Hammers, Nails, and Phillips Head Screws

The parenting toolbox and picking the right tool

[So, here we are at the final installment of what became a three-part series I hadn’t intended to write… and this installment itself has now grown into two. I will post the fourth and final-final immediately after this one.]

I hadn’t intended to spend a week writing about parenting, what it demands of us, and trying to being a good father to my son. I am really glad I did though. These pieces were statements of purpose. They documented things I care about more deeply than I’ve ever cared about anything. Someday, I will look back and re-read them and it will bring me right back to how I felt at this time my life.

All of the thinking and writing and focus has had me in a bit of a fugue though. A mental fog of sorts. Lost in thoughts that have felt deep but not heavy. It’s kind of wild. Like a walking meditation.

I mean, if you had only a few pages to explain the things you care most about, what would you say?

If you’re the introspective type, there’s a lot of meat on that bone. It has been a good exercise. I highly recommend it.

Soooo, annnnyway… there I was Monday morning at 6:40 a.m. with my prior piece about making our best reasonable efforts as parents already drafted. I had made sure my son was up for school. I had already gone out to warm up the car and filled out his form for the track team and coordinated when I’d pick him up for soccer practice.

And it was only 6:40!

I was clearly Parenting Very Goodly!

I had even written a grand treatise on that very topic to be posted in mere hours!

If I had a World’s Best Dad mug, I would have absolutely been drinking the World’s Best Coffee from it while slowly nodding to myself.

World’s Best Dadding was fucking happening. Boom!

So, anyway, fast-forward to five minutes later and there I was shouting at my son at the top of my lungs in the car. Not really the top of my lungs. That was just for dramatic effect. You don’t really have to shout at the top of your lungs in a car. You can shout at slightly less than the tops of your lungs but thanks to cabin-size and acoustics, it’s effectively just as loud. That’s how loud I was shouting – Car-adjusted-top-of-my-lungs.

And I had every right to be!

My son had gotten in the car in a long-sleeve t-shirt. And then, when I went to say something about that, he muttered something rude.

See? You see it right?

A long-sleeve t-shirt. The muttering of something.

Two very serious felonies were committed in close proximity to each other, each flagrant. Not one but two egregious offenses before we were even out of the driveway.

Sometimes, things are so serious, you have no choice but to take drastic action. Mine was to shout very loudly and without pause so as to not allow interjection or rebuttal for a solid minute.

It was really loud. I was really loud. There were no pauses or breaths taken. It was a solid yell-block.

My son started to get upset. I was midstream though and noticed but without really processing and just went on and finished my outburst. I then realized how upset he was and knew I had just smashed my own World’s Best Dad mug. Why don’t they make those things drop-proof or something. You should be able to drop them on occasion.

That’s not how they work though and I had just dropped mine on the metaphorical kitchen floor.

I had blown a gasket. It was over the top. And it had caused an emotional bruise. **I** had caused a bruise.

Before moving on, let me give you the backstory on those two offenses... which does not really help my case here.

Ten minutes earlier, I had told my son it was cold outside. That was dad code for “I have been telling you every single day all winter to dress for the cold and every single time you get in the car without a coat and sometimes without even a sweatshirt and then you’re cold until the car warms up and are sitting there all huddled up and cold - which you shouldn’t be because 1) that is bad for you; and 2) I told you to wear a coat – and, yes, I know cold doesn’t cause colds but it is my damn job to keep you from being cold anyway as if you are heading off to Antarctica where hypothermia sets in quickly rather than just walking 20 yards into your school WHICH I CAN ONLY DO if you listen to my demands that you wear a coat when it is cold out. WHICH. YOU. STILL. DON’T. DO.”

Ten minutes earlier. Literally ten minutes. “It’s cold out.” And nonetheless, out he comes in a long-sleeved t-shirt. Not even a sweatshirt.

And he entirely knew I was going to get on his case about that which I most fucking certainly was because (see above).

When I opened my mouth to do very much that, he muttered “I don’t care.”

Now, if you are a person of a certain age, you entirely understand the Code Red-level violation it was back in our day to say something like that to your parents. For a lot of parents, it still is… especially if their own parents were raised in a very respect-centric family or culture. It’s a violation of varying severity depending on the parent. In my day, it was on par with punching a nun.

Personally, it’s something I cannot stand and will never let go unaddressed and uncorrected but it isn’t something I am going to drop an atomic bomb on him over for a whole bunch of reasons. The first is my whole disposition toward addressing behaviors, enforcing discipline, and the system I’ve sort of backed into using with my son for those two tasks.

I am a child of the 70’s. I had two Boomer parents. Their parents (my grandparents) were Depression-era kids. My maternal grandmother had to drop out of school at 16 to essentially raise her siblings after her mother died. My maternal grandfather fought in World War II in the South Pacific. He saw terrible things which he never spoke about other than one quick comment made to me once when I was 14. It was delivered to shut down a conversation. And it did. It shut down that one and all others on the topic. It was enough for me to know he had seen terrible things and had been through the traumas of war and combat.

In fact, I would not exist were it not for those kinds of traumas. My grandmother had been dating someone who was drafted and then killed in World War II. Had he not, she would have never ended up marrying my grandfather, and they, in turn, would have never had my mother… and then she, me.

Depression-era parents endured bad thing after bad thing and all of them were communal. It wasn’t just their household or their family going through it. It was everyone. And when that is the case, the entire orientation of the community itself shifts toward the things lowest on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: the things essential to basic survival and now in jeopardy. Survival. Having a roof over your head. Having enough to eat. No one meditates on their tender feelings when they’re worrying about surviving.

When those are the conditions, everyone has bruises. Yours are no worse. You are expected to get up and get on with it.

As a result, Depression-era kids grew up with three parents: hardship, trauma, and emotional neglect.

The first was caused by the Depression. The second, by the war. And the third, by the circumstances and culture of a time where attending to emotions was a luxury that couldn’t be afforded – and even if it could, the attendants had neither the tools nor the capacity and were themselves saddled with a ton of unprocessed and unaddressed baggage.

Stoic suffering wasn’t a choice. It was mandatory.

“You get what you get and don’t get upset.” was practically the parenting model.

And there wasn’t even a body of information for parents to draw from that might enable them to choose differently for their own kids.

I mean, in the 1950s, psychologists were still doing experiments where young monkeys were placed in cages with only a wire monkey for a mother to see if it was bad to deprive newborns of all comfort, warmth, and nurturing. These were not the golden years of enlightened parenting.

Now, combine all of those situational things (the Depression, World War II, etc.) with all of the generational ones also passed down to Baby Boom parents – like societal views on kids, acceptable behavior, punishment, etc. – and you have the setup for parents buying into only one tool and then using it for every job.

You sell a lot of hammers but no screwdrivers.

When a parent disciplines their kids, they are basically trying to use work to produce an effect. “Work” in the physics sense. Energy transferred to an object via the application of force. They are trying to apply some force, transfer it to an object – their child - and thus impart some movement. I, the parent, do this so that you, the child, will do that.

Discipline is someone doing work with a tool to produce an effect on an object. The person doing the work is the parent. The work is the application of discipline. The “object” they are trying to effect is the child.

The child’s behavior is the thing they want to move in some direction. It isn’t okay where it is. The parent wants to move it toward where it should be.

There are a lot of different tools that could possibly be used for that. There’s a whole hardware store full of them. Some are simple; some are complex. They all do different things and therefore work well for some tasks and not for others.

Kids are a complicated little project though. Building one takes a whole lot of tools. And what those are depends on things specific to the kid: they’re unique blueprint and what tools work best for them. And it depends on things specific to the parent: what they are trying to build up in their kids; and their ability to pick and make good use of the right tools for that.

Baby Boom parents grew up in a world that absolutely loved the shit out of hammers.

Every kid was seen as a nail and whether it was a parent, teacher, or minister, behavioral changes were pounded in with a hammer. They might have used one of those tiny little rock hammers or a 9-pound sledge, but the tool was a hammer. Missteps were met with punishment. Disrespect and non-compliance were not only not tolerated, they were treated as aggravated felonies severe enough to warrant actual physical abuse if a parent chose.

And all along the way, kids took a regular hammering and were told that was the way a parent’s work was done.

Hammers are crude instruments though. They are the simplest of tools. You can literally use a rock as a hammer. You ain’t getting the battery compartment off a kid’s toy with a rock unless you want to smash the shit out of it. Hammers require power but not much in the way of coordination or dexterity.

A screwdriver, on the other hand, requires both pressure and torque. It’s more complicated. Too much or too little downward pressure, the screw will be hard to turn or won’t turn at all. Too much or too little torque, the screw won’t turn enough or will turn too much and then not hold.

A screwdriver is a harder tool to use and boomer parents grew up in Hammertown. So, when they had kids, they either just stayed local and kept on hammerin’ or they moved away toward some new, less harsh and punitive discipline model but without having been raised in it. They had still grown up being seen as nails by parents who pounded ‘em into position when they were out of line.

A lot of their children – 70s and 80s kids like me – grew up with parents closer to the latter. Adults who largely rejected the punitive punishment model their parents (and all of society, pretty much) saw as THE way to raise a child right: Spare the rod, spoil the child. Ya gotta bruise them Little Apples, you see… or else they’ll go bad.

Buuuut, those same parents who rejected the model still kinda held onto some of the philosophy, employed remnants of the thinking, and, at least sometimes, used their parents’ favorite tool: a hammer.

My parents were pretty balanced and reasonable when it came to discipline. I got spanked when I was little but only very rarely and without a harshness, and not past the age of maybe 5 or 6 as far as I remember. The awaiting a spanking was the real punishment. The spanking itself was not much of an event. As I got older, discipline took the form of losses of privileges like having to stay in my room or stay home. That kind of thing.

My parents were still relatively strict about speaking respectfully to both them and other authority figures though. Didn’t clean up my room, eh, I might get a pass. “Back talk” or “sass” though would absolutely draw a response and it would be a bit more firm than if it had been another violation of equal real-life severity.

Fast-forward 30 years and there I was as a single parent to a 2-year old with a Job to Do. I was totally invested in wanting to do it well and in healthy, effective ways. I had a vast array of resources at my disposal thanks to both the era we live in, my baseline familiarity with Psychology, and my fluency at finding information on pretty much anything I might want.

I’d just go get the books and read up on it and there would assuredly be a simple, good answer on how to shape and guide your child’s behavior and then correct it when not appropriate. There would probably even be a pull-out chart or something I could just put on the fridge.

So, um, yeah… as it turns out, that’s not a thing that exists. There is no simple, easy, or standard model that is universally effective and agreed on as effective.

There are things to do and not do - and there are things that do harm rather than help - but there isn’t a specific Blueprint for Managing Child Behavior Modification which is just the thing you use.

It’s like looking for “THE recipe” for chocolate chip cookies. There ain’t just one. They ain’t all wonderful. There are a bunch that would probably work. But the best one depends on who’s cookin’ and who’s tastin’.

So, I didn’t set out with a set of specific, fixed beliefs about how to go about managing behavior modification and discipline. I had firm to very firm ideas about what I saw as acceptable and unacceptable behavior. I didn’t have a firm idea on what tools I should have in my tool chest. I knew I might need a hammer but didn’t want to see it get much use.

So, I just kinda winged it using judgment and by reading my son carefully and seeing what worked and didn’t.

And it at this point, I should absolutely define what “worked” meant to me. Worked meant led to the desired change in behavior/choices with the least forceful intervention. Explaining to him why he should do A rather than B might work to get him to do B. Putting him in timeout might work too. If they both did, I wanted to use the lightest tool I could to get the job done. I never wanted to use a hammer for a job a screwdriver could have handled just fine.

(And I will tell you, I labored over whether that was the right approach every single time.)

When your kids are younger, ohhhh, there are a lot of “times”. Every single time adds up to a big number. You open your toolbox A LOT. You practically just have to leave it open on the counter.

You develop an entire dialect of the word “No.”

There’s the soft “Noo…” and the flat “No.” and the stern “NO.” and the emphatic “NO!”

Then there are the more fancy noes where you extend the pronunciation out and then sprinkle on the CAPS and exclamation point as needed to flavor it with seriousness. “Nooooooo!”

And then there are the graduate-level noes where you raise or lower the key you’re delivering the no in and maybe even vary the key mid-delivery to end it on a higher or lower key than where you started. A lot of moms are partial to the low-to-high rising pitch. Probably because it sort of mimics the Mom-ese lilt of how we all talk to babies.

My favorite was to deliver a first “Nooooooo” in a lower pitch all James Earl Jones-like and then immediately follow it up by raising my eyebrows and delivering a second in a higher key and then hold the eyebrows up to really nail the landing. It has a certain “Darth Vader saying no” and “Did you not hear what Darth Vader said?” panache.

So, anyway, the point is, you get a lot of trial and error work in over the early years. You get to feel your way towards something that works for you and your child.

You also get to second guess every fucking thing about that every damn day without ever feeling wholly confident you are somehow not entirely fucking it up in a way that will render your child unable to live in a world where humans aren’t free to act like feral dogs.

The year is 2045.

(phone rings)

“Dad…?”

“Son?! Is everything okay?”

“Well, I got arrested for eating grapes before I paid for them…”

“EATING GRAPES? BEFORE YOU—”

“Dad, I know… That’s not how you raised me. I was just really worked up about—”

“About what?!”

“The fight I got into.”

“THE FIGHT?! I taught you to--”

“—de-escalate whenever possible using a variety of methods including by walking away but my neighbor picked a fight with me.”

“Over what?!”

“Where I parked.”

“Which was WHERE?”

“On his lawn.”

“On. His. Lawn? WHAT IN GODS NAME MADE YOU ACT THAT WAY?!”

“It was you, dad……… You never put me in timeout for long enough when I was three…”

“My god. I… I… I thought one minute per year of age was enough. The book said--”

“THE BOOK WAS WRONG, DAD.”

When you are trying to figure out a discipline model, you 100% think you are going to get one of those phone calls if you land on the wrong side of above or below three minutes of timeout for a three-year old. And listen, three minutes is a long damn time for a three-year old. But what if only two turns your child into a premature-grape-eating lawn-parker?

These are the things you wrestle with. Or I did. A lot. A lot, a lot. I don’t think I ever left an early episode of serious behavioral correction thinking I 100% knew I had done it right and would 100% do that next time.

Mostly I just did what I thought was best; felt my way through it; and adjusted, adjusted, and adjusted.

From that, I can tell you two things that I came to fully believe were true (for at least my son, me as his father, and for our relationship).

The first: Punishment is personal

There ain’t no one tool. There ain’t even any tools that are right for the same offense every time. You have to know your kid and know what works best at getting what you need. It is a constant exercise in fishing through the toolbox to pick the tool for the moment that will put just the right amount of pressure without an overuse of force and without producing an accidental collateral scrape or scratch.

Note: I don’t mean “pressure” literally. I mean it in the sense of “influence”. That can be positive via incentives, encouragement, etc. Not literally “put some pressure on your kids.”

The second: My son is a Phillips-head screw. He is not a nail.

And he never has been. He not only doesn’t respond to a hammer; it actually works against the movement the person is trying to achive. Doesn’t matter whether that person is me or someone else. Treat him like a nail and he ain’t going where you want.

He has always been that way. I knew it early and have known it throughout his entire childhood… and still, I either never fully accepted that or never fully accepted that a hammer was never going to be a great tool to reach for whether it was the first incident or the tenth.

Fumbling through finding better tools and the conclusion to the morning mess I made are the subjects of the final installment here.