… and asking you for permission beforehand?
 | By Indrani Sen Culture Editor, Opinion |
At a weeknight family dinner in March, the journalist Matt Gross's 13-year-old daughter, Sasha, asked her parents for permission to skip school. |
Matt and his wife told her no, as he wrote in a guest essay: "You just can't. Not allowed. Nope!" But then he offered his daughter a bit of unsolicited advice: |
Next time you want to skip school, don't tell your parents. Just go. Browse vintage stores, eat your favorite snack (onigiri), lie on your back in Prospect Park and stare at the clouds. Isn't that the point of skipping school, after all? To sneak around, to steal time and space back from the arbitrary system that enfolds you? To hell with permission! That's being a teenager — carving out a private life for yourself under the noses of the authority figures who surround you. |
I'm a little in awe of Matt's parental grace. The ways in which my 6- and 9-year-old boys have asserted their independence have been relatively tame so far: their refusal to get haircuts, resulting in shaggy mops of hair that they're perennially "growing out"; the little one's insistence on wearing a beige silk necktie over a pajama top to school; the big one's love for video games where a lot of bashing and biffing happens. |
Bigger provocations are surely ahead, and remembering some of the risky and ridiculous things I did as a teenager, I worry that I won't show the restraint that Matt counsels. But I hope I will be able to trust my children's judgment. I agree wholeheartedly with Matt when he says, "I want them to navigate this huge, messy planet on their own, when they're old enough to — and be ready for things not to go their way." |
Still, I couldn't help but giggle when I got the following text messages from Matt, after his essay was written and edited: |
Matt may not have expected or wanted Sasha to take his advice quite so soon. But as he suggests in his essay, our children will not — should not — always do what we want them to do, what we think is good for them. They are, he writes, "not precious innocents to be culturally cocooned, but thinking, feeling, increasingly independent human beings who are busy making up their own minds." |
I asked Matt whether he was angry with Sasha when she told him she'd skipped school. "Not at all," he replied. "In fact, I don't know if I believe her. Which is kinda cool in a way. She has her own mysteries." |
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