Kids Like Mine

There is a scene in one of the Addams family movies where Wednesday passes by her mother carrying a large knife. Morticia asks if it is for her brother. She says “yes” and Morticia says “I don’t think so.” She takes the knife away and hands Wednesday a larger one.

I imagine a lot of what I did looked a bit like that to other parents. I got accused of being a doormat and letting my kids run the show (which my kids find laughable as I was the disciplinarian, not their father). Other people seemed to think I was an “enabler”, as if the natural curiousity of children was a bad habit in need of breaking, like drug addiction or alcoholism. I do not view it that way. Children have mind’s and wills of their own. If they are determined to do something, you can’t really stop them. If I saw nothing wrong with what they were up to, I tried to support it so it would be as safe as possible, like the scene in “Overboard” where the butler tells Goldie Hawn he cannot let her jump overboard…at least not without a life vest.

A few examples come to mind:
When my oldest was two years old, he was adamant he wanted to climb the ladder to the slide himself. He was not going to be stopped and he had a fit if I tried to help him. But it wasn’t really safe to leave him to his own devices. Ultimately, I formed a cage around his body with mine. That way, he could climb all on his own but if he slipped I could catch him. He was wiling to accept that and so was I.

At an even younger age, less than eighteen months old, when I noticed he was not only almost tall enough to reach the door handle but also trying to do so, I promptly taught him to scoot down the stairs on his butt. We were living in Germany where the doors have handles rather than knobs. All he had to do was jump or get a little taller or hook something over the handle and pull down. We lived on the third floor. I wanted him safe if he managed to escape the apartment. Not long later, he did escape the apartment. And scooted all the way down all the stairs on his butt. I discovered his escape and caught him just outside the building, in time to avoid having him disappear into a nearby corn field, which would have been a nightmare. Since he did not wind up in the emergency room with a fractured skull, I feel my tactic was success. It was inevitable that he would get taller and escape the apartment at some point. It was not inevitable that it end in tragedy.

More recently, after he reached adulthood, he wanted to walk several miles to a game store to buy a game. I did my best to show him a map, explain the directions, insist he take drinks and snacks and so on. His first attempt failed to get him to the store but he came back home, tired and hungry but safe. I explained where he went wrong and he tried again a few days later. That trip was a success and subsequent trips went smoother. I gradually quit fretting and quit fussing over him so much as he was leaving. I was very stressed out when he made first trip, so he laughed that I was doing everything I could to help him make it a success instead of trying to stop him. I asked him “What am I supposed to do? Take away your shoes? Revoke your license to walk? If you really want to do this, you will. Trying to stop you can make it go badly but I can’t keep you here.”

Children have to spread their wings. Trying to stop it causes more harm than good. Either they will defy you and trouble will ensue or they will do as they are told and fail to learn what they need to know to be competent adults. Either outcome is a problem. Best to let them go a little overboard at times while fussing to make sure they wear their life vest.

We are watching the new show “Unchained Reactions”. Adam remarked that he figured out when he was eight years old that he could set ice on fire if he first coated it with clear coat. I turned to my oldest son and said that Adam sounds like he was even more challenging to raise than said oldest. He again launched into his explanation as to why he never ended up a pyromaniac and never did anything like burn down a shed, in spite of finding the physics of fire and electricity fascinating.

See, I have mild pyromaniac tendencies. In my teens, I once broke an ashtray by building a small bonfire in it. But one of the reasons I remained fascinated for a time (I’m less pyromaniacal these days) is partly because fire was a “bad”/forbidden thing. In contrast, my oldest son swears that I taught him to play with fire one stormy night when the power was out excessively long and my kids were getting dangerously bored. With no power, there were serious limitations on how to keep them entertained. As a desperate last resort, I began building fire bridges and what not with matches. This was effective in keeping them temporarily entertained. Nor did I forbid them from playing with it later, when the power was back on. The catch? They had to follow rules which kept it a safe activity and they also had to clean up the mess afterwards.

Buzzkill.

My “clean up the mess” policy was a far more effective deterrent than making it forbidden could have ever been. Safely cleaning up the mess took far longer than making it had. They decided to spend their time on less messy activities. Like video games.

When my oldest was 8 months old, I heard a blurb on the radio to the effect that 80% of what most kids hear is “no” or some variation thereof (“stop that”, “quit that”, etc).  I swore to myself right then and there that at least 50% of what my kids would hear would be what they could do, not what they couldn’t do.  (Think about that for a minute:  Most kids hear something negative at least four times more often than both positive and neutral things combined. And we wonder why we can’t achieve world peace.) My sons both fit the profile for ASD (autism spectrum disorder) and are often very ‘duh’ about social stuff.  But I have been told by waiters, waitresses, store managers and the like on two continents how amazingly polite and well behaved my kids are.

Why is that? Because I rarely said things like “Shut up and sit still.”  Instead, from a very early age I offered them options for how to keep themselves quietly entertained.  When my oldest was the aforementioned 8 months old, I was listening to the radio in my truck because I was basically living out of my truck all day so he could breathe and spend less time in the ER.  I would get up early with my husband, who was in the military, and go in with him in the morning.  We were in Germany in a little town called “Dampfach” (try telling the minister where you live when that’s its name) and it was like a 20 minute drive by autobahn.  We would get to the kasern — which is an odd little word I probably can’t spell and it’s what they call the little American military bases in Germany which take up as little as a city block and don’t look anything at all like what Americans think of as a military base — and it was dark and there was nothing to do.  After my husband went to his first roll call and probably did PT (“exercise” for y’all civilians), we would get together and have breakfast at some little eatery on the kasern.  

So here I am with a sick 8 month old, living out of my car and eating breakfast at some godawful early hour of the morning with a sick child who is doped to the gills.  Why was he ‘remarkably well behaved’ under such circumstances?  Because mom would reach into her purse every five minutes and hand him something new to play with — my watch, some pennies, the tiny tape measure I carried with me everywhere, a coin purse full of change, my driver’s license, anything he hadn’t seen in the last twenty minutes.  When he would start getting bored and irritable, I would dig around for something else, sometimes desperately trying to come up  with something “new”.  In other words, well before he could talk, he was taught to play quietly in a restaurant.  He was taught what was socially acceptable behavior.  

And it didn’t involve expecting him to sit there dying of boredom and somehow behave anyway.  He was taught he could get his needs met, that was perfectly okay, he just couldn’t scream and cry incessantly — and that not screaming and crying wasn’t some exercise in self discipline. It was an exercise in keeping yourself quietly entertained.  We were in the restaurant more to meet my needs than to meet his and that generally remained true his entire life — mom needed to eat a decent meal, by god — but that didn’t mean it needed to be just utter torture for him.

So my kids didn’t hear “no” all the time.  Instead, they were taught what they could do.  It not only made them ‘well behaved’ in the eyes of others it also means they have a better relationship to me than many kids have to their parents.  Why?  Because their experience of me wasn’t overwhelmingly negative.  I was not that awful person who told them “no” constantly. I was that person who kept them quietly entertained and helped them get their needs met.  Which means my kids trust me, like me, and when I do scream at them (which I do), they either figure I have a very good reason or I am temporarily insane due to my health issues.  Either way, it doesn’t create baggage.  We either resolve whatever good reason I have for screaming at them or we work on getting me feeling better so I’m not some deranged screaming lunatic.

So if you want kids like mine — kids who are well behaved and who are fanatically loyal to you and forgiving of your personal shortcomings — then stop telling them “no”, “quit that”, “stop that”, “I’m warning you!”, and  ”if you do that one more time…”.  Process of elimination is the hardest, longest, most painful way to learn something.  Knowing one thing that works is worth a heckuva lot more than knowing 10,000 things that don’t work.

When my oldest was eight years old, his brother turned six. For his birthday, my youngest son got enough money to purchase two or three video games. My oldest tried to talk him into buying a video game for him as well. I promptly forbade my youngest from doing so. He then defended his request by saying something like “It’s not like I want all his money. I’m letting him keep part of it.” I didn’t bother to discuss it with him. He clearly didn’t understand what the problem was. When he was nine, I put him on a vitamin therapy. After about a year on this treatment, out of the blue, he suddenly announced that he finally understood why that was wrong. He continued on the therapy for several months. In addition to improved social behavior, he also showed improvements in handwriting. Even after he stopped taking these vitamins, anytime he got too weird, I would give him a B-complex supplement. There was one memorable incident when he was about fourteen. He had done something unacceptable to his brother and I sent him to go sit on my bed to keep him and his brother apart while I went and got his vitamins. He was so frustrated he was in tears. He just didn’t understand what he had done wrong. I gave him his vitamins and told him I would discuss it with him later, that he just wouldn’t understand until the vitamins had time to get into his system.

For my oldest son, inability to understand social issues was at least partly rooted in a vitamin deficiency.  Treating the vitamin deficiency dramatically improved his social skills without any need for occupational therapy  or other behavioral intervention. I have heard similar stories from other parents — that treating an underlying biomedical issue significantly improved social skills without need for other (behavioral/psychological) intervention.