Quiet Comfort
Quiet Comfort: 15 February 2024
On the drive to get his braces off this morning, I told Jack that I’d removed TikTok from my phone. I didn’t intend it as a Lenten practice, but the timing is right, and 40 days seems like a good hiatus. I want to salvage my attention span, and the easy dopamine hit of scrolling wasn’t helping at all. I need to retrain my discipline of sticking with a hard task, like writing an essay on deadline. I also want to reclaim the pleasure of reading a book without self-imposed interruptions.
I told Jack about it because I wanted to ask about his TikTok and social media habits. As Emma’s sustained campaign for connection approaches success, I’m even more interested in technology/social media and how parents decide how much and when and under what circumstances. Jack has handled having a phone really well, but I also made him wait a lot longer. And Jack is more of a watcher, whereas Emma is more of an engager. Pros and cons to each, of course.
Dr. Lisa Damour offered, as she often does, a helpful and nuanced approach to social media in a recent podcast episode. We are balancing the threat of algorithms and potentially awful content for kids who have devices against the threat of social isolation for kids forbidden access. Not to mention that each child is different, with his/her own set of frailties, interests, resiliencies, and fears. It’s a difficult needle to thread. And it's more like a series of needles. On a roller coaster.
That was another great episode—riding the tween/teen emotional roller coaster. My daughter can express huge emotions about a horrible situation that happened at school but have no idea what I’m talking about when I check in with her about it the next day. School and friends can be a mire of complexity with peak good and bad emotions following on each other’s heels and then replaced in the rapid-fire churning of adolescence.
For situations that linger, Dr. Lisa offered this framing: sometimes things can be real but not true. That is, the emotion and the actions are real for the child—he really feels that this situation is awful, and he’s stuck in the quicksand of no right response. But a teen’s emotional read of a situation may not be the truth of what occurred. Checking in with a teacher might lend a completely different explanation of the situation. Talking with the other parent after a tween confrontation might provide a different lens on what happened. And yet, for our child, the situation and the emotions are real.
The parent’s job is to help kids gauge what truly happened and how to respond. Ideally, we offer support and comfort while acknowledging the fact that life is hard and can be unfair. We want to help kids engage fully with life, but also to be wary; help them not run away from big emotions, but not to succumb to them either.
The parents’ impossible job is to help kids develop perspective and empathy. With unconditional love. While threading our own emotional needles. On our own roller coasters. After our own long day. With no ideas for supper.
And that, I think, is why change is so hard. We’re barely hanging on as it is, and now we have to rethink gender? Or what we think about Russia? Or immigration, or guns, or abortion?
It’s too much, and it’s too fast. And the way we’re fed the situations in our silos, they feel urgent and really really real. But we forget that they might not be true. Things are always more nuanced than the way they are presented. Especially as presented by people who have a lot to gain from keeping us scared—or at least skeptical—of one another.
I am dismayed by the human frailty for absolutism, for either/or. In everything that is truly important and beautiful, the mystery and the ambiguity are the tantalizing breadcrumbs that lead us closer to the truth. God, governance, love, physics, biological processes, pheromones, the fact that bees can fly, human kindness—all the best stuff is impossible to grasp yet enchanting to behold. Mysteries remain because the universe is bigger/greater/more spacious/beyond human understanding. It’s beguiling.
But here we are in this divisive political moment. And I’m torn by how to talk with my children about navigating it. I believe both of these statements:
1) “In some circumstances, the refusal to be defeated is a refusal to be educated.” --Margaret Halsey
2) “It has always seemed to me that the test of integrity is its blunt refusal to be compromised.” -- Chinua Achebe
It's hard to grow towards common good as an electorate if we refuse ever to be wrong, or that there’s more to a situation than we first thought, or we decry experts as partisan instead of as deeply knowledgeable in their chosen field (and that they might be wrong, and that their chosen field of expertise may not lend itself to accurate explanations about other fields…). But we also need backbone and integrity.
Currently there’s a very low tolerance for mistakes, for changing one’s mind with more information, for growing in our understanding. Sadly, change is taken for weakness these days. And far too often in this election year, the goal won’t be the good of the commonwealth, the goal will be the downfall of the other side. Facts only get in the way,
So here we are with our own set of frailties, interests, resiliencies, and fears. On our silo-ed emotional roller coasters, where everything seems an urgent blur of real.
Who will help us navigate?
As I was preparing to write this essay I received the obituary of a lovely Presbyterian pastor, the Rev. Dr. Fitzhugh Legerton, who spent most of his career in the Atlanta area. I regret that, even though he retired to Montreat, I never met him. Among his other ministerial acts, Fitz wrote occasional newspaper columns, and this excerpt seems perfectly to summarize the frustratingly beautiful way that God enters into human endeavors—as a source of consolation and of challenge.
“God does not coddle us when he comforts us. Nor is God’s comfort an anaesthetic that dulls us to pain. It is no spiritual sedative, no paregoric: such would not only dull us to pain, but also to joy. The word “comfort” means “with strength.” God gives us …strength to …bear the burden or meet the challenge….Life loses its tyrannies—fear, worry, responsibility—and we face it with a quiet comfort.”
May it be so.
