I have not chained myself to the computer to blog all
summer. I have all sorts of excuses – a
new wee one keeping me busy, a funk of post-partum baby blues that left me
tired and not wanting to do much of anything for a while, going back to work,
the never-ending blur of kids’ summer camps, playground playdates, and trips to
the pool, the fact that the carpet in my house is barely identifiable
underneath all the coloring pages and toys.
Really, though, it’s been nice to take a break. But since I promised myself that I would
start up again with the new school year, and since I just printed out my first
week’s worth of lesson plans – then here we are!
We had some great fun this summer. Sprout went to his first sleep-away camp,
half of it with SSHH and half alone, with the Cub Scouts. SweetPea did her own day camp, and all the
kids rocked out at Vacation Bible School.
We went on a week-long family camping trip and got cold and hot and
dirty and bruised and scraped and too full of s’mores. We did some summer reading but no math or
grammar or Latin or geography and it was really just very, very nice.
But I’m approaching school with a bit of a deep breath this
year, as we also spent the summer doing some very conscious, planned regrouping
as a family. A new baby always shakes
things up a bit, but beyond that there was a general level of chaos and crisis
that needed to be sorted out. We like
the free-wheeling nature of our homeschool, work-at-home life, but there’s a
line between “loosely structured” and “stay in your pajamas until dinner” – and
we were starting to cross it. After a
few false starts, we found a chore structure that is working well for us and WOW, is it ever helping. It’s not perfect – you could still lose a
small child in the clean laundry pile (and we routinely do) – but everyone
knows what they need to do every day and how to do it, and the bathrooms are
(relatively) clean, beds are made, and the kids have even taken over most of
the pet care. SweetPea can fold all her
clothes and the baby’s, too, Sprout can Swiffer the kitchen floor like nobody’s
business, and SweetPotato is an expert wastebasket-dumper on trash night
(although being the smart worker that she is, she’s trying to train up Doodle
so she can delegate this chore to her unsuspecting little sister).
We also needed to work with Sprout. He’s smart as a whip and knows it, and we
were encountering increasingly difficult power struggles with him. He’d refuse to do something – anything,
really, from picking up a book off the floor to finishing his math – and then
things would get started. He’d turn on
the obstinacy, the volume would escalate, occasionally he’d lash out
physically, and we’d end the day barely wanting to look at each other. Things were getting worse, not better, and we
just didn’t know how to change. We knew he was a loving, kind, caring,
respectful kid – the other adults in his life just couldn’t say enough about
how respectful and helpful he was, and he was still always the first to
volunteer to play with TaterTot or read a book to Doodle. His goals in life at the moment are to be an
Altar Server and Eagle Scout. But when
it came to good ol’ mom and dad – it seemed like every day was the beginning of
a new war.
In desperation, we bought a stack of parenting books that
seemed to fit with our general outlook and started reading, because we clearly
needed to up our game. And we did a lot
of talking, and a lot of praying, and a lot of begging God to not let our
beloved kiddo turn into a juvenile delinquent.
And we went back to the drawing board in terms of how we interact with
our children, and tried to treat them more Catholically. Because if we’re going to talk about the
inherent dignity and worth of every person, and how we are each fearfully and
wonderfully made in the image and likeness of God, then every encounter should
lead with respect, kindness, and openness.
And if we’re to treat them more Catholically, then we needed to be
focused not just on their challenges as individuals, but on how those
challenges affect their role in the family – for in Catholicism, contrary to
secular society, the fundamental unit of society is not the individual but the
family.
And we hadn’t been doing very well on that front. It’s hard, admittedly, to respond calmly and
respectfully to a kid who is yelling at you at the top of his lungs about how
awful you are, and who has just shredded his grammar worksheet on the floor and
thrown his pencil across the room. We
certainly aren’t any kind of mean parents, but the frustration level with these
outbursts was building quickly, and we’d clearly soon be in over our
heads. We’d decided at the beginning of
this parenting gig that we weren’t going to spank our kids, and we’ve stuck to
that, but it turns out there’s more than one way to injure a child. Yelling, demanding, not stopping to listen to
them – those can be just as harsh. It’s
not my job, I’ve learned, to control my kids, or to have them “do what they’re
told.” It’s my job to teach them to make
responsible choices on their own without coercion, to be their coach, to help
them navigate the thousands of decisions that are made in the course of every
day, respectfully, thoughtfully, and all the while preserving the freedom of
will that is so integral to their inherent dignity.
And how that’s played out in practice in our house is that
when Sprout starts to tip off the deep end – we step back. Most adults I know don’t have perfect control
of their emotions all the time, and it’s certainly unreasonable to expect that
of a nine year-old. So when he starts to
boil and taking a deep breath doesn’t cut it, he can take a moment and head to
his room. If he needs to punch
something, he can beat up his pillow. If
he needs to scream, that’s okay, too. If
he just needs to sit in quiet, away from everyone, fine. When he’s ready, then it’s time to face the
issue again. We’re trying to ask for
things from our kids, and not tell them what to do. My litmus test for myself is that if I
wouldn’t speak to SSHH that way, then I probably shouldn’t be speaking that way
to my kids, either. “Sprout, clear your
place at the table please” is not impolite, but it’s authoritarian. I’d never speak to another adult that way,
because it would be insulting. Yet
somehow I had been repeating that phrase, and hundreds of others like it, every
day. “I’d appreciate it if you would
scrape your plate and put it on the counter now so we can do the dishes” is
respectful. It offers a choice and a
reason. It offers a conversation if it’s
needed, and asks for rather than demands obedience.
It sounds like the recipe for chaos and disobeyed rules
right and left. But the beautiful thing
is that it’s working. Chores are getting done, we’re so much more
peaceful, and I no longer feel like I’m walking on eggshells with my son. This past Sunday he’d been playing chess (the
new obsession among the kids) with SweetPotato.
She, being four, was frustrated by the loss of one of her pieces and Sprout’s
insistence that she follow every miniscule and incomprehensible rule of chess
and tipped the board over, scattering the pieces. Sprout yelled, she yelled back, they both ran
out of the room. I asked them to work
together to pick up the game – and Sprout started to lose it. He got louder and louder, insisting that he
wasn’t going to touch it because it wasn’t his
mess. And while I was in mid-sentence,
he turned and walked out of the room. I
found him in his bedroom, and (stupidly) continued the conversation, insisting
that he help since the argument over the game was due to both of them. And then, since we were just going ‘round in
circles, I quit. It really annoyed my
immature self to let a nine year-old have the last word in the argument, but we
were both getting angrier by the minute.
So I quietly asked him to do whatever he needed to do to calm down and
then when he was ready I would appreciate talking with him, and I left. And you know what? Not three minutes later he trotted up the
stairs, beaming, telling me not to look because he was going to give me a great
surprise – and he cleaned up not just the chess set, but all the toys and
flotsam and jetsam in the living room, all by himself and entirely of his own
volition (and got a big hug and a high-five for it, too). Given the opportunity to exercise his choice
to comply, and treated with respect as an independent person whose feelings and opinions matter, he
couldn’t wait to not only restore the status quo in our war-zone of a living
room, but make a contribution of value.
I’ve learned so much through all this. I’ve learned that being a “nonviolent parent”
doesn’t just mean “don’t spank your kids.”
It means treating them as persons who, while they may still be “in
training,” have dignity, worth, and value equal to that of their parents. They are not offshoots or appendages of
me. Their opinions and voices
matter. Their interests and time
matter. I don’t care one whit about
computer programming, but to Sprout, this is vitally important – so when he’s
reading a book about the history of the internet and I ask him to pick up his
stinky socks, I have to realize that although the socks shouldn’t be on the
floor, I am asking him to change focus in a way that would be hard for an
adult, let alone a child – and that I have no right to expect compliance solely
because I am “the parent.” Compliance
comes from respect, respect comes from love, and love is hard work. The necessity of getting through the day
means that the kids don’t always get what they want, but the necessity of stewarding
little souls means that they always need to be heard.
As Catholics, we spend a lot of time yammering about the
inherent worth and dignity and value of every person, whether we’re talking
about the unborn or the elderly or the disabled or the Third World. Among all that, it was easy to lose sight of
the fact that the dignity of every person starts with those people closest to
us. And while we’re not perfect, and
while I do still lose my temper and more often than I’d like, and while my
house is still appallingly messy, we’re getting there. School is going to be a test for us, because
the demands on everyone’s time and attention and energy are going to increase
dramatically next week, and that’s going to breed more opportunities for
conflict. But I like my kids. I love my kids. And even though this parenting thing is really, really hard, every minute of every
day, I feel like I’m on the road to being the kind of parent that I want to
be for them.
