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My friend got into a car accident not long ago. It was his fault, and he felt terrible about it. Nobody was seriously hurt, but the car was totaled, and he was a bit bruised and shaken.

When he broke the news to his dad over the phone, I was in the room. His dad was loud enough that I didn't even have to speculate about what he was saying. Do you have any idea how much your insurance is going to cost now? Go look up some insurance quotes! How could you do this? How could you be that careless? You want a wake-up call, I'm telling you, open up your computer, type in 'car insurance quotes'! It's not cheap! Your mother and I aren't rolling in dough, you know!, On and on. Not only was he a voice of chastisement and discouragement, he was also a voice of impending doom: It doesn't stop here! You live a life of careless behavior and recklessness, how are you going to afford life insurance! Nobody's going to give it to you, you keep this up!, I think he even reopened that long-suffering can of worms, my friend's chronic smoking habit. Great timing.

And you know, in the end, I'm pretty sure it was all because he was shaken and basically freaked out by the news of the accident. A dad who's going to spout off about life insurance and auto insurance quotes and smoking to his son who's just been in a semi-serious accident has got to be either unbelievably tight-fisted or completely caught off-guard and unsure of how to handle the situation.

Why is that so often the parental default response to offspring accidents: to yell? They knock over the lamp – yell at them. They flunk a test, yell at them. They get into an accident, yell at them. Maybe it will sink in. Maybe they'll never do it again. Maybe they won't notice I'm scared: that they could have cut themselves on the glass, that they might ruin their educational future, that they could have died. We think our parents are superheroes because they refuse to show us that soft underbelly.

Unfortunately, it's futile. We've all got one, and sooner or later we'll learn to see theirs no matter how well they're hidden.