Dadvice Weekly #53 / Three Things I Believed about Obedience
Dadvice Weekly - #53
Our five-year-old has been driving me nuts lately.
Last week I asked him to put his shoes on. I asked again a minute later, to which he said, “hold on.” By the third time I had edge in my voice, and I wasn’t asking anymore. But he still hadn’t moved off the rug. He was in the middle of a magnatiles castle.
After losing my cool, I got him in the car. I was annoyed the whole drive and he could tell.
When Alicia and I went through foster licensing training almost two years ago, a surprising amount of the sessions were spent taking apart parenting ideas that most of us absorbed without ever deciding to believe them. The training is mostly for kids who have endured significant trauma, but it’s how much of it landed for them just as squarely. Here are three of those ideas that have stuck with me.
Myth #1: A Well-Raised Kid is an Obedient Kid
This is the one that gets you in public, and it exhausted me with our first two. When one melted down in the Costco parking lot, the thing I felt first wasn’t concern for their wellbeing, but it was a quick calculation about what the guy loading his trunk two spaces over is thinking about me. Over time, I’ve learned to question those thoughts with a few simple inquiries for myself:
Why do you hold the expectations that you do with your kids?
Do you value obedience or your child feeling safe more?
Do you value peoples’ perception of you as a good parent, or your relationship with your kids more?
Kids raised in homes with no room for mistakes tend to grow into adults with a specific set of problems. Some of them resent authority for the rest of their lives. Some of them cannot say no, which means they cannot get out of bad relationships. Some go numb because big feelings were never safe. Some will not try anything new in front of another person because failing where somebody can see it is unbearable. If the goal is a perfectly behaved kid and you hit the goal, there is a bill attached, and it comes due about twenty years later.
Myth #2: Slow Obedience is No Obedience
The logic is that if a kid knows the right thing and does not do it immediately, that is defiance…
…except knowing the right thing and doing the right thing are miles apart for adults, too. I know I should not check my phone at dinner. I know the speed limit on Powers. Every single one of us has a gap between what we know and what we do, and we extend ourselves grace for that gap constantly. Then a four-year-old takes ninety seconds to come to the table and we call it a character issue!
Between eighteen months and two years, kids figure out that they are separate people from their parents, and asserting their will is how they test it. That’s not a defect. Preschoolers ask “why?” about everything because their brains are lighting up with curiosity. School age kids talk back because they have discovered they can hold an opinion and defend it. Every one of those stages looks like disobedience from the outside, but when viewed clearly, it’s obviously growth and development.
Myth #3: You Can Never Let Them Win
This is when a request about shoes into a standoff about authority. Once you decide you cannot lose, you have to keep raising the stakes until you don’t. I fall into this one constantly.
There are three fears that motivate going this route.
The first is that if I let it go, I have lost control. What I have come around to is that walking away from a power struggle is not the same as losing one. My kids are watching how I handle the moment more than they are tracking who technically got their way. A parent who can absorb a little pushback without escalating looks steady. A parent who has to win looks like someone who is not sure of his footing.
The second is that if I let it go once, they will know they can get away with anything. In our house the opposite has been closer to true. When I hear a kid out and tell him his reason makes sense, I get better behavior later, not worse. Kids who feel heard have less to prove. The ones who fight me hardest are usually the ones who feel like nobody is listening.
The third fear is that letting it go makes me a bad dad. That one is the loudest and the least accurate. It takes more from me to stay calm when my kid is being unreasonable than it does to raise my voice and end it. Yelling is the easy option, it just costs more later.
You only win if the relationship is still standing when it is over. Nothing my kid did today matters more than whether he still wants to be around me after I’ve imposed my will.
Let’s be clear: this doesn’t mean the house runs on “vibes.” There are rules, some of which are unmovable. But what I’ve come to realize is that most of what is framed as “disobedience” can easily be reframed as a five year old who enjoys playing with his toys and a dad who didn’t leave himself enough time to get out the door. –KC
Dadvice Weekly is Kyle and Skyler—two friends in their thirties, living in Colorado, settling into fatherhood and trying to stay sane. Every Tuesday we share what’s working in our homes: gear we use, routines we’ve tested, ideas we’re trying. It could be a recipe, a product that solved a problem, or just what we’re thinking about as dads.
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