Light and Momentary

End the eye-rolling, part 2

Okay, this is the post that is actually about eye-rolling and not about generalized bad attitude.

FIRST, everybody needs to be clear on the behavior you're trying to stop. Learn from my mistakes, my friends, as described in the last paragraph of this post from five years ago. Get specific with yourself and your kid about what you want to work on. With eye-rolling specifically, I would elicit it on purpose in a fun and silly context. Make ridiculous requests of each other and roll your eyes at each other deliberately. This will allow you both to be laughing when you say, "That! That's the thing that makes me feel like my head might explode, even if you do it accidentally!" In a situation like the one Kellie mentioned, where the kid's awareness seemed inconsistent, I might let her borrow my phone to take selfie videos and connect the dots: this is what it feels like when I do the thing that makes the grownups so frustrated.

SECOND, how can you frame the "why" in a way that puts you on the same team? Adults can't demand respect from a hardcore NOPE kid; they can only let it unfurl. Rigid rules like "no sass" are more likely to spark enduring resentments than stronger relationships, and stronger relationships are the big-picture goal. If you can make it clear to your kid that you share the same long-term ideal -- for her to be a healthy, independent adult with solid nurturing relationships -- it can smooth the path for short-term behavior changes.

In setting forth the "why" I might share my own childhood experiences, places where a perceived nasty attitude damaged my relationships with trusted adults and cost me opportunities. Or I might be really candid that it's hard for me to be kind to people who treat me in a way that feels disrespectful, even if they don't intend to signal disrespect. If you say, "It's easier for me to be nice to you when you find another way to tell me what's going on," it sets you right up for step 3, which is... 

THIRD, figure out replacement behaviors. What's a less exasperating way for a small person to feel those feelings? Bonus points if you pick something that makes everybody laugh some of the time, something that can become its own gentle joke. I mentioned "yes, Mom; right away, Mom" in my post yesterday. My kids really do say that and chuckle-- not because they are afraid of consequences if they don't, but because they have internalized the message I was sending after many thousands of repetitions. An exaggerated jokey way of expressing frustration can make you both laugh and break the tension, and can also become a cue for her to muster her better self and do the right thing. Maybe in the short term she practices saying, "Dernit, I hate it when I have to pause my video," instead of rolling her eyes, and pauses the video as she's saying it. She gets what she wants (an outlet for the frustration); you get what you want (the video is paused and there is no eye-rolling).

You might find some useful tips in my ZETZER post, and the post I linked above is also filled with ideas for shaping behavior that's bugging you. It won't be directly applicable if the target is eye-rolling, but the framework might be helpful in straddling the tensions. Some days it just feels like too much to be clear and firm, loving and lighthearted -- all at the same time. Good luck! Keep me posted! I am cheering for you!

Kids who roll their eyes and parents who want them to stop

Back at the beginning of NaBloPoMo Kellie requested a post on responding to a kid who rolls her eyes. I wrote this post and realized after 1200 words that it is about bad attitudes more generally, so I'll be back with a second installment that is specifically about eye-rolling. Here's part 1:

Be patient with yourself. A lot of parents have absorbed the message that their kids' behavior is a direct reflection of their parenting, but kids' behavior is unpredictable. A long time ago I wrote about YES kids and NOPE kids. It is not your fault if you have a boundary-testing kid who says "BUT WHY?" at frequent intervals. In the moment you can only control your response to the boundary-testing and but-why-ing; shaping those behaviors is a long-term task. If you look with curiosity and kindness at the ideas you have internalized about how these interactions are supposed to go, you may find that they are not ideas you actually believe with your adult brain. This realization can (a) set you free and (b) lower the thermostat in tense moments.

Be patient with your kid. A measure of compassion will leave them feeling better and, somewhat surprisingly, will often leave them more willing to comply. Here again I recommend Haim Ginott's magical strategy of granting the wish in fantasy. "Wouldn't it be fun if you NEVER had to clean your room?" you can say as you are writing a list of the room-cleaning tasks (because structure is a huge help to kids in completing unwelcome tasks; see below). "It is SO FRUSTRATING to clean when you'd rather be reading a book," you can say. "If I had a magic wand that would wipe down the bathroom for you, I would totally lend it to you." Or, "Maybe when you are a grownup you can live in a house where the cleaning fairies come in every Tuesday! That would be the coolest!"

Make it predictable. If responsibilities are routine, they will generate less resistance over time. If chores always happen at 9 on Saturday and are done by 9:45, there will be less wear and tear on everybody once the habit is established. If "clean your room" means finishing a list of 5 concrete tasks, it will feel less overwhelming and be more likely to get done, with fewer tears. If chores are followed by a small fun thing that ONLY happens after the house is clean, there is some built-in motivation for everybody to finish their tasks briskly and well.

Engage your inner goofball. Humor works better for me than sternness on this front. If you say, with goofy feigned confusion, "Wait wait wait, did you forget that your line is 'yes, Mom; right away, Mom'?" some of your children will laugh some of the time, and over the years they will learn to say "yes, Mom; right away, Mom." If you say, lightly and laughingly but also persistently, "Hold on, I am pushing the rewind button and we are taking another crack at this. I say, 'Empty the dishwasher, please,' and you say, 'Sure, I'd be glad to!'" while you push an imaginary rewind button (with sound effects, natch), you will set a better tone than if you call upon your inner drill sergeant. It's extremely important to be consistent, but power struggles rarely end well.

Model the behavior you want to see. It's worth thinking about what your kids see when an unexpected responsibility plops into your lap (though recall my advice above about being patient with yourself). I think it has been helpful for my kids to hear me talk through my own feelings occasionally, to say, "Oooh, I was not expecting to have to do that today. Ugh, I am having a little grumbly moment here. OKAY, though, I am going to do the unpleasant thing cheerfully in 3-2-1..." Here too I tend to rely on humor ("I am OFFERING IT UP for the souls in Purgatory and I HOPE THEY APPRECIATE IT"). I believe that kids benefit from role models who can show them that negative feelings can be experienced and moved through, rather than being stuffed down or over-indulged.

Find good real-life examples. We were lucky, when our kids were young, to connect with a great Scout troop here in town. One of the surprising benefits to our family was the troop's emphasis on cheerful service. If your kids are spending regular chunks of time with older peers who are willing to do hard things for other people without complaining, it will (probably) shift their attitude at home. 

Find good fictional examples. There are a ton of kids' shows and books that pit the scrappy kid protagonists against the boring demanding grownups. They make it seem hilarious to have a lousy attitude about pitching in and doing what's asked of you. Mixing up the media diet can put some different examples in front of your kids, which has the potential to make a difference in how they think and behave. You might want to be subtle about it. With my oldest son I read Little House in the Big Woods AT him as a lesson in How Good Kids Respond To Their Parents, and he responded by telling me that the only worthwhile person in the whole book was Charley, the misbehaving cousin who falls on a hornets' nest. (The nasty subtext of "look at him getting what he deserves" does not sit well with me as an adult, I have to say.) I would be cautious about revoking access to books or TV shows with a NOPE kid, but I would sprinkle in alternatives in a low-key way, seeking out vintage books and shows with characters who are both dutiful and interesting.

Offer occasional opportunities to see that grownup chores are harder than little-kid chores. This is an approach I would recommend deploying only judiciously, but it can be very useful in small doses. If your evening job is to scrub the pots and your kid's job is to put silverware in the dishwasher, a switch can make it very clear that everybody pitches in according to their abilities. Adult life is not an idyll of staying up late and eating cookie dough; adults do hard things to keep the household running smoothly. When pushed to my limit, I have sometimes said to a kid, "You have required me to do a big unhappy extra job in providing repeated reminders and patient responses to your terrible attitude, and consequently you will need to do one of my jobs for me." This is not usually well-received, but as a rarely used strategy it can be illustrative. If you can stay calm and let the learning happen, sometimes the lightbulb will flick on: my parents are asking me to do reasonable things at reasonable intervals, and I can oblige.

One more time: patience. It's totally normal for kids to resist unpleasant tasks. It's totally normal for parents to struggle with teaching kids to leave behind annoying behaviors. This is going to take some time -- not because you are doing anything wrong, but because it's intrinsically slow and difficult. Kindness will help. Hang in there! It gets better!

In which I opine about parenting

Yesterday I was walking Stella to school and she said, "Mom, would you ever take away my phone because I got a bad grade?" "Probably not," I said cautiously, unwilling to offend a friend's mother through a subsequent lunchtime conversation. ("My mother says it's a TERRIBLE idea for your mom to take away your phone": not the best way to endear oneself to other junior high parents.) We talked about it all the way to school, and I am still not done thinking about it. Ergo, a blog post.

It turns out that this question did not arise from a conversation with a temporarily phoneless friend lamenting her lot in life. It came from listening to the PE teacher, who says confidently, "Whenever my daughter gets a bad grade, I take away her phone." This, I submit, is short-term thinking with the potential to create future problems.

In these days of online gradebooks, I think a lot of junior high parents are hyper-aware of how things are going in the classroom. I am not sure this is a good idea. Junior high grades are a low-stakes way for kids to take responsibility for their own learning. The thing I want most for my kids to take from school is a love of learning for its own sake -- certainty that the world is a wide and interesting place, where they will make mistakes and struggle and learn over time to do hard things. In my view, aggressive parental oversight can interfere with this process. The goal isn't to get perfect scores on every assignment. Some assignments are dumb. Some are genuinely hard -- sometimes learning takes time. Perfectionism is destructive. Perfectionism about grades can directly interfere with a student's learning: I see this at work all the stinking time.

One of the biggest tasks that junior high sets before kids is the development of executive function skills. They have to meet the expectations of multiple teachers, along multiple timelines, while navigating a messy social landscape (<-euphemism alert). They have to do this at a time when their bodies are sinking a lot of energy into physical growth and development. They need a lot of sleep at a time when it's cool to pretend you go to bed at midnight. They need a lot of food in a season when classmates feel free to shoot off their mouths about their food choices and the shapes of their bodies. Junior high is hard enough. My whole goal with parenting junior high kids is to create a soft place for them to land, a place where they are loved exactly as they are, where they can leave all of the nonsense behind.

I said to Stella, "Before I decided that you deserved negative consequences at home for a bad grade at school, I would need a lot more information. Did you get a bad grade because the grading was weird and arbitrary? I'm not going to punish my kid because a power-trippy teacher is assigning points in a way that doesn't make sense. Did you get a bad grade because you genuinely didn't understand something and you need help figuring it out? That's a terrible feeling, when you think you're behind everybody else. The last thing you need is for someone to punish you because something is hard for you."

I have posted before about giving kids enough room to feel their feelings, and it remains valuable in junior high. Getting a zero in junior high is an extremely useful life experience, I think: watching the math unfold in the gradebook shows you exactly how hard it is to come back from a zero. If I swoop in and shriek "A ZERO YOU GOT A ZERO DO YOU KNOW HOW HARD IT IS TO COME BACK FROM A ZERO?!?!" I will only interfere with the process by which a kid says, "Huh, I don't want to do that again. Better figure something out for next time." I will absolutely help kids with writing respectful emails to teachers about whether it might be possible to make up assignments. I am 100% available to strategize about homework alarms or calendar skills. But I want those things to arise from a child's desire to do better and not from my own opinions about the importance of academic success. One thing I have learned from sending five children to junior high is that I can't create that desire to do better -- I can only make space for it to unfurl on its own. If I bring down the hammer I offer myself as a lightning rod for the negative emotion; a kid can say, "Oh, I feel crummy because my mom is so mean!" instead of "I feel crummy because I did something careless and I need to learn how to do better next time."

A key component of the work of adolescence is saying to one's parents, "I am separate from you; I am different from you." It is normal for kids to look at the things their parents value and say, "What if I don't do that? What if I root my identity in something else instead?" The message I want my kids to hear is that they are loved forever, loved unstoppably. It's okay to mess up; it's okay to get a bad grade. They never have to hide from me. They should never be afraid of me.

I told Stella that I could imagine a narrow set of circumstances in which I might take away her phone as a consequence for a bad grade. If she were repeatedly defying a teacher's instructions about phone use in class, and if her choices led directly to a bad grade, then we would need to think about putting the phone in timeout. But I would still frame it differently; I would say, "You are having trouble regulating yourself, so I'm going to do some external regulating while you figure out how you can be more respectful and attentive in class. You tell me when you're ready to try again." This is the same philosophy I wrote about when she was small, because it is still true: kids need help learning self-regulation. The long-term goal is autonomy. If I am punitive and controlling, I only interfere with the long-term goal.

You guys, I feel a little shy about posting this because I have been SO LUCKY with my teenagers. We never get into dumb arguments; they never yell or sulk. I have been blessed with kids who want to do what is right, even when it is hard. I will never know how much of that is blind stupid luck and how much of that is because my ideas about parenting are solid. But I feel reasonably certain that my choice to avoid harsh and arbitrary punishments does mean that my home is more peaceful than it would be in other circumstances. If you have a typically developing junior high kid and your oversight of the gradebook is making one or both of you unhappy, close the tab! Step away! Be free! It is ultimately their responsibility; you will not be able to make them do the work in college. The sooner you both figure that out, the better off you will be.

Knees

This morning I was reading a blog post that mentioned the massive mess small children make with rice, and I said to myself, "...huh, I'd forgotten about that." If you are in the trenches with small messy eaters, I promise it gets better. Gradually, gradually, so gradually that you may think you are just doomed to a life of couscous-covered carpet, it will get better. One day it will be the aberration and not the norm when someone knocks over a glass at dinner.

Here is my #1 tip for cutting down on the amount of food on the floor at the end of a meal: knees. If their knees are under the table, their faces are probably over the table. And if your face is over the table when food falls out of your spoon on the way to your mouth, or falls out of your mouth because you are laughing so hard at your hilarious brother, it will mostly hit the table (maybe even the plate, if the stars align) and not splatter all across the floor.

Kids don't have to sit perfectly still. Most young kids can't sit perfectly still. It's developmentally appropriate for them to jiggle a little bit, or even a lot, while they're sitting at the dinner table. But if the jiggling is happening with their faces over the table, it's less likely to be messy jiggling. Once you get a little practice in with "sit-on-your-bottom-knees-under-the-table," you can shorten it pretty quickly to "knees!" -- a brief, cheerful reminder that's much less likely to disrupt the flow of dinner conversation than "how many stinking times do I have to tell you to be more careful not to spill food all over the floor?" Kids who can eat with their knees under the table are easier to take to friends' houses and restaurants, because it's much easier to brush off a messy table quickly and inconspicuously than it is to tidy up a messy floor. 

Here are two bonus tips. Number 1: if you make it the norm to drink water with meals, the inevitable overturned glasses will cause less wear and tear on everybody. If I were still in that phase of life, with a crowded table and children with developing fine motor skills, I think I would add dish towels to the table-setting crew's list of requirements. That way, every time we sat down together, we'd have a couple of dish towels handy for when someone's glass got knocked over. Another advantage is that across the years you will save money on restaurant meals if everybody knows in advance that the answer to "may I order a drink?" is pretty much always "no, we'll stick with water tonight."

Tip number 2: teaching kids to clean up is such an unpleasant job but also so worth it. If the 4-year-old who is careless about spills learns that he can't build with Legos until aaaalllll the crumbs are out of the carpet, he will learn the rules a little more quickly: the muffin goes on a plate, the plate goes on the table, the knees go under the table, and then I eat the muffin.

Hang in there! It gets better! It's such a pain but it gets better!

Twenty things you can do with little kids when it is snowing a ton

What is the largest amount of time you can spend outside? It will cheer them up and wear them out.

1. Build things in the snow: snow monsters and snow forts if your kids have the stamina for it, or snow possums if they have short attention spans. If a snowman is too hard you can make a snow squid: make one big blob for the head, and then use sand toys to carve out legs curling around it.
2. Sledding is super-fun on the way down, and those trips uphill will make for excellent naps afterward. Pro tip: promise them hot cocoa at home and leave 15 minutes before they think it's time to leave. If you wait until they think it's time to go, you might be in meltdown territory.
3. Kids love to move snow. Give them each a shovel and set them to work, man. (Keep your expectations very low -- any snow removal they manage to complete is snow removal you don't have to do. Even if they move snow back onto the walk you just shoveled-- hey, they are not squabbling inside.)
4. Make snow cream! I have such happy childhood memories of snow cream. In my recollection it works better to make snow cream outside.
5. Go on a polar explorer walk. Be Amundsen! Or Shackleton! (Just not Scott.) Take binoculars or a camera and take note of the signs of life that you encounter: footprints, scat, birdsong, actual critters. If you see a penguin, he might need a map.
6. It's true that snowball fights are only fun until somebody loses an eye (or takes a snowball square in the face), but they're really really fun up until that point. You can level the playing field if your kids are different ages by requiring big kids to throw with their non-dominant hand, or letting the littler kids start with twice as many snowballs, or something along those lines. 

When you get cold, go inside and pretend you're still outside.

7. Every big snowstorm, in my opinion, requires a fort. Possible materials: couch cushions, blankets, towels, clothespins, clamps. Folding chairs are useful because their frames are sturdy enough to provide some height but narrow enough for clamping. Also needed: materials for making "no grownups allowed" signs. If you can let them take over the living room to make their polar exploration station, they may hang out in it peaceably for a surprisingly long time.
8. Read about cold weather trials inside your warm cozy house. My kids have been riveted by the story of the Titanic. Shackleton's story has a happier ending, but what a heart-pounding story it is. Dust off Andersen's fairy tales and read about the Snow Queen. Oh, and I also love the story of Snowflake Bentley. And The Mitten! I might have to read The Mitten tomorrow even though my youngest child is 10.
9. Make your own snowstorm. Here's a how-to for the snowflakes I made when I was a kid; I never saw this kind until I was an adult but they're pretty nifty.

Snow day food offers lots of opportunities for creating lovely memories and scoring big Fun Mom points.

10. Muffins are pretty painless to make with small children and they can signal "it's a special day!" starting with breakfast. And if you say, "Guess what, kids, frosting for breakfast!" -- even though your "frosting" is lightly sweetened cream cheese thinned out with a little milk, you will still be a hero.
11. All-day hot cocoa is a favorite snow day thing. If I'm making a mugful, I stir together a spoonful of cocoa, a spoonful of sugar, and a tiny sprinkle of salt. I add a splash of milk to make a lump-free paste, and then add milk up to the brim. Microwave until hot. More often on a snowy day I would mix it up in my two-quart saucepan, for which I would need about a third of a cup of cocoa and the same amount of sugar, with a tiny pinch of salt. Here again you need to make a cocoa paste instead of pouring in all the milk at once. You can add vanilla when it's hot, but the kids won't complain if you leave it out.
12. If you are bringing cocoa to the table you can also put marshmallows into an empty sugar bowl and shift into your best snooty waiter accent. "Does Mademoiselle wish to add any marshmallows? Pairhaps she would like ze tongs to transfair ze marshmallows?"
13. Even a small thing presented enthusiastically can be a happy memory in what might otherwise be a long blank bickery day. "I know! Let's get the popcorn popper! Who wants to be my salt sprinkler?! And then! After it's popped! Would you like to eat popcorn...IN THE FORT?!" (I might designate a Fort Popcorn Eating Towel to cut down on the popcorn bits in the living room carpet, and shake it out in the back yard afterward for the squirrels.)
14. If you're a person who likes to spend time in the kitchen, it might be an excellent day for multi-step projects: make cookie dough in the morning (whoever volunteers to wash the mixing bowl gets to lick the beaters!); roll it out, cut out your snowflake cookies, and bake them after lunch; eat a few while they're hot but save the rest for after naptime, when you'll drizzle them with simple snowy frosting (confectioner's sugar + water + vanilla).
15. If you're a person who does not like to spend time in the kitchen (or a person who burned herself out while making cutout cookies with small children), simple comfort food is a perfect way to end a snowy day. Grilled cheese and tomato soup, or macaroni and cheese, or something like that.

Some fighting is inevitable if you have small kids thrown together for a long snowy day. If they get grumpy:

16. Don't try to logic them out of it. Sibling squabbles are generally impervious to logic in the moment. Brief brisk sympathy followed by distraction is your winning strategy here. "Oh, that sounds frustrating. Let's do XYZ instead."
17. XYZ might be a collaborative game like Forbidden Island. (It says 10 and up but you do not have to be 10 to play Forbidden Island.)
18. Another fun non-competitive game is Telestrations. I love it so so much. If your kids can read and write a little, you can have a blast with Telestrations. (We never score it; we just trace the mangled words through their permutations and lie on the floor laughing helplessly.)
19. A brief distraction could be a winter song like The Frozen Logger.
20. (If you become truly desperate, you could send a kid out with instructions to see what happens if he licks the downspout.)

Please share your own ideas in the comments!

Autonomy, the golden key

Months ago my friend Angela asked me about managing screen time with my kids, and then recently Jody asked about college applications and the angst they cause, and it occurred to me that my responses to those two questions would be closely related: I am all about age-appropriate autonomy.

With screen time, the long-term goal isn't to get the internet usage down below some target number of minutes. The big-picture goal is to help kids manage their own computer use, because you and your timer will not be going to college with them. I have found it useful to emphasize habits and frames, so that if a kid came to me and said, "May I play xyz?" I could respond, "I don't know the answer to that question -- you tell me." Computer time doesn't happen before a certain number of things get done in the morning (generally including a morning offering, putting away clean dishes, eating breakfast, and getting dressed). People know not to goof around on the internet until they have done their share of the dinner dishes. Nobody gets computer time after a certain (age-dependent) cutoff time at night. Phones stay downstairs overnight. You'll notice that a lot of hours remain for possible computer use, but kids can exercise better judgment (really, everybody can exercise better judgment) when they are fed and rested, and I have more brain-space available to teach them good habits if I am not shrieking like a harpy about the full dishwasher.

This part is squishier, but I also think it's important to emphasize courtesy and detachment in addition to rules. Courtesy: you have to be able to respond to a human being in the same room with you using a conversational voice. I am not going to yell for my kids' attention. Detachment: there is nothing on YouTube more important than saying, "Yes, Mom, happy to help." I'm not opposed to an occasional "but would it be okay if I helped you in 58 seconds when this video ends?" but the default setting should be an understanding that the real needs of the real people in your actual house are more important than internet goings-on.

When my two oldest children were small I imposed rigid structures for computer use. They set timers. When the timers beeped, they were done, period. I was always worried about how much time they were spending on the computer and what exactly they were doing. These days, for better or for worse, I am a lot more relaxed. At the beginning of the summer I asked my 13-year-old how much time he thought was prudent to spend on a screen in a day. I asked him to track his actual usage on the dining room white board to see how it compared to his target. I did not harangue him when the reality exceeded the target, because that happens to me too. He has been monitoring his own behavior, and strategizing about things he can do instead of playing brainless games. Do I want to do the monitoring? Nope. Do I want to come up with a list of potential non-screen activities, which will almost certainly be shot down one by one as too boring or too hard or too silly? I absolutely do not. So this is a win-win for us: he gets low-stakes practice with identifying and responding to internet-induced sloth, and I don't have to micro-manage his decisions.

In my ideal world they would spend less time playing dumb phone games, but I am a product of the Pong years so I should probably hush up about dumb games. (Also I harbor a secret love for Super Methane Brothers. I cannot put it on a device I own because I would huddle before the screen, twitching, in pursuit of a new high score. So! I should probably hush up about dumb games, huh?)

We have never owned any kind of video game system, because that's an easy way to encourage more engagement with the closetful of board games and other real-world activities. The downside of this decision is that tween/teen neighbor boys are less interested in hanging out at our house. Once they outgrow (or think they've outgrown) the Lego room, they prefer greener pastures, perhaps the ones in Fortnite. This is a disadvantage of our approach, but I am still not buying a video game system.

Hmm, now that I've typed all that up I fear it is obvious. But hey-- free advice, you get what you pay for.

Next, Jody. FIRST OFF, Jody, please be patient with yourself. I am dealing with one college applicant every three years, and you are dealing with three in one year. YIKES! I'm stressed out just typing that sentence! Also, your milieu is different from mine, I expect -- the kids in my orbit are mostly applying to state schools or regional Catholic universities. I have been pretty hands-off about college applications. I share this only as a data point, since you seem to be immersed in a hands-on parenting culture, and not as any kind of edict.

My logic, part 1: I am not going to be hands-on about test scores, because I do not want my children to tie their value to a test score ever, at all, for any reason at any time. I would rather be a little too mellow about a test score than a little too enthusiastic, because I have some baggage about test scores.

My logic, part 2: financial reality dictates that our children are probably going to attend one of a very small pool of schools. We're not going to tour the Eastern Seaboard in search of a just-right campus, because it's pretty painful to pay for higher education right here in the Midwest. So it's fine for them to apply to a couple of fancypants schools, but we let them know up front that the stars would have to align JUST SO for them to attend. I haven't felt the need to put hours and hours into editing their essays, because they don't need lapidary prose to get into the state universities.

My logic, part 3: if the college application process is about assessing students' suitability for college, it would be a little weird for me to put myself in the middle of it. Like, if my kid can't meet a December 1 deadline this year, how's he going to prepare appropriately for his October 1 midterm the following fall? I will help whenever I am asked to help: organizing campus visits, editing essays on request, brainstorming about which teachers might write letters of rec, offering low-level accountability IF my applicant is on board with it. But so far (two down, three to go) my strategy has been to wait for them to tell me what they need.

None of this would feel very helpful to me if I were surrounded by parents who were like BUT HARVARD OR AT LEAST COLGATE, so please accept my sympathies if that's what you're dealing with. Good luck! It's temporary!

Things I have learned about tantrums from painful experience, the postscript

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4

As I was writing thousands of words on how to deal with tantrums effectively, I kept remembering my own tantrum fails. I thought about the old friend who was miffed when I vetoed her plan for a group get-together in 2001 because I knew it was a tantrum waiting to happen. I thought about my old friend Tom, who witnessed my ineffectual response to at least one colossal Alex tantrum back in 1999, when he was traveling with our family. I want to come back to the thing I said at the beginning: big tantrums are really hard.

I have told you before about some of my favorite parenting books. Barbara Coloroso might be the single biggest influence on my parenting, but Haim Ginott was really important too. The most helpful book for dealing with tantrums was one I've never mentioned here before: Mary Sheedy Kurcinka's Raising Your Spirited Child. It was full of good ideas for responding to my kid, yes, but it also made me say to myself, "I am a spirited child all grown up, and I don't have to be ashamed of that ever again." So if the grocery store is getting me down in the run-up to Christmas, I will put my fingers in my ears and laugh about it later. If I go to Pier One because they sell pretty and inexpensive kitchen things, I know that I have a single-digit number of minutes to spend there before I get overloaded. I'm going to need to pick out my placemats quickly and flee the premises. In the process of learning to be kinder to my children, I have also learned to be kinder to myself.

One of the messages I hope my kids hear most clearly is this: It is right and good for you to be who you are. Sometimes kids are extra sensitive, extra volatile, extra fragile. I am going to keep nudging them toward maturity in those seasons, absolutely, but I also want them to know that I am there for them when they are difficult. 

I have been stalling on writing this post because I want to tell you two nice things that people in my family said about me, but I also want you to know that I am writing the series humbly, mindful of how long it took me to learn the things I am telling you. But anyway: here's the first thing. One night at dinner we were talking about this series and my husband chimed in. With tears in his eyes he said, "Mom is supernaturally patient." And if that is true (the source is anything but unbiased), it is because my kids (and the Holy Spirit) have made me so. Because of the nights that I was filled with regret about something I had said to a child. Because of the times that I have knelt before the tabernacle, weeping over my shortcomings. Because I was pushed again and again to my limits-- until slowly, almost imperceptibly, I was able to grow beyond them.

The work I am doing as a mother is fitting me for heaven. That's why it's hard.

Here's the second nice thing. Last month Pete and I went to Target, where I said something friendly to a mom and her toddler. "You're always so kind to the little kids we see," said Pete unexpectedly. "It must be nice for their parents to hear." This is entirely the result of dealing with giant public tantrums: I remember so vividly the moments of stranger judgment and the rarer moments of stranger kindness. I was so grateful for the people who said, "It is going to get better; it really is." Something inside me said, "That is the kind of person I want to be when I grow up."

This is going to sound pat but it is true: I am really grateful that I was given Alex as my first child. I fear I would have been intolerably smug if I had been given a meek and peaceable firstborn. It would have been entirely the result of my awesome parenting, you see. The reality is that a child's behavior only ever gives an outsider a vague idea of a parent's abilities, much as we might like to think otherwise. Recently I re-read an old post of mine in which I opined that "one of the best gifts we mothers can give to each other is the benefit of the doubt." I still think it's true. The world is roiling with mother blame and pointing fingers. What if we agreed -- in the face of a tantruming toddler, a sassy six-year-old, a truculent teen, a worn-out mom -- to lay down judgment and sow a little kindness? Kindness will seldom steer you wrong.

Things I have learned about tantrums from painful experience, part 4

What do I do when my kid is being melodramatic?
Tell him about it. I used to say, "I'm hearing this much drama and this much genuine sadness [illustrating proportions with my hands]. Lose the drama and I'll be happy to help you with the sadness." I can't deal with fake tears. So I don't. I think it's valuable to tell kids that you're willing to listen to small frustrations expressed honestly. I think it's valuable for kids to know early on that manufactured drama is a bad idea. Occasionally I've misjudged the proportions, but the attempt has been good for protecting my own reserves.

My mother says my daughter is manipulating me with her tantrums.
I roll my eyes at your mother. You guys, think about the strategizing that goes into effective manipulation. A manipulator has to think to himself, "Okay, I want Outcome A but I can't seek that directly, so I'm going to engage in Behavior B in order to elicit Outcome A from Person C. Let us consider, for approximately three seconds, the odds that we will see that level of planning and judgment from a person whose planning and judgment skills routinely leave her saying, "Oops! First we put the pants on, and then we go outside." Let us ALL roll our eyes at your mother.

Maybe she's hearing overtly fake tears. You can address those. It's true that tantrums can be an attention-seeking behavior. I've written before about the importance of attention in a healthy parent-child relationship. You can address that too, if you need to. But please: the idea that you're being suckered into an unwise choice to extend patience and compassion to a child who is overwhelmed by her emotions, and you should stop doing it at once? I mean.

Somebody's been reading too much John Rosemond. 

What about when he hits me?
Shut it right down. Do not tolerate it; do not ignore it. Create physical space between the two of you so he cannot hit you. Inhabit your authority and say very firmly (but still not unkindly), "That is not okay. You will not hit Mama." Accept that it's normal for kids to try it, and know that you are teaching your son something he needs to know for the rest of his life: no matter how mad he gets, he cannot hit a woman he loves. It's probably going to take some repetition. Keep at it. If you're dealing with frequent explosions, give some thought to containment strategies you can use when a tantrum strikes in public-- maybe taking along a soft carrier for the baby so you can strap the toddler securely in the stroller and move briskly to a less public location.

If violent destructive tantrums are a recurring issue, I encourage you to seek compassionate professional assistance. Ongoing issues with physical aggression suggest that maybe you're beyond stick-shift-in-San-Francisco territory. If you find yourself in a Yemeni city, where you don't speak the language and can't read the street signs, you're going to fare better with an interpreter.

How do I know when to negotiate and when to stand firm?
An often-repeated piece of bad tantrum advice is that you should never give in to a tantruming kid because it teaches her that tantrums get her what she wants. The thing that makes it bad advice is the "never" thing. If it's a tantrum over whether you should give her chocolate syrup for breakfast, then yes, absolutely: let it wash right over you while you prepare her a delicious scrambled egg with toast. Do not succumb to the chocolate syrup temptation.

But sometimes kids tantrum because we get it wrong. You promised that she could feed the leftover sandwich bits to the geese before you left the park, but you got distracted and forgot. When you pitched them in the garbage can, your daughter lost her mind. In this case, refusal to respond to her tantrum says not only "I'm going to keep doing my thing while you are sobbing great heartbroken sobs," but also, "And I get to break my promises with impunity and maybe even scold you about it afterward." Reverse course! Show your daughter that you are a trustworthy and responsive parent with occasional absent-minded moments! If the baggie with sandwich ends isn't too disgusting, fish it out and say you're sorry you forgot. It's normal to get upset when people break their promises. Her normal response doesn't void the promise.

It's not always that clear cut, of course. Often kids will freak out because they want something much less unreasonable than chocolate syrup for breakfast. Again, think about the long haul. It's important for kids to know that firm limits exist in this world. It's also important for kids to know that many things in this world are negotiable. It's okay to sit down next to your shrieking child and say gently, "You really wish you could wear the red sweatshirt today. I think we can do that." You don't have to worry that you'll be sentenced to years of tantrums if you say yes to a reasonable request expressed badly. After the tears are dried you can say, "Hey, next time you can use your big-kid voice to tell me what you want to wear. Let's practice." Have some fun practicing requests in a big-kid voice. Maybe it won't stick for the next time, but eventually you'll get there.

Kids don't tantrum because it's fun; they tantrum because they're figuring out how to do it better. And you can help them get there -- you really can.

Things I have learned about tantrums from painful experience, part 3

The comment that kicked off these posts came from Miriel, who said:

Speaking of children, I would love a Jamie's Parenting Advice post about how to keep your (my) cool w/a 3yo. The yelling/screaming/defiance

— MMR (@mirielmargaret) October 17, 2017

This is an excellent query. There are two answers, really: bring down the demands on your own emotional regulation, and increase the supply.

Before:
Think first about prevention, because you'll feel less frustrated less often if you're dealing with fewer tantrums. If you find yourself feeling hangry on not enough sleep, how likely is it that your best self will surface and steer you to calmer waters? Not super likely, am I right? It goes triple quadruple to the quintuple power for little kids. Toddlers need more sleep than they think they do. In practical terms, this meant that I was very very firm about bedtime for a long time. No, scratch that past tense. I am still very very firm about bedtime. I was just digging in my archives this morning, and I found my December self wondering if it was all right for an 8-year-old to stay up until 9 on her birthday. (Answer: yes. Live a little, December self.) I am the person at the grandparents' house insisting that it really is bedtime and so we'll see the cousins in the morning, because if I have learned one thing over the past 20 years it is this: everybody is nicer with a full night's sleep.

Blood sugar regulation is critical for emotional regulation. Many portable toddler-friendly snacks are simple carbs, which are not your friend if you are aiming for steady blood sugar levels. I used to take along a scrambled egg in Tupperware in my diaper bag. These days I lean more toward cheese sticks, or single-serving almond butter packets that I can squeeze onto an apple, or tuna salad pouches if they're on sale. Regular infusions of protein can make a world of difference.

Prevention is important for parents too. You know that thing where you stay up too late because it's FINALLY quiet and you need some quiet so badly and HEY TWITTER I HAD A HARD DAY and whoa how did it get to be past midnight? You don't need me to tell you that it's a self-sabotaging thing. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to infer that the next day's tantrums are likely to take even more out of that exhausted parent. Go to bed before you get too depleted to send yourself to bed. Pop some almonds in your purse so that "one more errand before lunch" doesn't cause you to have a meltdown alongside your toddler.

Another piece of prevention is looking at the bigger picture: what factors could be destabilizing the emotional climate of your home? NB: do not blame yourself for tantrums any more than you blame yourself for earthquakes, but think about anything that might be contributing to a surge. If Mama ain't happy, ain't nobody happy. Can you polish your mirror via self-care? Is there stuff going on between you and your spouse? A sensitive kid may try to draw your fire, because maybe it's less uncomfortable to be the emotional disturbance than to observe the emotional disturbance. Sometimes you can't fix it. Extra yoga classes and coffee dates and rosaries cannot avert the distress Miriel experiences as she prepares for her daughter's surgery. But sometimes knowing that increased tantrums are a normal response to family stress can put the kibosh on the guilt/anger/more guilt spiral.

During:
The best way I know to bring down the demands on your own emotional regulation during a tantrum: make sure you are only doing your job. Your job in this moment is to keep your kid and others safe, and to set the example that healthy grownups don't lose their shit in the face of strong emotions. That's it. Your job is not to manage anybody else's opinions about you and your kid. Haters gonna hate, and Target shoppers gonna make the occasional unhelpful comment about how the world is going downhill right here in aisle 3. Get out of aisle 3 if you can, but if you can't? It's not the only tantrum that's ever happened in aisle 3. Your job is also not to make your kid stop screaming. It is physically impossible to prevent a kid from screaming if that kid is really determined to scream, although you could display some deeply barbaric behavior in the attempt. And your job in this moment is not to reason; tantrums are impervious to reason. Calm now, logic later.

If you start getting too frustrated, say, "I'm feeling really frustrated, so I'm going to go into the kitchen and wash the dishes. I'll check on you in a few minutes." This says to your child, "Grownups get frustrated too, but they do not yell or flail. They give themselves a little space and do something brainless, and it helps them calm down." <---This is what you want your kid to know, right? Not that you never get frustrated, but that you have tools to get un-frustrated: label the feeling, get away from the trigger, and do something else while it dissipates. But oh, you guys, you can also do something really valuable if your inner adult temporarily loses her grip. If you bellow or smack or [fill in your worst tantrum response here], BUT THEN afterward you say, "I lost control of my temper and I am sorry; please forgive me"? You have just offered your kid a powerful example: in our family we all get it wrong sometimes. We don't blame other people for our own failures; we take responsibility. ("It's your fault I lost it" = so many flavors of wrong.) We seek forgiveness. We do it better the next time, or maybe the time after that. Emotions are BIG sometimes, but love is bigger and forgiveness is real.

After:
It took me years to figure out that I also needed to replenish my own reserves after dealing with a tantrum. I would be patient, oh so patient, with a tantruming toddler, and then snap at his older sibling about something minor. Being kind and compassionate and firm in the face of an enormous tantrum is an enormous job. What do you need to get back to normal in preparation for the next round? Twenty minutes with a novel while the kids watch a video? A cup of tea with a non-judgmental friend that evening? A solo bike ride or a kickboxing class? A visit to the confessional with no kids in tow? Think carefully about whether scrolling is restorative for you or just easy and diverting. Don't skip this step. You can't pour from an empty cup.

I remember feeling so much better when I figured out the before and during parts back when Alex was 2. His tantrums, when they struck, were still something to behold, but the feeling that I could do something was an immense relief. Maybe it's like living on the Gulf Coast in 2017 versus 1917. Hurricanes are still big and awful and unpredictable, but it's easier to preserve lives and property in an era with weather satellites, building codes, and FEMA. In 1998 the UK newspapers were a little sniffy about Hurricane Mitch, with writers wondering why the Americans were making such a fuss about a storm. "They don't seem to understand," I remember telling Elwood, "that this storm is bigger than their entire country!" Remember my geography analogy? People who aren't used to hurricane-force gales may not get it. Don't worry about them. It's not your fault that New Orleans gets hurricanes; you're not a bad parent because your child has tantrums. Batten down the hatches, and be confident that the storm will pass.

Oh, dang it, 1300 words and I still have lots to say. On to Part 4!

Things I have learned about tantrums from painful experience, part 2

Okay. So whenever I write about parenting I tell you the same two things, pretty much: take the long view, and exercise the Golden Rule. They are important for tantrums too.

Quick, think of people you know who manage their emotional volatility poorly. It's not hard, right? We all know somebody who loses it when things don't go his way. We all know somebody who apologizes for her feelings, even when her feelings are perfectly reasonable. We all know people whose substance abuse problems are rooted in their inability to cope with intense emotions.

I submit that these are not desirable long-term outcomes. I'll say it again: sometimes in parenting, your short-term goals are in conflict with your long-term goals. With tantrums, the short-term goal is to make.it.stop. Make it never happen again. The long-term goal, though, is a well-balanced adult who can handle life's ups and downs. Ideally (I know ideally is hard when your kid is screaming and flailing), our responses to tantrums will support their (eventual) healthy management of strong feelings.

This is not a quick strategy; it is not a sexy strategy. I am never going to sell a parenting book, because my #1 tip is Think About Your Future 25-Year-Old. But seriously, think about your future 25yo: you don't want him to think that flipping your lid is okay as long as you're big enough that nobody can stop you. You don't want her to be ashamed of feeling things keenly when the world urgently needs people who feel things keenly. And you surely don't want your kid to think that numbness is the answer.

Many people, in my experience, focus on the short-term solution. Bad advice abounds. Be stern enough to show your kid who's boss and maybe swat him on the butt! (Because it's okay to be a jerk once you're an adult? Because we want to set the example that angry grownups hit other people? No.) She just needs to know that big girls don't act like that! (Because shaming people for strong feelings -- at any age -- helps them to address those feelings effectively? No.) Just ignore it and he'll stop screaming eventually. Tell her after she calms down that she has lost x privilege because of the tantrum. Take video so he can see how ridiculous he looks. Never give a tantruming child what she's demanding, because she has to learn that no always means no. People will be delighted to tell you about the thing you're not doing that would fix all your problems-- the magic solution.

There is no magic. There is only love paired with persistence.

When was the last time you came unglued? What kinds of helpful and unhelpful responses did you get? I suggest that your answers to those questions will be helpful to you in responding to toddler tantrums. 

If I get myself into a freaked-out tizzy, these are the things that help me settle down:

1. Being listened to with kindness, even when I am not being my most logical
2. Adequate time to shift out of emotional overdrive, because some things can't be rushed -- whether or not they are inconvenient
3. Having a little space in which to get myself together, but also knowing that somebody is nearby
4. Physical contact with somebody who cares about my distress, even if I feel embarrassed about allowing myself to get distressed
5. A little perspective and problem-solving, once I'm in the right frame of mind for a post-mortem

So Golden Rule thinking tells me that these are the things I should try to offer a child in the throes of a tantrum. It is really hard to be a toddler. We don't remember in adulthood how hard it was, but it's a tough place to be. One of the most important pieces of tantrum management is prevention, about which more soon. But if you find yourself staring down the barrel of a full-blown tantrum, I suggest that you try the following strategies: 

1. Name the feeling sympathetically; grant the wish in fantasy. "You're really angry about that" or "You wish we didn't have to go. It would be so fun to stay longer!" NB: Logic comes later. Whatever you wish you could explain, you are probably right. But logic is a neocortex kind of thing, and you are dealing with an off-the-chain limbic system here.
2. Don't rush it. Your kid most likely doesn't want to be having a tantrum, because tantrums usually feel crummy. But if I can't will myself into instant calmness, even with my adult metacognitive skills, it's going to be significantly harder for my toddler. Give it time.
3. Figure out whether your toddler needs space or company in this situation. If you need space to keep calm, then give yourself some space. More on this tomorrow.
4. Make a way back for your toddler. It's tempting to shower a repeat offender with icy scorn after the tantrum ends, but choose your message carefully: I can handle your strong feelings. You might get really upset, but that doesn't mean you're a bad kid. 
5. After he's calm, after you've reconnected-- that's when you talk about what went wrong and make a plan for next time.

This leaves you with a bazillion questions, right? Like, I think you may have forgotten what this is actually like, Jamie, since your youngest child is almost 9? Tomorrow let's talk about prevention, and about these other things too:

• What do I do when I can tell my kid is being melodramatic?
• My mother says he's manipulating me.
• What about when she hits me?
• How do I keep from losing it myself when my kid is having a tantrum?
• How do I know when to negotiate and when to be firm?
• Why does this have to be so hard?
• What are some helpful resources?

Things I have learned about tantrums from painful experience, part 1

Today a Twitter pal asked me if I'd write about responding to tantrums, and OH YOU GUYS, I have more tantrum experience than your average bear. My oldest son threw hardcore tantrums for a long time. We laugh about it now, but it was not at all funny when it was happening. And here is a strange thing: I started to tell you a couple of the stories and I immediately felt inner resistance, a certainty that somebody reading this would say, "Well, why didn't you just--"

Believe me, I tried to just. Just ignore it. Just make my expectations clear. Just meet the needs he was struggling to express. There was no just-ing this boy.

Dealing with tantrums is harder than most things in life. I like doing hard things. I blog about them with some regularity. Shepherding a kid through serious tantrums is harder than all of the following:

• training for a half-marathon across a broiling Midwestern summer
• arranging a transatlantic move with young kids
• reading the complete works of Shakespeare
• completing the coursework for a PhD
• finishing a triathlon when you swim with all the grace and buoyancy of a Denali
• losing 30 pounds in middle age

I could go on. I tell you this because if you are having a hard time with tantrums, the reason is that tantrums are hard. It's not you. It's the task.

Think back to learning to drive. I am certain that if you reflect on your first year behind the wheel, you will recall moments that felt awful or at least awkward. The first time you drove an hour in the rain through construction with traffic surrounding you, it was scary and exhausting. You got out of that car and felt a little weak in the knees. Did you slide right into the space the first time you tried to parallel-park? Or even the tenth? I'm guessing you did not. Your parents' friends probably sympathized with them about how hard and time-consuming and sometimes frankly scary it was to teach a teenager to drive.

We learn to drive when we're old enough to remember the stress that goes along with it. It is every bit as hard for young kids to learn to manage their emotions.

Like driving, learning emotional regulation requires us to control a complicated tangle of interrelated systems. We have to practice being in charge of them, and practice and practice and practice some more until it becomes automatic. As with driving, we have to prepare for the occasional moments when we lose control-- how can we minimize damage in those circumstances? The consequences can be grave; the skills cannot be infused by osmosis.

Some of your peers, I'm betting, seemed to sail right through their driver's ed class. Others were more nervous, or had more trouble with figuring out the position of the car in space. But even the most spatially aware kids still needed time for the skills to become automatic.

Some kids have extra challenges when they're learning to drive. Here in Gladlyville, there's not much traffic; the streets are wide and flat. I would hate to teach a kid to drive in the West Virginia town where I was a teenager. I would hate to teach a kid to drive in Chicago, because secretly (except that I just put it on the internet) I still get a little stressed out about driving in Chicago myself. It would be preposterous for me to tell parents in those towns, based on my n of 2 licensed drivers, that I know just how they should teach their kids to drive. Some parents are teaching kids to drive manual transmissions in San Francisco: hills + traffic + fog + ill-timed stalls. And yet some people whose kids had Gladlyville-level tantrums think nothing of telling the parents dealing with stick-shift-in-San-Francisco-level tantrums that driving instruction is no big deal. Just-- insert preferred technique here.

I am not going to just you. I am going to tell you that it gets better. I promise it gets better. I am going to tell you that it's not your inadequacy; it's the magnitude of the task. And tomorrow I will tell you some things that helped me get to the other side.

Parenting and pomegranates

For about 20 seconds today I thought that I agreed with John Rosemond. But then I kept reading.

John Rosemond, if you're unfamiliar with the name, is a psychologist who is perennially urging parents to do it his way. I first encountered his column when Alex was an indomitable toddler, and it worried me. What if I wasn't being harsh enough with Alex? What if Dr. Sears was wrong and Dr. Rosemond was right?

Eighteen years later I'm still giving John Rosemond side-eye. Today I was with him for about a paragraph, when he encouraged a mother to rely on her authority instead of threatening her 4-year-old. It turns out that he and I have very different ideas about how mothers can rely on their authority.

His first principle: Do not stoop down when talking to a child. That is a submissive posture that undermines a child's perception of a parent's authority.

Nope #1: I want my kids to know that their opinions and their troubles are important to me. Posture and facial expression can convey that more persuasively than any number of words from on high. On a purely practical note, everybody is more willing to listen when he or she feels listened to. One translation of Psalm 116:2 says that God bends down to listen to us. Perhaps Dr. Rosemond would advise him to be harsher as well.

He argues next that parents should keep talking to a minimum and decline to offer explanations. Explanations only open the door to arguments, he says. The proper answer to "Why?" and "Why not?" is "Because I said so."

Nope #2: I want my kids to respect me, not fear me. I want them to feel comfortable negotiating in unfair situations. I think a lot about what they need, and I have good reasons for my decisions. In Gretchen Rubin's Four Tendencies framework, there are a couple of Questioners in my family. "Because I said so" is the least useful thing a parent can possibly say to a Questioner. Is his goal to inspire resentment and rebellion? That strikes me as the most likely outcome.

If kids don't cooperate with parents' instructions, he says, parents shouldn't threaten. Instead they should do the job themselves (Nope #3) and then later announce that there's a consequence. And make it BIG! he says. (With the all-caps, and the exclamation point. As if he gets genuinely enthusiastic about hefty surprise punishments. Nope #4.) 

Nope #3: If your kids aren't doing what you tell them to, I think it's often more helpful to do some problem-solving than to swoop in and do it yourself while plotting the oversized punishment that will follow. A 4yo, the topic of today's column, will often benefit from ample transition time -- maybe with a visual timer to say "This is how long you have to play with the Legos before they go into the bin." A 4yo may have a specific objection to one part of putting the Legos away, and will object to the whole process as a result. "Which structures are special to you? Let's find some shelf space for them first thing." A 4yo will often be open to a race or other contest: can you pick up a hundred double handfuls while I work on the dishes? Can you finish before I'm done in the kitchen? A 4yo is also a little young to pick up a really big mess on his own. What if you pick up all the yellow Legos and he races to see how many other colors he can pick up in that time? He might need a little guidance if things from multiple bins are jumbled together on the floor. He might need to have some of those toys rotated down to the basement for a while to avoid future unmanageable jumbles. He might need more practice than you expect with habit formation; new habits require a lot of parental bandwidth.

What he does not need (Nope #4) is to learn after the fact that you have imposed a sizable and arbitrary punishment without warning. The world is full of unpredictable ugly events; it's true. But if I impose a consequence I want it to be a teaching consequence -- and to teach something other than "you should listen to me because I will make bad things happen if you don't." If a kid is clearly slacking (or whining or sassing), I might do part of the pickup and then put those Legos on a high shelf for a while, to be earned back via cheerful cooperation with upcoming household tasks. "You're responsible for your own stuff, and for your own mouth," would be the message I wanted to send. Not "I will give away your Legos if you don't do what I say," but "Lego ownership is a privilege, and it comes with responsibilities." I might also require a slacker-offer to do one of my jobs-- maybe mopping the kitchen floor. This strategy can show a kid that small responsibilities are more manageable than big responsibilities, and that we all need to pitch in cheerfully to keep our household running smoothly.

After years of slogging I am on the far side of the little-kid struggles. And lately I have been feeling so lucky to have my particular kids -- they are such good kids. I think that it's easier to be good if someone close to you can see the good in you. Today my 12yo was bummed out after his soccer game. His bigger brother responded in such a kind and mature way, acknowledging the bad feelings and encouraging Pete to be proud of what he had done well. I am remembering all those years of painful sibling interactions, coaching them endlessly to be kinder while also contemplating a despairing defenestration, and realizing that it only seemed endless. That they really have been learning about love all along. That I don't have any regrets about being gentle with them.

Oh, gosh, I am past a thousand words already but I want to tell you about Stella today. One of my struggles with her has been figuring out how to manage her pickiness-- how much to push her, how much to accept that she has really strong food preferences. I'm sure John Rosemond would have ideas for me about how I could do it better. But slowly she's eating more foods more happily. She was so pleased with herself when we ate at a fancy tapas place earlier this month. "I think squid is delicious," she said loftily. Today I was surprised to see her nibbling at the remains of a pomegranate. "I didn't know you liked pomegranate," I said in surprise. "It's delicious," she said. It was almost gone, but she found a pocket of jewel-like arils tucked away in its depths. "Oh," she said, "it's a ruby mine!" 

I watched her tuck in and I thought about Persephone, who did not know that the things she was taking in would bind her to the place where they were offered. I hope my kids are soaking up certainty: that they are loved, that there's room for disagreement in a family, that their needs matter. I hope those truths can weave a tether that will always tug them home. I hope they're learning that they should listen to me because they can trust me, and not just because I said so.

18 things you can try instead of repeating "stop it now" in Target

Yesterday I went to Target, where I heard someone admonishing a child from a couple of aisles away. "Stop it now," a female voice was saying. "Stop it now. Stop it now -- I mean it." Coincidentally, they were in the aisle I was heading to. A boy who looked to be about 5 came crawling across the floor, head down. "MEOW!" he was yelling. "MEOW!" He was with his grandma and his slightly older sister. "You're going to bump into somebody," cautioned his irate grandma. And indeed, he crawled right up to my shins before he looked up at me. "Hello," I said, and smiled at him, because I have dealt with my share of animal impersonations in Target. I exchanged a smile with his grandma, too, and went on my way. I encountered them again 10 minutes later, and once again I heard the grandma from a distance. "Stop it now, Cory. Stop it now. Stop it now. Stop it now."

I wasn't clear on what she wanted, exactly (about which more below), but if you ever find yourself in a similar bind in Target I have some thoughts for you.

If it's the crawling around on the floor that's the problem, you can...

1. Scoop him up and plunk him in the cart's child seat, saying kindly but firmly, "Time to get out of the floor now."
2. Say, "Hey, kitty cat, show me how you can walk on your hind legs like a fancy circus cat! Wow, can you do it all the way to the end of the aisle? Wow, how about around the corner and down the next aisle?"
3. Set a deadline: "In two more minutes, it will be time to walk." You might get more enthusiastic buy-in if the walking has a Target-friendly fillip: walk like a zombie? walk like a soldier on parade? walk like a grandma?
4. If the crawling isn't actually bothering anybody besides you, then you can also consider letting him crawl all the way to the restroom to wash the ICKY ICKY HEAVEN KNOWS WHAT from his hands. That's probably enough crawling to get it out of his system.

If it's the loudness that's the problem, you can...

1. Tell a very quiet story together. "Once upon a time [whispered] there was a very quiet armadillo, and one day in its wanderings it met a--" [pause for kid to fill in the blank; if he does so with a yell you can say, "Oh, no, let's not alarm the armadillo. No alarmed-adillos allowed!"]
2. Share a favorite story that involves pursuit. My own youngest kids were very fond of Why the Chicken Crossed the Road. If you re-tell the story together (modeling a quiet voice), and then pretend to be Desperate Dan on a Target run together, quiet voices will follow naturally. Would you want to be responsible for Desperate Dan's arrest? 
3. You can adapt that idea if you have favorite hunting stories. You can be Pooh, he can be Piglet, and BY GUM you will find the heffalumps lurking in aisle 12. Or maybe you need to keep being quiet while you search in aisle 13...
4. What's a nice quiet sea creature? Could your cat become an anemone waving its fronds around? Maybe an octopus that sits in the cart and contemplates its tentacles?
5. If you're stuck with a cat, make it an alphabet cat -- one that only meows when it encounters the letters of the alphabet in sequence. No meows until you spot an A, and then a B, and so on. Bring down the volume and boost pre-literacy skills at the same time -- winning!

You can also make the most of the environment. You can...

1. Get some shopping help. Send him to the snack aisle with the mission of bringing back the Pringles. #sanemomrevolution, baby!
2. Invite participation in a low-stakes decision. Pick the toothpaste flavor! Pick the laundry detergent fragrance! But I can only hear you when you whisper. What? What? I can't understand you; your voice is too loud.
3. You are surrounded by distractions -- make use of them. If you're in the seasonal aisle, you can hand him a bucket and shovel. "This is something special for you to play with while we are here today," you might say. "We will say goodbye to it when we check out, but you can scoop up pretend sand the whole time we're shopping. Want to build me a pretend castle?"
4. Or do something similar with a kid's book.
5. If that feels like a dangerous idea because of the potential for checkout counter meltdowns, a 5yo might also be perfectly happy to spin the wheel on a can opener (or some other inexpensive kitchen tool) for a while, and less inclined to freak out about leaving it behind.

This is the part I feel awkward about writing, since this grandma at Target clearly has more years of experience with child-rearing than me, but I am writing it anyway: I submit that it's not a great strategy to keep repeating an instruction that's being ignored. It sends the message that you don't expect to be listened to, and that's not a message any caregiver wants to broadcast deliberately. I further submit that "now" is a Really Useful Word, one to be used with caution. I wrote about this in my croissants series: if you teach your kids that "now" means "you have to do this now, no dawdling" rather than "I'm thinking about this now but I don't really care if you do it now or not," then you have a powerful tool to wield in moments of stress and time pressure. The downside is that you have to police your own language pretty carefully, and follow through on "now" pretty vigorously, before the magic happens. (But oh! so magical when it does.)

With that in mind, my last set of strategies is all about how to talk to the kid in this situation:

1. Be really explicit about what you want. "Stand up on your feet"? "Inside voice"? He has to know what you want him to stop before he can stop it.*
2. As far as possible, keep the annoyance out of your voice. I get it, I really do, that it's annoying. Some kids respond to distracted caregivers with the view that negative attention is better than no attention. Don't feed that beast -- starve it right out.
3. Related: if you are dealing with a kid in annoying mode, it's probably prudent to minimize your own distractions. This means phone in airplane mode, all extraneous purchases deferred until another day. This is not the time to compare the conventional chocolate-covered açai berries in aisle 28 with the organic ones in aisle 29. Git 'er done.
4. Consider proffering a treat: if we all use our best Target manners today, then we'll each have a few Pringles IN THE CAR. If we don't, then we'll have to wait until we get home. Food rewards are not an optimal strategy, but it is a true fact that sometimes in life good manners will offer you a speedier route to a desired outcome.

 *I started this post yesterday and saved it in my drafts folder overnight. Today, out of the blue, my 14yo reminded me of a story from when he was 7. We were at Mass, sitting on folding chairs, and he was up and down, up and down, between his folding chair and the floor. I leaned over at him and hissed, "Stop wallowing around like a hippopotamus." "Hm," he thought to himself. "Maybe 'wallowing' means yawning. I'm not sure." So he tried valiantly, mightily, desperately not to yawn -- holding his mouth shut with his hands, even, in the effort to obey. But...he kept moving around until I hissed again (because I'm holy like that), "Get up off the floor!!!" "...Oh," he thought to himself. "Wallowing doesn't mean yawning." 

Learn from my mistakes, friends.

Uncertain Compass Revisited

"We need to talk," my husband told me last night. One of our kids had done something dumb. I'm 20 years into this mothering thing, and it is not news to me that kids do dumb things. But this-- I wasn't sure how to respond to this. I was furious. I knew that fury wasn't going to do anybody any good, but I was furious nonetheless.

I woke up at 3:00 this morning and tossed and turned and fretted. I stewed about it all day; I kept having to yank my thoughts back to the oral finals I was listening to. And then tonight my husband and I sat down with the kid in question.

Ten years ago I was on the other side of this situation with a different kid, and it did a lot of damage to our relationship with the other family. I was on the other side of this situation myself as a kid, and I knew objectively that my own experiences were a big part of the fury. I didn't want to get it wrong. I didn't know how to get it right.

For a chunk of the conversation I just sat there and prayed: Come, Holy Spirit; come, Spirit of truth. And I think, as I sit here and reflect on the situation, that it went better than I had dared to hope. I think we know the truth; I know the kid is repentant; I am pretty sure we have a plan.

After the dust settled my husband and I were talking about it. "This parenting thing is hard," he said. "We're twenty years in," I told him. "Shouldn't we have it mostly figured out by now?" "I'm not sure about that," he answered, shaking his head. "I'm not sure."

Mostly when I write about my kids I want to tell you that they are terrific and funny and bookish and delightful. Mostly when I write about parenting I want to tell you the things I have figured out over the years. But sometimes I need to tell you that this is a tough gig. Sometimes you do the very best you can and it still feels crummy. Sometimes all you can do is pray, and hope for the best, and tell them that you love them anyway.

How to get your kids out the door on time

El-e-e asked about making the morning routine less painful for her...friend, and I am happy to share some ideas I picked up...from a friend.

Step 1: Think it through. What is usually the hardest part? If it's getting dressed, do you need to hit the thrift store or an online sale so you can add a few extra pairs of pants to the rotation? Do you need to make a Target run so nobody is scrambling for socks as the bus rumbles by? Do you need to take 20 minutes on a Saturday afternoon to purge an overfull dresser and reduce decision fatigue? Do you want to mix it up a bit the next time you're at the grocery store, so you have more options for appealing breakfasts and lunches?

Step 2: Take it off your plate. This is going to sound a little bit California; bear with me. It's not your job to get a 7-year-old dressed. It's not your job to make a 7-year-old eat breakfast. You're in charge of providing clean clothes and good food and clear expectations, but 7 is old enough to own some responsibilities. Visualize yourself picking up that load and moving it from the "my job" column into the "not my job" column in your mental spreadsheet. If you are doing the work of getting anxious about her deadlines, she doesn't have to. This doesn't mean that you are flippant about being late for work or school or whatever, but that you let her carry the worry about the consequences of dawdling. You can also enlist older siblings in the battle against tardiness. They can be surprisingly effective at prompting without hectoring.

Step 3: Check on the sleep situation. Sleep deprivation makes everything worse, for everybody everywhere all the time. It makes you crankier and it makes you less able to fix solvable problems; same goes for your kid. Adequate sleep is the most important part of planning for more peaceful mornings. If you live in the US this is a great time of year for addressing morning routine issues, because your body clock is still saying, "Wait, what just happened?" It's the perfect time of year to ease bedtime back a bit, which makes it easier to give yourself a little more time in the morning. This is a step where "taking it off your plate" is especially important. You can't make a kid sleep (though you can surely make yourself nuts trying), but you can set an earlier cutoff time for screens and enforce quiet reading-in-bed time. You can't make a kid be perky and alert in the morning, but you can open the blinds 20 minutes earlier to let the time-change sunshine in, and you can plan ahead to work around slow risers' needs (see #5 below).

Step 4: Make a schedule with your child. Work backward from your ideal departure time. If you need the shoes and jacket and backpack on by 8:00, what time do you need to start getting arms in sleeves? What needs to come before that, and how much time does it require? I've included a picture of our white board with Stella's schedule, which we constructed together by talking about what she liked to do first and how much time she needed to do it. Post it in a prominent place, and talk your kid through it until she has internalized it.

Step 5: What needs to happen the night before? If you have an owl kid in a lark world, make the most of it. Lunch is easy to make ahead of time. Fixing a portable breakfast in advance can reduce stress too, because if you discover that you need to tweak your schedule, you can still grab that bagel and eat it on the way. Laying out clothes in advance will mean that a sleepy kid doesn't need to burn through limited cognitive resources making decisions in the morning. My scourge is backpacks: just two days ago I was saying, "What do you MEAN I'm supposed to sign something two minutes after you were supposed to be out the door?!" (I refused, FWIW, despite tears and fretting. I will not feed that particular beast.)

Step 6: Build the habit. How can you make space in the mornings for supporting habit formation? You won't need to do it for a long time, because once the habit is in place it is likely to be self-sustaining. It feels good to be competent. It feels good to be prompt. All you have to do is make space for your kid to experience those good feelings consistently through a series of low-stress repeatable actions. This might mean that your morning cup of coffee needs to happen earlier or later for a few weeks. It might mean that you show up at work with your hair crammed hastily into a bun. But it won't mean that for very long.

Getting out the door on time in the morning is a complex skill that kids can absolutely master. Both halves of that assertion are important to keep in mind: it's not easy, and so it's 100% normal for them to need support in learning to do it. But at the same time, typically developing school-aged kids are capable of sequencing the tasks they need to complete in the mornings. Some of them will pick it up more quickly than others, but even the ones who struggle can get there. 

Comments or suggestions are most welcome! And good luck to you...r friend, El-e-e.

The Heron

I always look for ducks in the creek near our house. There are almost never ducks, but I look anyway. 

On the first day of school I walked Stella across the bridge. It had rained heavily the day before, and the creek was high. "Maybe we'll see a duck!" I said. 

Instead there was a heron: blue-gray with implausibly slender legs, taller than Stella. It waded gracefully toward us, unruffled by our gasps of surprise. We'd never seen anything like it.

I was brimful of wistfulness that morning. Pete is in fifth grade this year, and so he takes the junior high bus instead of walking with Stella. But you guys, I was JUST blogging about Pete starting kindergarten. That post is from, like, two weeks ago. The older boy who talked all summer about switching schools had headed out with his chin up, leaving me proud and worried and...wistful. And Alex-- I miss him every day. If I think too much about it my eyes well up: he's gone. Gone.

It sounds a little wacky to say that my son's successful transition to college feels like a loss. So I will say it quietly, just between you and me and the internet: it feels like a loss. This is my job here at the end of my second decade of motherhood, to welcome the losses as my children head out into the world.

Recently Calah Alexander posted about the adjustment to life after her first baby's arrival. I found her post very evocative, because it was a tough adjustment for me as well. That new little person took up about 80% of the available real estate in my brain. I would remember something from five years earlier and catch myself thinking, "But what did I do with Alex while I was backpacking / singing in the choir / taking that final exam?" My mom pals had all seemed to make the adjustment more smoothly, but my mental gears clunked audibly as they tried to process these enormous truths: here is a little boy who did not exist a year ago. My world is different forever because he is here, and he needs me.

Now my world is different because he is not here, and he only needs me occasionally.

When you're in the thick of little-kid needs, you can't imagine that it will ever be different, really. You know people whose children have grown up and moved out, but it's hard to envision your particular children outgrowing Frog and Toad or goldfish crackers or peeing on the floor or eventually your home. (I do not actually miss the peeing on the floor part. I'm wistful, but I'm not that wistful.) You get occasional glimpses of where they're heading, like those elusive ducks in the creek nearby. But the reality, I think, is almost certain to be surprising-- like the enormous heron.

That morning I walked Stella to the school and kissed her goodbye. I ambled back toward home. When I stopped on the bridge the heron was still there. But as I stood there, he spread his great wings. And as I watched with an ache in my heart, he flew away.

Croissant crumbs

Here's a bullet-point version of my series. It is 2015, after all.

• Be compassionate. It's hard to be a kid. It's hard to be the mom. You both deserve patience. While being compassionate is the right thing to do, it will also make your job easier. (More details in the sixth paragraph of this post.) (Use of the phrase "sixth paragraph" is a dead giveaway that I am not really a 2015 kind of blogger.)
• Pay attention. Put down the phone, the book, the knitting, the worries, and perceive. You and your child will both feel the difference. (More details in the seventh paragraph (oops) of this post, but you can also CTRL-F for "Stella hates" if that's easier.)
• Emphasize autonomy over compliance, flexibility over rigidity. Create a context in which your child makes as many of his own decisions as he can. Push back against a culture that says he's too young for that. Self-direction is essential for self-discipline. And if you model flexibility, you will see it in return. Eventually. I promise it's true.
• Build good habits. You can set up routines that will make almost everything easier, for them and you both. If you have a problem, habit formation is probably part of the solution. Establishing the routine will take longer than you think. It will be worth it. (More thoughts here.)
• Set high standards; enforce them kindly. See my ZETZER post for details.
• Own your authority. You don't have to bellow. You don't have to threaten. You're the mom. Your authority is the lever that can move the world, or at least your apparently immobile child as he lies in the floor wailing. (Some details in the sixth paragraph of this post, or CTRL-F for "motherly authority"; more specific details in this post.)
• Take the long view. You have 18 years with this child in your house, God willing. It wouldn't take that long if they could learn things the first time you showed them. Keep at it. Don't let the naysayers get you down. In 80 years, when your child remembers your kindness tenderly, the naysayers won't matter. They don't really matter today. It will get better; truly it will. And if it doesn't get better fast enough for your liking, you can rest assured that it will get different. (This is the point that kicked off the whole series, so it's a fitting place to end.)

Good luck! I am pulling for you! If you want to read the whole thing, here you go: Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6

Resources for you: Barbara Coloroso wrote the book that revolutionized my parenting; Haim Ginott is really helpful; try Alfie Kohn too. Lissa Wiley wrote a beautiful post about her own journey. I'd love to hear what's been helpful for you in learning to parent your children with gentle authority.

Croissants: from apprentice to master baker

Okay, everybody, this is the last installment.

Almost five years ago, after my defense but before my graduation, I presented my dissertation results to a mix of students and faculty from my department. I wrote about it at the time: my deliberate decision to aim the presentation at the master's students, the eruption of rude and hostile questions from the organizer during the Q&A, the audible gasps from other faculty when my advisor told the story at a gathering two weeks later. That hour marked a change for me, from nestling to fledgling. His final question was prefaced with "There must be a literature on this," which flicked a switch inside me. I realized, "He knows nothing about this topic. Nothing. And I don't know everything, by a long shot, but I know a lot."

In that moment I stepped into my authority as a scholar. I did it with my body, when I squared my shoulders and stood up tall. I did it with my voice, allowing a hint of frosty steel to surface. I did it with my words, shifting into researcher-ese to show that I could in fact speak that language competently. I did it with my attention, purposefully saying, "Who else has questions?" and shifting my focus away from him. Most of all, I did with my inner certainty: I have poured my brainpower and my heart into this project, and in consequence I am the expert on this question. I was polite to him, but I was also clear that I was not there to be steamrolled. 

"You handled it beautifully," my advisor told me afterward. It was hard, you guys. It was really hard. It took me a long time to feel at peace about it. In that post from a month later I was still fretting about what I might do if it happened again.

I see a lot of parallels with my authority as a mother. It was hard to own that authority. It took me a long time to feel confident about it. One of the most striking scenes in Bringing Up Bébé is the moment when another woman urges Pamela Druckerman to say no like she means it, to say it with confidence that her son will listen. He listens.

Motherly authority has the same constituents as scholarly authority. Part of it is in my body, whether I draw myself up or kneel down for a face-to-face chat. Part of it is in my voice, which might range from tender to stern. Part of it is in my words, which can convey much more than a casual observer would hear. A big chunk of it is my attention, about which more below. But the heart of it is in my inner certainty: I have poured my heart and my brainpower into mothering this child, and in consequence I am the expert on him. He is hard-wired to love me and respond to me, and I am not here to be steamrolled.

I want to go back to the issue of attention, because just last night I was reminded about how much of a difference it makes. Stella hates having the earliest bedtime. I was knitting in the floor while she played with Jenga blocks next to me, and she was unhappy when I told her to pick them up and put her pajamas on. Drama loomed, but I did not need a magic wand to defuse it. I needed to put down my knitting. With my eyes on her face, I could read her better. With my face relaxed from its knitting scowl, I could set the mood for the interaction. With my hands free, I could offer to fasten the ziploc bag she filled. She had to pick up the blocks herself, because six-year-olds need to clean up after themselves, but I was available to help her with the hard parts. I could have said the same words while I kept on knitting, but they would not have had the same effect. (Another bit of this interaction that might be useful to somebody is this: I said, "If you briskle, we'll have time for a story." This offers a measure of autonomy to a frustrated kid, because I don't care if she goes fast or slow, within reason. This teaches real-world time management skills: if you dawdle, you might miss out on something fun. Bedtime is coming at 8:30, and you can decide how to use the minutes leading up to it. As it played out, we didn't have time for Curious George but we could squeeze in Good Night Gorilla.)

I think if I had read this post as a young mother I would have been skeptical. "You're telling me I'm not paying enough attention to this kid?" I might have said. "I have never paid as much attention to anybody as I pay to this kid." I'm talking about a particular kind of attention, though. Have you ever felt someone staring at you? It's the same idea, without the creepy: your focused attention has a perceptible weight. For kids it's like a mantle: comfort when they are sad, warmth when you are proud of your achievements, authority that's not yet theirs -- but that they're growing into slowly -- when they're misbehaving. It says something really important; it says, "You are worthy of notice," and that opens a kid right up to hear you say, "...and I know you can do what I'm about to ask of you." 

Rachel asked about what I would have done if Stella had pitched a fit about leaving the childcare room. My answer, I'm afraid, is "it depends." If it were an ongoing problem, I'd be thinking about context. Is this child getting enough rest? Do I need to send myself an automated reminder for next week, to bring a cheese stick to avert a blood sugar crash? Does this child hear me say, "Okay, I can be flexible about that" with some regularity? Does this child have plenty of opportunities to exercise autonomy, to say no? (For instance, I am really laid back about what my children wear to school. If it doesn't have holes in it, it's probably fine. If she puts her T-shirt on backwards I will point it out, but she is free to leave it that way.) Does this child have plenty of happy interactions with me, in which she can see that I genuinely enjoy her company and see the best in her? These are guilt-free questions, Rachel, because I know how hard it is to keep the balls in the air.

Even in a supportive context, though, some kids will continue to push. They may need to see that you are strong enough for them to push against without knocking you over. Even if it gets loud, you can still scoop them up and take them out. I might position a fighter with his back to my chest, flexing his legs all the way up in front of him to minimize flailing limbs. In those circumstances I would do my best to keep absolutely calm, to keep stating my expectations clearly, and to avoid looking at anyone else who happened to be around. I don't need to worry about judgment -- I've got enough to do. Afterward I would be clear that the behavior was not acceptable, but belaboring the point is a bad idea. Kids need space to feel the weight of a bad decision. A typically developing kid will know that other x-year-olds don't act like that. If it doesn't even work to get them what they want, they can decide to pursue other options...especially if you give them room to make the choice freely. This is pretty much my ZETZER approach: set a reasonable standard, and enforce it with absolute consistency and unrelenting courtesy (while making sure you have supportive adults around you to whom you can complain later). Drama only sets you back.

I do want to say very clearly, though, that just as I cannot be authoritative about someone else's scholarship, I cannot be authoritative about someone else's children. I can only determine what works for us. One last example: this is my fourth year in the classroom and this year I am feeling comfortable at the lectern. My evals are pretty consistent. Most often they say, "This class is really hard, but Dr. Gladly is kind and patient with us." They're not all favorable; for some students the "really hard" is "ridiculously hard, so hard that I don't care if she's nice because I'm never registering for one of her classes again." Regardless, I am pretty comfortable with that identity. (When my chair heard me stewing about my fall semester evals, she said, "It's supposed to be hard.") That's what I hope to be like as a mom, too: high standards, yes, upheld with kindness and patience.

The competence curve for academics, I think, looks something like an inverted U. Novices struggle, because presenting complex information is a hard and unfamiliar task. At the other end of the age spectrum, I have seem professors near retirement who are totally phoning it in. They're not meeting the needs of their students, because they're no longer engaged. Parenting can be the same way. Kathy asked me if my younger children picked up on my authority more rapidly, and the answer is both yes and no. Rachel Balducci wrote a post that resonated with me, about how it's easy to let things slide with the youngest kids in a large family. The confidence that kids will learn over time can get tangled up with the reality that a person gets tired of teaching small people to sit on their bottoms and close their lips around their food, every bite every time. Sometimes I have to herringbone myself up from the wrong side of that U-shaped curve.

I don't blog much about parenting these days (except for, you know, the odd 6000 words here and there), mostly because I am figuring out the teen thing as I go. How can I communicate effectively about the hazards of substance abuse when I have SO MUCH BAGGAGE about substance abuse? How can I send a kid out into the world when his bathtub-scrubbing skills are so far inferior to his coding skills? This series has been really helpful for me to write, my friends. I have been down on myself as a mom for years, because teenagers, and it has been encouraging to think, "I can learn useful things and apply them!" I was full of self-doubt as a young scholar, and full of self-doubt as a young mom. But I know that impostor syndrome is a treacherous waste of time. And I have been thinking about the promise of 2 Peter 1, that God has given us all we need for life and godliness. It leaves me feeling grateful, and hopeful, and quietly confident.

Thanks for reading.

Croissants: the bakery

As a parent, I have enormous power to influence. Huge, vast, colossal, humbling, heartbreaking power to influence. When I stop and think about it, it brings me to my knees. I could not see this when my children were smaller and my ability to influence them into commonplace civilized behaviors (like, say, wearing clothes in public) seemed inadequate. I see it now, and it makes me a little trembly: oh, God, make me the mother they deserve. Make me the example they need.

As a parent, especially the parent of a small child, I have considerable power to coerce. This power has its limits. I can tell you from long-ago but still vivid experience that the toddler who has sunk his teeth into your arm can keep them there despite vigorous attempts on your part to remove them. I am really grateful in hindsight that my firstborn was a take-it-to-the-mat kind of kid because he taught me something important: there's only so much good behavior you can compel, and compelling is costly. Compelling shapes the parent as well as the child.

This is hard to see when your kids are small, but compelling is a short-term strategy. If one of my teenagers said to me, "No, I absolutely refuse to do what you're telling me," I could not physically make him do it. They're both taller and heavier than I am. (I can still pick them up, but I wouldn't get very far.) I could say, "Then I'm taking your car keys" or "Then I'm grounding you," but my take-it-to-the-mat kid is still a take-it-to-the-mat kid, whose tendency is to say, "You go right ahead and see if I care." His brother is still the kid who crumples inside when an authority figure disapproves of his behavior, taking harsh words to heart long after everyone else has forgotten them. So that's not how we do things around here.

Coercing good behavior is a short-sighted strategy as well as a short-term one. Remember that thing I said a few days ago about two goals in tension? (You probably don't, because I'm writing, like, the Moby-Dick of blog series here. Middle paragraph of this post.) It's like I have an imaginary checking account from which I draw my mothering funds. If I spend my money on the snowmobile of BECAUSE I SAID SO AND HURRY UP DAMMIT, it might feel really good. I can rev my figurative engine and zoom down the hills at speed, feeling macho and invincible. The thing about snowmobiles, though, is that they're expensive. If I sink $15,000 into a snowmobile, I might not have the funds to cover the broken leg (i.e., the injured dignity) I get when it pitches me out. I might not be able to pay for the rescue operation when I trigger an avalanche (i.e., losing my kids' respect over time).

The croissant approach is like saving for retirement: month after month, you take the money you might rather have spent on snowmobiling and put it in your 401K. Sometimes it's painful, sometimes you'd rather buy plane tickets to somewhere fun, dernit, but you're taking the long view. (This analogy is probably offending every single person who likes Supernanny, but I'm going with it anyway.) If my daughter is being loud in church, as just happened on Sunday after a long stretch of better behavior ("BORING," she announced in an outside voice, as I withered inside), my short-term goal of getting her to straighten up THIS INSTANT IF NOT SOONER may be at odds with my long-term goals of teaching her to regulate her own behavior and learn to love the Mass. What I wanted to do, frankly, was seize her by the earlobe and hiss "NOT APPROPRIATE" in a Voldemortian voice. What I did do was remind her of our expectations, with clear disapproval in my face and voice, and give her a minute to collect herself. If she hadn't quieted down in that minute, of course I would have taken her out. But another thing I have learned is that inserting a pause is good medicine for an angry or embarrassed parent as well as a defiant child. Expecting instant compliance might make me look like a better parent. I think that acknowledging how often kids need a little time to pull themselves together has made me be a better parent. I also think it has taught them how to pull themselves together after a conflict, which is a life skill worth having.

(Here I pause for a moment of self-doubt. It is deeply ingrained in our culture, this idea that good parents say "jump" and good kids immediately say "how high?" I believe, I really do, that it is easier to find the joy in jumping if you are given a minute to gather your own momentum.)

Bribes and threats are attempts to compel. They are extremely motivating for some kids, but it's short-term motivation that actually erodes long-term uptake of the target behavior. (On which topic, see Alfie Kohn.) If your kid is not motivated by a given bribe or threat, you have to decide how far you're willing to up the stakes. If obedience becomes an economic transaction, your kid might choose not to buy in.

Here I am going to offend a bunch of people again (sorry!), but I think that steady reliance on bribes and threats is something like a steady diet of Noodle-roni and chicken nuggets. Noodle-roni is quick and easy and it's designed to be tasty, and we all know every kid in America eats chicken nuggets with alacrity. That approach is everywhere, but I am skeptical about its long-term benefits. The transition to a new menu takes time. If you serve a kid accustomed to Noodle-roni and chicken nuggets a dinner that consists of grilled salmon, sauted kale, and baked sweet potato, he's going to say, "...Are you kidding me?" He's not going to say, "I've been longing to eat this kale ever since I saw its beautiful dusky blue-green leaves at the CSA pickup." Tastes can change. I would honestly rather eat a bowl of garlicky CSA kale these days than a bowl of Oreos. But (here I go again) change is slow. A kid whose only exposure to pumpkin has been the pumpkin spice frappuccino (is there such a thing? I feel like there's pumpkin spice everything these days -- pumpkin spice library paste, pumpkin spice motor oil...) is going to be slower to perceive the sweetness of a wedge of roasted pumpkin. With time and persistence he can learn to enjoy it, though, just as he can learn to find the joy in duty.

I use some strategies that would look familiar to any mom. But I frame them differently than many sources do, and it makes a difference for me that I think my kids perceive. When my oldest kid was an indomitable toddler, I would put him in time-out when he did something wrong. He wouldn't stay in the chair, so I buckled him in his booster seat. Once buckled, he would kick his feet until the chair beneath him tipped over (his motto: "live free or die"), so I laid it back on the floor until the timer went off to let us both know he could get out. This was -- what's the word? -- insane, but everyone said he should get a time-out if he misbehaved.  Right? Right??? I believe I could have broken him eventually, but I think he is the kind of kid for whom the Pearls' plumbing supply line tactics would cause broken kidneys before they caused a broken will. It dawned on me slowly that I didn't want to break anything, didn't want to dominate my indomitable boy. The goal wasn't to overmaster him but to teach him to master himself. It is right and appropriate for 2yo boys to need support in the self-mastery department.

These days at my house if you can't follow the rules at the dinner table, you go sit on the steps until you can. But it's not "the naughty stair" and you don't stay there until I decide you're done sitting. You always, always decide for yourself when you're ready to come back. Take the time you need to pull it together, and then come join us again. No shame, no wrath (or very little wrath, very seldom), no worries. (This happens...maybe every three weeks or so? Less than that, now that I think about it.)

Sometimes I do things that look punitive; I do assign extra chores to kids who don't do theirs or do them badly. I explain it like this: when I have to get after you to do a job or to do it better, that takes up space in my head and minutes in my day and it makes me grumpy. Since you added something to my plate, you'll need to remove something as well. Usually there's an option, A or B. (This happens a couple of times a month.)

Sometimes I do things that could look bribe-y: I may offer kids something to look forward to after an unpleasant experience. But I always say after, not if. Getting your tooth filled is not negotiable, and I will not attempt to bribe you into compliance. But I will sit near you and hold your hand, and I will tell you softly about the outing I have planned for afterward when we can talk together about how we don't like getting our teeth filled. (This one I can't quantify.)

These are small differences, maybe, but they have changed me and the way I think about my children's struggles.

You guys, it's important to me that you know I am writing about my best self, who disappears with troubling frequency. But it boils down to this: Do I believe in the capacity of the human soul to respond freely to grace? You'd better believe I do. And my highest goal as a parent is to show my kids that grace is real, and transformative, and available for the asking.

Croissants: the cookbook that will never be

You guys, it's so nice to hear from you! I didn't think anybody was going to wade through that whole post, so thanks! This is making me nostalgic for 2005.

Alexandra said that perhaps I could write a book, which I appreciated very much. I do not think, however, that a book is in the cards. Here is most of what my book would say:

1. Think carefully about the good habits that are (a) important for your family and (b) suitable for your kids' ages and temperaments
2. Enforce those habits kindly and consistently
3. Repeat #2 for months or years until it sticks

This is why Jo Frost's website gets more hits than mine, right? This is me telling you that we started the croissants at 1 on Sunday and they weren't done until 7:30 and we washed a lot of dishes and wiped up a lot of flour in between. Even though I tell you how pretty and golden brown they were, and how delicious the kids said they were (which I can't corroborate -- thanks, Whole 30), I would be completely sympathetic if you thought a can of frozen crescent rolls sounded more doable.

But I do want to write a bit about establishing good habits. If you can teach the kids to internalize your "do it now and do it right" voice, then you rarely have to use it. I only have ten minutes before my self-imposed blogging cutoff (that's the habit that equips me to be more patient with kids who need patience), but I'm going to throw out some thoughts and pick them up again tomorrow.

Here's an analogy that occurred to me: in teaching our kids to take on adult responsibilities, we are teaching them a foreign language. Fluency in another language takes years. No one ever hears a 5yo say "I satted down" and snarls "WHY are you STILL adding -ed to irregular past-tense verbs? What is WRONG with you?" (We would hope that such a person was taking anger management classes.) And yet we expect kids to get it quickly when it comes to responsibilities and adult behavior. I have said it myself: how many times do I have to tell you? 

The answer: a lot. A lot a lot a lot a lot. You don't notice all of the English (or whatever language you speak at home) you're modeling for your kids. You don't notice all of their errors, because you have absorbed the truth that kids make mistakes with language. It is every bit as normal to make mistakes, to sound babyish, as they learn Adult.

I used to underestimate the bandwidth that was required from me for habit formation. I had told them we were going to do this every day. I had made it clear that this was their responsibility. End of story, right?

Nope.

If I can't muster the follow-through, I'm not going to see the habits form. Good habits are another of the Golden Keys to authoritative parenting: they can carry you through annoying chores, previously soul-sucking sibling conflict negotiations, responsibilities like piano practice, you name it. But kids need support to get to the point where it's all automatic and they wouldn't dream of flaking out -- the point where they spontaneously apologize and offer to do one of your tasks* if they happen to forget one of theirs. They can get there, and you don't have to bribe or threaten or yell along the way. But you have to have the bandwidth to make it happen.

Oh, rats, I got excited and missed my cutoff. More soon!

*That's a rare occurrence. Apologies are common; voluntarily taking on more work is not.