The headline grabbed my attention: How do you teach kids to be responsible?

My hackles raised as I read through the vertical text from the anonymous writer who was complaining about their adolescent son’s repetitive forgetfulness in packing necessary sports equipment ahead of time, requiring (at least in the teen’s estimation) an abrupt delivery of gear as an emergency. With each unexpected delivery, however, it seemed apparent that the pair’s tolerance of each other’s patience grew increasingly tense.

Naturally, the advisor assumed the parent was the mother and that the teen was a boy-child, and as such spent some dozen or so words explaining how it would not be fair to the teen’s future wife if he expected her to be his sherpa.

The writer then spent a few hundred more words describing all the snarky ways a response would teach the kid a lesson, such as charging a fee for the delivery that would be refunded if the kid could figure out a solution that didn’t require parental involvement.

The writer also helpfully imagined the person’s selfish child yelling, crying, and screaming over the phone and hanging up.

I don’t know why I tend to bristle at such advice.

I recall, at the dawn of the cell phone age, before I became a parent, I passed a similar judgment. I was shopping in a department store when the purse of a woman across the rack from me started ringing. There was a momentary silence after she picked up the phone until she blurted out a complete story of parenthood immemorial in one simple question: “How am I supposed to know where your soccer cleats are in that mess you call a room?”

Back then, I wasn’t judging her or her parenting.

I wasn’t judging the kid, whose voice I hadn’t heard and whose gender I did not guess.

I just wondered: “For this, we need to be reachable at all times? This is progress?”

Today, my phone rang.

It was a child who hadn’t “needed me” to do, or bring, or help with anything in a long time.

This child just wanted to say hello. Hear my voice. Check in.

I should say this is an adult. … Because this adult was once a child who forgot things. This was a child who requested last-minute interventions that I was sure would continue needing my attention forever, and the forgetfulness would persist despite my stern face and evident displeasure as I dutifully delivered whenever humanly possible.

The calls stopped coming.

It didn’t happen overnight, but it certainly seems like it now.

How fast time flies may be a cliché, but it is also an incontrovertible truth.

A part of me thinks my “teachings” were my kids simply figuring out how to deal with their parents, or their friends, or all the other people and things in their lives they couldn’t entirely control.

We tilt at windmills, and cell phones, and adolescent brains. and our mid-life malaise. It doesn’t always work out the way we hoped, but it happens.

Our children grow up.

Time keeps changing us, too.

Experience is the actual teacher. And we are never too old to learn.

Siobhan Connally is a writer and photographer living in the Hudson Valley. Her column about family life appears weekly in print and online.

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