For Them and for Us

October 1, 2020

Parenting is, fundamentally, a sales job.

If you're trying to get someone to follow your lead, you have only two choices: You can either order them or persuade them. I personally was one of those kids who loathed being ordered to do stuff; even when I was very young, I resisted "because I said so" with all my heart and soul, even if my outrage was all internal. I remember vowing never to say that when I had my own kids someday.

So here's a slight correction to my earlier statement: Parenting is either a sales job OR a dictatorship, and we parents make that choice both globally and in each instance we need kids to do what we ask.

Sometimes being a dictator "works" in a snap moment. But there's a difference between working in the short term and in the long haul. And during the long haul that is COVID, parents everywhere are discovering that an "or else" attitude to parenting just doesn't work: There's no way simply to order kids to jump happily into self-education, or navigate the pain of missing their friends or extracurricular activities or trick-or-treating.

This leaves us parents no option but to sell our kids on the COVID experience, to help paint a picture of persistence, of new ways of approaching activities, of learning for the sake of their own futures. It sounds hard, and it is hard: Even during the best of times, sales requires a lot more time, energy, planning, and creativity than a dictatorship. But there's a lot more at stake here than usual, not least of which is that we're very conscious of how we want our kids to look back at this time. And that's helping people summon their very best selves as we all manage it together.

And what we're finding, as we provide facts, as we persuade our families of what we need to accomplish in order to get through this successfully, is that at the same time that we're selling our kids on this experience, we're also selling ourselves. When we show our kids how to manage with all the masks and hand sanitizer and social distancing and remote learning, when we show them the mostly-successfully-flattened curves, we're painting a picture of why and how it's going to turn out okay... for them, sure, but for us, too.