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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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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.