Lessons from Luca: Preparation vs Protection

Last summer, I discovered that our Spotify membership now includes access to around 15 hours of audiobook listening a month, and for a busy mom who also loves learning and stories, this has been a game-changer in rediscovering my love of audiobooks (or as I struggle to stop calling them, “books on tape”). Not only has it been a joy for me, but we’ve also discovered that many Disney stories have been added to the library, so we can listen to some of our favorite Disney stories in the car. Recently, we listened to Luca, the story of a kid sea monster who journeys onto land with his sea monster friend, Alberto, in search of a Vespa. They take on human form, but always with the risk of getting wet and revealing their true form to a town of Italian fishermen who fear sea monsters (strange premise, but trust me, it’s really cute). In listening to it, I found myself mostly focused on Luca’s mom, Daniela. Daniela is a loving mother who worries a lot about her adolescent son. She wants desperately to keep him safe and happy. She learns of his journeys away from the safety of their home, and she reacts to the fear by threatening to send him away to live with his deep-sea, terrifying-looking uncle, where he will be away from any opportunity to get near the surface of the water. This turn of events leads to Luca running away out of fear of being sent to “the deep” and is driven by the curiosity of what lies beyond his known world under the water. Now hear me out, I am not saying, “the moral of the story is don’t put boundaries on your kid or they’ll run away and never return,” but I do think there is a message of caution to parents from this and so many Disney stories related to parenting: When we parent from fear, we leave our kids feeling isolated and cut ourselves off from connection with them.

Parenting is a lot of living with your heart outside of your body. It’s terrifying. We can think of the mistakes we made as kids and want desperately to protect them from those, or we might look at the world and see all the terrible things that can happen and want to shelter them from all that harm and danger. It’s completely understandable and something we all live with. Here’s where I’ll challenge us all (myself included!). That’s our work to grapple with, not our kids. We have to do the work of wrestling with our fears without it leading to wrapping our kids in bubble wrap and avoiding the world. The truth is, we can’t protect them from everything, and in the long run, trying to do so is a disservice to them. All that will result in is an adult who is ridden with anxiety and avoids hard things, or a young adult who has been so deprived that they sink their teeth into risky behavior with terrifying abandon. So what is a parent to do? We can start by addressing our fears, acknowledging them, and deciding what is a necessary boundary, and what needs to be an exploration with your child. If I were to have Daniela, the sea monster mom, in my therapy room, I would first offer her a pool of water, and then I would encourage her to start by asking Luca what about the surface he is feeling curious about. If she can understand what the appeal is, she is better able to connect with and see her kid. Then, I would ask her to explore how she could move from protecting Luca from the surface to exploring and preparing him for it. He’s going to seek it out, so why not give him the tools to do so safely instead of having him explore it in a risky way without the necessary information? This might mean going with him the first couple of times, maybe talking with other sea monsters who have been to the surface, and then letting him go to a safer area first to explore on his own. Obviously, you are dealing with other aspects of this nuance than a fictional sea monster mom in Italy, but you get the point. Fear shuts down a conversation, curiosity and a lens of desiring to prepare your kids opens up conversation. This is a constant balancing act and is not easy, but I think the lens can be a helpful one for all of us as our children grow up and get closer to adulthood. May we all learn a little from Daniela and Luca.