Softening My Grip

How big changes come from small questions.

"That's who you keep lookin' out the window for?"

"Half."

"What else then?"

"Just lookin' for what's comin'."

"Yeah, but no one ever sees that."

I realized recently my youngest child is growing beyond my control. This isn't to say he's out of control. He's kind-hearted. And though he has big emotions, he's not feral. But my ability to influence how he is, what he does, and how he "turns out" is entering a phase of diminishing returns. I'll explain how it dawned on me.

We were acting out our middle-school morning routine: He sleeps through his alarm so I get him up. He forgets to brush his teeth so I remind him. But other than that, I've been feeling redundant. The one alarm he does obey tells him when to leave for the bus stop and I usually head downstairs to give him a goodbye hug and see him out. But it occurred to me that maybe he didn't need me to shut the door behind him. Maybe that gesture alone is enough to rob him of a slice of independence he could otherwise enjoy - being fully in charge of getting himself ready and leaving the house. I wasn't sure if he liked my company in the morning or if he'd rather I bugger off. I tried deducing the answer from his body language, but he wasn't giving up the goods. He seemed fine with whatever I did. Maybe he didn't have a preference. In the end, I did the unimaginable. Something so bold - brazen even - as to risk throwing my years of impeccable parenting into disarray.

I asked him.

I presented two options because leaving this open-ended would return the infamous shrug-of-undetermined-resolution. Option 1 includes me milling around downstairs while he gets ready, then offering a quick hug before saying goodbye and closing the door behind him. In option 2, I go back upstairs to my office door and leave him to it, letting him say goodbye when he's ready, i.e., he's in charge of everything. He chose the latter.

Satisfied, if not unsurprised with his choice, I turned to walk away. But I only made it three steps before something stopped me. There had to be more to this.

---

I live at the extremes of a bell curve with my youngest. One moment I'm checking on him for the 5th time about whether or not he remembered to set his phone alarm for screen time, and then next I'm secretly hoping he asks me to ride his bike alone into town, knowing he'd have to cross over a highway interchange on the way. One side of my face is telling my wife he's fine walking home in the dark while the other asks him how he's doing every hour like the annoying beep of a smoke alarm that needs new batteries.

When I was a kid, having both parents working from home was a rarity. And by rarity, I mean the phrase "work from home" didn't exist yet. If we were lucky, the earliest we got to see our dad was 6:00pm when he got back from work. I lament the fact that my kids never got to experience the horror of hearing the garage door opening in the evening, knowing they were about to answer for the unspeakable crimes they put their mother through while I was at work.

But unlike my Dad and other dads of the pre-internet era, every day since my son's birth I've spent hours (emphasis on the plural) in his presence. The winds shifted months ago when he began making himself scarce on most days, but I didn't catch on until now. Having two older kids, I'm familiar with this change in temperature from partner-in-crime to glorified chauffeur. This is bitter-sweet. In one sense, it's liberating not to be on-call as often, but sad to lose some of the things that make cute kids cute. He's taking the reigns of his own life and won't need me quite as much. But with that comes a disarming question from my inner monologue:

"Have I done enough?"

I always rattle on about our nature being the dominant driver of our behavior with nurture taking the back seat with zero legroom. So over the years, I've tried to tailor my parenting to suit each child's temperament, allowing us to gel as a unit rather than grinding each other down in opposition. At least that's what I'd like to believe. In truth, I seat-of-the-pants parented the first two kids and now I'm overcorrecting to make up for those mistakes with the third. I'm not hovering, I swear.

---

As I stood in the kitchen unable to go back upstairs, I searched for the root cause of my nagging. It isn't out of necessity, per se. This kid knows how to make himself ramen, so it's not like he'll leave the house with no pants on. I wondered what things were missing when I left him alone to do it his way before. Then I remembered.

Hygiene. Brushed teeth and deodorized pits. Every morning I would ask, and every morning they weren't done yet. Even when I waited to ask until the last possible moment - until he had one foot out the door - they still weren't done.

I circled back to ask him what the solution to this, the actual root of the behavior could be. He suggested writing a sticky note and leaving it in a prominent place, but prior versions of this solution always failed, leaving us with a house full of Post-its no one ever read. Another idea was setting an alarm on his phone, which works for some things but not others. Also, if he's occupied at the time the alarm goes off, it loses all effect since the whole purpose is to initiate immediate action.

However, there is one thing he does reliably. He empties the dishwasher. Every night we run the dishwasher and every morning his job is to empty it so we can put the day's dirty dishes in it instead of the sink. If he fails, the sink gets full and we all get sad. His job has consequences, so he remembers to do it. Let's use that.

Emptying the dishwasher has a great three-act structure: In act one, the door opens. During act two, he removes the dishes and puts them where they belong. And in the final act, he lifts the door back up and flips the little magnet on the front from Clean to Dirty. Curtain down.

When speaking about performing dangerous acrobatic maneuvers in flight, former Blue Angel pilot John Foley cited that neurological research shows it takes ~65 repetitions to "wire a groove" into our brain. All we need to do is put a new groove into his dish routine.

So for our first attempt to rewire his brain, we'll patch his hygiene routine into opening the dishwasher door. He's already doing that part on his own. After a brief discussion, we decided to add an "interrupt" between opening the door and emptying the dishwasher. Now, he opens the door and immediately goes upstairs to brush his teeth and deodorize. After that, he takes a detour into my office to hug me goodbye, and upon returning downstairs, the gaping door is the trigger for him to reengage with his established routine which closes the loop.

It's scary to relinquish control of anything, let alone when it involves raising my kids. Dozens of what-ifs and worst-case scenarios can cloud us into believing we have to be on constant alert. In my case, that was enough to keep me stressing over his every move far longer than I should. But the simple act of asking him what he preferred uncovered the deeper question of why I was like this in the first place. We followed the trail of reasons and found a strong signal pointing to my fear of being the father of "the smelly kid with bad breath". That and the fact that he has braces now and if he doesn't brush properly it will cause huge issues when they come off. Regardless, together we devised a strategy and implemented a solution, but without asking why, we wouldn't have even known what problem to solve.

In the end, we both learned something. He learned how to insert new responsibilities into an existing routine, and I learned it's never too late to let go. Especially when what's comin' is already here.

Thanks for reading. -Tim