classmate and close friend Bill Petraiuolo describes doctors as paid observers. Writers take this one step further and seek to find the larger themes that tie together those things we have observed. Sometimes, if we’re lucky, those observations and the interpretations we make crystalize into little nuggets of useful, actionable advice. One could think of them as wisdom I suppose.

Could be that I’m just getting old though!

Ah well; old or wise, in the end I’ve come up with three nuggets. The first: Talk to strangers. I know, your Mom always told you never to talk to strangers, and that’s really good advice when you’re a kid and just starting out. But as you grow up, go to school and start a career in pretty much anything, NOT talking to strangers handicaps in ways you might not realize. I mean, unless you’re a pathologist or radiologist, every day at work means talking to strangers, right? Patients and their families mostly. You can’t escape them. With all that practice at the office or in the hospital, why not take advantage of this necessary skill and bring it out into the “civilian” world?

Contrary to what your Mom was trying to protect you from, the overwhelming majority of our fellow travelers are really quite friendly and nice. Most are interesting, and many have stories they are happy to share. If I never talked to strangers I never would have met that really smart business consultant who designed partnerships for small, boutique service companies like specialty law and accounting firms. There was the marketing consultant I stood in line with at a Chipotle who described how the culture behind the counter was what really set the brand apart. Or the genius engineer I sat next to on a flight who described micro-marketing targeted to an individual identified by armchair-mounted screens with iris scanning to ID a patient so that you could show them educational information about the very reason they had come to the office.

All of those chats occurred in the early 2000’s; parts of all three became part of the DNA of my practice, SkyVision. I would have missed all of it if I didn’t go out of my way to talk to strangers.

Always ask for the job. Wayne Gretzky once said something to the effect that you never score on the shots you didn’t take. One of my sons, all full of himself after making Dean’s list first semester in law school, marched into the business school’s office at the university where he was studying law and declared something to the effect that they should accept him into their next class. Tickled and intrigued that he simply asked for the gig the dean told him to take the GMATs, that she would see if he was serious when she saw his results. The kid’s a pretty good test taker; she gave him the job. My other son traveled the world after asking for an internship in what was then known as CrossFit Kids. At age 18 he was teaching full-grown adults how to safely and effectively teach fitness to kids. My daughter, a behavioral therapist, built and ran two ABA clinics from scratch. When she learned that her company needed someone to do it, she asked for the jog.

Last, but definitely not least, don’t forget to sing when you win. Friendly strangers and the perfect next job both out there for the asking notwithstanding, this can be a hard world. Victories are there to be had but they don’t come easily. You can go a very long time between even the tiniest wins, so you need to rejoice each time you get one. You are all doctors, and I’m sorry to say that the hardest days of your medical career lie in front of you, not behind in the classroom or the lab or the clinics through which you rotated.

And so I ask you to be sure to celebrate every win. This might be the most important of my three little nuggets. Big or small, sing your victory song. You get that kid off the ward in time to graduate from kindergarten? Don’t forget to sing. That guy who showed up asystolic in the ER who you stayed with all night in the CICU? Yah, he just walked his daughter down the aisle. Don’t forget to sing. You went into psych and a desperate and depressed high school student came to your clinic, battered and beaten by what our modern world can do to us. Ready to be done with all of it, forever, but you saw them every day for a month. Gave them your phone number. A last desperate call before giving up and you took them to the ER. Now married, almost finished their Ph.D. You won! Don’t forget to sing.

Me? Well, talking to strangers helped me to create a culture-driven practice that rests upon a foundation that places caring for each other in the office and the OR first. We give better care for those who come to us because we care about each other. I am here today mostly because I asked Mark for the job! The last thing he heard from me as my wife Beth and I were turning to leave was to remember me for the gig. What a win! I’ll be singing as soon as I step off the stage.

And you? You’re about to be handed a fancy bit of paper that says you are officially a doctor!

Don’t forget to sing!

I’m back from the graduation I will never attend and the speech I will never give, and I’ll see the rest of you next week…

Beth and I have been on an adventure cruise, a quest of sorts. We’ve been exploring the wonders of the classic cocktail. Today as we welcome dinner guest and watch for a bald eagle flyover will be no different. Equal parts alchemy and indulgence, our trip has been more exciting (as all adventures are) because of the little bit of risk involved. What if we find one (or two, or…) we really like? Like many pleasures to drink is to willingly hold the proverbial double-edged sword in your hand; in this case the sword just happens to look like a martini glass.

Alcohol as both a substance and a subject is complex and rife with controversy. It’s legal, but only to a point. It’s beneficial, but with a caveat–people who drink just enough live longer than those who drink more, or not at all. Or maybe not. No one knows. As a chemical it’s a depressant, and yet in many circumstances it imbues joy in those who imbibe. It all comes down to a fine and delicate balance, not unlike a perfectly aged wine or single malt scotch.

The matter of regulation intrudes on the pleasure. Knowing the existence of the second edge and maintaining an awareness of its cut is both necessary and nettlesome. If you find this lurking behind every glass it may rob you of the joy; if you careen from joy to joy you will inevitably suffer its cut and bleed. Temperance, then, is the essential ingredient, the co-pilot who must be ever present on this particular trip. Ah, but temperance, willful self-control, can feel like a 50 MPH governor on a Ferrari, especially if you make the Indiana Jones-like cocktail discoveries we’ve made. It might be so difficult and so distasteful that you decide to roll your dice on the “not at all” line. “Abstinence is as easy to me as temperance would be difficult.” Samuel Johnson.

Indeed, temperance is so often fueled by the wraith “guilt.” I was raised by a deeply devout Catholic mother who secretly wished she was Jewish; I suffer double guilt. There’s joy and pleasure to be had, but what if there’s too much? Ah, guilt. In the classic children’s book “The Little Prince”, one of the characters is known simply as The Drunkard. He explains to the Little Prince that he drinks to forget that he’s ashamed of drinking. How very sad, that.

It’s all so complicated, not unlike the math involved in the archaic elixirs we’ve been experiencing. So very hard sometimes to ease off the throttle without the aid of the governor. If the “Gizmo”, the “Sideswiped”, and the various versions of The Spritz” be guilty pleasures we might ask the socialite turned fashion entrepreneur Charlotte Stockdale what she thinks of such things. “I don’t have a guilty pleasure. I don’t really feel guilty about anything. What’s the point?” As you listen there it is. Out of the corner of your eye you can just see it, the shadow of the double-edged sword. One edge Samuel, the other Charlotte.

[Tips glass] Slainte

1. Munsingwear. Watching the Scottish and British Opens and noting the return of the penguin logo on a few of the golfers shirts. Once ubiquitous (didn’t Arnie start off wearing Munsingwear before launching his own umbrella logo’d line) the penguin seemed to be extinct.

Seems you just can’t kill a great logo.

2. Nike. Simultaneously watching the Wimbledon men’s finals (gotta love that “last”, as in channel, button on the remote) and noting that both Alcatraz and Sinner are sponsored by Nike and are wearing shirts festooned with the same rather pretentious logo on their left breast. Seems that Nike has succumbed to the pretentiousness of the venue. A bit of a surprise, at least for me.

I just can’t think of a better logo in sports than that plain, unadorned swoosh, especially on a plain white tee shirt.

3. Billboard. If I was a bit more ambitious I would make an effort to find and watch the Tour de France, too. With the Sunday papers taking up residence in my lap I just ran out of brainspace. Shame, because I always enjoy the blatant commercialization of the wearable real estate on the riders. Seriously, perhaps only race car drivers (and their vehicles) can lay claim to making more productive use of the marketability of being on air. Golfers have only their bag, hat, and shirts; tennis players shirts and hats. Only recently have other sports (NBA, MLB) started to fill their mobile billboards.

I think my favorites might actually be those bikers. Might have to surf over to France and check ’em out.

4. Reading. I love to read. Almost all kinds of reading. I prefer what one might call legacy reading. You know, books and magazines and newspapers printed on paper. Sure, if the timing is right I’m quite content to read stuff on a computer or a tablet, but the whole read it on a phone thing just never grabbed me.

Except social media.

Last night I had some trouble falling asleep. Worked out pretty well for Beth, at least in the beginning of the night because she was able to fall asleep before I started snoring. Despite the presence of a book I am enjoying right their on my nightstand (“How I Won the Nobel Prize”) I picked up my phone and started surfing Twitter and Facebook. Every now and again I will come across something worthwhile doing this, but not last night. No interesting or challenging lines of thought. Nothing to do further research on. Not even anything that I might like to buy.

Bupkis.

To be sure I achieved my ultimate goal of becoming tired enough to quickly fall asleep, but it was just a silly waste of time. Do I need to be on any of these sites? Nah. Not really. Sure, some folks have found my little bits of written drivel there, and I have to admit that it’s more than a little bit of fun to have folks read and comment. But I can accomplish all of that without spending time looking at fake stories about benevolent pachyderms hosing down overheated infant ungulates. Once or twice a day on a laptop, business focus engaged, is all I really need.

Time to clear up some memory and screen real estate on my phone.

5. Pro. As in going pro. Two brilliant athletes in their early 20’s have concluded this year’s Wimbledon. A couple of PGA tournament winners are barely out of college. Sitting in second place in the British Open is a golfer who turned pro at age 15. Countless youngsters barely weeks removed from their senior prom sat with their families hoping to hear their names called in last Sunday’s Major League Baseball draft. The newspaper brought the story of JoJo and Jacob Parker, fraternal twins who were both expected to be selected in the early rounds the draft. They are the sons of a father who was by all accounts an extraordinary, pro-caliber athlete whose entire life was turned upside down by an injury on the football field that left him paralyzed from the neck down but did not keep him from coaching his gifted sons (more in a moment).

And of course all of the “one and done’s” in the recent NBA draft, rising college sophomores who will leave college behind led by Maine native Cooper Flagg.

What’s got me thinking about these boys is how very few kids actually go on to play a sport beyond high school. I’ve thought and written about this before, that time in response to a slew of articles one weekend about parents (and youth coaches) pushing children to specialize in a single sport as early as 5 years of age. Rather than playing sports for the love of the games and the healthy interactions with neighborhood friends, kids compete to play for regional “travel teams” or are recruited away from their local schools to play for “power” schools. While this usually actually happens at the junior high school/high school transition year it still means that adults are making decisions for kids which are often based on the notion that putting all of your athletic eggs in one basket is going to result in either a college scholarship or a pro contract.

In reality the odds of sustaining an over-use injury due to the concentration on a single set of repetitive movements is actually dramatically higher than the likelihood of playing a sport beyond high school. Recent data for baseball players shows that ~30% of high school baseball pitchers undergo ulnar collateral ligament (UCL) or Tommy John surgery over their career; 8.1% will go on to play college baseball at any level, 2% in Division 1. 18% of high school girls soccer players will suffer an ACL tear over their soccer career, 82% of which will be a complete tear; 7.9% will play soccer in college, again roughly 2% in Division 1 (data via ChatGPTo4). Overall, 7.5% of high school athletes go on to play a sport in college at any level, and less than 2% will receive any scholarship money to play in Division 1.

More likely to have surgery for a sport-related injury than to play in college.

And yet parents continue to find the Siren song of college scholarships and pro contracts sung by youth coaches, if only they will commit their child to 12 months of playing and training for a single sport. To have their kids play with other gifted athletes on elite regional teams or for schools far away from home where they are told the kids will get “better competition”. Do they, indeed, get better at their sport if they do so? Almost certainly, yes. Does it matter? Again, <2% will get a scholarship, and less than 1% will play a single minute in any professional event. 0.05% of high school baseball players will get the proverbial “cup of coffee” in the majors.

To be sure, if we add back in non-scholarship schools such as the Ivies and highly selective Division 3 schools such as those in the NESCAC conference in the Northeast, historically all of which place an emphasis on high caliber athletes in the admission office, some kids will parlay a level of athletic skill into a step up the collegiate reputational ladder. The boy who played baseball for his hometown high school and is not quite good enough to start at Vanderbilt may be just what they are looking for at Yale, even though his grades and scores place him in the lower half of accepted students. Or the girl with above average grades and scores who was a second team All-State field hockey player, not quite good enough to get a scholarship from North Carolina but gets into Middlebury and has a stellar 4-year career as a starter on a perennial D3 power team. Some kids do leverage sports in non-financial ways.

My kids are all in their 30’s, each a talented athlete in their own way. Megan, the equestrian, played her sport in college. My nephews and nieces are in their late 20’s and early 30’s. Many of them played sports in college, two of them in D1, one on scholarship. All of them played at home, for their local high school or local parochial school (3 did a PG year before college). Whether or not they played in college, each one played their sports (often more than one) with the kids they grew up with (the hockey players were often on travel teams during the “off-season”). So many of the kids here in NE Ohio who would be legit stars at their home town schools leave them to play a sport in one of the larger regional powerhouse schools, only to find themselves mired on the bench or peaking on a JV team. At home they would have shined, perhaps in more than one sport, and gotten to do so with their neighborhood buddies.

Everybody loses a little bit when that happens.

Cooper Flagg and his twin brother are examples of the good that can come from following the Sirens. After a stellar freshman year at Nokomis Regional High school is his Maine hometown in which he was named Gatorade player of the year in Maine, Cooper and his twin brother Ace decamped to national powerhouse Montverde Academy in Florida. Cooper was the number 1 pick in the NBA draft, taken by the Dallas Mavericks, and Ace accepted a scholarship to play basketball at the University of Maine.

How about our other set of twins, the Parker boys Jojo and Jacob? They stayed home and played baseball for their hometown school, Purvis High School in Purvis, Mississippi. They pulled up their high stirrups and laced up their cleats next to the same kids with whom they played Little League ball and went to school with since kindergarten. Drafted 8th in the first round by the Toronto Blue Jays JoJo will begin his pro career this summer, while Jacob (19th round by Arizona) will accept a scholarship offer to play at Mississippi State. You CAN play for your hometown school and go on to play at a higher level.

Like all of the athletes in the next generation of my extended family, neither Ace Flagg nor Jacob Parker are likely to sign a professional contract to play their sports for a living. All of the family’s parents in my generation at one point or another echoed what my brother told his boys, multi-sport athletes in both high school and college, about their footwear in future employment opportunities: don’t plan on wearing sneakers, cleats, or skates; you will be wearing leather soles or heels to whatever job you take. Early sport specialization, especially if it involves leaving your childhood friends in order to pursue the Siren song of pay to play, costs much more in what is lost from childhood than is likely gained, even without injuries.

For all but the very, very few, what remains at the end are the memories, and those memories always seem to me to shine more brightly if they were made together, at home, with the friends you grew up with.

I’ll see you next week…

1. H2O. Once again, like so many Sundays before and hopefully many Sundays to come, I sit before my muse, my inland ocean, and peer within, trying to capture the random thoughts that fly inside my head like so many molecules in a vacuum.

I never really know what I’ll catch.

2. Spotify. I’m not really sure when I started writing with music on in the background. Certainly not before we moved to Casa Blanco in late 2013. In many ways my writing music has evolved along the same lines as my music in the OR. For nearly 10 years the majority of the music played in my OR’s was instrumental only. You know, lest I start to tap my feet or sing along. The first is obviously a problem because I control my instrument and microscope with foot pedals.

Singing risks sparking a mutiny in the rest of the OR “crew”.

Where once I was dependent on, and limited by my collection of CD’s, the era of music streaming has brought me music from every era of my life. Top 40 in Jr. High? Hello “Stairway to Heaven”, the most awkward slow dance song ever written. High school and college funk? I see you Earth, Wind, and Fire. David Sanborne, Chuck Mangione and their peers played background to my early career, giving way to all things Eric Clapton. “Clapton Unplugged” accompanied me as I caught up on last week’s newspapers yesterday. Ozzie Osborn said farewell yesterday in an epic 10 hour concert in Birmingham. Through the wonder of Spotify and its competitors I will be able to sample the concert’s fare.

Just not in the OR.

3. Independence. Friday was Independence Day, the Fourth of July, edition 249. On Saturday the United States began “turning 250”. Long-time readers (both of you) will get the reference to one of my better pieces from yesteryear “The Hard Turn at Mile Marker 49”. I struggled mightily with the whole “turning 50” thing over what turned out to be a rather trivial, buried aspiration first verbalized in my early 40’s. Still, with the perception of a fraught world, or at least a fraught U.S., I do wonder if 250 might be kinda like my 50.

But with the help of social media, Twitter/X in particular, I went back and took a look at what was going on hereabouts in 1975-6, the Bicentennial year when the country turned 200. As an aside, although I’ve read it dozens of times, I simply can’t remember the proper word for 250 year anniversary. No matter. The point, of course, is that the American society was aflame back then, too. So much so that you didn’t need SM to hear about it. Riots. Occupation of buildings in colleges and universities. The “Sexual Revolution” was in full swing (sorry). Unbeknownst to most everyone, the most important man in government was soon to be confirmed as the head of the Federal Reserve and would battle crazy inflation.

Deja vu all over again, eh?

My response? I’m gonna re-read the Declaration of Independence along with an academic treatise on its writers and its creation courtesy of my College email thread buddy Mayday, who spent his career under cover in the service of country and countrymen. I will endeavor to seek the good in every person I encounter, and I will offer them whatever there is in me that is good. Citizenship one-on-one and one-by-one.

It’s the least any of us can do.

4. Power. How do you take your water sports? Specifically when it comes to powering your movements on the water. Each year around this time Beth and I are reminded that we aren’t really boaters, despite the fact that we own a perfectly functional antique Boston Whaler. In fact it is this very same Whaler, christened “Jet Ski” by Beth to win a discussion about the possible acquisition of Jet Skis for the grandchildren (“There. Now we have a Jet Ski!”) that does the reminding. Every boat takes a certain amount of care and feeding to remain seaworthy.

Each year we find ourselves struggling to get an unsinkable boat afloat.

This is perhaps because we are both at heart “self-powered” water people both raised with a healthy dose of the Atlantic Ocean sans outboard assistance. For years now we have primarily played in all manner of water with toys that require people-powered propulsion. Paddle-boards, kayaks, and boogie boards to harness the surf. Accompanied by one of our growing families we spent 4 1/2 hours in our liquid playground, moving about using ourselves as the power plant. For sure you can do all kinds of stuff to tire out a gaggle of family members with a boat and stuff that floats, but there seems to be a different kind of satisfaction that comes with the exhaustion earned through a paddle.

I do confess to a deep curiosity about wind, though.

5. Upbringing. Is it nature or is it nurture? The hardware you received at conception or the software that was downloaded by your parents, other family members, friends, and others? The answer has to be “yes” of course. My daughter is a behavioral therapist with a special interest in very young children with various degrees of autism. When she is introduced and this comes up she is often queried about parenting and raising children. Megan is kind and gracious and by all accounts she maneuvers through these minefields as one would expect from such a lovely person.

I was casually eavesdropping while Megan and Beth were chatting about one of these conversations. A couple of hours later Beth and I got to talking about parenting, a very long conversation that we have been having for at least 30 years. If you know us at all you are now doing some math and discovering that our first born, Dan, was born 30-SEVEN years ago, and indeed, it was during those first 7 years of his young life that we discovered just how different our parents approached the child raising thing, as evidenced by how we instinctually reacted so differently to various scenarios and challenges.

For all of the differences between our families there are some very significant things or hardware both families have in common. For example, both of our Moms are the children of parents who both went to college, while our Dads were the first members of their families to do so. Our Dads both went on to get advanced degrees. Each marriage lasted for their entire lives, and both couples lived to see their children graduate from college, marry, and raise children of their own. The hardware seems fairly similar, and one might think that “nature” might prevail.

If we dig deeper, though, we discover that our families grew up with a very significant, fundamental difference in how parenting was carried out. There were rules in my family that were followed because they were the rules. Not unlike your favorite board game or if you favor a bit more intellectual example, chess. You wouldn’t dream of moving your castle along a diagonal in chess or fail to pay your “rent” on Boardwalk in Monopoly because, you know, rules.

There were certainly rules in Beth’s house growing up. My perception is that they likely had a similar number of rules as we did, certainly when it came to safety and “proper” social behavior. What seemed different as it became obvious to us as young parents that we were coming at the nuts and bolts of parenting from almost different poles, is that my parents were content to disclose the rules while Beth’s parents were interested in their three kids understanding the “why” behind most rules (don’t push your sister down the stairs really didn’t need an answer to “why”).

While listening to Beth and Megan I heard a word that I have to admit has been a little slippery for me; I’ve not really grasped how “validation” works in parenting until yesterday, but in a nutshell it explains the difference between how Beth and I were raised. In context, validation seems to mean that a parent acknowledges unhappiness in a child who must follow a rule or an order, accepts their unhappiness on its face, and nonetheless follows through with that rule while perhaps explaining a “why”. As a young parent I simply could not have been more of a “them’s the rules” guy. Watching Beth parent our kids and offer guidance to our grandchildren is to see a master’s class in validation.

So I guess I’m in the “nurture” camp on this one. Absent conscious premeditation and purposeful work prior to being handed that first baby, how you were raised is likely the default setting for your initial parenting style. It is certainly not destiny. Like a software update or new operating system installation it is possible to take the better parts of how you were raised and add in what you learn as you are in the act of parenting your own. Like a pitcher learning a new way to throw a fastball I can now identify feelings that come to the surface when a rule has to be followed, acknowledge them in a way that makes it clear that I am hearing the feelings, and to explain that sometimes we just have to follow the rules even if we are unhappy. Perhaps it’s simple: you have to take a shower because you were in the lake all day.

Sometimes it’s a little more complex and the “feels” are a lot bigger: I know you are unhappy about “this” but no, you can’t run away from home. Everybody there loves you.

I’ll see you next week…