When I was a teenager my dad went through management training which he then used on my sisters and my mom and me. It turns out management philosophies work really well with teenagers. I'm not being facetious; I'm serious. I remember all his dictates. "No flat surfaces!" he'd declare, eyeing the papers and backpacks drowning the kitchen counter. When I'd fight with one of my sisters and eventually, inevitably involve the innocent third sister, my dad would cry, "Bring in the third party!" (I hated that he exposed that one. Bringing in a third party is a great way to deflect blame.) And when my mom would yell at him, he'd stare at her for a second, then ask one of us kids, "What's she really saying?"
That last one made the biggest impression on me, perhaps because one of my sisters was always yelling at me and so I had ample opportunity to apply it. (LOL Juliane!) No, seriously, it's a useful conflict management strategy. Pausing to determine what a person is really saying keeps one from reacting defensively. It encourages dispassion. It probably drove my mom nuts.
Anyway, after I wrote that post about homework, my dad's voice echoed in my head. I began to wonder why homework makes me so angry. How can it possibly be true that my kids' homework is more painful than mine was? I remember the mind-numbing nature of fourth grade vocabulary homework quite clearly, thankyouverymuch. Also, I have to make my kids do lots of things they don't want to do, but nothing makes me gnash my teeth and wail like homework does.
So: what am I really mad about?
***
I've got two answers.
The first is the most obvious: given the structure of our evenings, the kids need to start their homework while I'm starting dinner. Enough said, eh?
But also, I've been turning homework into a larger issue. When my son fights me over spelling, for example, I think about how I communicate at work entirely by email, and I wonder how the hell he'll manage in a world like that. In other words, when he fights spelling, I see him Unemployed! in Greenland!
I need to trust both my kids more than that.
P.S. All y'all's comments on the last post were really, really helpful. My husband and I talked over everything you said, using it as a springboard to develop our own approach.
2 comments:
the spelling thing. Yup. I had to threaten my younger daughter with death and dismemberment to get her to work for even a C in spelling. She still has errors, the kind spellcheck ignores.
But, BIG but, she is a highly skilled communicator who writes very well and is able to employ a minion to check over what she writes.
Dyslexia + brains = problem has a solution.
Nice job figuring that out. I have a tendency to get worked up and then it takes a while to figure out why I am so worked up.
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