With The Girl’s college graduation next month—and yes, dear reader, you can expect more on that in the coming weeks—it hit me that we’ll be entering a new, less intense phase of parenting soon.
When I started this column back in the ’00s, part of its spirit was the idea that teaching, managing and parenting are remarkably similar: They’re all about helping others emerge into their best selves. The timelines and boundaries are different, but the core idea is the same. The idea behind the Dean Dad pseudonym, which lives on as my column’s email address and my Bluesky handle, was that the skills of deaning and the skills of parenting overlap. The subtext of that, which some folks missed, was that most of what appeared in the popular press about parenting was written by, about and largely for women. Guys needed to step up, and I wanted to narrate one guy’s efforts to do that in hopes of making it just a little more normal for men to address work-life conflicts directly.
Moving from a phase of constant juggling and balancing to one with far less juggling is welcome in some ways. The years in which nearly every evening was spent driving kids to and from baseball, basketball or soccer games were exhausting. Even then, though, I could see personalities taking shape in real time. After a baseball game in which TB didn’t get to play much and his team lost badly, he was uncharacteristically sullen on the ride home. When I asked what was wrong, he said, “It’s hard to just sit there and watch other people suck.” I thought it was brilliant at the time, but it also turned out to be a pretty good indicator of who he would become. He’s the guy who steps up when the situation calls for it. We couldn’t be prouder of him.
The revelatory moment with TG came when TW had the breakthrough idea to get her an indoor tent for Christmas. TG was around seven at the time. TG immediately brought lanterns and flashlights into the tent, along with blankets and a dozen or so books, and made it her spot for the next week. She’d climb in, make herself comfortable, adjust the lighting and start reading. She wouldn’t come out except for food or bathroom breaks.
Eventually we moved the tent upstairs and she perched it on her bed, sleeping under it every night for several months. Next month she’s graduating from the University of Maryland with a 3.9-something GPA in English, with an honors thesis on John Keats’s unsuccessful attempts to transcend the influence of John Milton. Because of course she is.
Neither of them is a clone of either of us. TB has an easygoing sociability that’s all his own and a way of being comfortable nearly anywhere that people notice quickly. He also has a strong moral compass, which is probably his single best trait. He handled adolescence with far more aplomb than I ever did and carries a sort of Gen Z savoir faire that he absolutely did not learn at home. TG somehow balances a take-no-prisoners intellect with enough social grace that people don’t realize what she can do until she laser-beams through a bad argument or a thoughtless comment.
When she was younger, I used to describe her to other adults as being like Lisa Simpson with darker hair. Watching her in debate tournaments was a joy—she’d be charming and courteous while utterly laying waste to the opposition. My biggest challenge in the audience was suppressing snort laughs at her one-liners. Now she balances real kindness and charm with insatiable curiosity and lethal wit. She doesn’t want to be a lawyer, which is a favor to other lawyers. You wouldn’t want to be on the opposite side from her.
TW and I made our mistakes, but I’m glad that we were always aware that it wasn’t our job to raise mini-mes or to force the kids into preset molds. We tried to set the conditions in which they could grow into the best versions of themselves. That’s almost verbatim how I describe my role in administration: The point is to set the background conditions in which people can do their best work. Sometimes they work in ways similar to mine, and sometimes they do things that would never have occurred to me. My role is to make it possible for them to emerge as their best professional selves.
With TG’s graduation, we’ll be entering a new phase of parenting. That’s how it’s supposed to be. They’ve grown into their own, remarkable people. And they still have a cheering section, even if it’s hundreds of miles away.
