Kids needs borders. They need rules. They need a framework of how to approach the world, because the world, to them, is a big, loud, and often scary place.
Kids thrive in routine.
Which is why the holidays can be so extraordinarily difficult for parents with little kids. Because holidays take the routines and the borders and the schedules that we as parents so carefully curate and they throw them in the fucking incinerator.
To wit, this week, we sadly have to forego heading to the beach with my dad and my sister and her family (whose three kids our son absolutely adores) where they’ll be celebrating Thanksgiving, as the little town on the southern coast of North Carolina where they’re heading doesn’t offer much by way of distraction. Which is to say, there’s nothing to do. Which is to say we won’t be able to give our son any kind of routine or schedule or activity beyond going to the same playground that is a fifteen-minute drive away.
The beach house is amazing in the summer, as it’s nestled into a little nook of a barrier island, one block from the beach and one block from the bay on either side. But in the winter, it offers a whole lot of hanging out and little else.
And the idea of bringing our three-and-a-half year old nearly four hours away for a few days of lounging in a deserted beach town is setting him up to fail.
One of the core functions Emily and I try to approach all of our parenting is through the lens of setting our children up for success.
And I don’t mean in the macro sense, in which we help them build a good foundation for which they can lead happy and personally fulfilling lives (though, of course, we’re trying to do that, too).
For us, setting our kids up for success happens on a micro level, each and every day.
Going to a nice-ish restaurant with our son?
We’re setting him up to fail. Because those places aren’t built for kids and he’s a kid and what he’s going to do is nothing that is in anyway wrong but it’s still going to result in no one having a good time.
Taking our son to a loud and boisterous pizza parlor when mom and dad crave a dinner out?
That’s setting our kid up for success. He can run around a bit without disturbing anyone. He can (and inevitably will) spill a soda and we can just wipe the formica table top. No harm. No foul.
Virtually every single thing we do with our son, and soon, our daughter, is subject to the question, “Is this setting him up to succeed?”
And so we decided that taking our son to a featureless beach town in the middle of winter would be setting our son up to fail.
Thanksgiving is a bit of a dry run for the big one.
That is, Christmas break, when our son’s preschool is closed for a whopping fourteen days.
At some point next week, Emily and I are going to sit down and map out a day-by-day schedule of those fourteen long days, each broken down into two sections: pre- and post-nap.
From sunup (and usually before) to sundown, we have to make sure that our days are full of activities, all wedged around a do-or-die nap in the middle of the afternoon. It’ll be one long blur of a seemingly endless weekend, because, as Emily recently said, the holidays are weekends on steroids.
We’ll take a day trip to the zoo, spend a morning at the Museum of Life and Science and an afternoon riding bikes up and down the American Tobacco Trail, and may even go to the mountains for a day and a night. We’ll go to the movies and pick a different playground every day. We’ll visit as many children’s museums as we can find.
But whatever we do, it will be mapped out far in advance and dialed in to the hour, in our best effort to set our son up to succeed. Because kids need borders. And when kids don’t have borders, their parents had better fucking create some.
Have a wonderful Thanksgiving, friends.