The Long Game

My husband and I recently had dinner at our second-born son's house, and thoroughly enjoyed visiting with him, his wife, and their four energetic boys, aged almost one to almost six.  (We fondly refer to their rough-and-tumble family of little men as "the Gronks." Does anyone outside of New England--where we lived for 27 years--get that reference?)

At bedtime, the oldest of the four boys had been promised that he could come out and visit with Papa and Grammy after his little brothers were asleep, but he got impatient and started banging on the wall to be let out sooner rather than later. Our son went to his room to talk to him, and when he came back I asked him if Junior was going to be able to come out eventually. His answer?  "No, I don't negotiate with terrorists."

Score one for Dad.  As much as we would have liked that extra one-on-one time with our growing-up-too-fast grandson, it was the right call to make. 

What a good lesson for a young kid to learn: that parents make the rules, and you don’t get what you want by trying to wear down their resolve with unreasonable demands or bad behavior.  It's a tough thing to stick to, as a parent, because it's always so much easier to give in and give them what they want, isn't it?  There's so much less stomping, door slamming, back talk, and crying. 

But that's just in the short term.

If you stand firm about how you expect your kids to behave, it pays off a hundredfold in the long run.  As my husband liked to say, if you want your kids to be your friends as adults, you have to be okay with them not liking you sometimes when they're little.  Parents who try to be their kids' friends when they're young can end up with grown children who are hard to like.

Of course, when you’re in the trenches with relentless little would-be terrorists, sometimes you're just too tired to deal with the power struggle, and you weaken and cave.  You’re only human.  But you just have to persevere--with the help of God, the Blessed Mother, and every saint in Heaven--and keep trying to play the long game, so that in the end, everyone wins.

Son #2 sometimes balked at having such strict parents when he was growing up; you can be sure that his father never negotiated with terrorists either, and there were definitely consequences for bad behavior. But obviously, as a dad now himself our son believes that was the right thing to do, or he wouldn’t be following the same playbook. 

It's so satisfying watching your grown children raising their kids to be obedient, kind, respectful, compassionate people.

Just like the ones you raised.

Here we are at Christmastime, 2018, with our "Big Five" (who make me feel petite!).
I like them.  I like them A LOT!  They are all MVP's* in my book.

*Mom's Valuable Players