Just Wear It

I recently wrote about our family’s trip to visit the Queen City. It was a great time (mostly) and a valuable learning experience for my wife and I .

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Plus, we hit ballpark number 25 on our quest to see em’ all!

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Along that quest, we had our 3 kids under six years old out pretty late past their bedtimes. In an overstimulating environment. And not because they begged us to go see a baseball game. It was our choice to put them in an unfamiliar environment and let chaos reign. Alas, it should come as no surprise to you that on the walk back to the car, one of our kids (the 5-year-old, and this is important for the context of what I am talking about, our kid with the most strength), devolved into a classic meltdown.

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It began when I had the audacity to ask him to hold my hand as we walked back along a busy street, because he kept trying to run into the road. Crazy, I know, that I would want his obstinate ass to be safe. His response was “I am too old to hold your hand.” My thought was you are never too old to not get squashed into human pancake mush along the bank of the Ohio river.

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At this time, a “typical” parent response would be to go into the reasons why hand holding was the smart choice. But he was past the point of information intake, so I picked him up, slung him over my shoulder as he doth protested, and proceeded to continue to our minivan rental (side note: having rented multiple mini vans, I can confidently say when it comes time for a new vehicle, hell, no).?

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As you probably guessed, he gratefully accepted my offer to keep him safe and give his little 5-year-old legs a break. And as you probably also guessed, that last line was full of sarcasm. He protested by hitting, punching, kicking, screaming, and choking.

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At this time, a? “typical” parent response would have been to stop, explain why hitting and overall kid-on-parental violence is bad, and take away some privilege to prove my point. But he was way past that, so I took a typical unconventional approach, and just as we used to say when I played baseball and you’d get hit with a pitch:

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Wear it.

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I wore the punches, kicks, scratches, and gouges for about 15 minutes until we got to our stupid-ass minivan. Eventually, we got him and his siblings back to the hotel and mercifully, to sleep.

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The next morning, a typical response would have been to lecture him on his “bad behavior.”

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But I ain’t typical, and I suggest you shouldn’t be either. It was mine and my wife’s fault he melted down. We kept him out too late, with too much stimulation, and so like my long march to the minivan, we had to wear this one.?

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It is not always easy to break the convention of lecturing and discipling kids for bad behavior, but a wider lens often shows that the grownups set them up for failure, and when that happens, the best thing you can do is keep them from running into the road/hurting themselves, extricate them from the situation, and wear/bear the bad behavior as best as you can stand. Because at a certain point, there will be no lessons learned, no behavior modification, and no reason to waste your energy.?

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You just gotta wear it, like a vacation rental minivan, until the time passes.?

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