View from the Control Tower

Sometimes it feels like 99 percent of parenting is manipulation. Control. We're forever trying to get our kids to behave in certain ways, react in certain ways, even think in certain ways. The right ways. The considerate and responsible and confident ways. We can do that with base threats or only slightly less desperate bribery, or we can do it with righteous modeling and active listening and other things I suck at.

Ultimately, though, it's all controlling. In the end, on a fizzled evening when no one's particularly pleased with the family members they were dealt, our preschoolers will still come stomping through our living rooms in protest, throwing around that dirty word as if he knows it'll fully freak us out.

Do you know what happened when I stopped panicking long enough to ask my son why he would say such a thing? He told me his older brother made him do it.

MADE him. As in climbed into the saddle of that vexing situation, commandeered those coveted reins, and ordered his poor brother to giddyup.

What can I say? It's hereditary.

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