I poured myself a glass of wine one evening — just a reasonably priced California vintage — and as it opened up, so did a thought I hadn’t had before: some songs don’t just last; they deepen. “Teach Your Children” by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young has aged for me like a fine Merlot.
When it came out in 1970, I heard what I yearned to hear: “Teach your parents well.” I seized on that line like it had been written just for me. Finally, a song that flipped the script. The grownups didn’t get to be right by default. We had something to teach them back. We had a sneaking feeling we couldn’t trust anyone over 30.
That was the moment Graham Nash was writing into, a cultural standoff. The so-called generation gap felt more like a chasm. Parents and kids weren’t just disagreeing. They seemed to be living in different realities.
The band’s harmonies make the song. When the chorus comes in, the voices of David Crosby, Stephen Stills and Graham Nash (with Neil Young sitting this one out) come together into something fuller than a single voice. You stop listening for who’s doing what. The sound settles over you all at once, much like pumpkin pie spice: cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg and cloves. You could separate the flavors, but that misses the point. It’s better to let them work together.
“Teach Your Children” hit me differently over time. At 16, I heard rebellion. At 30-something, responsibility.
As parents, we hear in small, everyday moments the challenge of teaching our children well. Public tantrums that make us want to disappear into the supermarket floor. Teenagers testing boundaries in ways that leave us fumbling for the right response.
Fred and I tried to raise Amanda and Rio to be curious and to be kind-hearted. But tucked inside that hope was another thought we rarely admitted aloud. What if our kids turn into the kind of people we don’t want to be around? Fortunately, they became people we genuinely liked (believe me, that’s not a given).
And then Fred got sick.
I pulled to the side of the road the day the neurologist called. Untreatable. Incurable. I sobbed, then called the kids.
You spend years raising your kids, assuming, without quite saying it, that when life turns frightening, you’ll be the steady one. The practical one. The one who knows what to do.
Yeah, right.
Our son Rio moved home to help care for his dad, and, in ways I didn’t expect and didn’t always want to admit, he proved a better caregiver than I was. More patient. More attuned. Less tangled up in history. We argued about whether to cut up Fred’s food. About how to lift him after falls. About how long he could safely stay at home.
You imagine that your response will be like that of great bands when they’re locked in, each player hearing the others, adjusting without effort, staying in time.
But families aren’t studio-polished songs. They’re more like a rehearsal where everyone hears the music a little differently. There are more missed cues. Fewer retakes. More flubs.
There were times I felt the old parental reflex rise up: Because I said so. But I held myself back. The song had been working on me longer than I realized.
Teach your parents well. It’s a startling lyric to grow into.
Turns out, the teaching doesn’t end at adolescence. It circles back years later and asks something harder of us: to let our children show us how to do something we thought we already understood.
Caregiving, like harmony, isn’t one voice overpowering the others. It’s listening closely enough to recognize when someone else has the steadier note and letting them carry it for a while. Even when every instinct tells you not to let go.
Now when the song comes to me, often unannounced, it carries all of that with it. The teenage thrill of pushing back. The long middle years of guiding. The humbling exchange of learning from the very people we once tried to shape.
We hear the song differently as we age, but, like a finely aged wine, the song keeps offering up new notes if we’re willing to pause long enough to notice them.
We lift the glass. We take a slower sip, and, for a moment, feel the depth in the harmonies eluded us at 16: each voice keeps its own character, yet together they carry us further.
Joan Axelrod-Contrada is a writer who lives in Florence with her two dogs. Sign up for her free quarterly newsletter — complete with links to bonus content such as music videos and fun facts — by emailing her at joanaxelrodcontrada@gmail.com.