Trying to make my kids interesting
1. Years ago, I used our tiny back bedroom as an office. For reasons that surpass understanding, we painted the walls a deep, gloriously terrible blue. One afternoon, admiring that indigo blankness and seized by the whimsies, I used a Sharpie to sketch a little figure on the wall. Then another. So liberating did I find this home-décor taboo-busting that I eventually let my three young sons doodle on the blue walls too: drawings, aphorisms and general nuttiness, layer upon layer, their creativity running riot until the room resembled some wack combo of ancient cave, tagger lair and asylum cell. If Kafka had written an episode of “The Brady Bunch,” it’s what Bobby’s room would look like when the secret police came for him, laugh track chortling along.
This may not be considered normal, I dunno. I’m not the guy to ask about that. But I always knew something like it would happen.
2. When I became a parent, what I knew about parenting wouldn’t have filled a sippy cup. My experience with birth was limited to litters of kittens, and when I tried to carry my son in my jaws I immediately grasped the limits of kitten-based knowledge.
But I did have one good intuition. “We should always talk to our kids in complete sentences,” I told my wife. “And we should use the actual words for things.” Bottles would be “bottles,” not “ba-bas,” even though that’s how toddlers say it (with many parents following suit). No “bankies,” only blankets. No goo-goo. No ga-ga. For one thing, I imagined how ridiculous I would sound with the goo-goo and the ga-ga, so I suppose it was a little bit about me. But, more generally, I wanted my sons to develop interesting minds — if I was gonna spend 20 years with ’em, I’d better enjoy it. So I guess it was a lot about me.
Here was my thinking: I’m a journalist — I have nothing useful to offer them. No wisdom about getting ahead, no ability to swing Ivy League tuition, no entrée into lucrative fields of employment. But, if I could start early equipping them with a broad vocabulary and a penchant for whimsy — building blocks of an interesting mind — I figured maybe they’d come to view the world with a certain offbeat cognitive fizz. If we skewed their outlook enough, I reasoned, that might eventually add a pleasing texture to their everyday lives, no matter what they wound up doing.
So we used a lot of adult-level, complex sentences to discuss ridiculous topics (“What should the color blue smell like?”). My wife taught them to read before kindergarten. A wall, and lots of other things, got drawn on. And always, I challenged the things they asserted as certainties. How do you know that?
3. We weren’t trying for Tiger Mom-style super-parenting. I didn’t make my kids the vessels of my ambition. (When my oldest, in a fit of rebellion, sneered, “I won’t be a writer when I grow up,” I could’ve hugged him.) I didn’t push them toward any vocation, and, while we demanded they work hard in school, we didn’t ride them like Grand Canyon pack mules to ensure they get a 4.0 and scholarships to Hahvahd.
And it worked: None of them went to Harvard. But all three are smart, funny, well-spoken and tend to come at things from odd angles. You can have an interesting conversation with any of them. This strikes me as a pretty good set of attributes for making the most of your day-to-day, which was probably the best thing I could realistically give them. They can find their own damn jobs.
4. Nowadays, when I drive my granddaughter to school, we talk like this:
Me: I wonder what kind of shoes ants wear?
Her: That’s silly. Ants don’t wear shoes!
Me: Well, have you ever looked closely at an ant’s feet?
Her: No ...
Me: Then how do you know?
I suppose it’s my fault if she gets bitten while examining an ant’s feet. But it’s worth it if our chatter empowers her sense of silliness, instills an appreciation for the absurd and gets her to realize there are many perspectives besides the conventional ones.
“Also,” my wife tells me, “you’re helping teach her how to have a conversation.” An educator, my wife works with young kids every day. “So many of them can answer a question, but they don’t know how to have a conversation. No one ever engages them in a back-and-forth.”
Well, I do. It keeps my own cognitive fizz going, too. But I swear it’s not about me.
