Making a Better America, One Child At A Time

My friend The Lifetime Member was complaining about Facebook the other day. He can’t stand it when friends of his—people he used to respect!—post gushy, sentimental shit about their kids. [Note: My FB friends don’t go in for that sort of thing, but apparently some of his do.] It just rubs him the wrong way in a big way.

I agreed that that kind of emotional bloodletting was more appropriately blogged about, or discussed with one’s therapist if discussed at all. I mean Facebook updates itself constantly, bringing all manner of unsolicted content to your attention all the time, occasionally including the kind of mundane and/or intimate revelations my friend has no use for.  Blogs, on the other hand, must be sought out. They do not show up, unasked for, like old friends’ latest romantic travails or extensive philosophical ruminations do on Facebook. Blogs, I argued, are an ideal forum for gushing.

He disagreed, taking the opinion that there is no room for that kind of conversation anywhere, any time. It’s plain undignified, bragging to the world at large about your parenting accomplishments.

I wonder how he feels about parenting defeats?

In spite of my best efforts, The Boy has become addicted to cell phone video games. Me, I don’t have any such nonsense on my phone or any of my computers. With my addictive personality, I’d slip down the bunny hole in no time and never get another non-essential thing accomplished for the rest of my life.

It’s beginning to look like The Boy is going to fulfill the diagnosis I made for myself.

Thus the Cat-5 tantrum tonight when he was denied access to said video game come bedtime. (After the storm, The Missus went to great pains to explain to me the game’s overall coolness and relative educational value, but to me, a video game is a video game. Even when you call it a “science game” and give the 5-year-old a talking point I would have been better off if he’d been without.)

Anyway, the first big explosion of the video game era came tonight. I’m not sure what the run-up was, but the result was The Missus turned her phone off before The Boy was ready to stop playing and he went ballistic. Much more so than I’ve seen and heard him for quite a while.

After a minute I figured out the situation wasn’t going to resolve itself and dragged myself up off my ass and lumbered into The Missus’ office. There she was, trying to use logic and common sense on the red-faced howling banshee. She gladly accepted my offer to give it a try.

The first thing that happened was that he tried to turn her phone back on, right there as I sat hunkered down, looking him in the eye. Clearly testing his limits, perhaps forgetting the fact that although it was Mommy’s phone that started this fracas, once I became involved, it was now all about satisfying my needs.

And what I needed was for him to settle down, so I immediately accelerated the situation by disconnecting the phone in question and pocketing it, telling him bluntly that he was done playing with it for the night. No preamble, no negotiation, just pure unilateral action.

As expected, he went immediately to Defcon One. His screams were directed point-blank at my face, so loud I was worried that he would hurt his throat—at one point, I made him stop and take a swallow between screams for that very reason—his little fists clenched at his sides, still having it together enough to remember that striking Daddy draws immediate and very undesirable consequences. He leaned in and shrieked, “NOOOO!!!” at me, so close our faces were only inches apart. He was red as a ripe rutabaga and the tears flowed copiously.

I remained impassive, neither resisting him nor ignoring his resolve. I talked to him in a low voice between screams, pausing so as to not interrupt any of the individual banshee wails. Eventually I just clammed up and just let him run out of steam. I never stopped looking him in his eyes—I knew exactly how he felt, and was happy to let him blow off steam without the kind of repercussions I would have drawn if I had done the same as a kid.

The looking in the eyes thing usually works, and this time proved no exception. All unhappy kids want is to know you really, actually notice them and their needs. And when they’re screaming too loud for a verbal reassurance to be effective, a good empathetic, unwavering eye-lock usually does the trick.

When the yelling petered out, we went back into my office, which is always warmer and more poorly-lit than any other room of the house. A good setting for a calm, reasoned conversation. I loaded him up into my easy chair and sat on the floor, facing him. We had another, quieter, more articulate talk about anger and courtesy and all that stuff, the absence of which, I explained to him, had always made my life harder than it had to be for longer than it had to be.

(I make an awesome cautionary tale, and will no doubt continue to do so for years to come; I have cautionary tales for almost every circumstance.)

I packed him off to bed about ten minutes later a happy camper, the cell-phone video game completely forgotten (which fact I know because when his mother brought it up as she was tucking him in, he had to be reminded what she was talking about).

Sorry, Lifetime Member, I just love being a Dad. And I’ll bet you do, too, you cranky old curmudgeon, you! You named your son after your favorite make of rifle, after all—if that’s not love, nothing is!