A Parenting Win–Quickly Followed by a Fail

BY ANDREW DAVIS

With Robin away this past weekend, my State of the School presentation loomed large on my Sunday morning to-do list. Walking the dog, tidying the house, and doing the laundry weren’t about to magically happen on their own, so they all got added to my paper to-do list. Oh, and I also had these two things called children, who would have “nothing to do” while I worked. And “nothing to do,” is code for “watch YouTube and play Madden.”

So, I made pancakes—it was Sunday, after all—and then stared down my to-do list, when I had a rare moment of parenting genius. These moments of inspiration don’t come often despite my profession, so I leaned in. I pulled out a scrap of paper and made a to-do list for each of the boys. Each had individual tasks:

• “Put laundry away—in drawers” (those last words are key; otherwise, the bin of clean clothes would end up shoved in the closet)
• “Room inspection clean” (I’ve been leveraging their summer camp’s Sunday “inspection” training all fall)
• Homework done
• Packed for soccer by 12

They also had two shared tasks:

• Walk Strudel (our dog) to Hawk Hill or at least one mile.
• Clean the TV room.

I explained the tasks and handed them their lists, asking them to cross off each task as they went. Then, I crossed those tasks off my to-do list. Parenting win! At MTS, our learning support team has been helping us reinforce executive functioning skills, and my to-do list brilliance (yes, I’m owning it!) accomplished two things:

1. The tasks I would have done otherwise were completed by the boys.
2. Seeing their tasks as a checklist reinforced their growing executive functioning skills.

Lest you think I’m some kind of parenting TikTok influencer with a new brilliant idea every week, in the midst of this success, I had a parenting fail. Our morning routine usually includes an adult pouring water or juice for each boy. They’re now almost 10 and 12 years old—well within juice-pouring age. Without prompting, Harrison saw I was busy, so he poured his own juice. Unfortunately, he poured it right over the floor and spilled a little in the middle of the kitchen.

While I didn’t cry over spilled juice, I did call him a “ding-dong” and pointed out that he should have poured it over the sink or counter. Harrison had taken the initiative to do something an adult usually does. Rather than praise him, I called him a ding-dong, reducing the chances he’d take that initiative again. Hence, parenting fail.

Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation is, of course, about the need for increased restriction and control in the online world. But it’s also about reducing adult restriction and control in the offline world. To interrupt the cycle of raising another anxious generation, our children need to put away their own laundry. They should do their own laundry. They need to walk the dog and clean up the TV room. And when they do these things, we—okay, I—need to avoid calling them “ding-dongs” when they make mistakes. Especially when fixing the mistake is as easy as wiping up a small amount of lemonade.

I look forward to joining many of you next Tuesday as we talk parent-to-parent about Haidt’s The Anxious Generation and how we can all work toward more parenting wins and fewer parenting fails.