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Literary inoculation

I’ve been thinking about how divided our country is right now, and how our children are watching. I wish we could inoculate them against the anger, and the zeal with which we assume the worst of one another.

I wrote something about this elsewhere, and about how maybe we can give our children the empathy so many adults are lacking right now, by encouraging them to read good books. Essentially what I’m getting at is that a good book—be it a novel, a biography, or person-focused history—humbles heroes and humanizes villains. They remind us that we, who are almost always the heroes in our life narratives, are fallible. And that our enemies love their mothers too. 

Though I wrote that essay for a book publisher, we know it’s not just books that cultivate empathy; good movies, documentaries, comics—anything with a well-told story can help a child empathize with the flaws and humanity in others. We need more of all these. Less formulaic stuff where the heroes are perfect and the bad guys irredeemable. More stuff that reminds us even the worst of us is human.

I want to illustrate this idea to my older kids and, in all transparency, to a lot of my adult friends who’ve lost interest in reading anything challenging a long time ago. I’ve been trying to recall stories where the hero is so flawed you cringe, or where you feel at least a flash of genuine empathy for the bad guy you’d rather just hate without reservation. Here’s a teen-friendly sample of what I’ve come up with so far:

  • True Grit
  • 3:10 to Yuma
  • The Book Thief
  • Les Miserables
  • Anne of Green Gables
  • The Penderwicks
  • The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

I’m curious how other parents think about this, and in particular what books or movies got you to empathize with characters you were inclined to hate. What, if anything, can our kids read and watch that will grow them beyond the devil/saint mindset that has seized so many politicians and talking heads?

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In praise of the irritating child

Since this week we’re focusing on the habit of proper praise, I’m thinking about my stubborn teenagers. Each of them in his own way has managed to get under my skin over the years, and I haven’t handled it well. I’ve come to realize this is because I’ve harbored the notion that I’m entitled to a disturbance-free life.

You can see how children might undermine one’s desire for calm. Far too late into fatherhood, I realized how often I get irritated at my kids for being, well, kids. Worse, as I’ve learned about the habit of praise, I’ve come to realize how often I got (and still get) irritated at them for manifesting traits which are good.

My irrepressibly active son now thankfully takes out his aggression on people other than me.

Qualities like honesty, persistence, and intensity can be challenging when they begin to bud. Thank God they’re hard to squash, though I wonder how many children this world manages to mangle permanently, what with our widespread desire for easy parenting, the prevalence of mind-numbing entertainment, and schools geared for somnolent obedience over the cultivation of virtue and action.

Since I’m also learning that the path to world reform begins with yourself, what all this big talk means in practice is that I’ve had to work on catching myself when irritation sets in, and asking whether the irritating thing my child is doing comes at least in part from a good place.

I’m realizing, further, that I should ask this about anyone’s actions, especially my own. Too much of my behavior-management has been superficial, aimed at the leaves rather than the roots.

My persistent bike-rider has graduated to even more nerve-rattling feats of daring.

My 15 year-old, for example, has an uncanny ability to sniff out hypocrisy. Once, when I complained about a jerky driver in front of us, he noted three or four jerky things I had recently done as a driver. My first instinct was to slow my truck to a less lethal speed and push him out the window. But the kid was right.

When he was four, my now 18 year-old insisted on riding a bike, repeatedly launching himself down the driveway and crashing. I pleaded with the boy, as his knees slowly turned to hamburger, to just use a bike with training wheels. But no, it was essential to him for some reason to ride a big-boy bike.

My 20 year-old, meanwhile, has always been like a hunting dog with a scent. Once he locks in, there’s no distracting him. No reminding him that there are other things he should be doing. No suggesting that perhaps his obsession with learning how to build a computer, or training like a Navy SEAL, or building a survivalist go-bag is, perhaps, overdoing things a bit. He always seemed to have just two gears: Disinterest and Overdrive.

My hyper-focused one-track son is now a United States Marine.

Not only have they irritated me, these boys have produced a fair share of chaos, epic messes, broken bones, and poor grades in subjects that bore them. I’ve worried whether each of them would survive childhood, and whether I would survive them.

Now I’m seeing how many of those irritating qualities sprang from strengths that are the best parts of them. Thank God they’ve been more persistent in becoming men than this man has been in conforming them to his desire for comfort.

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Future workers

Something you can’t comprehend until after you’re a parent is all the work involved. I don’t just mean the labors of feeding, changing, washing, and supervising the little turkeys. I’m not even talking about the added work of home repair, which, with sons ranging in age from 20 to 3, I’ve found to be, well, significant.

All that work aside, there’s the added burden of just accomplishing everyday tasks. Unloading the dishes, once you’ve got a toddler interested in “helping,” means pulling out dishes while you quickly scan the racks for something he can “put away” (i.e., shove into a random cabinet for you to hopefully find later) that won’t shatter when he drops it. Painting a door means giving him a little brush and a cup of water for paint and repeatedly steering him away from your open paint can.

A nice thing about building a workbench for three year-olds is they don’t know enough to judge your craftsmanship.

It’s easy to adopt a mindset that our little ones are obstacles around whom we must work, rather than workers in training. We’re busy enough as it is, after all. Teaching them how to help with a task makes it take three times as long.

But they’re wired to work, aren’t they? It’s why they get into our toolboxes and climb onto our desk chairs and pretend they’re us. Even the busiest parent has noticed how working alongside us can calm and center a child.

When my oldest son was four, I cut an attic door in our ceiling and nailed in plyboard flooring. He put on his toy tool belt and hard hat, and was so insistent on helping that I finally took him up and put him to “work” hammering and painting. It was a summer day in the South, and the attic was sweltering. But he stayed up there with me for hours, his attitude far better than my own.

When my 15 year-old was three, he would follow me on his tricycle as I drove our riding mower. When it came time to push mow, he’d get out his toy mower and push along behind me. And when I started in with the weed whacker, he’d follow along with a hockey stick. He’d spend every minute of the three hours I was out there in the hot sun, working just as hard as I did. And he loved it.

He hasn’t yet figured out why his chainsaw isn’t taking this tree down.

Now that several of my sons are older, I look back on all the ways I squandered their inclination toward work. I was too busy trying to get my own projects done, forgetting that my most important work is raising them. Even today, when I conjure work for one of them to do alongside me, that cheerful camaraderie returns, and it makes me feel the way I imagine we were crafted to feel about work, before we made it about the dollars we pocket rather than the things we create.

And because in many ways I’ve had a restart as a father, with these unexpected toddler twins, I’m trying to do better.

Our littlest ones celebrated their third birthday last week, and even though the rest of the world is quarantined they don’t know it, because their parents and every brother but our Marine are here, and that pretty much is their world. We had a wrestling tournament in our back yard, and a nail-hammering contest, and limbo (we needed something a three year-old could win), and other feats of daring. And as I watched my older sons take care of their little brothers, I realized there’s another work they lean into with joy, which is the work of fathering. And I certainly can’t claim an ounce of credit for it. It feels like something that happened in spite of me, with all my grumpiness and self-obsession. It feels like something entirely unearned. It feels like grace.

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Close quarters in quarantine

I wrote this not for the fathers who work in the front lines amidst this worldwide pandemic, nor for the fathers who’ve fallen victim to what is becoming a nationwide shutdown of several industries. Your lives are likely in a different kind of turmoil than the fathers I have in mind here—the ones who, like me, find themselves working from a home that has suddenly become everyone’s home base, every day.

You know who you are. Cast from our offices, we non-essential knowledge workers huddle in our Zoom and Skype calls. The men sport hoodies and coronavirus beards; our female co-workers don ballcaps and yoga clothes. While the real workers of the world pick up garbage, tend the sick, stock grocery shelves, and run toilet paper mills, we blink at glowing screens and try to conjure remarks about scenario planning and cost-cutting.

Increasing this feeling of impotence are all these children underfoot. To them, this is Christmas. No school! Mom and Dad are home!

They call to us across the house. They demand we play with them. They wander into view during Important Meetings.

A lot of parents are struggling. Our schedules are upended. We can’t focus. Many of us have two working adults (a luxury, compared to families who now have zero), triggering daily debates about who should cover the kids at what time. Whose project is more pressing. Whose work is more important.

Not only is our work suffering, we’re letting our children go to seed. Sure, kids—have cereal for lunch. You can’t get porn on YouTube, right? Okay then, watch all you want. Just don’t knock on my door during this call with my boss.

The walls between work and home have dissolved, and the effect is . . . unnerving. What we have to remember is that the whole world is in chaos. Which means our domestic chaos is, well, forgivable. Who even has time to cast a stone?

So, what I’m thinking as a father is: maybe we should make the best of this passing season. Have you, like me, had your child on your lap during one of your Super Important Zoom calls? If so, have you noticed the smiles? And have you noticed that when someone else has a child on their screen, you’re more interested in that cutie pie than the topic of the call? At some deep DNA level, we know they should be with us, and we with them. And they know it too.

Want to know what I did on my calls today? I wiped a child’s behind. I got my kids to “help” me in my workshop so their mother could get some work done. I taped together wine boxes and told my toddlers it’s their new office. Please don’t tell my boss.

I’m playing during the day and working at night and sometimes I work and play simultaneously. I don’t know if any of the management gurus whose books gather dust in our shuttered bookstores approve, but the truth of it is that I feel more grounded than ever. Everything is a mess and I can’t remember the last time I showered and I’m unnerved by how my children talk about my coworkers by first name though they’ve never met them. But I also feel fully me. A man who works and a father who parents and not one at a time, but all at once.

It’s a bloody mess, but then again, so am I. And maybe all I, or you, or any of us are supposed to do right now is just muddle through. Just serve whoever needs us without worrying about the mixing of business and personal, and be thankful we’re needed at all.

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What’s lost and gained

This will seem like a story about losing, but believe me, it’s the opposite.

A few weeks ago, before everyone’s world got tossed upside-down, two of my sons were wrestling for spots in our state’s high school tournament. One was a long-shot, the other a number-one seed in his weight class. Hopes—and the smell of gym clothes worn by boys trying to make weight—were high in the Woodlief house.

One of my wrestlers with one of my future wrestlers

Well, nothing went as planned. The long-shot wrestled his way into contention, while our higher-rated wrestler, suffering from undiagnosed strep throat, got in trouble early. It all came down, for both of them, to one match. One more win apiece to reach the state tournament.

To compound the tension, their clinching matches were scheduled moments apart, on adjacent mats. Please, I prayed, give them this.

It was a shallow prayer, I know. Every boy in that gym worked hard to get there. Every one of them had a mother or father or someone praying. And wrestling is not, as we’re all being reminded these days, that important.

Future wrestler #2 wanted a turn

But I prayed, like every other parent in there, and like most of them, I watched my sons lose. Both of them, seconds apart.

It’s hard, in a moment like that, to make sure your child understands that you’re disappointed for him, not in him. And it’s hard, as a son, to stand in the gaze of your father so soon after losing. Understandably, the boys chose to ride home together, in the older one’s car.

Those of you with children in sports know there’s always a dozen things your kids leave behind, so we were several minutes behind them. Long enough for anything to happen on that long country highway home.

Some twenty minutes up the highway, we saw flashing lights. A lot of them. Firetrucks, an ambulance, state troopers. A tangle of metal strewn along the ditch.

I found myself praying again. Please, God. Not them. Not my children.

Which I suppose was more selfish than my first prayer. It had to be, after all, somebody’s children. That’s the terror of this world. It’s always somebody’s child.

I’m ashamed and thankful to tell you it wasn’t my children. And though I’ll always hurt for them when I think on that day, I can’t help but think of it as a gift. The day I didn’t lose my sons.

It’s a good season of life, for all of us, to be mindful of our gifts. We’re wired to take it all for granted. To let our everyday miracles become part of the background. Keep them in your sight.

The littlest one tags in his twin
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Control your concern

I was reminded recently of a helpful distinction Stephen Covey made in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, which I’ve recreated below:

In the universe of our cares, there are things we can control, things we can influence, and things that concern us, but which we can’t do anything about. Common sense suggests that our energy, creativity, and time is best spent on the innermost circle, with effort applied to the middle circle as interest and opportunity allow.

It suggests we bring order to the little parts of the world we control. That we make beauty and peace where we can.

The challenge is that in stressful times, our emotional energy gets drawn to the outer circle. The things we can’t control start to dominate our thoughts. In the present crisis that’s obvious: people worry for their jobs and financial assets. They worry people they love will get sick. They fear needing a ventilator themselves.

And to compound the cruelty, our obsession with what we can’t control prevents us from doing what’s needed in the domains we can control. We begin to fail our colleagues, our friends, our families. When we dwell on the things we can’t control, we become our worst selves.

The good news is that we can control how much we obsess over what we can’t control. We can govern our thoughts. We can restrict how often we check the news or our investments. We can dial into the lives of our children, of our friends, of strangers who need us now more than ever. We can fill the hours with so much labor in that center circle that we simply don’t have time or energy to fret over what isn’t ours to decide anyway.

All it takes is intention, and a plan. Commit to refocus on what you can control. Turn off the TV. Spend less time on the internet. Calendar more time with your children. You can control how much you worry over what you can’t control. And the first step is committing to do it.

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Your quarantine survival kit

Maybe your children are happily ignorant of what’s going on, or maybe they’re worried, and looking to you for assurance. Many of them are home all day now, their schools shuttered into the foreseeable future. It’s a stressful time. Whenever I hear people are being told to shelter in place, I think: I’m a father. I am the shelter.

But what if I’m not enough?

My struggle in crisis is that I worry for my children (their health, their economic future, whether I’ll even be able to provide for them in a year) to the point that I get short-tempered. I grow impatient with their recklessness, intolerant of their foolishness, fed up with their sloppiness. In an ironic twist, my care for them gets transmogrified into unkindness.

Perhaps you face the same struggle.

Photo credit: Markus Spiske

Well, one thing I’ve learned about coping with uncertainty is that we can reduce our stress by creating domains of certainty. We can turn our attention from the things we can’t control to the opportunities all around us to fix, to heal, to teach.

But without a plan, that’s just a nice sentiment. If you’ve been looking through the resources here, and if you get my daily emails, you’ve probably discerned that I’m a big fan of the calendar. If your home life is getting turned upside-down like that of many families, you can inject some immediate certainty by helping your children put together a simple task list for the day. Ask them to come up with some ideas to exercise their minds and bodies, and to have some fun.

While you’re at it, write down some things in your own calendar that you’re going to do with them. Don’t let day after day slip by, especially now, when so many people need the simple reassurance of human contact.

And if you’re wondering what to put on your calendar, below are some resources chock-full of ideas. Whether you make a backyard mortar or find a comfy book to read together, don’t miss the opportunities in this upended world to be the shelter your children need far more than bricks and mortar.

Quarantine survival supplies

Art of Manliness DIY projects: Everything from potato cannons to paper fighter jets.

Arts and Crafts projects: 50 projects that are less dangerous than a potato cannon, but still kind of fun.

Backyard games: Cardboard forts, giant dominoes–there’s something here for everyone.

Exploratorium: Tons of science projects for kids of all ages.

Khan Academy: These people have revolutionized math, science, computer programming, even art history. Sign your kids up and watch them love to learn.

OpenLibrary: With libraries closing across the country, here’s a free resource filled with online books for all ages.

Kanopy: Movies and documentaries available with a library membership, including a host of instructional videos.

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Guard the door

Fear is a thief. I say this as a father whose pockets have been picked many times. I’ve had countless moments of peace snatched from my hands. Hours of sleep pilfered. Excellence replaced with adequacy, because my mind was elsewhere.

Where, exactly? On what could go wrong. An illness, a car accident, a vicious dog on a frayed leash. I am a walking encyclopedia of worst-case scenarios. Go ahead, name something children do every day, and I can tell you a dozen ways they could get hurt, crippled, killed. Where someone else might see a toddler riding his tricycle down the driveway, I see a careless UPS driver behind the wheel of a two-ton truck. A walk on the nature trail? Poisonous snakes. Family cookout? Exploding propane tank.

I was this way before my daughter died from a brain tumor, but that nightmare certainly made it worse. Enduring horror makes you realize the worst things don’t always happen to other people. They happen to you.

But fear, like I said, is a thief. When I invite it to lean over my shoulder and whisper in my ear while I’m working or praying or playing with my children, I invite it to confiscate the small joys that are our only solace in a world of hardship. How foolish, how cruel, to let what has not come to pass steal all that remains untarnished by what did come to pass.

I share this with you because this is a fearful time for many of us. Fear of the coronavirus, of a sagging economy, of what our fellow humans are capable of when they too are afraid. If you need a few dozen other looming troubles to tremble over, I’m the man to see. But right now I’m the man reminding you that there’s good all around you. That the darkness will always and ever have no choice but to retreat in the face of even a little light. That it only wins when we clamp shut our eyes.

So today, and tomorrow, and maybe even the day after that, spend a little time noticing the good. Gratitude has always been the undoing of fear. This world is full of suffering, yes, but it is also filled with goodness. See that. Be a part of that. Don’t let the thief in.

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The ripple effect

My son is staying home from school today because he’s afraid he might get shot. Rumors are swirling about a group of kids talking, possibly even planning to bring guns to school. We’re told the authorities are involved. Who knows what’s real? My son says one of the supposed plotters doesn’t like him. He’s afraid he’ll be looking down the barrel of a shotgun or pistol or whatever else children can nowadays get their hands on regardless of their mental state.

I don’t know anything about that kid, and I doubt most of the rumors are true. But I know, you know, our children know: This is our world now. The world we’ve made for our children.

I say We because of the ripples we all of us create during our lifetimes. I’m thinking of the old neighbor who always welcomed me into his workshop while he tinkered, to ask all the questions I wanted. Of a woman on my street with a house full of books and no TV that I ever saw, who used to welcome me in, give me cookies, let me sit dropping crumbs all over her nice chairs, and talk with me. I have no recollection what either of these adults ever talked with me about. I only know that to this day I love to be in workshops and rooms full of books.

Mister Rogers and Officer Clemmons

And I think as well about the people I’ve either wronged or been kind to, and how they went on to wrong or be kind to others, perhaps the momentary decision turning on how I treated them. And so on, and so on. Yes, this is the world we’ve made. Are making.

There’s a wonderful essay by the reporter portrayed in last year’s movie about Mister Rogers, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. In it he ponders what Fred Rogers would have thought about school shooters:

“The easy answer is that it is impossible to know, because he was from a different world, one almost as alien to us now as our mob-driven world of performative slaughters would be to him. But actually, I think I do know, because when I met him, one of the early school shootings had just taken place, in West Paducah, Kentucky—eight students shot while they gathered in prayer. Though an indefatigably devout man, he did not attempt to characterize the shootings as an attack on the faithful; instead, he seized on the news that the 14-year-old shooter had gone to school telling his classmates that he was about to do something ‘really big,’ and he asked, ‘Oh, wouldn’t the world be a different place if he had said, “I’m going to do something really little tomorrow”?'”

He went on to devote a week of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood to talking with children about how being little doesn’t mean unimportant. How they can do big things by first doing little things. He gave them hope that their lives matter, that everyone’s life can be a good one.

Which I suppose is true for any of us. It’s why we focus here on building up small fathering habits. Because of the ripples all around us. C.S. Lewis once wrote that everyone we meet is either an immortal horror or an everlasting splendor. And if you believe in ripples you understand that, intentionally or not, you play a part in which of these a person becomes.

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Your child the wild river

A stubborn child can be hard on a parent. We’re trying to keep them alive, and it’s like they’re working against us. It’s the stubborn child who keeps climbing onto the roof even though you’ve warned him about broken necks. It’s the stubborn child who tries to tame the stray cat even after you’ve explained to him that rabies is incurable. It’s the stubborn child who won’t keep his mouth shut around the impossibly cruel bully at school.

And all you want to do is help your stubborn child, if only he would listen. But of course he won’t. Sometimes it feels like all your warning words only serve to increase his interest in the forbidden fruit.

Every child is like a river, and his will is the river’s depth. The thing about a deep-running river is that it runs fast. It’s a matter of hydraulics and velocity and other words I don’t completely understand, any more than I understand why so many of my children came out stubborn.

And the thing about that fast-running river is you’d best not try to dam it. Because maybe you actually could, but then you wouldn’t have a river anymore. You’d have something else. Something it wasn’t meant to be.

If you don’t want to bottle up the river that is your child, all you really have to work with are the banks. It’s the patient, hard work of shoring up those banks that is your only hope of directing your child the river along a path that doesn’t smash through every town in sight before careening off a cliff. You want those banks strong enough to keep the river flowing toward the destination that only it knows. Which means you have to accept that the destination isn’t yours to decide.

A postcard of the Niagara Falls Gorge

We’ve all seen parents who can’t abide this lack of control. They craft retaining walls, hard twists and turns, dam after dam, trying to direct their rivers to the larger river they believe it should belong to, or to the ocean that is their dream. Many of those rivers comply, but their spirits are broken. Other rivers smash every restraint in sight in an effort to survive. To keep being a river. The broken river and the untamed river both lead to a kind of heartbreak, I think.

I wish I had some applicable piece of parenting advice, but I’m afraid I have none, other than to ask yourself whether you’re building dams or banks. Whether you’re helping your child develop the depth of will she’ll need to leave you a strong-running force in this world, or a dissipated and shallow swamp. I don’t suppose any of us are river engineers, or that we’ll get all the little decisions that shape a river right. I only know that as a father, my job isn’t to direct these rivers in my care to a final destination. It’s to send them off strong, purposeful, and unbroken. Not into safety or predictability, but into life.