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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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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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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.