Shouting

Yesterday afternoon, during the witching hour--that hour right before dinner when the kids go crazy--I totally lost my cool. My son was pestering me to pick up a pen cap off the floor for him while I was stirring meatballs into hot spaghetti sauce and my daughter was hanging on my leg whining. I turned to him and shouted "Hey!" with what I thought was a withering glare. I caught myself, took a breath, and apologized: "I'm sorry for shouting at you. I shouldn't have done that." I thought, rather proudly, that I was doing such a great job parenting, providing him with an example of contrition without justifying my actions. But he totally missed that point. "Mom," he said. "Shouting is what you do at birthday parties! But you shout 'surprise.'" I had just started a party without even knowing it.

Pirate Rules

I made the mistake the other day of telling my three-year-old son that pirates don't follow regular people rules, they follow pirate rules. I meant to highlight the idea that pirates aren't just anti-rule; they have their own set of codes that rule them on the high seas. But the nuances were lost on the three year old. Every time he did something he's not allowed to do, he'd say, "Mom. I'm following pirate rules."

These pirate rules included everything he wanted to do but isn't allowed: laying on top of the kitchen table, spraying the laundry hanging in the back yard with water from the hose, poking his sister with the toilet paper holder. Following pirate rules in our house often meant behaving unkindly.

I've been thinking a lot lately about what are the most important things to teach my kids, and where obedience falls into the mix. It's easy to decide that I want them to be able to think for themselves and make wise decisions, that I want them to explore their world, that I want them to be creative, that I want them to know the value of working at something that's hard for them. But much of the time I just want them to do what I say.

I've read many books on the subject of raising kids, and each one touts a different highest value. For one author, it's obedience. For another, it's kindness or humane-ness, and the critical thinking skills necessary to make humane choices. For another, it's responsibility and thinking for themselves. For yet another, it's love of learning and creative problem solving.* And these are all good things. I suppose this is the problem of parenthood. There are so many good things that children are and that they can become, and there's no philosophically and practically perfect system for enabling the good.

My dad's advice is to raise kids you'll like to hang out with as adults, because you'll spend a lot more time with them when they're adults than when they're kids. That seems a good place to start, even as I puzzle over what my parenting priorities are. I'm not a big fan of pirate rules, but I love the sparkle in the eyes of the boy who's inventive enough to try to follow them.

*Books referred to:
--Ted Tripp's Shepherding a Child's Heart (I do have some strong philosophical disagreements with Tripp)
--Zoe Weil's Above All, Be Kind (it includes some great questionnaires to help parents think through their values and how those values should affect their parenting)
--Foster Cline and Charles Fay, Parenting with Love and Logic (lots of practical application, though I'm still thinking through some of the claims they make)
--Alfie Kohn's Unconditional Parenting (this one really challenged me to think about what values I hold, and he provides lots of psychological studies to establish his argument)