Mars Rover Curiosity
Remember when NASA launched the Mars Rover?
On November 26, 2011, a car-sized object named Curiosity began its 350 million mile voyage to the surface of Mars. Along the way, engineers on Earth remotely fired this vehicle’s engines in a precise fashion, worked out in advance, in what’s known as a TCM (trajectory correction maneuver) — adjusting its path so it would arrive at its pre-determined destination within acceptable mission parameters. TCM’s, which have been going on at NASA since the Mariner 2 mission to Venus in 1962, are basically what fathers do to their children when they intervene in their lives.
Children are like bowling balls — sort of
When you throw a bowling ball down a fiberglass alley toward a triangular formation of tenpins, there’s a lot of invisible math happening right up inside your meat computer. Your brain, reconciling its memory of what your hand just did, starts in on a simulation of a forecasted outcome. And if you’re like me, you stand there, eyes going from the ball to the pins, hands clenched, just staring forward like a dope. And if the ball doesn’t comply with the simulation inside your head, your body begins to contort, as though your hips will somehow impact the weak and strong forces acting on the ball.
Think of bowling balls launched into space
The journey a kid undertakes, from childhood to adulthood, is something in between the bowling ball example and that of the Mars rover Curiosity. As your kid ventures further out into the world to explore and learn, you realize that in some cases, you can actually make adjustments when things go wrong. This is much truer at the beginning of parenthood, when your kid is small and highly dependent on you. For example, maybe she plays with a strange new boy at the playground, and winds up trying to do a trick on the monkey bars she wasn’t ready for. She falls and bangs her head. You run over and scoop her up and give her a hug and dust off her pants. No big deal. But… this approach doesn’t exactly SCALE.
One day, your kid is going to want to go places and do things that aren’t in your line-of-sight. And you as a dad know the world doesn’t give a rat’s ass about your kid. So little by little, you try and gird yourself for this eventuality — a kind of exposure therapy where you incrementally raise the stakes, similar to how Milo of Croton lifted that baby bull. This way, the distance between your kid’s decisions and your ability to mitigate the consequences of those decisions grow at an imperceptible rate of change.
Bowling balls launched into space (like children) eventually drift beyond your sphere of control
In no particular order, your kid will one day want to…
Pick her own snacks at the store
Go to sleepovers
Own a phone
Keep her internet passwords secret
Start riding the subway. Alone. At night. 😬
Learn how to drive
Possess a credit card
Attend college on the other side of the country
All that distance adds up. Suddenly, you realize: if something goes seriously wrong, you won’t be around to soften the blow or mitigate any disasters.
Which is why a father must be like a NASA engineer
Remember the TCM (trajectory correction maneuver)?
“My role, in the 18 to 25 years we will spend together, is to serve as a series of well timed explosions — intended as course corrections as you drift further and further away from childhood toward your final destination. But one day, that’ll all stop.”
TCM — come again?!
A TCM is a carefully planned series of remotely detonated rocket ignitions intended to adjust the trajectory of a moving object in space… well-timed-explosions that engineers apply to spacecraft in ways that a bowler only wishes he could apply to a ball after it’s released from his hands. They are also what fathers do with their daughters. The point is not to keep doing TCM’s as long as possible — the point is to teach your kid how execute their own as soon as possible.
“It’s something we do to change the direction the spacecraft is moving through space. We’re not aiming for Mars — we’re aiming for Mars to a point where Mars will be in its orbit on August 5 so that Mars will be there when we get there.”