Jason M. Jones

On Saturday, my wife and I took the kids to the arboretum to see the taiko drumming for the cherry blossom festival. Early in our relationship when my wife and I first started dating, we saw taiko drumming at the Institute of the Arts and enjoyed it. One of our early trips together was to DC during the cherry blossom festival to view the activities that were happening there. So when we get a chance, we like to go see it. To get our daughter into it we showed her YouTube clips, and having fought through the traffic, we took our seats around the metal sculptures where the drumming was to take place. Just that morning, I’d posted about recent thoughts I’d been having on discipline, but our daughter was behaving herself. She kept getting up and going to sit on the ground and coming back to sit on my lap, but I had no problem with this because she wasn’t blocking anyone’s view. Midway through the second or third song, however, I looked up to see a two-year-old boy thrashing a clump of daffodils. He started hitting a few of the flowers and then really went to town. Of course, I can’t blame him because he’s two. But I looked over, and no more than five feet away, his mother was sitting, staring at him, smiling, doing absolutely nothing to stop him. And I couldn’t help wondering given my recent post on discipline: is it me? Am I too uptight? Should I let my child have freer rein to thrash a bunch of flowers that are in theory there for everyone’s enjoyment?

Of course, I’m being facetious. I didn’t think that at all. But I should cut the woman a little slack. Given the arboretum’s locale and the nature of most members, I assume the child has been with his au pair all week and she doesn’t know what to do with him now that she’s the primary caregiver. I swear I try not to judge other parents. It’s a tough job. It’s exhausting. There’s no clear right way to do it and so many wrong ones, but the quickest way to make me betray this self-imposed non-judgment clause is to do nothing when your kid is acting up. It wasn’t enough to ruin the morning. It only distracted me for a moment. I watched as the mother waited, and after the flowers were beaten to a pulp, she decided to get up and remove her son, and I went back to watching the drumming, but afterward, I couldn’t help reflecting on discipline further.

It may be old school, and it might sound lame, but I believe in the social contract. When you’re in shared spaces, public spaces, you should behave with respect to the people around you and the resources you’re using. To this extent, with my children I’m often enforcing rules I find a little ridiculous. I would say a prime example is trying to keep my child reined in at the library. I’m not really sure why anyone needs to be quiet at the local library on a Sunday afternoon. It’s not like we’re at Harvard’s library during finals week. Is anyone doing research that requires that much study? Unique tomes they can only access in our little suburban niche? But the old rule goes the library is a place of quiet, and even if I find it silly, I’m in. I’ll play by the rules.

There seems to me to have been a shift in ideas about childrearing between the Boomers and Gen Xers, and maybe it’s time to find the compromise between? You see, it strikes me the Boomers were more of a children should be seen and not heard type of parent. Kids were grounded. They were told no, sometimes maybe even spanked. Then there were the Gen Xers, who even though most of them turned out fine, whined about how they weren’t going to raise their kids like their parents raised them. Children never got told no, their feelings were considered, things were discussed with deference to the wishes of the child, and maybe…I’m not saying definitely…but maybe the rise in feelings of entitlement in this country are linked to that? Just maybe?

I care about my children’s feelings. I’d like to take them into consideration when they’re in accord with the health and well-being of our household. But quite honestly, no is a concept in life they’ll encounter a lot, stop doing that is something they’ll hear quite often, and they need to respond by stopping. Might I even add they’re probably going to meet a lot of I don’t care how you feel in their lives. I’ve known parents who buy into that don’t say no but distract them with something else in my life, and if you’ll pardon me, at least one of their kids if not all of them, are assholes. So while I might not often go as far as saying “I don’t care how you feel” to my children (admittedly, it may have passed my lips once or twice; Boomers are like, “So what?”; Gen Xers are like, “But you’re wounding her little soul!”), I do say “no” to them. My wife says “no” to them. This house isn’t a democracy. There’s a king and a queen and their subjects. We try to rule with fairness. They can petition us. But if they start acting the fool, we’re not having that. Step over that line, and I’m not scared to go straight Machiavelli. I love my kids, and they love me too, but would it be gauche to admit that I don’t mind it too much if they’re a little scared of me as well? Not much, just a little…maybe intimidated is a better word.