Number 94
September 9, 2011
These days, Owen is copying behavior quite a bit, often whatever his dad is doing. “I just copied you,” he says with a gleam of triumph.
For example, he reaches behind himself and feigns a wince, “Owww, my back.” Nothing wrong with preparing a bit early for having kids, son.
Over the next few weeks, I’m going to learn a lot, good and bad, of what I am impressing on him.
All of this is natural, of course. Kids learn as much from experience as from observing what others, older kids and adults in particular, are doing. I can be rolling along, talking to Owen while doing something else, and turn to discover those dark eyes focused like a laser on his dad.
It makes me jump a bit, this sense that a voracious and beautiful sponge is soaking up so much of this hodgepodge I put out into the public world.
I try to be careful with what I say and do, to step with care from stone to stone across the foggy pond of my son’s experience. But I do misstep. Ker-splash, and we all get a little wet.
Yet looking back at my own childhood, I have no early recollections of the specialness of my father; he was simply Dad. He seemed to know a lot of stuff, and some of it he struggled to teach me at a young age. It wasn’t until later that I realized my dad’s essential brilliance (really, he’s brilliant) and basic incapacity for day-to-day parenting.
I have no memory of seeking him out for answers, looking to him for specifics or boasting of him to my pals. All of these activities, my son engages in. Perhaps, though, he will not remember them.
Four years and one month into it, parenting remains a huge everyday responsibility. The physical labors have begun to subside with the older one, but we now have entered the more subtle and in some ways more challenging months of shaping and growing the individual. Those ever-vigilant brown eyes are watching. I’m not sure he even blinks. No breaks, Dad.
Do my missteps help or hurt?
On the one hand, we are forging patterns of behavior that get trotted out into the public world. Some are better kept at home; witness the endless variants of “poop” talk.
And there are more malevolent forms, such as Owen turning to his sister and yelling, “Why did you do that?” I hear this and simply cringe. I hear and recall those terrible moments when I wish he’d had the wherewithal to spit back, “I did it because I’m 5 and by the way, you’ve lost it. Nice work, Dad.”
On the other hand, these missteps are conducted in an otherwise safe environment. Owen may be copying behavior of his parents at home, but he intuits that it is safe to explore these areas among family. In that sense, we are succeeding.
But the yelling has got to go.
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