Entertaining everyone. . . even the dog

Recently Judy commented that Carly, our six-year-old dog, seemed depressed.  The symptoms?  She wasn’t smiling, wagging her tail as vigorously, and appeared lethargic.

Beyond marveling at Judy’s insight into canine nonverbals, I couldn’t help but wonder at where we’ve arrived.  When I was young (I’m now old enough to say that), my parents didn’t worry about the emotional stability of dogs.  They didn’t even feel compelled to entertain their own offspring 24/7.  Now that's not to say they were disengaged as parents, just that the expectations were different.

For some reason parents today feel that they’ve got to entertain everyone. . . even the dog.  I realize that we live in a world with different concerns and seemingly different pressures, but think about it – if I had been abducted on a summer day as a child, my parents wouldn’t have even thought about looking for me for several hours; not until they rang the cowbell to tell us it was time to come home for dinner.  Today we have to know where our children are at every moment and if we feel we’ve lost touch we can text them, call them, track them (with GPS-enabled devices for parents), Facebook them (not sure if that is a verb), and so on.

I do believe (and have said many times) that you cannot schedule quality time with your children.  Quality time grows out of quantity.  I do believe it is responsible to know where your children are going, with whom, for how long, and what they will be doing.

What I don’t believe is that parents are responsible for entertaining their children and making sure they never experience boredom.  Boredom is not the end of your child’s world.  Some experts on child-rearing contend that parents should not intervene every time there is conflict among children because part of that experience is learning how to handle conflict, especially since there won’t always be someone to step in and end it (notice I don’t say “resolve it” because many interventions have little to do with resolution of the issues, they are more about quieting the participants).  Similarly, I would contend that we don’t need to step in each time our child is bored.  Letting children learn how to entertain themselves (appropriately) is a life-skill.  There won’t always be someone to step in and entertain them.

In the movie Breaking Away, the father of the main character – a young man moving from high school to college – is upset that his son isn’t working with him at the used-car lot.  His reasoning: "He's never tired. He's never miserable. When I was young I was tired and miserable!"  So, in that spirit I say: “They’re never bored.  They’re never without entertainment.  When I was young I was bored and had to create my own entertainment.”

I’m not calling for parents to be unengaged and disinterested in their children’s lives, I’m just making the observation that when you’re worried about the emotional states of your pet, you may have succumbed to the unreasonable expectation that you’re required to entertain everyone. . . even the dog.

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