So the Tiger was invited to a birthday party this weekend, which lots of his first-grade classmates attended. Including the one boy who’s always brimming – nay, boiling over! – with aggressive energy. If this boy (let’s call him Jayden, because all boy names must now end in “N”) successfully reaches adulthood, he may have a great future in professional sports or on the floor of the NYSE. For now, though, he mostly chases his classmates, using whatever blunt object is at hand. This time it was the plastic baseball bat intended for later use with the pinata.
Scene one: I’m sitting with the dad of one of the Tiger’s friends.
He says: You ever notice there are two kinds of boys? The gentle ones and, well, the crazy ones?
Me: Yep. The Tiger is full of mischief, but he’d never run after other kids with a baseball bat.
Him: Yeah, there’s energy, and then there’s brutality.
[We laugh, grateful for our relatively calm boys, perhaps a little too smug, but most just grateful.]
I make a half-hearted attempt to confiscate the bat, but Jayden is too fast for me and we both know it. Eventually the birthday girl’s mama grabs the bat. Through sheer luck, no one has gotten whacked, and no one is in tears.
Scene two: A mom of girls surveys the scene, still driven by Jayden, though the kids are now playing an organized game that involves stomping balloons attached to other kids’ ankles.
She says: Boys are different, aren’t they?
Me: Mmmmmph.
The bat is somehow still in play, and guess who’s swinging it? The rest of the boys are acting … well, pretty much like the girls, squealing and screaming and running.
Scene three: Jayden’s mom studiously avoids getting involved in all the bat-whacking activity. I understand why – really, I do – she needs a respite, I’m sure. All parents walk the line between maintaining our own sanity and giving our kids some direction, and we all have to draw that line a little differently. But also, Jayden’s mom doesn’t seem to think intervening would do much good. She evidently thinks certain behavior just falls under “boys will be boys.”
Now, I’ve been a parent long enough to know that temperament plays a key role in kids’ personalities. You can’t trump that entirely as parents. But I’ve also been a parent long enough to realize that you can guide and develop traits that are likely to help your kids live a good and satisfying life, while discouraging antisocial tendencies. If the Tiger had been wielding that bat (a less likely but still not impossible scenario) I would have confiscated it pronto. I would not have assumed that setting rules was a lost cause, just because he’s an energetic boy.
Anyway, the next time some psychologists want to study how kids – and parents! – learn and do gender, they could do worse than to turn up at a kids’ birthday party. There are hazards of course, including obligatory strawberry cupcakes and the allure of beer on a hot Sunday afternoon (for the parents only, obviously; I resisted temptation). But the interactions around Jayden serve as a perfect laboratory for how all of us learn and reinforce gender.
Patron cat of Kittywampus (1985-2001)
Hi Sungold –
Love this vignette. Thanks for posting it. Am I hallucinating or did you edit the post after it went up (I recall something about the father…)
Just wondering about my sanity…
- Euchalon
Hi Euchalon! Yes, I did edit it. I hit publish inadvertently before it was done, then went to bed … and discovered it already on my blog this morning! I decided I’d made a few too many assumptions, and was afraid of being uncharitable. Strictly speaking I should have noted that in an update, but I didn’t do it because I hadn’t intended for it to be out there in the first place.
There oughtta be a law prohibiting blogging after 11 p.m. I’m often too fried to find my own feet, much less string together a coherent sentence. But lately that’s when I’ve had time. I’ve got three classes, a translating job on the side, and nowhere near enough energy for it all.
Funny, I was thinking about you today, and wondering how you would have reacted! Your calm as a parent is something I admire and try to emulate. You should write a book and call it “The Zen of Parenting. ” But maybe the whole point of zen is that it can’t be captured in a “how-to” self-improvement manual.
Please tell C. I’ve still got the beanbag she made me. My kids think it’s very cool.
If the Tiger had been wielding that bat (a less likely but still not impossible scenario) I would have confiscated it pronto. I would not have assumed that setting rules was a lost cause, just because he’s an energetic boy.
not to mention, even if he didn’t learn from it at least his fellow partygoers would no longer be at risk of bat-injury!
I’m still second-guessing myself as to why I didn’t just grab the bat. If his mom were one of my closest friends, I wouldn’t have hesitated, because I would have known they’d be okay with it. We may talk about it taking a village to raise a child, but in fact parents commonly feel infringed upon if another adult does something that might be interpreted as stepping on their turf or implying that they’re not doing their job right.
Thanks for your kind words, Sungold. Your sense of calm made an impression here all around, and I find myself thinking the same thoughts (what would Sungold do?…) Guess we fooled each other pretty good, eh?
The generic zen approach to any situation is just perceive the situation clearly and keep a calm mind so that correct action can appear all by itself. The reason this *should* produce a helpful action is that when you don’t use your mind to make distinctions (e.g. me vs. boy with bat or my child vs. someone else’s child) then we treat all actors in the benign way that we tend to treat ourselves. It’s really just the golden rule, but eliminating “self” and “others”. (To bridge to another post, most people wouldn’t consider kidnapping and enslaving themselves, or killing themselves and leaving their own body in a wall. To do something like that requires a *really* strong delusion of me-vs.-other.)
Perceive clearly and act correctly…OK, easier said than done. In situations like the one you describe, I would be inclined to make the bat the problem rather than the damn-near impossible task of changing child/parent behavior. Just get it and stow it. But I wasn’t there and I’m sure it’s more complicated than that.
About the edit, it’s funny that as soon as I hit the part you removed I thought ‘that doesn’t sound like something Sungold would post’. That said, since it’s already out there I’m kind of curious: Do you think dads in particular tend to encourage aggressive behavior in their sons or in general? I’d be interested to hear your thoughts/observations.
- Euchalon
Well, if I seemed calm, it’s probably because my own kids were a couple thousand miles away!
I really appreciate your description of the zen approach. I suspect that’s easier with other people’s kids than with our own. My kids definitely know how to push my buttons as well as each others’.
As I commented to Isabel, I’m still ruminating over why I didn’t just take the bat. I think it really is socially tricky to intervene. If it had been my house, I wouldn’t have hesitated. Jayden also came to the Tiger’s birthday party last summer, and since his mom wasn’t present *and* it was my turf, my husband and I both put the brakes on his behavior multiple times. At one point he dumped all the gummy worms into the swimming pool, and we just told him that wasn’t okay.
On the edit: When I’m writing a post, I tend to turn down my internal editor on the first pass, then censor thoughts that were half-baked. I’m sure plenty of half-baked ideas still get through the filter, but I try to catch the most egregious ones.
I wouldn’t say that dads in general encourage more aggression – I see moms tolerating it too. There are a few fathers at the extreme end of the spectrum who are really caught up in the macho thing. I’m thinking of the father of one of the Tiger’s soccer team mates who kept yelling at his 5-year-old daughter to be tougher and more aggressive. These are kindergartners in a league that’s meant to play up fun and dial the competition *way* down. I see a much bigger gender difference when it comes to discouraging ostensibly “sissy” behavior in boys, with fathers being much more allergic to it. This pretty obviously has to do with homophobia.