Dear Parents: Go Ahead, Enable.

We’ve learned a lot from you over the course of our lives. It’s true. We’ll be the first ones to admit it. But here’s the thing. Your lessons are most effective when we can see them in action.

How you work with a car salesman to get what you want. A little kid who pretends to help carry the ladder learns what primer is when you’re repainting the living room. When we’re out together, you can look at us with a wise, wry smile and say, “You see that guy over there in the business suit? He didn’t go to the right tailor and now he looks like he’s waiting for the flood.”

We actually like those moments. We seek them out, doing our best to learn as much as we can before we grow up. But when you throw them in our face, we get a little miffed, truth be told. Please, don’t feel like you have to tell us what we’re supposed to take away from a given situation. We’re already taking it in. Your role in these little vignettes of our lives that tell us all we need to know is to be an enabler. That’s the best way to teach us. Not through lectures, not through diatribes or harangues with their sweeping generalizations and well-intentioned but ultimately myopic lessons.

We’re a big-picture generation. Micromanaging each individual situation into a lesson worth teaching is a tiresome and unnecessary task – for everyone. As long as you keep enabling our growth as people, you’re teaching us. You’re showing us not only what the world can be, but what we can be. When we’re allowed to learn for ourselves, we’re much more willing to admit that we don’t know everything. Then, something amazing happens – we let our guard down. We become open to the nuances of the everyday situation. We figure out how to stir our Café Mochas without letting the whipped cream soak in.

We learn how to safeguard our money by watching Bernie Madoff go down in flames. We learn how to deal with driving in a traffic jam, or the best proportions to use to make coffee in the morning (because we all know it’s not 1 tablespoon per liquid cup like they say on the package). These are important lessons that we learned from watching you. That’s right, you taught us even when you weren’t looking.

For so many years, we’ve heard “learn by doing” or “you have to see for yourself.” When we asked you what a word meant, you told us “look it up.” And we did. We are at our best when we are allowed to learn within the context of our own lives and to – to borrow your phrase – “see for ourselves.” We’ve remembered more from the simple moments than we could ever have possibly learned from the lectures. Besides, it’s not like we were listening in the first place.

Image: Ginnerbot