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One night last week, our 9-year-old son complained that no one in the family would help him study.
"Study by yourself," my 14-year-old son said. "What do I do? I take a book and go up to my room, right?"
"But you didn't when you were nine," I said. "You needed help, too."
I often think of adolescence as an underground tunnel. You enter on your hands and knees and come out the other end stretching and standing tall.
Our sons are at opposite ends of the adolescent tunnel.
Little brother, a fourth-grader, is anxious. For the moment, he is stressed about school; spelling tests are especially ominous. Meanwhile, middle school, with its social land mines, looms on the horizon.
Meanwhile, big brother, who turns 15 years old later this month, has just gone through a big maturity surge. No longer completely dependent on Mom and Dad, he handles his business - school, sports, social opportunities - with increasing independence. He is eager to get his driver's license next year so he can drive himself to sports practices and Christian youth group meetings.
As a parent, seeing one child emerge whole from the tunnel gives you confidence that younger siblings will also make that perilous crossing.
When son No. 1 was younger, his anxiety was my anxiety, his problems my problems. I absorbed his angst like a sponge.
With son No. 2, I am much more likely to believe anxiety is just a phase.
Waiting things out - as opposed to panic - is a learned skill. Albert Einstein said: "The only source of knowledge is experience." Sometimes I think that experience is an undervalued commodity in modern life. One of the redeeming features about being an older dad - I'm 58 with a 9-year-old son - is the value of life experience.
We all know intuitively that a senior quarterback on a college football team has tremendous advantages in knowledge and resourcefulness over a freshman. Similarly, a 15-year-old is light years ahead of a 9-year-old in life experiences.
The neat thing is watching our older son share life experience with his younger brother. One night last week, he sat down at the dining room table with his little brother and helped him finish his math assignment in subtraction. The episode was noticeably less tense and brittle than when Mom and Dad try to help.
Still, I have hopes that better parenting will help my younger son negotiate the rigors of adolescence more easily. A relaxed attitude is contagious, just like anxiety can arc from one person to another.
Sometimes at dusk, the boys ask to ride bikes together for 10 minutes. They disappear into the cul-de-sacs near our house and practice their curb-hopping skills. In those few minutes, their ages seem to converge and they are just boys sharing a few minutes of separation from Mom and Dad.
I saw them pass in the shadows the other night and it occurred to me that we might be only months away from our older son disappearing into the fog of the middle-teen years. No teen with car keys will find a neighborhood bike ride with his little brother entertaining any more.
I grieve that separation. Experience tells me that the boys will circle back to one another in a decade or so as friends and confidants.
In the meantime, I'll stand at the back door and watch. Admiring their companionship; counting the days.
Contact Mark Kennedy at mkennedy@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6645. Follow him on Twitter @TFPCOLUMNIST. Subscribe to his Facebook updates at www.facebook.com/mkennedycolumnist.