Jason Buffington .com

A word of encouragement to parents of preteens … parenting is like making good bourbon. Sure, it starts with good ingredients, but let’s talk about distillation and barrel processes.

video transcript

A word of encouragement to parents of preteens … parenting is like making good bourbon. It starts with finding the best ingredients you can and putting them in the best environment that you can: education, activities, friends/family, values, encouragement, opportunities —  it all comes together and you cook it.

During the distillation process, there’s three kinds of fumes that actually come off the still:

• The first fumes, the heads, are harsh and toxic
• The middle fumes, the hearts, is the majority that comes off – it’s the good stuff
• Last come the tails, which can ruin the taste of the whole batch

The job of the distiller (and the parent) is to figure out how to separate away the stuff on the edges and focus on what really matters. That is as much art as it is science — I can tell you I probably wasn’t as good at that with my first kid as I hopefully was with my third. There really a bunch of stuff on the edges that you really can just roll your eyes and not address. Focus on what matters.

And then, it goes in the barrel.

Fun fact, wine barrels are kept in temperature-controlled environments their whole time. Bourbon barrels experience hot, sometimes brutal, summers and the liquid expands and breaks through the charred wood into the edges; actually pulling flavor elements from the wood into the juice. Those attributes actually end up defining the flavor of the finished product. The barrels also go through cold winters, everything contracts back in. It is the repeated cycles of high heat and cold that end up making each barrel as well as each batch unique in its own way.

That’s like parenting a high school or college person, where you no longer control the ingredients and the best you can do is hope to influence the environment. You’re just hoping that what comes out of the barrel was worth it. Then one day, it’s time and you take that first pour of each matured barrel, saying “Wow, this might not be how I thought they would turn out, but they are amazing.” As the proud parent of three 20-something young adults, I didn’t always think we were going to get there and some of those summers/winters were brutal (at the time) – but they (and it) was worth it.  Cheers