One of the local towns had a parade this weekend to kickoff the Christmas season. Cheerily titled “The Holiday Dazzle Light Parade” I’ve dutifully watched it from the sidelines for the past several years. I say “dutifully” because of all the things I’d like to be doing, parade watching it way down there on the list. Actually, it might not even be on the list.
But that’s just me.
The Wife has a much different view of parades, as do both of the kids putting my firmly in the minority on the matter. Thus, each year I do my duty.
Being the Cub Master for our Cub Scout Pack, I got a different view of the parade this year. I marched in it along side the boy. Or, I should say, with the boy. He was handing out candy initially and, when he exhausted his supply, he rode on the float that a couple of Moms in the Pack put together for the occasion.
The different view was an improvement over the prior one, since, give the choice, I’d rather be doing something and walking the parade route, monitoring kids definitely counts as something.
But it also gave me a chance to realize something that I think every parent knows, but finds it difficult to put into practice. We want to expose kids to different experiences. But those experiences are often filtered through the ones that we, the parents as people, prefer thereby denying a lot of different opportunities or experiences to our kids. Given a choice between a parade and, say, a day of woodworking, for me, there is no choice. Give me the wood and saw any day of the week and twice on Sunday.
I think it’s largely natural for us (parents) to do this. Our most stretched resource is time and given a choice most of us would rather spend it doing something we enjoy that we can share with our kids. Thus, family traditions are propagated down through the generations. Also, I’ve found that as a parent there kind of a “stride” that we hit or a rhythm to our life where we rotate through a set of activities that are all similar but different. Striking out and doing something really different just doesn’t come to mind.
It’s easy to forget that, even though they’re our kids, they are not us. While they’ll likely enjoy the stuff we choose to do with them, there’s little reasons to suspect that they won’t enjoy other things that we might never think to do, like participate in a parade. The boy had a blast doing it and I suspect he’ll want to do it again next year.
And that will be fine. Even with admitting I had some fun this year, I still don’t particularly care for parades; but that doesn’t mean the boy has to.