Being a parent is easy. Or it should be right? All you have to do is be there for your kids, provide for them, and be a good role model… Right?

I imagine anyone who has been a parent will probably say yes and no. Yes, because these principles are true. But No because, there’s more to it than that. Reality throws us all types of challenges, and suddenly, just falling back on these general rules doesn’t help much. Instead, we have to rely on a wide array of our life experiences, and make sense of competing priorities. Do I push my child into an afterschool program that teachers say will improve their reading abilities, even if they have told me that they rather play basketball? What if the child says they don’t want to go now, but was an avid reader when they were younger until they discovered TikTok? It depends on my parenting priorities.

When we play the rhythm guitar, it’s really not that different. Is it as simple as playing an Am and G chord? Does knowing the chord shapes and the strumming pattern make me a perfect guitar player? Of course not. Because we are looking at it with too high a level of generality. There are trillions of little nuances that all add together to tell us that one player seems to be better than another.

What makes one parent better than another (not withstanding the ethical consequences of such a judgement…) comes down to very small nuances (and a lot of luck.) What makes a good rhythm guitarist comes down to small nuances too. How hard are you playing the low E string relative to the high E? How often are you playing a droning note at a varying strength? Where on the strings are you strumming? How does your strumming interact with your vocals if you are accompanying yourself? There are practically infinite questions we can ask. So practice becomes the real arbiter of quality, because the theory involved can yield an infinite number of questions and answers and combinations. But after doing something a long time, small nuances are refined, and one becomes just a bit slightly better of a guitarist, parent, etc. over time.

So on the one hand, we have the experience of our ears telling us that for some reason, when Bob Dylan strums the acoustic guitar, it seems more effective than Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, even though my brain tells me the latter is playing more in time and cleaner. And so my brain might make a foolish statement that Bob Dylan is a bad guitar player, or that Joni Mitchell or John Lennon are bad guitarists, but my heart knows otherwise. It’s because my brain can only view at a certain level of generality, but all my senses and subconscious brain can perceive much more than my higher brain can conceive.