“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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I am not going to do it and you can’t make me!!!

My youngest is now laying on the floor, screaming out a guttural cry of defiance like some kind of Scottish warrior in Braveheart. Laying next to him is the cause for all this yelling and crying – his violin.

He does NOT want to play his violin.

Not today. Not tomorrow. Not now. Not in 5 minutes. Not in an hour. Not. Ever.

“NEVEAHHHHHHHHHRRRRRR!” he shouts, writhing on the ground.

We have come to an impasse.

Because there is nothing I can do or say right now that is going to cajole him into playing his violin. No bribe in the world will be big enough, no promise I can make grand enough to get him up off the ground and happily practicing Go Tell Aunt Rhody.

Here are a few of the thoughts that crossed my mind during this episode:

1. Oh my God!
2. What is wrong with him?
3. If he screams loud enough the windows are going to break.
4. I wonder if the neighbors can hear this.
5. Are they going to call CPS on me?
6. How am I going to get him to practice?
7. His lesson this week is going to be awful.
8. Why is he doing this to me?

But is he doing this to me? Or am I doing this to him? Or are we doing this to each other? And what is this?

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“Bam!”  The door has just, yet again, shut in my face.

This is not a metaphor. The door literally just shut in my face.

I was out with my children. And, as kids usually do, my son ran ahead, eager to lead the way. But, just as quickly as he barged through a door ahead of us, he hardly glanced back as he let the door shut in my face.

We’ve all been through it.

We bristle and wonder how we’re managing to raise our children to be so thoughtless and rude. To become the very type of person we don’t want them to be.

We want our children to demonstrate empathy for others. We want our kids to be the light of helpfulness in a world that sometimes feels dark with selfishness. But how do we do that?

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