Come On, Get Happy

Has anyone ever asked you what you hope your children will be like when they grow up, and you reply, “It doesn’t matter, as long as they’re happy.”  It sounds good to say, and heck, you probably mean it when you say it.  I mean it when I say it, at least I think I do.

But then, I end up spending most of my time grooming them to be “the right kind of people” when they grow up and not a lot of time focused on making my kids happy.  I’ve put a lot of effort into making them smart, healthy, athletic, attractive, savvy, and polite.  I guess I always expected ‘happy’ to be a by-product of the rest.  As if being the straight-A student will make my son happy.  Or getting to the next level in ballet class will make my daughter happy.  Hearing the grandparents tell them how good they are with their “please and thank yous” makes them happy.

It does to some degree because children generally like to be praised.  It certainly makes them proud to have achieved goals they have set for themselves (or more likely, that their parents set for them).  And when they grow up, they will definitely be happier if they are successful in their careers, fit and healthy, and have strong friendships with people who will support them in meeting the goals they end up setting for themselves. But do these things make them truly happy now?

If I think about some of my daughter’s happiest moments, they include an unplanned walk to Baskin-Robbins and sharing an ice cream cone together or a tea party on a Saturday afternoon or even just a chance to sit in my lap to read together.  My son favors a good, old-fashioned tickle session on his bed or watching a hockey game on TV with his dad – oh, he likes that walk to Baskin-Robbins, too.

We don’t do those things very often.  Usually, we are too busy shuttling them from swim lesson to karate lesson, volunteering at the library, preparing for some Big Event for school, or nagging them to do homework, clean their rooms, and say “please” and “thank you”.   Not that any of those are bad things; they are building a foundation to ensure happiness in their future.  But I can’t help but feel like I do need to take more time to give them happiness today.

The (Not So) Good Old Days

I like to think that over time, we are becoming more enlightened and embrace progress, which is why I usually roll my eyes when people resist change with the refrain of, “I grew up with…, and I turned out fine.” I grew up with asbestos ceilings, but I’m not going to knowingly put asbestos in my house, even if I think I turned out fine.

But every now and then, I do yearn to hearken back to bygone days of parenting, back when:

1) It was OK to hit your kids. I’m not saying that I want to use my kids as punching bags and take my frustrations out on them. But I can’t argue with the effectiveness with an occasional spanking for serious offenses. For example, the other day, the kids snuck out during their afternoon nap and went into our exercise room, which they are not allowed in without adult supervision. It only takes the thought of a 10-pound weight dropped on a toddler’s foot to know why we have this rule. I found out about their scheme when I heard someone scream, which turned out to be from my son when my daughter slammed the exercise room door on his fingers. They both know the rule about not slamming doors, about not going into that room unsupervised, and about not leaving their rooms to play when it’s nap-time. I really wished I could have spanked them both as a reminder about why we have those rules.

But I couldn’t spank them, not just because I don’t want Child Protective Services on my case, but because I’m conditioned not to lay a finger on my kids. I would have been consumed by guilt. As it was, I was feeling pretty guilty just for wishing I could spank them.

2) You could leave your kids in the car by themselves. The really horrible parents who left their kids in a locked car on hot days ruined it for the rest of us. Whether you’re stopping at the ATM, picking up your dinner at Applebee’s to-go, or dropping off another child at school, if you need to get out, all the kids have to come with you. That’s extra five-point harnesses to undo and extra hands to hold crossing the street. Suddenly, what was a two-minute task takes 15 minutes.

3) You didn’t know how horrible high-fructose corn syrup was. It’s in practically every single snack food there is, even stuff you think might be healthy (I’m on to you, granola bars!). Of course I want to feed my children good, nutritious food. Every lunch I pack for them contains fresh fruit, a green vegetable, some lean protein, and a little starch to keep the tummy full. But when they hit a growth spurt, they seem to be hungry 24/7, and it’s a long and expensive scavenger hunt at the supermarket to find them good snacks that will keep them sated between meals. When I’m short on time and feeling a budgetary pinch, I do wish I could buy some Oreos and Pop Tarts and be done with it.

Under Pressure

The documentary Race to Nowhere has been making the rounds in our communities, and all around me, parents are tsk-tsking the achievement-obsessed pressures put upon our kids today. In the Silicon Valley, where everyone is hustling to create the Next Big Thing that will Change Life As We Know It, the pressure is even greater as parents try to instill that drive to excel in their children at a very early age.

But it’s not just the kids who live in this pressure cooker. We parents are getting cooked right along with them. When my son started kindergarten, I was immediately approached by the PTA recruitment team, mostly comprised of the wives of the VP’s, CEO’s, and CIO’s that run companies like the one at which I work. They needed room mothers, fund raising task force members, traffic council volunteers (“traffic council” is a fancy word for being a crossing guard in the school parking lot). They’re very lucky that they don’t need to earn a living with jobs that dictate how to spend 10 hours of the day, but I do and their husbands work me to death. I don’t have the energy to work for them, too.

We can’t just sign up our son for Little League, we have to coach, too (they must be strapped for coaches if they’re asking us). And I can’t bring cupcakes for him to share with his classmates on his birthday due to a strict no-sugar policy. Instead, I am supposed to put together a book about his life that I need to present to the class. Really, he’s the one in kindergarten, but I have to do a project?

We get weekly reminders – er, I mean newsletters – to pack healthy lunches, buy organic, support local businesses, recycle, conserve water, compost, participate in school events, read to our children at least 15 minutes every day, sign up for [insert sport here], and (my favorite) slow down and enjoy quality time with our families.

It’s not that I have any issue doing those things, but we can’t just do them. We must perform them at the highest level at all times. And for some reason, even though I believe that I would try to do most of those things on my own anyway, it becomes so stressful when there are external levers driving those behaviors.

Don’t get me wrong. I love where I live. I love the diversity. I love the culture of innovation. I love having my family close. I love having Stanford in my backyard. And I love the weather. I just wish this area came with a safety valve.

Declaring Victory

It's been a little crazy over the last few months, and I haven't had time to properly declare victory over the tiny diapered diva. Yes, after many frustrating months and an EPIC battle of wills, V finally shed her diapers during the day around the start of the year.

If you had asked me back in November, I would have told you V would be wearing diapers all the way to the day she graduates high school. It felt like there was nothing she wanted enough for us to dangle before her as a reward, no punishment scary enough with which to threaten her, no shame too great to inflict on her psyche. She simply wanted nothing to do with the toilet or underpants and that was the end of discussion for her.

(By the by, yes, she does display my mother's stubbornness and temper, aren't I lucky to be sandwiched between them?)

So how did we finally turn the corner? I'm not proud to admit it, but I pretty much had a melt-down in front of her. We had been trying to send her to the potty every hour to get her to pee in the toilet, and I had just returned from such a fruitless journey to the bathroom when she ran back to the play room, defiantly plopped down on the carpet and had a pee of such gargantuan proportions that it completely saturated and defeated her pull-up. So I grabbed the closest thing I could find to soak up the mess, which turned out to be one of her favorite shirts (a coincidence, I swear). And instead of cleaning it up, I threw the shirt at her and made her wipe it up. Then I screamed at her that I was done and I wouldn't be cleaning up her mess anymore, and I couldn't care less if she wore diapers for the rest of her life. I pulled off her wet pull-up, stuck underpants on her because I was too lazy to open a new pack of diapers, then I left to fume.

Probably not one of my finer moments of parenting.

But the next day, she didn't wet her pull-up at all, and the day after she started wearing underpants, and she's had nary an accident since. All in all, my momentary loss of parental dignity was well worth the results. Duh, winning!

It Gets Better When We Get Better

Maybe you have seen the recent “It Gets Better” campaign, in which celebrities urge LGBT youth not to take their own lives. It’s a tragic campaign really, putting the spotlight on how trapped today's kids feel by bullying.

It made me wonder how kids can be so cruel to one another. Then it made me mad. Why is everyone trying to convince the victim not to commit suicide? Why isn’t anyone telling those bullies to stop? And what about their parents? Who are the horrible parents of these horrible kids?

Certainly I’m not one of those parents. I’ve never taught my kids that it’s all right to take out my anger, frustration, and insecurity on someone else. I’ve never acted in a way that would encourage such awful behavior in my children.

It’s not like I’ve ever had a bad day at work then yelled at my five year-old for something as trivial as spilling his water on me at dinner. Or been embarrassed by my three year-old pooping at the public pool then humiliating her by scolding, “only little babies poop in their diapers” in front of her friends. I’ve never made a side comment to my husband about how the waiter at Chevy’s must be kind of stupid to get our order wrong three times in one visit and will be lucky if I don’t complain to his manager. Nope, not me. Or maybe I did – once or twice.

But surely the parents of these bullies do more than lose their temper. They must beat their kids. Or drink themselves into a stupor in front of the children. Or completely neglect them and leave them to lead “Lord of the Flies”-like lives at home. Losing one’s cool occasionally in front of the kids can’t turn them into bullies, right?

Then again, my kids have been yelling and taunting each other a lot. That’s just siblings being siblings, and a kindergartener learning delinquent behavior from the more belligerent kids at school. It couldn't be me. Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling that maybe I had something to do with their recent aggression toward each other.

So I have been trying very hard the last few days not to yell at them at all, not to lose my temper over a five year-old acting five and a three year-old acting three. It isn’t easy – five and three year-olds are pretty evil – and there is a lot of stress in our lives from our environment, the economy, and an ever-growing sleep deficit.

What amazes me, and shames me, is that it has made a difference. They listen about as much as they did before (which is to say, not much), but they treat each other more civilly. They treat me and my husband more civilly. We’ve had fewer tantrums from the kids because their mom is throwing fewer tantrums.

It’s a disturbing realization. How many of us suffer incompetent co-workers, bad drivers, and apathetic service providers all throughout the day and go home feeling just a bit pent up? How many parents take out all the inequities of their crappy day by inadvertently letting off steam at the stupid (sometimes colossally stupid) things their kids do? How often are bullies passing on the hell they catch at home – over getting a bad grade, forgetting to do their chores, talking back to a parent, or being generally lazy and recalcitrant – to someone who is going to shut up and take it (until that someone can’t take it anymore)?

In other words, how many parents essentially bully their kids without realizing it? After all, bullying is inflicting emotional pain and creating a threatening and hostile environment. What’s more painful and hostile than to have your mom or dad go crazy mad at you?

It’s really difficult as a parent to recognize when we’re treating our kids like emotional punching bags. At the end of an immensely bad day, if you come home to a whiny son and a daughter who decides to paint your skirt with strawberry yogurt, the first reaction is to yell and punish them. But that doesn’t make the day any better. Nope. It gets better when we get better, about managing our own hostility and giving our kids a good example of how to treat others.