My daughter chose Margaret Mead for her biography museum project. She was ten. She stood at her poster in her white blouse and read aloud: ‘Never doubt that a thoughtful, committed group of citizens can change the world — indeed it is the only thing that ever has.’

I posted a photo and went home and sat with it for a while.

She had chosen a woman who spent her life observing how people become who they are — and insisting that the becoming could be different. Who looked at her own species without flinching and reported back. My daughter, at ten, chose her specifically. And I thought: she already knows something I had to learn much later. Also, I couldn’t help thinking about how we nailed the outfit. 

There’s a list I’ve been building for years, without meaning to. Things I give my kids that I didn’t have. Not material things — the list isn’t about stuff. It’s about specific textures of childhood that I’ve been quietly, deliberately, sometimes clumsily providing.

The permission to be defiant. Not reckless — defiant. My daughter pushes back. She always has. She’s spunky and brave and caring, as I have described her since she was small, and she argues with me when she thinks I’m wrong. I wasn’t told directly this quality in a girl was a problem– but on an individual basis, it certainly caused me problems.
I tell her I hear talking back as information. I tell her the version of herself that knows her own mind is the version I want to meet when she’s thirty. I tolerate degrees of sass that others question; the worst hypocrisy I can imagine is answering myself coming out of her mouth to demand respect as a display for someone else. YEAH RIGHT. Talk back, girl. And you don’t ever have to hug anyone. You know how hard it is to follow that rule– myself– I don’t make her give me hugs? I miss her hugs sometimes but when I get one now and then I know how much it means.
She’s going to disagree with people in positions of authority who deserve to be disagreed with, and she’s going to need to know how to do it without apologizing for the impulse. Respect for how we live and interact, not reactive or punitive to the moody words she baits my ego with—that’s what I’m modeling, and I intend to see it through. 

The explicit acknowledgment. My son needs to be seen. I know this about him the way I know things I had to learn about myself too late — that the need for someone to name what you did, specifically, out loud, is not vanity. It’s how some people receive love. He gets the specific praise. The named accomplishment. Not always — I’m not a saint and sometimes when the accomplishments are in a video game, it’s hard to understand  — but consistently enough that he knows I’m watching. That his particular kind of effort registers. I can’t pretend I’m not grateful Jake doesn’t talk back. I am also so grateful that he will talk about his thoughts and world with me. That’s what I’ve worked to earn. 

The honest conversation about the hard thing. Not every detail, not age-inappropriately, but the real answer when they ask a real question. They know our family has a history. They know grown-up relationships are complicated. They know I made mistakes and had to figure things out. They know I’m still figuring things out. I would rather they trust me with the actual questions than learn that the actual questions are off-limits. The biggest compliment I ever received from Jake was about how talking with me helps him with how to think not just what to think. It’s not unrelated.

I didn’t get everything I needed as a kid. Most people didn’t. The parents who did give us everything we needed were doing the work of correcting for what they didn’t get — and most of them were doing it without a roadmap, the same as the rest of us.

The things I give my kids that I didn’t get aren’t dramatic. They don’t require a better income or a bigger house or a complete rewrite of my personality. They require noticing — noticing what was missing from my own childhood and making the specific, boring, repeated choice to provide it differently.

The greatest inheritance we can give our kids is our time. No, that’s not quite right either. The greatest inheritance is our honesty about what the time was for.

My daughter chose Margaret Mead. The woman who looked at people and told the truth about what she saw.

I like to think she’s been watching me do some version of that. And it feels like both kids are on track to end up doing it even better.