A boy, we’ll call him Calvin, asked my son to carry his backpack for him, after an injury left him on crutches. I was proud. My son is kind, thoughtful.. and just an all-around nice guy.
Calvin had been in my son’s life in 1st and 2nd grades, but the the friendship had grown apart over the last three years, as my son’s interest evolved into sports, and Calvin’s didn’t.
Over the next couple of days, I began to notice the little snippets tacked on to the end of my son’s stories that revealed how much of Calvin’s incapacitation was influencing my son’s school day. It wasn’t just that Calvin insisted on walking the long way around the gym, making my son miss the regular group of guys he normally walks home with, there were other things. My son carried Calvin’s lunch tray, which moved my son to an entirely different “lunch table,” where the conversation introduced words to his vocabulary that made my ears burn. (He did share these new words with me as a “what do you think about this” conversation.) My son was no longer sitting with his regular group of friends.
Then, I heard about the funny trick Calvin played on my son.
“He left his binder, pencils and papers on his desk, and said I had to put all his stuff away for him.” Calvin’s hands and arms are fine — his leg is injured, I thought. “While I was stuffing his stuff in his backpack, Calvin left and went to the elevator, pushed the button, and left without me. So I had to carry his backpack, plus my backpack, all the way down the stairs. Calvin just laughed.”
Tell me more, I said. “Well, he calls me his slave… but he’s just kidding,” he said.”And, he snaps his fingers, and tells me to hurry up.” He added, “actually, he can’t ‘snap’ his fingers… he just pretends.”
Soon, my husband, overhearing the words from the other room, joined the conversation with, “He DOES WHAT!” Soon, our other son, joined the room, peppering the conversation his his version of “Why didn’t you just…”My son continued, “He forgot his lunch money on Friday, so I paid for his lunch,”
Did he pay you back?
“Well, he said he would… but then he forgot his money again, so I bought his lunch for him again today.”
At this point my husband and I are, in a word, steaming with anger. Calling his parents would have sent the wrong message: “We don’t think you can handle this on your own.” Besides, this incident was actually an opportunity, that laid the foundation for some growth. I had just finished reading Your Child’s Strengths: Discover Them, Develop Them, Use Them
by Jenifer Fox, the night before, and we were already working on a “strengths chart” for each one of the boys. (The book outlines a how-to format for all ages, including the pre-school set. ) Your child’s strengths are not the acts that you observe in your child, the ones that warm your heart and then you spoon feed them to your child and pat them on the back, while you say, “This is what your strengths are dear,” as you tick them off the chart. No, Fox says, “Your child needs to come to a (strengths) epiphany on his own. You can lead him with your questions, but you cannot have it for him. Your job is to direct your child’s attention.” Chores, by the way create the perfect opportunity for your child to figure out what his strengths are, according to the book.
Fox says it is important to resist giving advice to your children… they will miss that internal shift that will make have the big impacts on minds. Rather, we need to teach our kids to accept responsibility, and “to see where he may have used his strengths to make poor decisions.” With no children of her own, Fox draws on her vast 25 years of experience as an administrator and teacher in both inner-city public and posh private schools. It’s tough to write a parenting book, when you’re not a parent… I found myself wincing at some of her advice. Yet, I knew what she had to say in this book was on-target, honed after her years of handling the toughest kids.
Right now, I needed my son to know, deep within, that Calvin was being disrespectful, and that Calvin, was in fact, a bully. As parents, as protectors, we just wanted to spit out the words, “You are not going to help Calvin anymore. You’re done. Calvin is taking advantage of you, and we won’t allow it.” We couldn’t do that. Yet, that’s exactly what we did. But, we were wrong; this was something I knew, especially after reading Strength’s. Yet, when your child needs help, sometimes you can’t help but try to rescue the one you love.
With or without Fox’s book to guide me, I knew I was wrong just by looking into my son’s eyes while I dictated advice to him, I could tell he didn’t “buy” what I was saying. “He’s just trying to be funny, Mom.” He felt uneasy about confronting this kid… he wasn’t convinced; in his mind, he wasn’t being bullied — although he did mention the word, on his own, earlier in the conversation.
I knew that once my son believed Calvin was wrong, the words, the motivation he needed to stand up to Calvin, would come to my son, all on its own. First, my son needed to believe it was right for him to say them.
Although we missed it on our first go-around in our strengths pow-wow with him, one of my son’s strongest strengths is that he is just a nice guy. He’s kind, and wants to help. He kept saying, “Mom, you told me how nice it is of me to help Calvin… and I couldn’t let him go without food at lunch time.” Deep down inside, my son wondered, “If I don’t help Calvin, who will?” Now, he needed to see how this strength was getting him into trouble. I didn’t want him to leave this thinking that it’s not a good idea to be nice to people.
This was a tricky situation, and it would take time, Fox warned, for this epiphany to occur. “Children’s innate strengths are like live wires connecting their unique inner qualities to their promise as adults. … when the energy is turned up and strengths are developed to their fullest, people’s passions light up. Life becomes meaningful and enjoyable even in the face of conflict, she wrote.
I began to ask my son how he felt when Calvin called him a slave, or how he felt when he left him at the elevator. I got nowhere. “I know he’s just kidding Mom… he laughs when he says it.” Doesn’t it bother you that you can’t sit with your regular friends? Nothing bothered him. His belief was still, “If I don’t help Calvin, who will?”
Exasperated, and trying very hard not to show it, I finally asked him; “Is there ANYTHING about helping Calvin that hurts you?” He said, well, yeah, “it makes my back and my neck hurt to carry both of these backpacks all day.” This was good, I thought. Physical pain is real, and he can identify with that. My son is, unfortunately, no stranger to neck pain. The weight in the backpacks they carry in middle school are close cousins to ball and chains, and they were already, before this incident, taking their toll. He had spent a few hours with ice and heat on his neck with pain.
“So,” I said. “Think about that pain, and now can you tell Calvin you can’t help him anymore because it hurts your neck?”
He looked away — almost as if he could no longer hear me, and he started to talk, “You know… yesterday, when I bent over to pick up his backpack, he left it unzipped, and didn’t tell me, so everything fell out and I had to pick everything up for him.” (Again, what is wrong with this kid’s hands?!)
What were you thinking?
“I thought, why does he need my help… I mean, Larry has crutches and nobody helps him carry his stuff. Why does Calvin need my help anyway?
Finally, I could see that my son had tapped into his on vein that got him thinking and processing information. The crucial step that Your Child’s Strengths claims is so necessary to helping our children develop their own self-esteem. My son began to see, and talk about, how helping Calvin was affecting his own life. Then, of course, I couldn’t stop him, which was great, even though it was after his bedtime. He talked about how the other kids were no longer laughing at Calvin’s jokes, and how people just don’t seem to like hanging around with him anymore.”
Update:
The subject of what my son would do was forefront in my mind all day long. When I finally saw him at the end of the day, he told me, as if it was no big deal, that he told Calvin he couldn’t help him anymore. Why, Calvin asked. “Because it hurts my back.” Calvin’s response was, “Come on, I carry it … you can do it… stop being such a wimp.” But the subject was dropped, and my son saw him later, with some other kid helping him.
Later, my son told me that he couldn’t say no to Calvin at first… he ended up helping him the morning, and then told him no. “So, what did you think about to give you the courage to speak up?” “Nothing,” he said. I was hoping for more “Epiphanies” but they didn’t come. So, you’re done, I asked? “Yep. I’m done.” It was no big deal, and I ate with my old friends.”
Although I am satisfied with the way this turned out, I wish I had refrained more from lecturing and giving advice. I wish I hadn’t given him the ideas… I wish I had been more patient and let him come to this discovery about how being Mr. Nice guy had turned sour, all on his own. It could have taken days, instead of hours. And it should have. Next time, I will try to do a better job, and show more restraint.. and do more directing, so that my children can discover these truths on their own. It was very hard for me not to “rescue.” Your Child’s Strengths is a work that’s under construction.
This review was written for the Parent Bloggers Network.
Tags: book, self-help, teen by SusieJ
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into Roxanne’s Mother’s hands, but you could never make her read it. Yet, this book, would have been the perfect straight-talk-about-parenting-advice that Roxanne’s Mother needed to hear. Practical, down-home advice, yet radical to her, that would have put things back in perspective, and put the Mom, the rule-maker, back in the driver’s seat. Rose Rock raised ten kids, and 17 foster children; and she’s proud of every one of them. Roxanne’s Mom could have benefited from Mama Rock’s advice about the role that family meal times serve in parenting: