Sometimes, Parenting Is Just Band-Aid Solutions

Our rituals of care aren’t what it actually takes to heal our kids, but the rituals matter anyway. (Guest Post)

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash (cropped to fit)

The bike park is a truly magical spot with my preschooler during nice weather days. There’s a pump track, a series of dirt hills that my son can tool over on his balance bike. On wet days, though, I still give my son the option to go to the bike park, even though all that fun turns to mayhem and potential for injury quite quickly. The whole place becomes a mud pit, and my son is so ecstatic barreling through a serious puddle on his balance bike with both legs akimbo, spraying his entire back with mud and water. Usually at least two or three times during a mud-pit bike park day, he wipes out hard and takes a full body tumble. He looks up to me, betrayed, surprised, and occasionally a little scraped up.

The nice thing about my five-year-old not yet being willing to tackle the pedal bike life is that he’s amusingly close to the ground when he wipes out. Still, no matter how close you are to the pavement, it’s not fun to get forcibly ejected due to slippery tires. This park stays on my list because the available damage is so minimal; he’d have to be doing some kind of stunt I’ve never seen him attempt in order to sustain any real damage. The constellations of bruises and boo-boos on my kid at this age are pretty rough to see, layers of recent to mostly-healed, but they are all fine, ultimately - he’s not unsafe, and he’s not incurring piles of medical bills. He heals fast.

That doesn’t mean he won’t scream himself hoarse when he sees an errant trickle of blood. Yesterday, he took a scrape to the elbow, and two thin scratches welled with a tiny amount of blood after I gently cleaned off the rainwater and leaf litter. He couldn’t get any words out as I made my leg into a seat for him and let him crumple up to me. Eventually, he talked through his snotty, nasal sobs, and said, “Band-Aid!”

This is exactly what The Band-Aid Industrial Complex wants my kid to think, I thought. But then I carried his cute little frame up to the nearest bench, set him up with an applesauce pouch, and walked back to the car to get a Band-Aid.

I am not a “rub some dirt in it” parent. I’d love to have a “rub some dirt in it” kid, like the next-door neighbor’s grandson who tries to get out of trouble by saying that his most recent wipeout doing some kind of daring stunt “didn’t even hurt!” That kind of kid would be a pleasure to raise, if occasionally rough on the blood pressure.

But I don’t want to be the kind of parent who provides contradictory evidence to what my kid experiences in the world. Reassurance is crucial, but invalidation is so rough on the psyche. If my kid is a little bit histrionic about boo-boos, well, that’s his personality. He’s not going to become a tough dude just because I constantly tell him to stop crying. All that will teach him is that I have a short fuse for crying.

Instead, I lean on a good ritual. Since he was two years old, my kid has known that any bump or bruise that happens at home will elicit a calm question from his parents: “do you want an ice pack?” He doesn’t use the ice pack correctly at all; he quickly touches it to the boo-boo like a magic wand and then hands it back to us, despite plenty of demonstrations of how the cold could help him feel better. But no, for him it’s a totem, a way to transition from the shock and sadness of pain to the next thing of the day. He invariably stops crying, says, “you can put that back now,” and goes back to playing, placid as a lake.

Band-Aids are like ice packs for us, but for whenever scrapes or blood are involved, so we keep them with us all the time. There’s a reason why people refer to not really solving a problem as “putting a Band-Aid on the problem,” because the Band-Aid doesn’t do the healing work, it just keeps a few things at bay while the healing work must continue. But for my son, they’re more than that: they’re a sign that the challenge has been managed, and that we can all move forward.

Band-aids are to my kid moving on from a minor injury what confessional is for sin, what forgiveness is for resentment, what funerals are for grief; a kind of documentation and a kind of ceremony, a way to say that something unsolveable, something that won’t really be right again, must be moved beyond anyway, and this is the thing we’ve agreed will help us move beyond it.

Parenthood has taught me how many solutions aren’t durable, how every time you solve the kid climbing out of the crib by putting him in a “big boy bed” you are just picking new challenges, not by solving all nighttime woes. For people who don’t parent, I think that would sound incredibly disheartening, since so many of the other parts of adulthood have at least the veneer of real solutions. But parents will resonate and recognize this: the challenges we face are always in flux. Sibling rivalry persists, independence comes and goes, and picky eating worsens or improves. Very few things are done and dusted as a parent. Everything waxes and wanes, building a kind of long-term patience unlike anything I’ve ever known.

That’s why I like the Band-Aids. Because my kid’s knee is going to keep having all those scratches, small scars where things went a little deeper, and four different shades of healing bruises. But a Band-Aid is me saying, “I’m here while you’re healing.” It’s me saying, “You can look at this glow-in-the-dark jellyfish print rather than just thinking about your pain.”

And when we build these rituals, these care-moments that help us accept the real healing timeline, we can invite others into them too. When a friend at the park gets hurt instead of my son, offering a cool-looking Band-Aid is a tangible way for my son to start learning how we take care of each other: imperfectly, without really taking on the bulk of healing that most people have to do for ourselves, but in community all the same.

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Laura L is a writer and editor who is thinking about parenting, community, and ethics over at Vita Incognita.