Parenting without the Power Struggles

Parenting: Joy or Nightmare?

A wise child loves discipline, but a scoffer does not listen to rebuke.

PROVERBS 13:1

A mother and father stand outside of a restaurant in the rain asking their three-year-old, Chloe, to get in the car so the family can go home. Chloe refuses. Her parents spend the next fifteen minutes begging and pleading with her to do it on her own. At one point, the father gets down on his knees in the puddles, trying to reason her into the car. She finally complies, but only after her parents agree to buy her a soda on the way home. If they have to use a soda to buy her off at three, what will they be facing when she reaches sixteen?

• • •

Jim sits in the airport awaiting a flight, watching as a mother gives at least eighty different demands to her three-year-old boy over the course of an hour without ever enforcing one of them:

Come back here, Logan!

You better listen to me, Logan, or else!

I mean it, Logan!

Don’t run, Logan!

Logan eventually finds his way to where Jim is seated. The toddler smiles at him while ignoring his mother. The mother yells, Logan, you get away from that man! You get over here this instant!

Jim smiles down at Logan and asks, Hey, Logan, what is your mom going to do if you don’t get over there?

He looks up and grins. She not goin’ to do nothin’. And then his eyes twinkle and his grin becomes wider.

It turns out he is right. She finally comes apologizing. I’m sorry he’s bothering you, but you know how three-year-olds are. They just won’t listen to one thing you tell them.

• • •

On a Saturday at a local supermarket, two boys, ages five and seven, have declared war. Like guerrillas on a raid, they sneak from aisle to aisle, hiding behind displays and squeaking their tennies on the tile floor. Then suddenly a crash — the result of a game of shopping cart chicken — pierces the otherwise calming background Muzak.

The mother, having lost sight of this self-appointed commando unit, abandons her half-filled cart. As she rounds a corner, her screams turn the heads of other shoppers: "Don’t touch that! You — get over here! She races for the boys, and as she’s about to grab two sweaty necks, they turn to Tactic B: the split-up, a twenty-first-century version of divide and conquer." Now she must run in two directions at once to shout at them. Wheezing with exertion, she corrals the younger one, who has just blitzed the cereal section, leaving a trail of boxes. But when she returns him to her cart, the older boy is gone. She locates him in produce, rolling seedless grapes like marbles across the floor.

After scooping up boy number two and carrying him back — you guessed it — she finds that boy number one has disappeared. Mom sprints from her cart once more. Finally, after she