We'll Get 'Em Next Time

So it's Dad Stories You Want, Eh?

Here we are, again. Just like I figured. I have seen my son behave this way before but this time I think it’s mostly my fault. Repetition is a necessary symptom of long-game parenting. It is not easy to get things right on the first try. Knowing what is coming doesn’t always make it easier, especially when it’s something you hoped to avoid. But if you look hard enough at the parenting bread crumbs you’ve left along the way, you might be surprised to learn you aren’t where you thought you were headed.

My 12 year old son Beaux is a Boy Scout, 2nd class. He’s committed to making Eagle scout as soon as humanly possible. It’s a lot of work. Honestly, the merit badges might be the thing he loves most about Scouting. He enjoys hiking and camping too…except when he doesn’t. And today, again, he doesn’t.

It’s Thursday evening and Beaux’s got his backpack out, collecting his gear for a two night campout with his troop tomorrow. His body language is like the pages of a book I’ve read 100 times. He’s sitting on the floor, staring at two pairs of identical white socks as if there is some difference between them. So far nothing has actually made it into his pack. He doesn’t want to go, again.

From experience, I know I’m looking at 24 hours of fragmented conversations covering (exhaustingly so) the benefits of going versus the consequences of staying home. That’s fine with me. I excel at these conversations. In fact, I feel like I was built to have them. But there will also be tears.

The only thing more fragile than my ability to support this particular display of emotion is my confidence. When it comes to breaking down a situation, weighing pros and cons, I’m your man. Decision making, particularly in an emergency, call me first. But if you need someone to sit with you and connect through an upsetting moment, call my wife.

That might seem like a typical bull-headed male statement, but Jill happens to be a pro. She is so good at emotional support that I cannot even begin to emulate the model she sets. Kids. The elderly. The infirmed. Perfect strangers. She’s got every situation covered. My failure is not for lack of trying and I say this with no small measure of disappointment in myself. I wish I was better at this, but here I go again, once more into the fray.

I hear the sniffles as I walk into the room. “Hey buddy” I say with a soft dad voice, which to me sounds anything but genuine. “How ya doin?” He looks up with tears in his eyes “I don’t wanna go.”

Attempting to maintain my cushy approach, I said. “Yeah. I understand that. It’s tough being away from home for the whole weekend.”

Here, I should mention that today, I’m alone. Jill is visiting her parents for the weekend in upstate NY. So not only is there no choice as to my role in this, but the moment also carries extra emotion for Beaux, who misses his mom. I miss her, too. So I revert to my standard problem-solving approach:

“I know how much you want to be an Eagle Scout and that’s a really hard thing.” I said with a thick air of knowing, fatherly wisdom. “If it were easy, there would be a whole lot more of them. But Eagle Scouts are rare because it takes a lot of struggle to get there. Most Scouts give up somewhere along the way because something was just too tough for them. That’s why people respect the ones that make it -because they know that person has pushed through some hard stuff.”

After a somewhat awkward silence, I left the room to give Beaux some time with his thoughts. A few minutes later, he found me in the kitchen and said “Yeah. I should go.”

Perhaps you see this as a solid fatherly intervention with the ideal outcome. Back-pat for dad. It used to look that way to me, too. But there’s a revealing question I never used to ask myself. I wouldn’t have had the answer if I did. How does my support address his tears?

It doesn’t and that’s why I’m telling this story.

Let’s go back to last Summer, where somehow I was roped into accompanying Beaux’s scout troop on a one-week campout in Pennsylvania. The plan was for me to stay up there the first three nights to be replaced by another chaperone at that point. I would go home alone and Beaux would stay for the rest of the week.

Anyone want to guess how that played out?

We drove home together after my three nights. Admittedly, from the beginning, Jill and I were pretty sure that’s how it would go. My presence was too influential for Beaux to overcome. But we held out hope that his friends, canoeing or archery merit badges would tip the scales enough for him to stick it out. Any pretense of this disappeared at about 1:00am on my last night in camp.

I woke to a headlamp shining six inches from my face, which immediately scalded both of my retinas. Even once Beaux turned it off, I couldn’t see his face. Just a fuzzy green dot where his head should be. The tears, however, were unmistakable.

In 22 years of fathering through these situations, my game plan has been mostly the same: Let’s get it done. Because whatever it is, there is at least a benefit to completing the task even if it is only to put distance between it and the next one. There might be disappointment, sadness and tears, but let’s get past that so we can start acting on the situation.

This is what has been expected of dads for as long as dads have existed. It’s a part of how we teach our kids to carry the obligations of adulthood; to expect and handle the unavoidable challenges and disappointment of life with strength and capability. It’s also part of the reason we’ve historically been given a pass on emotional support responsibilities.

In addition to falling short of the emotional intelligence mark, my “Let’s-get-it-done” plan underscores a common misconception of Stoicism -that we should all go through life without emotion. But dads are learning that the emotional piece is far more important than our upbringing has led us to believe.

Instead of running past the feeling, we must try to stay with it. Take time to understand and name it. But this whole idea runs counter to my own life experience. So for all of their success in pushing through adversity, the one thing my boys have rarely gotten from me is quiet, emotional support. And it has taken me all these years to realize just how important that is.

Back at camp, of course, there had been warnings earlier in the day. More circular discussions of indecision. Throughout, I did my best to be supportive but also as neutral as possible. I had already complicated things enough by attending this campout in the first place. So I listened to his thoughts and offered possibilities while aiming at facts without judgement. When we split up for the night, he was 50/50.

Emotions are hard enough to manage in the cold light of day. The middle of the night is no time to make a point. This actually made my response more straightforward. There really was no choice but to help him process this emotion so he (and I) could go back to sleep.

So I didn’t talk about what would happen tomorrow. I dispensed with the logic. Nothing about the activities he has enjoyed or the time he has spent with friends. No mention of how he might feel on the ride home or the possibility of regret in the days and weeks to come. Besides, we already covered that earlier in the day.

I didn’t say much at all. Just told him it was ok to be sad and that his tears made perfect sense. It’s a tough decision. I wanted him to know how proud his mother and I are of him, regardless of what happens at camp. He slept in my tent until morning.

Parents encounter this decision point all the time. There’s a challenge in front of your child and it has given rise to some emotion. It could be finishing his broccoli, walking the last 1000 steps of a hike or getting a vaccination shot. Should we hold the line and push them through? Or say “We’ll get ‘em next time” and let this one slide?

That night, I fell asleep thinking that I hadn’t really made progress in either direction. But the next morning at camp, Beaux seemed as if he had shed a heavy weight. After breakfast, he confidently, unequivocally made the decision to leave. I hid it well, but I did not share his certainty and frankly took it as a loss. Like I had failed to hold him accountable and instead led us into a new precedent where my son would become a quitter.

That feeling came crashing back today in his bedroom as those worries came to fruition. I felt the precedent slipping beyond my grasp. If he skipped this campout, he might never go back. But this time, to my surprise, Beaux made the hard choice.

I’ve poured over this thing for a little while. Why did it all workout the way it did? And I have come to the conclusion that his decision had very little to do with my Eagle Scout speech. It wasn’t the sound logic of my argument. It was that night last Summer at Scout camp.

I know now why Beaux seemed so light the next morning at camp. It wasn’t because he was able to put the weight down. It was because by validating and supporting his emotion, I made it easier for him to carry.

So this time, instead of being pulled under by that same emotion, Beaux was able to hold it up to the light. He understood how not to dismiss it, but to see it for what it is. This time, he was able to reframe it as one of many points to consider, rather than the only one.

To really play the long game, sometimes it is hard to connect the dots from past to present. I thought I saw a problematic connection between last Summer and today, but I had it all wrong. I worried that my soft approach would undermine future parenting situations. Instead, side-stepping the big decision to offer emotional support actually made the logic approach easier to absorb the next time.

For the football fans in the audience, I’ll leave you with this analogy: Varying your approach between logical problem solving and emotional support is like using the run game to setup the deep pass. Sure, you could throw the ball at your kid all day. Sometimes he’ll catch it, sometimes he’ll be double covered. But if you hand off the ball every now and then he just might find it easier to get open in the endzone on the next play.