The Crier Landing Page >>
Dad’s Corner
LOOK UNDER THE HOOD
By: Justin P. McCarthy | October 5, 2022
It’s a brisk, uncharacteristically rainy September morning in Tiburon. My wife, Katie, is gone for the week, careening through Switzerland, France and England on a whirlwind industry tour. The pace at home is bracing, too: after a calm-ish first couple of weeks back at school, we’re now grinding forward under the full weight of Jack, Ali and Claire’s ever-more-intricate athletic and extracurricular schedules.
I’d like to say we didn’t flinch at last year’s three soccer practices and two games every Saturday (when, ahem, I was supposed to be watching football), but oh, what I wouldn’t trade for those halcyon days, now that we’re up to four practices and–sometimes–three games. Since we fancy a good challenge, we’ve also enrolled the girls in two different weekday choral rehearsal sections, one in Mill Valley and one in Ross, during rush hour.
We’d be remiss to omit martial arts, music lessons, Boy Scouts, play dates, 4,000 birthday parties, and the handful of things I’m too cognitively depleted to recall at all until, four breaths into the peaceful center of that Headspace meditation I’ve finally manifested time for, my watch chimes to remind me Ali and I were supposed to be leave for the orthodontist ten minutes ago. So, right, we have a little bit going on, and occasionally things can get a touch tense.
Back to that rainy morning. It’s Wednesday, so the kids and I are headed to New York Bagels at the Strawberry Village Shopping Center, which we have done almost every Wednesday for more than ten years1 . KDFC is playing one of Weber’s clarinet concertos, which we’ve never heard and which is exquisite. Just as we pass Blackie’s Pasture, Claire lets out a pained yelp, and Jack growls out a throaty, aggrieved pre-teen “Come on!”
“Jack, why did you kick me?” she demands, with genuine confusion.
His curt reply, “Your foot was in my way and I needed more room.”
Ali, the eager enforcer, wades in: “Jack, you have to try words before physical violence. You have to talk about it, and then talk to Dad if you and Claire can’t agree. And then, even after that, you still can’t use physical violence.” I remind myself to give Ali a high five once the dust settles.
“She’s four-and-a-half years younger than you, Jack–” I contribute, with deliberate calm, “you’re getting big2 and you could really hurt someone. What would Sensei Mike say?”
“But I have no room back here!” he insists, floating a knee over Claire’s sovereign airspace for emphasis. She glowers at him. We all simmer for a few silent minutes (I feel a pang of guilt for getting to enjoy the Weber in peace) before reaching the girls’ school. Their exit vents the accumulated pressure and affords Jack the full expanse of back seat for his unrepentant boyspreading.
Back home after releasing the man-child into the wilds of middle school, it occurs to me that this conflict has happened before, building slowly from a few intermittent shoves and swipes to a more regular, simmering dissatisfaction on Jack’s part with the space allotted him in our car. This got me thinking, how can we prevent this from getting worse as Jack continues scaling up to Brobdignagian proportions?
Dusting off my old (so old!) consulting hat, I invited the kids to a post-mortem discussion after school that day. I asked each of them separately what they liked and didn’t like about their experiences being driven to and from school, and elsewhere. Their primary complaints, as it turned out, were not so much the arc and swing of one another’s ever-lengthening limbs, but the increasing shortage of footwell space as their school backpacks had grown larger each year.
We all decided we’d add a step to our morning routine: rather than squishing their legs in around their backpacks, which worked when both the legs and the bags were tiny, we’d start putting their packs in the trunk every morning. A simple change, but those fights stopped right away!
After sorting out Backseatgate, I decided to look at some of our other recurring disputes and frictions through the same lens: could we tweak the process in small ways to yield big gains in family comity? The results have exceeded expectations!
After three years of relentlessly nagging the kids to charge and wear their FitBits, we uncovered that it was the short charging cycles and general pain in the butt of remembering to take them off, charge them and put them back on that they didn’t like.
We got Jack and Ali–who were not interested in the fitness and sleep metrics–simple, Timex Ironman-style watches, and Claire–who was–a Garmin fitness watch with a battery made to last a year. The kids all started wearing their watches, and we haven't fought about it since.
Tweenage Jack had started grunting and groaning discontentedly at me during feedback conversations: “Glasses can break if you slam them down.” “Uhhhh.” “Bubbly cans go in the recycling, not on the counter.” “Meh.” “Your floss picks go in your bathroom trash, not behind your dresser (I know; eww).” “Errr…Fine!”
I would get frustrated when he grunted or groaned, thinking he wasn’t listening, and would typically respond by repeating myself at higher volume and with increased threats of reduced screen time.
Talking it over calmly one non-conflicted evening, he revealed that it was my repetition of the same information in the same conversation that was bothering him, not receiving the feedback in the first place. I committed to offering each individual point only once per talk (while maintaining I had the right to repeat myself if I felt he wasn’t listening), and he committed to constraining his disgruntled semi-verbalizations. These simple changes have noticeably lowered the temperature in many of our exchanges.
The experiment has worked so well I’ve asked Katie and the kids to put together their own lists of the most common disagreements we all have with one another, with a 1-10 scale of how frustrating/upsetting/generally irritating each recurring conflict is. We’re going to roll them up into one list and start picking off the disagreements and frictions which bother the greatest number of us the most, the most often.
Running a family is a messy business. There will be bumps, scrapes, scraps and bruises (both physical and emotional), but that doesn’t mean every conflict is necessary, and it doesn’t mean every fight that happens more than once has to keep happening. Before accepting any sort of ongoing disharmony, it’s worth putting in some troubleshooting time.
[1] The USDA estimates that the average large bagel contains 353 calories (and, if we’re being honest with ourselves, they’re all large). In addition to Wednesdays, we also have bagels on Saturdays, and probably average around 46 weeks of this habit each year, allowing for travel, illness and scheduling conflicts. Jack, our most consistent and determined bagel eater, has therefore likely ingested something like 920 bagels, totalling ~324,760 calories since 2012. To derive the same amount of energy from spinach, he would have needed to eat ~3,123 pounds of the stuff in that time, or ~.85 pounds every day. Food for thought.
[2] At the start of seventh grade this year, Jack was a five foot nine twelve year old wearing men’s 10.5 shoes. By the time you read this, he’ll likely be over nine feet.
Justin P. McCarthy lives in Tiburon with his wife, Katie, and their three children--Jack, Ali, and Claire. He’d be delighted to hear from you at jpm.smmc@gmail.com.