I was sitting in our living room, browsing on my phone when the boy strode into the room in a huff. I’d been listening to him get ready for his hockey practice and argue with his sister. In truth, he’d done more arguing than getting ready. I had to remind him that he’d be late for practice if he didn’t start prioritizing his hockey gear.
Now, here he was with his skates and skate guards. Since we were going to be cutting it close getting to practice, he wanted to just wear his skates out of the house. In order to do that, he needed the guards on his skates to protect the blade edges.
The reason he was in a huff was because the guards wouldn’t stay on the blades. The guards are adjustable so they can be made to fit just about any length skate. In this case, they were a bit too long so they kept falling off. The boy had a method of testing the fit by putting the guard on the blade and then tapping the skate on the ground to mimic walking. The guard would pop-off if it wasn’t fit correctly to the skate.
And right then, every time he performed his test, the guard popped off. Every time it popped off, he got a bit more frustrated.
In my mind, there was really only one reason he’d suddenly appeared in the room with this problem: he wanted me to fix it for him. There was a time when I would have done that for him without batting an eyelash. But as he’s gotten older and more capable, I’ve left him to flounder more and more, trying to encourage the development of his problem-solving skill set.
Unfortunately, that skill-set still largely depends on “Dad can you…?”
I sat there quietly, just me and my phone, while the boy continued to get more and more agitated. Rather than be methodical with how he adjusted the guard, he’d move it in large, exaggerated increments in one direction and then the other, always missing the one that led to a proper fit. From my perspective, he was intentionally sabotaging himself.
I tried to make up my mind that I was going to let him figure it out. I tried to calm him down with simple words of encouragement, but he refused to listen and remained agitated.
I could feel my own agitation growing inside.
The infuriating thing of it is kids know how to get under their parents skin. They know what to do and how to do it because while you’ve been living and learning about them for their entire life, they’ve been doing something similar to you their entire life. They invariably know when the conditions are right for them to get what they want.
So it was with the boy. After several minutes of watching him repeatedly mess up the skate guards, I finally lost my patience and fixed one for him. Feeling that I was giving him what he wanted without extracting a proper price from him for it, I decided to give him more than he bargained for with a little speech designed intentionally to call him out on his antics.
“You know, you can’t sit there and methodically adjust the guard to figure out how to get it to fit. OHHHH NO. You’ve got to sit there and cry and carry on and be ridiculous about it so you can get me to do it for you. Don’t think I don’t know you’re doing this just to get me to, yet again, fix something for you that you are completely capable of doing on your own if you’d just calm down and think about for a minute. Instead, you made up your mind that you couldn’t do it and did your best to make it look like you were trying without really trying, all so you could get me to, once again, do it for you.”
While I was talking, I adjusted the guard. When I was done talking, I attached the guard to his skate and tossed it on the ground in front of him. He fixed the other guard, I tied his skates up for him because he can’t tie them tight enough himself (another source of irritation) and we left for practice.
It still bothers me that he manipulated me. As to how I “knew” he was manipulating me, well, I can’t say with 100% certainty he was. It just felt like it from the moment he stepped into the room. That said, that’s probably my problem- deciding when he’s manipulating me versus when he honestly needs my help. In general I hate to just do things for him- I want him to learn to problem solve. I recognize that he will still need my help though.
Did he really need my help this morning?
Obviously, I’d argue no, he didn’t. Skate guards aren’t terribly difficult to adjust and if he’d just calmed down a bit he could have figured it out himself quickly enough.
But maybe he did, in a way, need my help and my losing my original assumption about his motives blinded me to what he needed help with. Not the physical act of solving his problem, but the mental act of solving it. He’d lost his cool. In the process, he also caused me to lose mine. Perhaps what I needed to do was, rather than do it for him, was to just talk him through it and calm him down so he could fix it himself.
Instead, his antics got under my skin, aided by my own pre-conceived notions about what was going on. To make matters worse, I intentionally set about laying a guilt trip on him with my little speech.
So, perhaps, he and I have more in common than I originally thought.