Lucky Draw
I didn’t choose my parents. Nobody does.
The process is closer to a raffle than an interview, and I drew a winning ticket before I could even hold a spoon.
Plenty of people don’t. Some are orphaned. Some are raised by parents who are neglectful, cruel, or simply elsewhere. Some get the best parents in the county and lose them early.
Every ticket is in the drum.
I think about this when I see a child acting out with real malice. It’s rarely in the blood. Even Charles Manson had a wrecked childhood to point to. Broken people tend to be made by broken people, who were made by broken people, and the cycle keeps meticulous books.
The Parent Who Is Home But Not Here
The old villain may well have been the parent who hit or the parent who died. The new one may be the parent who stays and isn’t present.
I can’t prove it, and the CDC’s own epidemiologist says her survey can’t establish cause and effect. But the trend lines are hard to ignore. Nearly half of U.S. adults report loneliness, and depression symptoms in people 12 and older climbed from 8.2% to 13.1% in about a decade. Divorce and single-parent homes did real damage: only 46% of kids now live with two parents in a first marriage, down from 73% in 1960. But divorce peaked decades ago and hit a historic low in 2023. The structure has stopped sliding. The numbers haven’t. Something else is moving.
My suspicion is attention, and the phone is a big part of it. It is the one distraction that follows us to the dinner table, the playground, and the bedtime story. Small daily device interruptions have been linked to anxiety, depression, and hyperactivity in kids. Even the Swiss study that found screens no worse than other distractions found that every kind of distraction hurt the bond. The phone is simply the easiest one to carry.
So the answer starts with us. Put the phone down, so our children see what a life looks like when it’s lived in front of you. Then give them what the screen steals: long, unscheduled, screenless hours of play, where attention gets built the way muscle does. Be fully there for them, and for the family you’re building.
You can’t teach a child to look up while you’re looking down.
The Job Description
It begins with accepting that the work is tireless and thankless, and that you’re raising a work in progress with opinions.
Show up. Listen. Watch what they love instead of pushing what you loved. Let them fall flat on their face, then be there, and then step back. Ask questions. Have the uncomfortable conversation. Know their friends. Take them to new places. Raise them with faith and a respect for the unknown. And tell them about the blue oceans, the empty water where nobody’s fishing, so that when they push on alone, they know it’s a frontier and not a failure.
Don’t be their friend or hand over the prize, protects the chase.
The Porch and the Table
My childhood was good enough that I’ve learned to be modest about it.
Someone was at nearly every game and recital. Screens were capped at an hour, a rule that held until high school, when night TV crept in like a polite burglar. Dinner was home-cooked and everyone attended. We were sent into the woods behind the house to explore, and we felt like frontiersmen. My parents watched from the porch, the original GPS.
The holidays ran on rails. Christmas Eve in New York, then a meal at Heidelberg. Thanksgiving at my grandmother’s, football on the lawn and football on the television. Easter at the Estonian church in Lakewood. We visited the grandparents even when they were hours away, because my parents decided we would know them.
Estonian school every other Saturday, Estonian camp every summer, no negotiation. The language stuck to me like a burr and to my brothers like Teflon. I’m still carrying the baton.
My father gave us guidance. When I needed to think through money or a career, he was the call, and he said what he thought, plainly, and left the rest to me. My mother gave us an ear. I’d walk the environmental center with her and talk until I’d argued my way to the answer, and she’d be there for the whole journey with me. Even today, I can call and have a willing ear or guide.
And they lived what they told us. Their word was good, and our house ran like a railroad timetable, with a hug at every station. A child can build a life on that.
A Name That Carries Weight
In Estonia, and in the small North American Estonian community that raised me, the Skonberg name means something. Not because we were famous. Because generation after generation, we volunteered, stepped up, did the work, and did right by people. Parents who were involved raised children who contributed.
I’ve heard, more than once, “You wouldn’t understand, growing up the way you did.” It’s true. I can sympathize, but I never lived the other way.
My hometown friends and I drifted apart in high school. Some took roads I didn’t want to follow, so I stepped back quietly and have wished them well ever since. At my wedding, the guest list showed it: my family, the Estonian community, a couple other friends from along the way but not one face from the old neighborhood.
That said, I was never without a village. I chose the Estonians, and by some mercy they chose me back. They taught me my language, fed me, and introduced me to people who knew my grandparents’s names before they knew my own.
Roots don’t care where you were planted. They care who watered them.
Same House, Different Roads
Siblings matter. But I’ve watched great families lose a child to the dark despite everything. It looked less like a choice than a condition, as if some kids are born to test the edge of the light.
I don’t fully understand it. Same parents, same drum, and the draws still come out different. Nature and nurture both vote, and (in my opinion) nurture still does more than we credit.
In my house, the same parents handed down the same values, and we each took different pieces. All of us are “successful” in our own ways. The paths split long ago and the shared stretch narrows with age. Maybe that’s the point. Maybe a great parent’s job is to say: you are loved, enjoy the journey, stand apart from the crowd.
Saving the Table
Now that I’m a father setting the tone for our little minions, I’d like to layer in more Estonian, more faith and community, more time in nature, and more of the world’s characters at our table: the weathered, the worldly, the nothing-like-us. Beyond all that, I aim to be a bastion of presence, consistency, and teaching.
Every generation inherits a house and gets to renovate it. I’ll keep and hold to much of what I was handed and add some intentionality. And I’ll keep the table: dinner together, phones in the other room, an extra chair for whoever needs one.
I didn’t choose my parents, and I’d draw them again. My kids won’t choose me. In about thirty years, I hope they’d say the same.
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Stats were pulled from: Surgeon General loneliness advisory coverage, CDC depression data, Pew household data, divorce rates, technoference research, Swiss distraction study