A Fine Parent

Piercing screams came from the playroom. Happy screams or hurting screams? My mom ears pricked up.

Those were not happy screams.

Abandoning my work I marched up the stairs. My daughters backed away from each other upon seeing me. I could see that neither of them was hurt, but they were still shooting daggers at each other with their eyes.

Dutifully, I launched into a lecture on the reasons why they should treat each other with respect.

There are many valid reasons, so this was not a short talk.

By the time I wrapped it up, I had bored myself to the point where I was tempted to roll my eyes and say blah, blah, blah.

My girls bolted as soon as they sensed they were allowed. I had a sense I’d missed the mark, but, oh well, at least they’d stopped fighting.

Later on, at dinner, one of my kids made a rude remark about another child. My husband and I reacted in sync, and proceeded to tag team a lecture on empathy and kindness.

While we made several excellent points, dinnertime turned into a sort of ultra lecture where the kids ate in bored silence, probably plotting their escapes from the table.

For parents like myself, ultra lectures are fun in the moment, but as with other over-indulgences, like eating a whole tub of Hagen Daz, I tend to feel worse about myself almost as soon as I finish.

I knew that in each of the scenarios above, my children had not gleaned the wisdom I had hoped to convey; those teaching opportunities had been wasted.

Instead of learning valuable life lessons, they felt like victims and learned to ignore my words.

I felt that I had hit the rock-bottom of lecturing.

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Here I am. Folding laundry. The ball and chain of chores.

I thought it was bad when they were babies and they had multiple outfit changes. I buoyed my spirits by telling myself that when they were older and didn’t spit up so much and were neater eaters things would be better.

Well, let me tell you, people. It’s not better.

They are 12 and 9 now and it still never ends. I do some laundry and then there is always more that appears! Some random white t-shirt when I’d just done all the whites shows up in the basket, mocking me.

And most of it is theirs! Their pants! Their shirts! Their socks and underwear! Without me they’d never leave the house in clean clothes.

OMG. Without me they’d never leave the house in clean clothes!!

What about when they go to college? Who’s going to do their laundry?

What about when they get married? Am I setting some poor person up for a lifetime of no help with laundry duty?

Holy cow, I am!

I had to wonder what other responsibilities I hadn’t taught them about yet, either because they were “too young” or because it was faster to do it myself.

Then I wondered when I was actually going to find the time to teach them things like laundry, cooking, and washing the dishes. And what about bigger responsibilities like managing money? When was I going to get around to that?

This little epiphany hit me in the middle of folding towels. I looked down at them and realized I needed to start immediately. And I could start with towels.

That was my first step on the path to really, thoughtfully teaching my kids the life skills that lead to learning responsibility. The next step was to decide what to teach them next.

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“Mom, I have better things to do now.”

When the conversation is about reading, few words cut a librarian to the quick more efficiently. My 13-year-old son and I had first been talking about screen time limits. He had been expressing his thoughts calmly while I mentally congratulated myself on how I was handling this touchy conversation.

It went downhill when I shared my hopes for better use of his time than first-person shooter games and YouTube.  Then came his comment about reading.

“I have better things to do.”

I stood like Wile E. Coyote who has been hit by an anvil but doesn’t realize it yet – mouth agape, eyes wide and uncomprehending. I must have looked stunned, because he repeated that sentence for me. Slowly.

As I looked into my son’s face, this kid who’s been steeped in the magic of books his entire life, my heart sank. I pictured the decline of his reading as the slamming of all those doors that my husband and I tried so hard to open for him.

Then I woke up and remembered he’s just turned thirteen – the game’s not over yet.

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Do you remember summers when you were a kid? How you’d leave the house in the morning and explore the entire neighborhood on your bike with your friend and come home when the streetlights came on?

I know I do.

During the summer my brother and I would burst out of the house at 9am with a bag of sandwiches for lunch and a “see ya later” to our parents. They never worried about us, knowing that we would come back – alive and well – when we had run out of food.

I love those memories! I think of those as some of the best times of my life.

Parenting is so much different now than when we were kids. In just 30 years smart phones and tablets have taken over. They suck my kids into a void where they remain, unreachable, until my voice reaches a pitch usually heard only by dogs.

And when they aren’t with a screen we are zooming off in the car to attend a carefully curated schedule of athletic practices, music lessons, and language classes.

These days I feel like I’m going to be accused of neglect at any moment because I let my children play unsupervised in the front yard while refusing to give them a smart phone complete with GPS tracking capabilities.

My children think differently. They think they need this stuff or their lives are going to fall apart.

They need to know French.

They have to be in 8 different sports or they won’t have any kind of shot at getting a scholarship.

They must have a smart phone and be on Snap Chat or their social lives will disintegrate into nothingness.

They are entitled to all of it! It is their due in life. It is what they must have. And I’m supposed to give it to them.

The worst part is that I feel helpless to stop it. All that technology and sport and entitlement is like a tsunami coming right for me to sweep me away.

But am I really as helpless as I feel?

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The boys are fighting. Again. Probably over a Lego minifigure, if history is any guide.

Part of me thinks, This time I’m going to stay out of it. I’m going to have them work it out themselves.

And then my youngest begins to shriek and I can’t stand it. My gut tells me I need to intervene.

I swoop in and try to determine who “owns” it and when they can’t stop yelling at each other long enough to even hear me I impound it, adding it to the bin of other impounded toys.

Did that solve anything?

They are still yelling – at me, now.

They are still angry.

They still haven’t learned anything. (Except possibly that the youngest’s shriek will send me running into the room.)

A lot of parenting is going with your gut. Does this feel right? Does this fit in with how I function as a human being? Does this fit in with my vision of how I want my children to act and behave?

Most of the time my gut is right. I have a strong sense of self and well-honed instinct. If my gut told me to go and comfort my crying baby I did it. If my gut told me they were fussy because they were hungry I gave them a snack. When my instinct told me to back off and let my second grader struggle with that math problem a little longer I listened.

And most of the time it worked out.

Sometimes, however that gut instinct was actually me being triggered. That shriek that sounded off like an alarm bell in the middle of the boys’ argument? It turns out that is a huge trigger. That isn’t me following my instinct. That is one of my buttons being pushed and me responding like a well-trained dog.

Okay, I am not actually a well-trained dog. It turns out there is a ton of scientific research out there that has been done on parenting. Thousands of websites, research papers, and books have been researched and written on parenting and child development.

There are numerous experts out there who can tell you, in obsessive detail, about how the brains of children develop and how our parenting choices effect that development. There are also experts that can help me learn how to recognize how my own brain works and how to disarm those trigger buttons of mine.

Any of that research could have been helpful to me during the argument between my two boys. Let’s break down that argument and my response using just four researchers and their theories.

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