Learning to Love the Screwdriver

While second-guessing yourself every day forever

[The final installment of my accidental four-part series on parenting, trying to be a good father, and my relationship with my son.]

My son, for reasons that are a tangle of nature and nurture impossible to fully unravel, does not, and has never, responded well to the simple mechanism of a hammer…

…and that has led me to thinking a whole damn lot about hammers and nails.

My son is a pretty ferocious kid in his own ways. He is strong and resilient and is absolutely impossible to bully. He is fiercely competitive. He can be fiery and passionate. He is also sensitive. He may have skin of leather sometimes but inside, he is a sensitive, emotional kid.

An adult using a hammer is jarring to him. It knocks him off balance a little bit. And when he didn’t see the hammer coming, instead of driving the nail into position, it bends it, and makes it completely impossible to drive it any further… and more hammering only makes it even worse.

My son does badly with people going cold without warning or foreseeability. He does badly with people going from hot to cold abruptly. And he does badly with adults just reaching for a hammer and trying to use their power to pound him into place.

And at the end of the day, that it what using a hammer is. Using power rather than authority. An adult with all of their inherent power can just overpower a child with less. And, to him, that is exactly what someone using a hammer feels like – them trying to overpower him.

When it is a teacher with an old-school command-and-control teaching style with a hammer dangling as their go-to, it ain’t going to go well. And when they then hammer harder to try to bend him back into compliance after having bent him out of shape with the wrong tool, it merely makes it worse. He had a couple teachers like that. Rigid, older teachers who thought a hammer was a Swiss Army Knife: the perfect tool for every task.

He just doesn’t move the way someone wants in response to a hammer and then he can’t be moved where they want until they stop hammering and use a different tool.

I have entirely known that about him nearly his entire life and, yet, I still struggled with whether to accept that was okay or was something I needed to coach him into receiving better. After all, there are a lot of hammers in the world. Fair or not, best tool or worst, sometimes you have to endure someone using their power as a tool because they do indeed have that power.

Ultimately, I don’t think I could have ever coached him to be a more willing nail if I had wanted to – and I never really wanted to anyway.

Children are all different and have different sensitivities. They emotionally bruise differently. The bottom-line when it comes to my son is that when the tool is a hammer he didn’t see coming, it bruises him. And no one – no one at all – learns well through infliction of injury.

They don’t learn the intended lesson as much as they learn to avoid future injury. They learn to center their thinking not on their behavior or choices but on the person with power and how they wield it - which is now potentially dangerous. The adult has the power to cause a bruise and they just did. The child doesn’t have the power to protect themselves or stop it other than by trying to avoid it.

Hammers condition kids to see behavior itself as revolving around power or fear of it. It teaches them to be cowed into compliance by people with more. It literally makes decisions that should be about their choices into being about the enforcer and their enforcement.

The locus of control is external and that IMHO doesn’t help prepare them to make good choices using an internal compass that steers them according to a set of boundaries they first chose to accept and now apply on their own.

When my son was younger and my other tools hadn’t worked, I sometimes went to the hammer out of either frustration or not knowing whether I should really leave it in the toolbox ad infinitum. Yelling my head off. Imposing harsh-ish punishments. Coming down on him heavily with consequences as a show of force. And sometimes, that actually broke the logjam.

He sometimes immediately flipped the switch and changed the thing that had gone unchanged over the earlier chances until I had flashed a hammer. And that made me question whether I had waited too long to use it; wasn’t using it enough; or, even worse, was somehow actually conditioning him to not respond to other tools as if it wasn’t serious until the hammer was out.

And I think society pushes us heavily to believe all three of those things.

Everything we are told about how parents should discipline kids and what happens when they are instead overly permissive makes it really, really hard to see a hammer seeming to “work” when nothing else did and not come away thinking maybe they’re right and maybe you should use a hammer more.

I didn’t. I just could never get there. And honestly, I never wanted to.

But because I didn’t, there were times where something was stubbornly resistant to change and then, at some random tally, he would do it one time too many and I would flip out like I did in the car Monday.

Usually, it was driven by the cumulative frustration of 20 violations rather than a deliberate decision to escalate. It was just me yelling about the fact that he had racked up 20 violations and was still racking them up no matter how many times we had talked about it.

To him though, and to all kids, I think, it felt like getting a 20-violation hammering for one violation. It felt jarring and disproportional and unexpected. I mean, after all, 19 times out of 20, that hadn’t been the response. They don’t think cumulatively. They think episodically. You can explain cumulative effects but that isn’t how they experience any one episode.

Orderly, to them, is the same cause producing the same effect… or one they knew to expect, at least.

In my opinion, if you are surprising your kids with something jarring and unforeseen – no matter how much you think they should have known or seen it coming – it destabilizes their world a little bit.

It not only knocks them off their feet, it teaches them that you can knock them off their feet and they might not see it coming. And that is something I am particularly sensitive to and would never want to model in my son’s life or make a feature. Strenuosuly the opposite, in fact.

I have spent my son’s whole life since I became a single father hyper-focused on one foundational principle. A single cornerstone idea that most of my other ideas about parenting stack up on top of or are laid alongside.

Kids don’t need the world to be perfect. They need it to be orderly.

If there is one thing that fucks kids up, it’s chaos.

Anything that makes a child’s world not just volatile but also incapable of being understood is bad. If things happen without warning and without any observable – or even explicable - reason, that’s bad. If people’s emotions skitter wildly, quickly, and sharply without an understandable reason, that’s bad.

Kids do not need the world to be fair. They don’t need it to always be a pleasure. They don’t need it to be free of hard things.

They need it to make sense.

And when the things that happen in their world hurt them or are hard, they need to be able to understand why. And they need to know that their feelings about them are normal and healthy and real and matter.

If you want to fuck a child right up to the point of being potentially impaired for life, subject them to a home life where one party abuses power and inflicts emotional pain; denies the child’s right to their emotions; applies more emotional abuse if the child shows their pain; and then dangles a means of escaping more abuse by doing or saying whatever the parent wants to see or hear.

That, my esteemed friends, is the Donald J. Trump origin story.

Volatility, unpredictability, emotional abuse, emotional negation, conditional protection from further abuse.

That’s how monsters are made.

And even if it doesn’t produce a monster every time, it leaves a child with wounds and scars that may be too painful or too injurious for them to ever repair even in adulthood.

Per my last post, in my childhood, in my time with my father specifically, I had a combo of those things albeit at a far, far lower-grade than someone like Trump. Unpredictability, unavoidability; and centering the parent and their mood state, as the most important.

As a father, I would go to my absolute fucking grave before I would introduce any of that into his life. What he would get from me was the very best effort I could humanly make to keep his world rock-solid stable. No volatility. No upheaval. No unpredictability. Granite and iron stable.

The world itself would always be at least somewhat unpredictable… but if there was any way within my human power I could keep him from being caught flat-footed and unprepared for an upheaval he didn’t see coming, I would do it.

I mean, I lived and died for that one mission. It was all ten of my ten biggest priorities.

It was a singularity of purpose that defies my ability to really explain.

He was in that period when all of the cement is still wet and the impression early experiences leave in it will be there to stay.

I protected that damn wet cement like my life depended on it.

I had grown up in an environment that was toxically unpredictable and unreliable. And the means of even lessening that were also deeply dysfunctional and toxic. Ten-year olds shouldn’t have to formulate and then spend weekends implementing strategies to keep their parent from drinking themselves right past being trustworthy.

A parent should be reliable. First and foremost, a parent should reliable. They should be trustworthy and safe. They should be someone a child can count on with so much comfort, they just understand it as how their world works. They should be able to take it for granted viscerally – because it is – and then be taught to appreciate it cognitively.

So, I lived that. There was nothing at all in his life that was left to surprise him if that could be avoided. I prepared him for everything. I explained everything. I gave him foreseeability and the ability to understand things in ways that he could.

Once, when he was about three, I had to go away for something. I was going to be away for four or five nights. It was to be one of the longest stretches I had been away. He was scheduled to split the time between staying with his other parent and with my mom.

At that age, kids can’t really understand the concept of time. Anything that happened in the past is “yesterday”. Everything that will happen in the future is “tomorrow”. A 3-year old doesn’t understand “I’ll be home Friday.” They can’t read. They don’t understand numbers on calendars.

Regardless, when there was going to be a change in his routine, even if I might not be able to successfully explain it to him or prep him for it, I was going to damn well try.

So, I made a simple calendar of sorts. It had two rows and five columns. I used only pictures. The first row were suns - where he would be during the day – and the second row was moons - where he would sleep that night. In each, I put a picture of his mom or mine.

That, he could understand. He understood the information.

And even though he couldn’t digest it in the way that would allow him to answer “Where are you sleeping on Thursday?” or “Who will be with you during the day three days from now?” he understood suns and moons, days and sleeps…

More importantly, while the week ahead was a change, it was not volatility. His life was still stable and predictable. What was coming up ahead could be explained and understood. He could look at a picture and understand it both in advance and as it progressed. I slept at _____ house last night. Tomorrow, I’m going to be with _______.”

And it subconsciously reassured him that the adults were in charge and taking care of him and had a plan. The week ahead wasn’t a bouncing ball with him as the ball. It was just the same as always. Adults taking care of him.

When he was maybe a year older, there was a time when he had been getting less time and attention in one of his relationships and it had been getting to him. As often happens when they’re too young to verbalize frustration, it was instead coming out as acting out which was then met with less of what he was looking for rather than more.

It was too big a topic to really explain to him. There were adult, complicated reasons for it. It wasn’t something I could control or independently repair. But again, kids don’t need the world to be perfect. They just need it to be orderly. They need to understand that things aren’t random.

So, I created a metaphor which fill the void between what he was experiencing and what he understood about it. I explained that people were like cars. They have gas tanks. Those gas tanks come in all different sizes. People don’t choose how big their gas tank is. They just have the one they have. Some people have big tanks and some have small ones and some are somewhere in between. So, sometimes, people run out of gas or need to take time to fill back up again... but I was really lucky, because I had a really big tank. Sometimes people ran low though and it wasn’t because of them or because of him or because of any other person. That’s just how gas tanks work.

And that made his world orderly. There was a reason. Even if it wasn’t perfect.

I was perpetually balancing all of these objectives – giving him a sense of stability, making his world understandable, being honest and truthful, messaging appropriately about the people in his life and his relationships, etc. – and I just… found a way to make his world orderly.

The world hands us infinite uncontrollable surprises that give us ample opportunities to teach our kids to be resilient and capable of handling the unexpected. I didn’t need to hand him any more.

And that driving, foundational, consuming goal and what it required has pretty much been at the heart of my entire relationship with my son. Explaining things to him. First, it was what made his world understandable and foreseeable and that made him capable of understanding and foreseeing things on his own.

And now, doing that is just entirely hardwired into me at this point. It is programmed into my Father Operating System. It is programmed into the chips.

So, when it comes to managing his choices, the thing that always worked the best for me was explaining what I needed from him and why and then giving him a chance to do it… and then giving him more chances… and between, re-explaining with increasing emphasis. Usually, he’d just respond and do what he needed to with nothing more.

Sometimes, a behavior had gone on too long and we’d reach the point where I was going to need to start dropping significant consequences if he blew through any more stop signs. And sometimes he did and I followed through as promised. But, to be honest, I never felt like the punishments themselves actually helped all that much. And I never felt like escalating them helped more.

My son said something that kind of aligned with this the other day. I found it pretty interesting. He said punishments don’t really work because the kid just spends them either trying to get out from under them or just doing their time. After the initial imposition of the punishment, it’s not like they’re sitting around in quiet meditation about their choices. The time spent serving the punishment really only serves to hopefully impact the cost-benefit next time but that makes the choice about risk-reward rather than making the better decision for the right reasons.

As my son put it, that makes the choice “a business decision.”

I mean, that seemed pretty damn insightful. I don’t know. Maybe it’s just me.

Maybe it just resonates for me because it lines up with my experience with him. When something has remained stubbornly unchanged, the thing that has often broken the logjam is maddeningly simple.

It’s what I should have done on Monday instead of losing my shit and causing a bruise and what, just like a bunch of other times, I went to only after reaching max frustration.

I just talked to him like it is any other conversation. No emotion loaded into tone. Just talking like we always do. I explain what was inbounds and explain the line is drawn where it is because the things that are out of bounds are bad for his development. I say we both know he had been straying out of bounds too much and I just need him to get inbounds now. If he didn’t, I’d have to do something but I can’t just let him stay out of bounds. If I did, it would be me who was failing. I wouldn’t be doing my job.

I will never not do my job.

And he knows that true. The above only works because he knows its true. I would never just accept something that I know isn’t good for his development. There is no intervention too large if I had tried everything else because the minute there was something left and I didn’t do it, that would be the minute I was failing at doing my job.

The job of a parent is to work towards your children being healthy, well, and prepared to live happy, whole adult lives.

If I am ever to fail at reaching the goal, it won’t be because I failed to work towards it with all I could.

So, that system works pretty well for me and for the two of us.

I am absolutely certain there are lots and lots of people reading this thinking to themselves that never using a hammer raises a soft child. No, it doesn’t. People never get good at being bruised. They get good at hiding the pain or coping with it. But mostly they get good at keeping it down. Especially when the person who caused it is the person with power and with a capacity to do it again.

I don’t want my son to ever get good at being a nail.

I don’t want him to ever get good at being bruised.

I want him to live a life free of relationships where causing emotional bruises is a behavior rather than a rare accident. I want him to be able to handle the times when someone bruises him without internalizing that being willing to be bruised is not a condition he should ever accept or impose.

And then, of course, I fucked it right up on Monday and used a hammer.

I had been the one out of bounds and, if nothing else, I at least get to work on repairing that relatively quickly. So, I owned my shit and apologized for yelling and having handled my frustration badly putting aside that I had some reason to be frustrated.

After school, we were both long past the morning and didn’t need to discuss it but we did what we always do when we’ve had a conflict of some kind.

“Housekeeping”

Once emotions have cooled, even if the situation and issue is past and feels long settled, we still tidy up the little mess we made and make sure there is nothing left unresolved. Every time. We never leave a conflict unclosed. It makes official having put something to bed and moved on.

That is not how it worked in my relationship with my father – or how it worked in his family.

When dishes get broken, no matter who breaks them, you have to clean up the pieces. My father and his family made an art of just pushing them out of the middle of the kitchen floor with the tips of their shoes and just going on as if they weren’t there.

The problem with just stepping around the pieces is that someday, someone is going to step on them. And they’re going to pick up pieces of glass in their feet that build up and build up and hurt until one day, one or both people have a whole lot of untreated injuries that they just soldier on with while hurting from as if they were fine.

The act itself – the housekeeping – keeps dropped plates from shattering like a wine glass thrown down on hard tile. The quick cleanup and resolution every prior time actually makes the cleanup easier next time. The dropped plate just cleaves into a couple of large pieces which can be picked up with bare hands and dropped into the garbage knowing there’s nothing left to step on.

And that was the case this time. My son didn’t need another apology from me but I gave him one anyway. And then we talked about how I was being a little over the top about him needing a coat to walk from building to car and then car to building. I was. Why do we parents freak out about outerwear as if kids are going to perish between curb and school door?

And then we talked about how he talks to me and other adults and him needing to get that inbounds. I suspect he will. Maybe not instantly, perfectly, or permanently… but I trust he will.

And that was that.

With all of this said, I have no idea if I am doing this right. I have no more comfort or confidence than any other parent. Discipline is hard. Knowing how to best change your kids’ behavior when you need to is hard-hard.

I know this though: for my son - for him as a person - and for me as a father and in our father-son relationship, the thing that works isn’t a hammer. It’s a screwdriver.

Using a hammer takes only power. Using a screwdriver takes authority. And I prefer authority to power.

Authority is being able to turn your child toward what you need with a restraint of your power.

It is getting to voluntary compliance with less force than you could have used.

Even the idea of a hammer is that noncompliance can be fixed by forcing involuntary compliance – and it is involuntary because nothing is ever really voluntary at the end of a hammer.

I’d rather just focus on getting to voluntary because once I am no longer the person in the room with power and authority, almost all of my son’s choices will be voluntary.

I long worried that I might be setting him up for conflict with authority figures… but I have come to peace with believing I am not. He has no problem with authority. He used to have a big problem with misuses of power. Now though, he makes value judgments about when those are battles to pick or just things to endure. They’re “business decisions” too… and isn’t that how it works for we adults? We sometimes decide to put up with bullshit from someone with power which we don’t deserve but endure because it is the better choice for us.

I don’t actually want to teach him to be cowed by power. I don’t want to nurture him to be accepting of people who weaponize it or abuse it. He has never been good at being overpowered. I don’t want him to ever be.

And I am more than okay with him staying a Phillips-head screw in a world that often treats kids like nails.

After we finished our housekeeping, we went back to walking around the kitchen barefoot and then went to a diner and had dinner. He told me about track practice and I told him about my day and the lid on the garbage can stayed closed because the dishes were well and truly cleaned up.

I try to model for my son what I see as the behaviors of love: expecting the other person to not be perfect; accepting them unconditionally; acting out of care for their feelings; taking responsibility when you haven’t; and forgiving them when they’ve done the same.

The thing about all of that which I felt acutely on Monday as the person with The Job rather than the person who is the intended beneficiary is that sometimes, when you model that for your child, they model it back.

My son is accepting of me with all my flaws and failures. He forgives my dropped dishes easily. We move on quickly. Rationally, I know that is at least in part the result of a decade and a half of working to make that so.

Irrationally though, emotionally, it feels like a gift. And it is one I am thankful for every day.

I spend so much time trying to model what I hope my child experiences as unconditional acceptance, it takes your breath away a little bit when you see that it is mutual.

The Job doesn’t come with a check but sometimes the pay is the best in the world.