Teaching your kid to whistle and other impossible parenting tasks

Palm Coast Observer
Opinion

There comes a time in every man’s life when he has to learn how to whistle. It was a proud day for me as a father when my 9-year-old son first emitted those joyous notes from his pursed lips.

Well, it was more like one note, over and over again, for the first few weeks. More like wind blowing through the trees in a scary movie. But just because it’s my son, I loved it. I’ve thought about taking him to Hollywood the next time there are auditions for “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”; I think he’ll be a shoe-in for a sound effect.

Then, he managed variations on the one-note theme. I started hearing some attempts at “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” from the other room. He returned with his cheeks frozen in place after practicing so much.

And then my daughter got in on the action. At 3 years old, she has skipped all intermediate stages of whistling and simply sticks two fingers in her mouth and lets out some real ear-piercers. But, although they’re high-pitched, they’re quiet because she’s not actually whistling but screeching.

I’ve always been a top-notch whistler. I can slide like a chipmunk trombone. I’ve got more vibrato than I know what to do with. But one thing I can’t do is teach it.

“You just move your tongue forward to change the pitch,” I try to tell my son. But it doesn’t quite work. Some things you have to experience for yourself.

That’s why parenting is so hard: You can’t make your kids do what you want, and you can’t give them your knowledge. They have to fail and figure things out on their own. Fortunately, not much is at stake with whistling. It falls in the same category as snapping, raising one eyebrow at a time, and doing the trick where you pretend to take your thumb off.

But what about the future? What about more consequential lessons, like how to be kind when someone else is being mean to you? Or how to act like a professional? Or how to take pride in completing a task even if you’re not passionate about it?

This year, my parents both turned 60, so my five siblings and I made books for them to relate a few of the lessons we have learned from them over the years. Some of the lessons will not surprise them, but others will. I wrote about moments that likely have been entirely forgotten by my parents but which have shaped my character in ways they never expected.

When it comes to my own children, some days I feel like I have forever to teach them, and other times, it feels like they’re practically gone already.

“Hey, Dad, look!” my son says to me. He has been chewing gum, and he has a pink bubble about the size of a marble on his lips. He’s trying not to smile because that could break the spell and cause it to wilt.

But somehow, the bubble is a victory for me, too, a reassurance. I’ve tried to explain to him how to blow a bubble, but without any success. You make a pocket in the gum, I’ve told him. You press it against the roof of your mouth like this — but he couldn’t see inside my mouth, so no verbal instruction really worked.

And yet, there he is. There he is, an official bubble-blower, a whistler of three and four notes in a row, a kid who will some day be able to clip his own fingernails and drive a car and sign up for college classes and get married and have a child of his own. There he is.