An airport, a three hour delay and the loveliest parenting I've seen in a while.

That looks like a lantern, but it's actually
 the picture of of a young teen's parent

Recently, I got stuck at the airport waiting for a plane which was being treated for mechanical failure, thank you very much. Hour by hour, the flight was delayed into the later part of the day.

I’m the only person I know who really doesn’t mind this kind of wrinkle. I use the time to watch how people talk to each other, and handle the unexpected. 

They say it is a test of character to be faced with tangled Christmas lights, an unexpected rainy day, or lost luggage.

I would add: knowing you may be boarding an aircraft that is currently undergoing plane surgery, three hours late, with a small child who badly needs the nap that was supposed to come with that plane and now has no choice but to fall apart.

Any parent who is still soft-spoken and patient with a child after all of that is a person who can probably handle anything.

One mother took out her ponytail and asked her very little boy to help her fix it. It took forever, and that mother is a genius.

It is the way of a young child’s world to expect a parent to be bigger and stronger when they are small and messy.  And here is where good parents understand their truest power – that responding with only the strength of their presence may not feel like enough, but usually is.

And while this stage may be exhausting, it doesn’t last forever. In no time, they're in the middle-school tunnel and our role is no longer about keeping them busy, but being the lantern hanging at the other end.  

Note to parents of toddlers: there actually is something harder than answering eight or nine questions a minute from your child when you’re tired, and it is silence when you’re worried. 

I run a small support group with young children who are often struggling to understand their family lives while they navigate their own. Despite what hardship might challenge them, what I hear all the time is “My mom said,” or “When I told my dad…” because bigger and stronger is in the eye of the smaller and messier. 

Bigger and stronger is about someone who respects their child's world, even if they also must expose that child to a more complicated one they don’t understand.

If there can be only one thing that we do every moment of a child’s life, it should be that - to think about their world as much as we expect them to think about ours. 

Later, when children are off the grid collecting themselves, will be when this matters most. Because, what helps keep kids upright is the known – not hoped or wished or longed for, but known – presence of a person to whom they know they can say anything, and around whom they can fall apart safely.  They may know all of this in silence but then, they'll say to someone like me,  "Well, my dad said that I should..."

Note to parents of teens who answer questions with facial expressions: it’s still easier to be you.

Putting aside the outliers for a moment – parents who are abusive, living through their kids,  narcissistic or addicted – it becomes truer with every too-mature child I meet, that the best parents can possess the least, and still give the most if they can do that – separate those worlds, and visit the smaller messier one, often.

Maybe with a ponytail to fix together.