Parenting, Happiness, and Mistaking “Sufficient” for “Necessary”

The first thing I remember trying to memorize was “What a Wonderful World.” I was about four. My preschool had us kids perform occasional parent-impressing concerts, and my classmates and I surely must have learned more songs off by heart. But I liked “What a Wonderful World” so much that I went over the lyrics* to myself to make sure I’d always be able to sing it if I wanted to.

As I got older, I “collected” more songs and poems in this fashion. Sometimes I’d copy them down in a notebook just in case. Why? A bit out of fear: what if I needed them? What if I wanted this feeling again and wasn’t able to find it? Surely only this exact constellation of words and/or melody could produce it again!

Likewise, as a preteen and even young adult, I “collected” happy memories. I wanted to write them down, take photos, remember all the particulars. Not just for my own pleasure, which is, I think, healthy, but with a vague idea of being able to recreate the feeling if I needed to.

But of course, recreating happy feelings by reproducing the exact circumstances that first created them doesn’t work. No matter how many times I play the exact same board game with the exact same loved ones, I’ll never recapture the silliness and joy we experienced the first time we tried it. My childhood friends and I might have tried to re-script the best make-believe games we’d improvised once-upon-a-playdate, but we could never re-bottle that lightning the next day or week or month. Actively searching for happiness by any means–expecting it–is one sure-fire way not to find it.

Older and maybe a teensy bit wiser, I understand these things now, though not always enough to avoid trying just in case. But as I navigate new parenthood, I realized I’ve been letting myself fall into a similar trap.

I want my child to grow into a content adult with so many of the benefits I’m lucky to have–values I believe in, strong social connections, tight family ties, knowledge of my religious heritage, and, yes, so many joyful memories. And sometimes, I feel like the only way to make that happen is to make sure my kid experiences some of the same things I did.

I went to religious elementary school, city day camps, and Girl Guides. Surely my child has to too! My kindergarten was Montessori. I learned French and Hebrew as a little kid. I had family Shabbat dinners on Friday nights and went to shul with my parents on the holidays and played soccer in house league.

Not to mention all the smaller things. How can my kid have a rich childhood full of joy and imagination without watching Sharon, Lois, and Bram on The Elephant Show? Or deciding which ninja turtle is the best one?** Thank goodness I have that shelf full of my favourite children’s fantasy series–Narnia and the Dark is Rising and Prydain–so that my child has the same rich literary experience as I did!

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to introduce my kid to the things I enjoy. When something makes you happy, it’s natural to want to show it to the people you care about in case it makes them happy too.

But it’s also OK if my kid never does or reads or watches any of these things. Because, as much as my feelings sometimes scream otherwise, trying to give my child the same outcomes as me by recreating the exact same childhood I experienced is as misguided as trying to recreate past happiness by recreating old memories.

It’s easier to see that when I think about the negative experiences that must have influenced who I am now, including all the positive parts. Do I want my child to also lose beloved family members too young? Feel overwhelmed by Holocaust narratives? Simply get scared by certain movies or TV shows? No, of course not! I can’t protect my kid from every bad experience, but it would be silly and cruel to force them through particular ones in case they were formative for me.

And even if I wanted my child to live the exact positive aspects of early life I did, it would be impossible. There are already differences! First and most important, my kid is a different person from me. Admittedly, it’s hard to tell exactly how with a tiny newborn baby, but it would be weirder if we were exactly alike. Even genetically identical twins raised in the same environment have different personalities; there’s no way my baby will grow into a copy of me (or of Husband), and I wouldn’t want to aim for that even if it were possible.

Besides, my kid’s life is already different. I didn’t have me as a mom or Husband as a dad. I didn’t live in an apartment. I was born in a different city than the one I live in now. And the outside world is different in unchangeable ways large and small: Internet, AI, climate change, new TV shows, new books, connecting with distant relatives over Zoom, group chats, social media, globalization…

Like, I could theoretically reject owning or using anything developed after I grew up, but the world would still be different. Even if we limited our kid to, say, playing Super Nintendo games, it wouldn’t be the same as playing Super Nintendo games because they were the latest technology available. It’s like how historical recreations, no matter how meticulous, can never achieve 100% accuracy, if only because we can’t recreate the mindsets of the original people involved or change what were choices for us into the restrictions they experienced.

So, my preschool self was wrong, but also right: I can’t “trap” the feelings I got from “It’s a Wonderful World” at age four by memorization. And I can’t make my kid love it as much or for the same reasons I do–nor should I fret over making sure my child hears and remembers it just because it was meaningful to me.

But I can still love the song for the joy it brought me then and the different joy it brings me now. And I can sing it to my baby for yet another new and different joy: that of sharing a part of myself and my happiness with someone I love.

* Admittedly, at four, the line about babies learning “much more/than I’ll ever know” confused me, because why would they? And now it makes me misty-eyed. Thanks, parenthood!

** Raphael. I’ll keep saying it until the truth is self-evident to all!