The Things I Can’t Protect Them From

My oldest daughter got a scooter for her birthday.

Like most things designed for children, it seems to have been engineered to produce equal parts joy and parental anxiety. She gets on it and wants to go faster. I watch her and immediately notice every crack in the pavement, every uneven patch of concrete, every place the front wheel could catch and send her forward.

I want her to have fun.

I also want her not to fall.

Those two things are not entirely compatible.

I can put a helmet on her. I can teach her how to stop. I can keep her away from traffic and make sure she rides somewhere reasonably safe. I can remind her to slow down when she gets reckless.

But at some point, if I actually want her to learn to ride the scooter, I have to let her ride it.

And riding it means she might fall.

I’ve been thinking about that more broadly lately.

I think of myself as a protector. Not only of my daughters, but of my family. It is one of the responsibilities of being a husband and father that I feel most deeply. I want my wife and daughters to be safe. I want to take care of them. I want to put myself between them and the things that might hurt them.

When my daughters were babies, that responsibility felt relatively straightforward.

Cover the outlets. Buckle the car seat. Lock the doors. Hold their hands near the street. Keep dangerous things out of reach.

The world was smaller then, and I could control more of it.

But children grow.

And the things capable of hurting them become harder to keep behind locked doors.

Recently, my mother and stepfather came to town around my oldest daughter’s birthday. They didn't attend her birthday party, and she was sad.

Watching your child hurt because of another person creates a different kind of parental instinct.

There was nothing for me to buckle. No helmet to put on her. No hand to grab before she stepped into the street.

Someone she cared about had disappointed her.

And I found myself confronting a question that I suspect will become more difficult as my daughters get older:

What exactly am I supposed to protect them from?

My first instinct is an expansive one.

Everything.

I want to keep people around them who love them well and keep away the people who might hurt them. I want to prevent the rejection, disappointment, betrayal, cruelty, and heartbreak I know exist beyond the walls of our home.

I know enough about people to know what the world can do to them.

I also know enough about children to understand that protecting them from all of it would come at a cost.

Because I want resilient daughters.

I want them to be able to tolerate distress. I want them to recover from disappointment. I want them to trust themselves when something goes wrong. I want them to recognize when someone is treating them poorly and have enough confidence to respond. I want them to take risks, try difficult things, fail sometimes, and discover that failure does not destroy them.

And none of those capacities can be developed in a life from which every uncomfortable experience has been removed.

You cannot learn to tolerate distress without being distressed.

You cannot discover that you can recover without having something to recover from.

You cannot develop confidence in your ability to navigate difficult people if someone else has always cleared them from your path.

That creates an uncomfortable paradox for parents.

Some pain is dangerous. Some pain is developmental. And part of parenting is trying to tell the difference.

There are things I will protect my daughters from without hesitation.

There are people who should not have access to children. There are environments children are not equipped to navigate. There are risks whose consequences far outweigh whatever lesson might be learned from experiencing them.

Protection matters.

Boundaries matter.

Sometimes love absolutely requires standing between your child and something that can hurt them.

But not everything that hurts a child is harmful.

Disappointment hurts.

Losing hurts.

Being left out hurts.

Falling down hurts.

Hearing no hurts.

Trying something and discovering you aren't good at it hurts.

Realizing that someone you love will not always show up the way you hoped they would hurts.

I cannot eliminate those experiences from my daughters’ lives.

More importantly, I’m beginning to realize that I shouldn't.

The challenge is figuring out where protection ends and preparation begins.

There is a version of protection that says, I will make sure nothing ever hurts you.

There is another that says, I will help you become someone who knows what to do when something does.

The first is incredibly appealing to me as a father.

The second is probably much closer to what my daughters actually need.

Because eventually they will move through parts of the world where I cannot walk ahead of them.

There will be classrooms I am not in. Friendships I cannot manage. Relationships I cannot control. Decisions I cannot make for them. People whose intentions I cannot screen before they enter their lives.

Someone will eventually say something cruel to one of my daughters before I can stop them.

Someone will disappoint her.

Someone may break her heart.

And when those things happen, my ability to protect her will depend less on whether I can remove the source of every painful experience and more on what she has learned about herself before it happens.

Does she know that someone else's rejection does not determine her worth?

Does she trust her own discomfort when something feels wrong?

Does she know she is allowed to set boundaries?

Can she distinguish between someone making a mistake and someone establishing a pattern?

Can she tolerate being sad without becoming frightened by her sadness?

Does she know she can come home?

That last one matters to me.

Because perhaps one of the greatest forms of protection I can give my daughters is not a world in which nothing painful reaches them.

It is a home in which they never have to make sense of that pain alone.

When someone disappoints my daughter, I don't necessarily need to erase the disappointment. I may need to help her understand it.

I can let her be sad.

I can listen.

I can help her put words to what happened without telling her what she is supposed to feel about the person who caused it.

And I can make sure she understands something children do not always understand on their own:

Someone failing to show up for you does not mean you weren't worth showing up for.

That is protection too.

Maybe a more durable kind.

I suspect this is one of the harder transitions of fatherhood.

When my daughters were little, protecting them mostly meant controlling what reached them.

As they grow, it will increasingly mean preparing them for what I cannot control.

I don't particularly like that arrangement.

There is a part of me that would happily walk several steps ahead of my daughters for the rest of their lives, removing every sharp edge before they reach it.

But then I think about the scooter.

If I held onto it the entire time, she probably wouldn't fall.

She also wouldn't really learn to ride.

So I put the helmet on her.

I show her how to stop.

I tell her where she can ride and where she can't.

I watch for the dangers she isn't old enough to recognize.

And then I do something that feels strangely inconsistent with my responsibility to protect her.

I let go.

She rides farther away from me.

I watch more closely than she knows.

And if she falls, I am there.

Maybe that is what protecting my daughters will increasingly require of me: the judgment to know which dangers I should never allow near them, the restraint to let them encounter the difficulties they need in order to grow, and the steadiness to be there when something hurts despite everything I did to prepare them.

I cannot make sure they never fall.

I can give them a helmet.

I can teach them how to ride.

I can make sure they always know the way home.

And for the things I can't protect them from, I can make damn sure they never have to face them alone.