fb-pixelHow do you tell your kids about your not-so-savory past? - The Boston Globe Skip to main content
PARENTING

How do you tell your kids about your not-so-savory past?

Shutterstock

Q. When I was a freshman in college, I got blind drunk, damaged some property, got arrested, and the school kicked me out. I put my life together eventually, but I’ve never told my kids about what happened. My daughter is 10 and my son is 13. I’ve got other secrets too (we all do, right?). I guess I’m asking when, and how, do you reveal your complicated past to your kids?

KATHY: I’ll start my answer by remembering when I was the kid in this scenario. We’re talking fingerling potatoes here, but when I was 8, I spied some paperwork that revealed that my mother was born four years before my dad. I’d always been told they were the same age; my mother was very proper, and marrying a younger man was deemed inappropriate, thus the lie. It shocked me to my core, though — what else didn’t I know? She was dismayed that I was so upset, but parental lies — outright, or of omission — feel especially big when you’re small.

Advertisement



As an adult, I respect we all need privacy. But as a parent, I think we owe our children more and more transparency as they get older. Partly, it’s because secrecy corrodes family relationships over time. Partly, because they need to know about our big mistakes, to realize that we’ve all made them, and to begin the process of seeing us as people, not parents. This can be excruciating; we try to be role models for our kids, and then we have to take a deep breath, and admit the inherent hypocrisy here. I’m not proud of my behavior with various old boyfriends, for instance, but as my daughter approaches dating age, I’m becoming more frank about this. My hoped-for payoff? She’ll make her own mistakes, but maybe think twice about repeating mine.

JEFF: And then there are the secrets that we don’t even consider mistakes, but which intermingle our “complicated past” with our nuanced present. A year ago, when I was issued a medical marijuana card, my wife wanted me to keep it hush-hush around the kids. I understood where she was coming from — pot had been illegal and stigmatized all our lives, so rethinking it as akin to a CVS prescription takes some getting used to. But my instinct tends toward normalizing (not to be confused with NORML-izing), so one day while we were driving past the new dispensary in town, I casually pointed out to my 13-year-old that that’s where I go for help treating my gout.

Advertisement



Yeah, I get an occasional “heh-heh, 420, Dad” from my boy — he’s a teen, what can I say? — but here’s the big-picture consequence of my very much downplayed revelation: It has opened the door for an ongoing conversation about drugs that I knew I had to have with my son but wasn’t quite sure how to initiate. And it has broadened his perspective beyond the stoner stereotypes he’s fed by our reductive popular culture.

By flipping the light switch to give the kid a glimpse at a part of my life he might have expected to be secretive, I feel like I’m demystifying one of the shadowy halls of passage he’s just now beginning to navigate.

KATHY: So you’re saying it’s a joint effort, Jeff? No, seriously, I’m with you about the surprising benefits here. To the questioner, I say tell the 13-year-old outright: drinking and college are not that far away, and he needs to know that childish behavior will soon have adult consequences. I’d tell the 10-year-old too — but separately because you don’t want your son to badly translate the message to his younger sister. And I’d couch it all by saying that every single adult has done something dumb or regretful, and here’s a big one on my list. Most importantly, I’d say how this changed the course of your life, for better or worse.

Advertisement



As with any revelation, measure it out carefully. My husband and I were both engaged to other people before we got married. Our kids know this, but they haven’t probed us about what happened. I’m resolved to be up front when they do; my own parents never talked about things like that, and I think that left me unprepared, in some ways, for handling certain relationships. The danger is giving TMI not FYI, but I lean toward erring on the side of oversharing.

JEFF: To me, it’s not so much the message as the delivery. Dropping knowledge when it organically fits into a conversation with my son or daughter works better, in my experience, than sitting one of them down for The Conversation. To cite an example, I’ll go Kathy one step further on her upcoming reveal: I wasn’t just engaged but was married before. I’ve never hidden this from the children, but it was only recently that one of my offhand references got a rise out of them. All of a sudden, they were ready to try wrapping their brains around the concept that there was a wife in Dad’s life before Mom.

Advertisement



Now, my ex and I have no kids and are not in touch, so this little shake-up is something my kids can just file away — as if, like them, I have a dusty box of school artwork sitting in the attic.

It’s no big deal because I didn’t present it to their impressionable minds as if it were.

That allowed them to let it sink in when they were ready. And speaking of being ready, I’ll rely on this same laid-back approach, I’m sure, when I’m ready to come clean about my own college partying foibles. If you’re reading this, kids, let’s just say for now that I made it through all four years.


Jeff Wagenheim and Katharine Whittemore were founding editors at the parenting magazine Wondertime. Whittemore now writes the “Four Takes” book review column for the Globe. Wagenheim writes about sports for the Globe and the Washington Post. Send parenting questions to parenting.globe@
gmail.com
.