Winning fights by not fighting

I was sitting on the couch. Sam was on my lap.

I had my right arm around his chest, firm but not too tight. My left arm was coming up from underneath, controlling his legs so he couldn't whack a heel into my groin (something we dads have to think about, and yes, it has happened, several times).

Sam was in a full-blown, howling, Linda-Blair-spitting-pea-soup rage. He was fighting me with every muscle in his little toddler body, kicking my thighs, pushing at my hands, straining, growling, snarling and spitting out "Mommy! Mommy!" in a demanding shriek.

"Mommy's right there, Sweetie," I kept murmuring in his ear. "She is ready to love you, but we need you to calm down."

When he paused for breath I could feel his little heart rabbiting along, pittery-pittery-pittery. Then, sensing some slack in my grip, he'd throw himself back into battle, like an animal attacking the wire of the cage.

"It's not going to work, Sam," I would murmur. "You're very strong, but I have 200 pounds on you. You're not going to win. But we love you, and if you calm down you can get down."

And even if the midst of the fray, I couldn't help thinking back to the fall of 2004.

My wife and I were, in early November, a few weeks from getting engaged. I was working election night, and was to meet a candidate near my wife’s home. So I stopped in to say hi to her and her boys.

I could see instantly that her then-eight-year-old was in a dark, steamy mood – a common state for him – so I grabbed him and pulled him onto my lap, trying to tease him out of it. “Give me a hug!” I said, wrestling him around.

I might as well have teased a Michael Vick’s pit bull. His scowl deepened and he immediately tried to yank himself loose. I hung on, still thinking that a smile was just beneath the surface.

I was wrong.

He yanked again, growled when I wouldn’t let go and spat out an order: “LET! ME! GO!”

Now, I don’t know about all of you out there, but I’m not really big on taking orders from kids. Maybe it’s some outsized male pride alpha-dog peeing-on-bushes thing, but, well, it’s just not happening. 

“Ask me nicely, and I’ll let you go.”

There was a problem with that, though. My eight-year-old eventual stepson had a rather sizable male pride alpha-dog peeing-on-bushes thing himself. He emerged from the womb that way, so my wife tells me, furious from birth. To ask nicely would be to lose, to yield, and yielding… well, it was just not happening.

So we sat there. He moaned, snarled, argued, fought, then started back at moaning again. I kept telling him, over and over, that I was not trying to offend him by hugging him, was not being mean to him or hurting him, and that he had had no reason to be angry in the first place. I deserved better treatment, I said, and I insisted that he ask nicely.

I was quiet. I was polite. I was not emotional. But I told him that not only was I bigger and stronger than him, I was also more stubborn.

My wife, meanwhile, sat at the table with a troubled look. I could tell she hated what was going on, and was not entirely sure she was in support of what I was doing.  She took my back, though, telling her son that he should, indeed, simply be polite.

After an hour – long enough that I was getting worried that I would have to give in or miss my assignment – he finally complied, mumbled a begrudged “would you please put me down?”

I’d like to say that it was a seminal moment, that from that moment he acknowledged my leadership and didn’t try to fight me anymore. It would be a lie, though. He is stubborn and tempestuous still, and that night was not the last time we engaged in such a battle of wills. But on some level, I think he does know that he’s not in charge, and cannot control his mother and me through the force of his anger. And I think that is a very good thing.

And what of my wife? “I was going to let you do what you thought you had to,” she said – a lukewarm endorsement at best. “I hated seeing him so frustrated, and I don’t him to hate you.”

So as I sat with Sam – frustrated for sure, and in his toddler way probably hating me with great fury – I wondered what her thoughts were. I had a strong sense that I was doing the right thing, but would she approve? Would she agree?

Finally Sam either gave up or simply ran out of energy. I kept my standard for “calming down” relatively low – five deep breaths and down he went.

My wife answered my questions a few minutes later, over coffee at the kitchen table.

“I love what you’re doing,” she said. “You’re being firm, but gentle, not getting upset. You’re showing him that he’s not in charge, and this his anger will not do him any good. It was wonderful.”

Made my day, that did.

So much of what we do as parents is by instinct – it certainly is for me, anyway, even after almost 17 years in the business. And sometimes I don’t know if my instincts are right.

But I think about that moment, and it seems like what was coming through to Sam was a very simple message: That I love him but he’s not in charge, and that nothing he does will change either.

And that, I would submit, is not a bad general statement of what parenting is all about.

Brian David can be reached at bdavid@post-gazette.com or at 412-722-0086.

Read the complete post at http://pittsburghmom.com/blogs/burghdad/archive/2008/09/05/winning-fights-by-not-fighting.aspx