Ethics Newsline®

Parenting at the (Table) Edge

Oct 15th, 2007 • Posted in: Commentary

LONDON
When your pre-teens drive you bonkers, what’s the right thing to do?

For Daniel, such questions once seemed less personal than professional. As a minister in rural Yorkshire, he ran weekly skill-building programs on parenting. Then his life changed dramatically. He married, becoming the stepfather of two children, and moved his new family to London. Suddenly this jovial, energetic law-teacher-turned-pastor had his own parenting workshop — right at home.

When we talked in his London office last week, he observed that good parenting often plays out through family conversations around the dinner table. But in his new home he was finding mealtimes anything but conversational. His stepchildren, at the ebullient ages of 8 and 10, were given to kicking each other — deliberately, secretively, and relentlessly — under the table. Daniel — a name I’ve given him, since he didn’t have time to run this column past his family before publication — wasn’t sure how best to intervene as the household’s newest disciplinarian. So, he said, he would just sit there growing increasingly upset, until at last he would burst out in righteous annoyance at whichever child he had fingered as the instigator. The result: sullen obedience and deadening silence for the rest of the meal.

Meanwhile, his parenting courses were off and running. They began by asking participants to think of something their children repeatedly did that drove them crazy and to describe their own typical reactions. Then they were given an assignment: Whenever that bad behavior showed up, they were to do the opposite of what they typically did, and report back at next week’s session.

Feeling he should take his own medicine, Daniel decided to give it a try. The next evening he was so primed for the occasion that if the kids hadn’t begun kicking each other (he told me with a chuckle), he planned on kicking them to get things going. Sure enough, they started on their own. But this time, instead of reacting, he turned to his wife and said, “We haven’t talked about our summer holidays yet — where do you think we should go this year?” Within seconds, the kicking melted into rapt attention, followed by a vigorous four-way conversation.

Granted, this is a little thing, but as Daniel often says to parents, “The little things make such a difference.” Looking below the surface, you can see why. This situation begins, as such cases often do, with a well-meaning parent struggling over a right-versus-right ethical dilemma. On one hand, it’s right to keep the lid on behavior that seems calculated to test parental patience, especially since eating together long has been such an important family value. “We honor the dining table,” he says, “at Sunday lunchtime and at evening time.”

Yet for that very reason it’s right, on the other hand, to maintain a friendly and convivial tone at mealtimes — not to turn dinner into a disciplinary gallows or an etiquette harangue. For Daniel, good parenting is about guidance and nurture, not manipulation and control. “I don’t think it’s right for me to assume that this or that is how my children should end up,” he says, reflecting the problem facing so many parents as they seek the fine line between molding children toward a predetermined image and modeling character in the best way they can. Instead, he says, the task is to discover “how we help people” — including our own children — “into good decision making.”

Look, too, at how this dilemma gets resolved. It’s not a question of choosing one unpleasant option over the other, but of turning the dilemma into what we at the Institute call a trilemma — the middle way that captures the best aspects of the situation while leaving behind the worst. His tale, of course, leaves open the question of what to do tomorrow night since you can’t spend every evening hashing over vacation plans. But as he notes from his long experience with parents, “There’s never only one alternative — you need a range of things you could do.”

In this case, finding the right thing to do required a fair bit of confidence, creativity, and forethought. And the outcome, he says, had a deep effect on him. Not only did it confirm the validity of his parenting curriculum. It also recharged his trust in his ability to navigate the ever-changing landscape of ethics issues that arise as children mature. It reminded him of the benefit of strategizing before, not during, an encounter. And it reaffirmed his ability to be innovative in resolving seemingly intractable issues.

And that, I suppose, is the point. Addressing ethical issues, in parenting and elsewhere, isn’t a matter of seeking what-to-do advice. Ethics isn’t formulaic: The moral of Daniel’s story is not to say, “When kids act up, talk about summer plans.” It’s to suggest a framework — about core values, right-versus-right thinking, and trilemma options — that helps generate solutions regardless of the circumstances. Given today’s tough ethical landscape, parents need confidence in turning meltdowns into mentoring.