The daily tug-of-war

Being a parent is difficult for many reasons, but they can be summarized into two: the impossibility to know what is in your kid's mind and the need to strike a changing balance between controlling and supporting. The communication is an obstacle to determining what would be correct response to a given situation: without all the information of how things happened, why they happened and what your kid's likes and preferences are you might end up suggesting an unfitting solution. The balance in  the control means that occasionally you will have to let them crash and burn under their own agency so that they understand decision-making and responsibility.

Today has been a day-long situation with Trevor, but luckily it all has ended well. Trouble has been cooking all weekend long, where was somehow excited about some matches he had played with his friends and probably let the homework slip a little bit. Today, he was exempt from class, with his school still running classes on alternating days, but he still had to turn in the homework, so he sat to work on the Math assignment, only to find that it was in total about sixteen repeats of the same problem: the resolution of systems of two linear equations with two variables.

Photo: TechBoston Integrity Academy

At age 16 Jason is already long over this kind of infighting and understands that, as the Borg say in Star Trek, "resistance is futile" and homework has to be done one way or another, but Trevor is still has in his fiery heart a rebellious flair that comes up every now and then when dealing with home work. He mostly wields, rather bluntly by the way, three reasons to try to resist doing the homework: "I will never use it", "it takes too much of my free time" and "I do not need to practice any longer". On the other side of the scales are the bad marks and his parents getting upset at the unfinished work, so he sometimes spends more time trying to decide whether (actually when) to do the homework than actually doing it. And the situation only gets worse when there are more than one assignment pending.

This morning he concluded that the task was just too long and mostly useless, because he already knew how to do it so he suggested skipping the last quarter and playing dumb, as if he had misunderstood the list of problems that he had to resolve. In the end he knew it well enough, so should he be asked to provide a solution for the class he could always excuse himself and improvise. Being his father, my first impulse was to tell him that it was a very sneaky way of dealing with homework and that he should know better than that. However, parenting is sometimes like a game of tug-of-war or like fishing: if you pull too hard or too fast you can snap the line and lose the catch, but if you are ready to exercise your patience and look for the right equilibrium between pulling and yielding you can get better results.

In the end, and with a non-negligible amount of doubts, I confirmed that it was a possible solution, not the one I would have liked the most, but a possible one and that I trusted his responsibility. My first feeling of triumph came when, relieved from the Math assignment, he smiled and plunged into sorting out the History one, which he dispatched pretty expediently before going back to play with his friends. But my satisfaction grew a lot just a few minutes ago when I found him at his desk finishing up the Math assignment that he intended to pretend "not hearing about".

When they are babies and infants someone has to take most the the decisions on their behalf, and as they grow they become more savvy at life and have to start learning to make their own decisions and carry the consequences. Our task is not done yet, neither with Trevor nor with Jason, but I believe that we have done a fairly decent job so far. I know that there are still a lot of headaches and heartburn to come before they are fully confident in life, but tonight I will sleep better knowing that, given the time to think about it, they mostly do the right thing. Have a nice week.