Is Loyalty Unconditional?

In June I took the kids camping up the Poudre Canyon. The fire danger remains high, so fires in campgrounds must be contained within built-up, enclosed metal pits. I readied our pit for dinner, loading it with branches, and struck a match. Within seconds, the pile of wood had erupted into a volcano of flames, sending devil-red ashes floating on unpredictable wind gusts. I quickly doused my creation with water.

Sophia asked me why I was panicking. “I didn’t want the fire to get too big,” I said, my heart still beating wildly at the prospect of such an awful, yet realistic, possibility. “If I start a forest fire, I’d be in serious trouble.”

Ella put an arm around me. “Don’t worry, Dad. I wouldn’t have turned you in,” she said.

I appreciated my 10-year-old’s allegiance to dear old dad, but the idea of her unwavering loyalty brought up an interesting point — from my side of the coin. Parents always say they’d sacrifice themselves for the well-being of their children no matter the cost. But is there a logical limit to parental loyalty?

From the instant our kids enter the world, we are entrusted with unprecedented levels of responsibility. We also develop, seemingly instantaneously, sharp protective instincts. As a result, the only people who can truly understand the nature of parental love are, well, parents. When someone says, “I’d do anything for my kids,” believe it.

But those same precious babies eventually make a few poor decisions. They get in trouble with authority. They do things to challenge our ability to sustain those feelings of unconditional love and support. Yet despite the wide spectrum across which these instances occur, most parents rarely stray from the need to protect their offspring.

My kid would never do that.

Those parents should teach their kid some manners.

Maybe little Johnny needs some boundaries at home.

We’ve all said things of this nature. And many times, we may be right. But it can’t always be someone else’s fault. Surely our kids aren’t always angels.

Resolute loyalty and the need to protect our young are necessary to ensure survival. But those same behaviors can lead to unclear thinking. In certain situations, we might actually help our children more by ignoring our instincts.

Simply by virtue of being human, children are fallible from birth to death. And if mistakes are part of life, we might, by protecting our children at all costs, actually be doing them a disservice. To survive in our modern, hypercompetitive world, they’ll need to learn to take responsibility for their actions when they mess up and do what’s necessary to correct them, without the biased input of their greatest fans.

With my second attempt considerably less of a risk to the national forest, I cooked dinner and s’mores for me and the girls. I enjoyed my night immensely, relieved that Ella wasn’t the one who almost burned down the forest. She saved me from a decision I would not have wanted to make.