She spattered the sauce again.
“Oops! Sorry,” she said.
“That’s okay,” I said. But I was lying. She was ruining the pizza. “Maybe we should take turns spreading the sauce.”
“No! I can do it.” And she spattered the sauce yet again. I grabbed the spoon back.
“Okay, you’re fired from this.”
“Aw.”
“Lemme spread this sauce and you can put the cheese on. You’d be good at that.”
“Okay.”
I spread the sauce lovingly around, bringing it right to the edge of the dough without spilling it over the side, finishing up just as she was wandering back to the TV again.
“Cheese time!” I said. “You can do the cheese now.”
“Okay,” she said.
Right then, my wife walked in.
“Oooh, are you guys making pizza together?”
“We are,” I said. “We’re having tons of fun, right?”
The girl said nothing.
“You’re letting her help, right, Drew?” my wife asked.
“Absolutely. She helped roll the dough.”
“No, I didn’t,” the girl said.
“And she helped spread the sauce.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Of course you did. I did virtually nothing.”
“You have to let her help,” my wife said. “It’s okay if she makes mistakes.”
“I know, I know. I’m letting her put the cheese on it, I swear.”
My wife and I had just bought a parenting book called Love and Logic that said you need to let kids do as many things on their own as humanly possible. That way, they become confident and more self-reliant and, most important, they don’t bother you with whiny bullshit all day long. Self-reliant kids are the ones that end up building railroads and annexing small Baltic nations. If you constantly hover and do everything for your kids, you hinder their maturation process. They become convinced that they need you to do everything for them. The authors argued that if you let children make mistakes when they’re young, the cost of those mistakes is relatively low: a spilled milk glass, a missed school bus ride, etc. Those are mistakes that any parent can live with. But if you butt in at every opportunity, then the child makes much more costly mistakes later in life: committing armed robbery, shooting liquefied crack into her eyeballs, going to law school, etc.
So here was a perfect opportunity for me to let my child stand there and make mistakes with relatively little consequence. I had jumped in when she screwed up the dough. I had jumped in when she got tomato sauce all over everything. If I jumped in on the cheese-application stage, the girl would never learn to make a pizza properly. But more important, she would never WANT to learn. She would become sullen and insecure. She would run away from home and hop on a bus to LA. Then she would become addicted to heroin and fall in love with an abusive record label executive. All of that would happen if I kept her from cheesing the pizza. I swore to back off, to watch patiently and let her figure out things for herself. The cheese was in her hands now. She was in full control.
And God, she fucked it all up. I mean, it wasn’t even close. There were slabs of cheese hanging over the sides. The spacing between slices was all uneven. She would jam the cheese into the dough and drag it around, creating huge snowbanks of red sauce and tearing holes—HOLES—in the crust. My pizza—my masterpizza—was being ruined in front of my eyes. It was like watching someone put his foot through a Van Gogh.
But I bit my lip. I had to. If I stepped in now . . . if I took away this precious learning opportunity, then all would be lost. I had to see this as a positive experience. My daughter would grow up strong and independent and it would all be thanks to my decision to let her make a pizza. A horrible, flavorless, overworked pizza. Surely one night of poor eating wasn’t worth a lifetime of— “Let me do the cheese. You go watch TV.”
“YAY!”
I finished the pizza and put it in the oven. Twenty minutes later, it came out perfectly.
NICU