A Dad Explaining The Paris Attacks To His Son Is A Good Look At Exactly What It Means To Be A Dad

Buzzfeed – Le Petit Journal, a French news show, interviewed a little boy and his father this week about Friday’s terror attacks in Paris.

The little boy’s father explains that while the attackers had guns, the people of France have flowers and candles.

I’ve mentioned in a blog before that despite the fact that friends my age are now fully in “Let’s have kids and be responsible for raising them for the next few decades” mode, I’m still not mentally anywhere near that and it takes a lot to make me go “Yeah, you know what, I can envision myself being a dad right now.” And a video like this perfectly sums it up. You want to be the dad here, making his kid understand a complex and horrifying situation in a way that makes sense in his little developing head. You’re responsible for the whole way he’ll view the world for the entirety of his life and that’s pretty amazing when you think about it. Good parenting in this situation can make all the difference in making a functional human for the world of tomorrow. When you compare it to the idiot moms here who can’t even explain Cam Newton dancing to their kid, that’s a stark contrast.

At the same time, how absolutely horrifying is that? Your child having to experience something as scary as this is one thing, but it’s entirely up to you about how he processes it. If you’re scared, he’s scared. If you use this to rattle off all the anti-Islam epithets you have in your head, he’ll soak that up like a sponge too. This is literally the moment in your life where you can make your child into the softest kid around by sheltering them from reality, someone with an axe to grind for the entirety of his life because he lived through this horrific experience and has no perspective on it, or someone capable of seeing both the bad and the good and the world who can somehow make sense of it all. And you don’t really have time to think about it because kids can sense everything, you just have to act and respond and teach no matter how capable or incompetent you are at all of the above. That’s a WHOLE lot of pressure to do the right thing, otherwise you’re the turning point of an entire lineage of shitty humans doing shitty things and making the world worse.

Bottom line: I’m still pulling out but I’m glad there are some guys out there ready and able to do and say the right things as a dad to make better humans for the future. I’m confident this kid’ll be one of the good ones.

Also while I love the message of peace the flowers symbolize and all of that, the best point in the entire video was probably made by that kid:

Seriously, what do flowers do? Is there a more worthless multibillion dollar industry on the planet than the flower business? This kid has a lot to learn about life and dealing with traumatic incidents but he’s definitely 100% of the way there on the flowers, no doubt about it.