Could It Be This Simple?

A number of my gentle readers* have inquired regarding my modeling advice. Not “Wear nice clothes to the audition,” modeling. Parents want to know how to combat the snares of process addictions. They want to know how to help their kids love reading (could it be as simple as just reading to them?) and avoid video games (is it as straight forward as just staying off the computer?) Moms and dads want to know how to bring up healthy kids in a toxic culture.

We get it, they say. Stop screaming at the kids; stop trying to change them; love them for who they are not for what they do.

But just the same, they go on, We’d still like to have our kids get off the darn X-box and pick up a book just this once. We’d like them to be successful. And while we know many folks who have jobs that require reading, we seldom see want ads including the phrase “must be able to play “Call of Duty” for hours on end rather than interacting with any actual humans.”

I could not agree more. Or as my grandmother used to say, “Rich or poor, it’s good to have money.” Of course, we want our kids to grow up to be independent and self-supporting. There is hardly a more frighteningly cogent image than that of a 30 year-old living in your basement, emerging only to get more Cheez Doodles and ask to borrow your credit card “just this one last time.”

So we are agreed that nothing succeeds like success. The question remains how to help our kids get from sleeping on the corner of Sloth Street and Feckless Avenue over to walking proudly down Independence Boulevard. Clearly, yelling is contraindicated. Absent “Look out! The crosstown bus is about to knock you into the middle of last week!” yelling at kids just teaches them to be yellers themselves.

So here’s my four-step process:

1) No video games. You heard it here first. You wouldn’t leave narcotics out in the open, not even if “all the other kids [are] doing it.” Books, sunshine, Frisbees, mud, trees, yes. Walking the family dog, making brownies, planting trees, fixing bikes, making campfires? Also yes. Computer games? Absolutely not. Why take a chance with something so powerful with so much capacity for harm? The five most powerful words of parenting are “Let’s go toss a ball.”

2) Note the intensity of the commitment to “being there” with your kids. Yes, I heard about those absent English fathers who trucked their six year-old progeny off to boarding school only to have their handsome, erudite kids return to the manor a decade later ready to defend the empire.

But I never met any.

3) Attunement. Hopefully your kids will show up from the factory grooving on anything brightly colored moving object and you can roll a big plastic ball back and forth with your six year-old before blinking your eyes and going outside to have a catch with your 16 year-old who now throws better than you. But not all kids are ball kids and Ferdinand the Bull might show up in the maternity ward instead. (For those of you who somehow missed Munro Leaf‘s delicious 1938 book, The Story of Ferdinand, I will only whet your desire by mentioning that Ferdinand would rather smell flowers than participate in bull fights. Not that I blame him.) If your kid would rather build space ships with dad and Legos rather than toss the pigskin, that’s okay too.

4) Then “love them for who they are rather than what they do.”

Because you did what you could do.

And they are who they are.

* Hey. Three is a number.