Can’t We Agree to Agree

Over breakfast recently, I mentioned in an overtly casually-pass the toast-sort of tone that I needed to travel to Northern Virginia to look at boarding schools.

“Where’s the marathon?” my long-suffering wife responded instantly.

“I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I replied. “Ethical independent consultants have to consistently update their knowledge of traditional boarding schools around the country. A colleague of mine who was the director of admissions at one of my favorite New Hampshire schools recently became the head of school in Virginia and I feel a responsibility to my clients to…”

“Where’s the marathon?” Patti repeated in the same steady voice that has caused many a fifth grader on the playground to P-U-T T-H-A-T R-O-C-K D-O-W-N R-I-G-H-T N-O-W.

“What in the world makes you think that there’s a marathon this time of year in Northern Virginia? Sometimes, I honestly just can’t figure out how you get ideas in your head.”

Patti was silent, but gave me “the look.”

Clearly beaten, I fessed up: “It’s the marathon of the Potomac,” I admitted. That the packet pickup for the race is actually in D.C. rather than in Northern Virginia scored me no husband points whatsoever; I decided that “right now” would be an exceptionally propitious time to clear out those palm fronds and attend to a number of other tasks calling to me from the back yard.

In short, Patti saw straight through me. Were my forehead made of glass, she could not have been more accurate about my intention. I frequently plan my business travel to correspond with local races and she knows it. Some people like to play golf courses around the country; I like to see what the locals are doing at 26.2. Heck, traveling to the 48 contiguous states to check out indigenous meth labs would be worse.

But the point is that family members–your kids in particular–don’t have to channel the Amazing Kreskin to know your opinion of matters ranging from studying to housework to promiscuity to underage drinking. They know what you think. The $64,000 question involves how to help our kids come to agree that our point of view involving sober attention to academics should take precedence over the prevailing opinion in our culture–that “fat, drunk, and stupid is [the] way to go through life.”

Imagine, if you would, just how violently unpleasant it would be if you were forced to listen to political, social, or religious views in direct contrast to those which you hold dear. Perhaps you don’t have to think back any further than a recent trip to an airport waiting room or your dentist’s office. Pretty miserable, huh? Those talking heads pontificating endlessly about how the president is right (or wrong), the course we should follow in the middle east (or not), and how our immigration policy in the American Southwest is correct (or isn’t.) Maddening, no? (Note to professionals, airports, and gas stations: turn the screens off. Please. We all have hand helds and, unlike when we’re trapped at your place, we are allowed to change the channel or-gasp!-turn the thing off.)

You already know what those crackpots think. Their views are ubiquitous. The REASON you don’t invite opinionated Republicans (or Democrats), Sunnis (or Shias), non-runners (or runners) to breakfast is that they are they don’t agree with you. People with disparate points of view are welcome to engage in informed discussion at the evening meal, but please, not at breakfast.

If your kids are living in a home where they are constantly subjected to a barrage of views that contradict their own experience, they are likely to shut out their parents. And who could blame them? Thumper’s advice applies to your children as much as to animated animals.

Or stated more succinctly: What makes you think that telling your son to do his homework for the one hundred and first time is going to make all the difference?