Love That Boy

by Ron Fournier

  Nobody is suggesting that your kids will become ax murderers unless you loosen the reins on play. But give it a try. Your children stand a better chance of being socially connected and successful adults if you ease off the structure, loosen up on the rules, and, whenever possible, simply let them play.

  Just chill. Odds are high that your children will never be truly exceptional in any field. Guaranteed: Your children will be godawful in more endeavors than not. In most ways, on most days, for most kids, much of their lives will be spent within spitting distance of mediocrity. Average Joes and Janes. We should refashion parenthood by tolerating pain, play, and failure. We should measure our children not by the mountains they conquer but by their efforts to climb.

  Oh—and let them pick which hills to scale.

  —

  The day we learned our third child would be our first boy, Lori panicked. She knew how to raise girls and was busy with two of them. But a boy? “I don’t even know how to get his hair cut,” she gasped. But I knew what to do. I bought him a baseball glove.

  The tiny plastic mitt was designed for show, not for shortstops—the perfect trophy for his nursery of my dreams. A blue-and-orange blanket with the Detroit Tigers’ Old English D covered one wall. Hockey jerseys autographed by Red Wings legends hung from three others. Atop a shelf painted with tiger stripes, next to a complete set of 1997 baseball cards and a framed picture of Hall of Famer Ty Cobb, sat a diary I kept for my son. We nicknamed him “Ty” and “Tiger.” One night when he was 2 months old, I rocked him to sleep while writing in a diary about the “perfect day” we had just spent together.

  “I tucked you in my right arm and munched on a cheese ball with my left hand while our favorite team, the Detroit Lions, beat the Jets to get into the playoffs,” I wrote in the soft glow of a baseball-shaped nightlight. “Barry Sanders gained his 2,000th yard of the year and, while I jumped out of my seat with you in my arms, yelling and twirling both of us around, your eyes popped wide open.” Looking ahead, I wrote: “I hope we share lots of time together. It doesn’t have to be football or any other sport, just as long as you’re happy and proud to be with your dad.”

  What a load of crap. Those last two sentences are a lie, family fiction—the first draft of my fairy tale on fatherhood. The truth: Eighteen years ago, I couldn’t imagine Tyler being happy, or me being proud, without sports. The machine of American mythology had told me so: Sports are the glue that binds generations of fathers and sons from cradle to grave, as famously illustrated in the movie Field of Dreams. “Hey, Dad,” the Iowa farmer said to his father’s ghost. “You wanna have a catch?” For other parents, the field of dreams might be a Broadway stage, an operating table, or a courtroom—but their hopes are just as big and often beyond reach.

  Most boys idolize their fathers, but I might have taken hero worship a step beyond the norm. My dad had a habit of blinking fast and hard when he was nervous, clenching his eyes like tiny fists. I did, too—an odd quirk for a happy 5-year-old. Dad pulled absentmindedly at his T-shirt, twisting dirty wrinkles into the white fabric bunched at his midsection. Mom would see me do the same, and she’d ask, “You got a tummyache?” Dad jerked his shoulders every few strides, like a football player adjusting his shoulder pads. I still do that. Dad’s enormous gait came with a slight limp, the result of a knee-crushing car wreck in the mid-1960s. Lori says I carry the same ponderous stride into my fifth decade.

  “When you walk away,” my wife told me at my parents’ 50th-anniversary party, “you look just like your dad.” The comparison made me smile, and I wondered, Will Tyler be like me?

  My dad was fiercely competitive. He counted cards like a euchre savant and expected that his kids would do the same. He adored his mother-in-law for many reasons, not the least of which was Granny’s no-prisoners approach to games. They loved playing together, though a stranger wouldn’t recognize the joy in their cussing, complaining, and cheating. Yes, cheating: In our house, when it came to family games, finesse was a synonym for the dark arts. Dad and Granny would warn visitors that if you’re not watching your cards, you deserve what you get. Neither of them would ease up, much less throw a game, even when teaching us kids how to play. That competitive fire helped me as a journalist, as I suspect it kept Dad safe on the streets.

  One of Dad’s favorite assignments as a cop was directing traffic at Red Wings hockey games. He often brought me and my brothers, Tim and Mike, to the stadium, where the locker room attendant kept an eye on us while Dad worked. We were rink rats, and we got to know Dad’s childhood hero, Hall of Famer Gordie Howe, as he was winding down his career. Years later, on a family visit to Traverse City, Michigan, Dad drove past Howe’s house and saw the legend cutting his own lawn. We had to stop him from bolting out of the car to help “Mr. Howe.”

  Fathers and sons don’t always know how to talk to each other, which is why we have sports. I never felt closer to my dad than when we played catch. He didn’t believe as much in saying “I love you” as he did in showing it, and sports were one way he knew how.

  And so, from the moment Tyler could cock his arm, I put a ball at the end of it. On September 19, 1999, when Tyler was not quite 2, I wrote about our first game of catch. “You scrambled up the small slope of a neighbor’s front yard and sat down, facing me. I showed you how to hold your tiny hands out, palms up. When I threw the fuzzy yellow tennis ball it hit your hands and rolled into your lap.” I pronounced that his first catch.

  Year after year, I dragged Tyler outside with a baseball, football, basketball, volleyball, hockey stick, badminton racquet, or croquet mallet. I signed him up for Babe Ruth baseball, flag football, and hockey lessons. He was awful at all of them. He never wanted to play.

  One time he played catcher (my old position!) for a Little League team of 8- and 9-year-olds. With every pitch, I stood behind home plate, my fingers gripping the wire-mesh backstop, as Tyler waved at the ball. Each pitch sailed over his shoulder or bounced at his feet, striking the umpire with a thud—followed by a grunt from the ump and, occasionally, a whispered curse. “Catch the ball, buddy. Block the ball, buddy.” I repeated the refrain for three innings, until the coach pulled Tyler out of the game and sat him on the bench.

  The bench is the last place a ballplayer wants to be.

  Tyler called the bench his “happy place.”

  There was no happiness for Tyler on a basketball court, either. I remember one excruciating game he spent at half-court, sprinting back and forth a few feet either side of the center line. His stiff, awkward strides were no match for the other nine boys, who blew past him in their full-court dashes, looking comparably feline. At one point Tyler looked up at me in the stands, shrugged, lifted his palms toward the ceiling, and shot me a bemused smile, as if to say, This ain’t for me.

  I never got mad, but I wouldn’t give in. First, Lori and I believed, Tyler needed the exercise. Second, he needed to learn what it means to be part of a team, particularly after we started to notice that he was strangely isolated from his peers. Tyler knew I wanted him to be a jock. But after a half dozen years of butting heads about sports, he had come to hate them—and he hated that I pushed.

  —

  I stopped pushing when my father reminded me at the Ford library that he’d never pushed me. You’re not me and he’s not you. It was clear what I had to do; the only question was how. Lori, of course, had the answer. When Tyler and I returned home from the Michigan trip, she said that I should cut a deal with him: Tyler could quit sports if he promised to exercise regularly and join an extracurricular club in school.

  I sat him down in the living room and offered him the bargain. “What do you think, bud?”

  Tyler smiled. “You got a deal.” He shook my hand, then grew quiet.

  I asked, “What’s wrong?”

  He said, “I was afraid you wouldn’t like me as much if I stopped playing sports.”

  SUCCESSFUL

  “She Can’t Wait to Tell Her Friends, ‘Oh, My Daughter Goes to
Harvard. I’m Such a Great Parent’ ”

  Boston, Massachusetts—What a frustrating kid. I can’t get him to talk to me, and when I do, it’s one or two words and a grunt. Tyler and I are touring the John F. Kennedy Library and Presidential Museum today, and he’s driving me nuts.

  “What was your favorite thing about the other day?” I ask.

  “The end,” he says.

  It was a softball question about the trip to nearby Quincy, Massachusetts, where we had toured the homestead of the first father-son presidents. Today my plan is to explore the complicated relationship between JFK and his father, Joseph Kennedy Sr., a domineering dad who wanted his eldest son, Joe junior, to become president. After Joe junior’s death during World War II, JFK became the target of his father’s obsession.

  Now I’m obsessed with getting Tyler to talk about his future—his career. But those are things he doesn’t like to talk about, especially when his attention-deficit issues get him revving. He’s frantic, flitting between exhibits like a moth against a well-lit window. He’s also hilarious.

  The Briefing Room: “Dude had a funny accent.”

  The Campaign Trail: “Did you cover this election, Dad? You’re old enough.”

  The Space Race: “We won.”

  The Oval Office: “No dog in this one!”

  While Tyler runs ahead, I linger over the family exhibit, where the mythology of Kennedy’s destiny is encased in glass. Artifact after artifact reflects the weight of paternal expectations: Kathleen Kennedy’s Red Cross uniform jacket, a blackthorn walking stick, and something called a “Kennedy family commemorative cup.” JFK had to contend with the legacy of two powerful Boston clans: the Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys.

  “When my great grandfather left here to become a cooper in East Boston, he carried nothing with him except two things: a strong religious faith and a strong desire for liberty,” the exhibit quotes Kennedy as saying on a trip to Ireland a few months before his assassination. “I am glad to say that all of his great grandchildren have valued that inheritance.”

  I catch up with Tyler and try again. “Ty, I’m not joking. What was your favorite thing about the other day?”

  He chuckles. “The beginning.”

  “Dammit, son. What was your favorite thing?”

  “The trolley ride, because it came at the beginning and the end.”

  He laughs while I try to bury my anger. Lori tells me all the time: I can’t teach Tyler how to hold a conversation if I can’t hold my emotions.

  “Everything is not a joke,” I say calmly. “Look at my face, son. My face is telling you that you’re hurting my feelings when you joke about something that’s serious to me.”

  “I don’t know how to read faces,” Tyler says. He’s messing with me.

  “That’s why we’re here, Ty. That’s why Mom sent us on these trips. You need to read faces.”

  He’s learned to read one face, at least—mine—and is taking full advantage. I look at him and take a deep breath, silently counting to five. “So what was your favorite thing about the other day?”

  “The end, I said.” He laughs.

  The door slammed behind me, shutting out the sunny Saturday afternoon and sucking me into a vibrating vortex of noise: squealing kids, clanging bells, and one muffled, overamplified baritone: “Kim!…Kim!…party of Kim!” Adjusting my eyes to the dark lobby of Ultrazone Laser Tag in Falls Church, Virginia, I saw a microphone in the hand of a craggy-faced teenage boy. “Birthday party of Kim!” he announced, swiping dirty bangs from his eyes. “Room 6, please.”

  Behind him were six party rooms, glorified closets crammed with two types of humanity: sugar-buzzed children and their parents. The kids had taken over, vacuuming ginormous amounts of pizza, ice cream, and sheet cake into their mouths when they weren’t pouring tokens into video machines, wrestling on stained carpets, or waiting in a ragged line to enter the laser tag course. For those not indoctrinated, a typical game of laser tag unleashes two teams of kids into a dark room to climb and crawl through a maze of obstacles while shooting each other with light-pulsing guns hooked electronically to what kids call “kill sensors,” which are placed over their dark little hearts. In other words, it’s insane.

  Because it was a typical weekend afternoon, the children outnumbered adults roughly 10 to 1, and it showed in the parents’ eyes. Experienced mothers and fathers had bored, vacant stares: Been here, done this. New parents looked wide-eyed and terrified: Why am I here? The answer is, because you love your children. One way you show that love these days is by shoveling money at customized, commercialized birthday parties in places like Ultrazone Laser Tag.

  I was there to test a theory: Birthdays serve a purpose known only to parents. More than an expression of love and a marking of time, they’re annual checkups. Expectations Celebrations. They give moms and dads a chance to take stock of their progeny—to measure their kids’ progress against their goals for them. Uncles, aunts, grandparents, and other family members gather to eat cake and sing “Happy Birthday” before sending the kids off to play so they can brag and bitch about the little ones. The birthday boy (or girl) gets the most thorough social colonoscopy (Are his grades any better than last year? Did she make the travel team this year?), but soon the adults are comparing each other’s kids.

  Our neighborhood in suburban Washington is a cradle of type A parents—affluent, mostly white social climbers who want the “right kids” at their kids’ birthday parties for the same reason they jockey to attend the A-list dinner parties: status. A father once bragged to me about how a moon-bounce rental had “paid off big-time” because the children of two congressmen and a cable television pundit attended TJ’s birthday bash.

  I had lunch recently with a well-regarded business consultant, a mother and wife with two young kids—one boy, one girl. This woman, one of five sisters in a large southern family, long dreamed of raising a daughter in her image. As she put it: “A girly girl—you know, a sweet and loving little thing who might have a career and all, but she’d always be a lady.” My friend rushed through lunch because she had to buy decorations for her daughter’s 9th-birthday party. “You know what the theme is? Star Trek,” she said, laughing herself red in the face. “My girly girl wants a Star Trek–themed 9th-birthday party.”

  Will she get it? “Of course,” the mother replied, “but I do hope this is just a nerdy stage that wears off.”

  In less-entitled neighborhoods, birthday parties tend to be as pragmatic as the parents’ ambitions. Jhakeye Garcia is a first-generation American from Bolivia, a single mother of two children who lives in a blue-collar neighborhood outside Washington. She wants her kids to stay out of trouble and in school, and to climb past her on the socioeconomic ladder. “Our birthday parties are pretty simple,” she told me. “A few friends, a cake, and some of those traditional games—you know, like pin the tail on the donkey.” I nodded. She had just described the quintessential birthday party of the 1950s and 1960s, before extravagance became the norm in neighborhoods like mine.

  —

  When I wandered into Room 6 at Ultrazone, I found three mothers sitting at a table littered with sticky cake plates, pizza boxes, and cups. Their boys were on the laser tag course, and they agreed to talk to me about the future they hoped their kids would have. “Good marks,” declared Mrs. Kim, the mother of the birthday boy. “Good marks…and I want him to grow up to be a good person.”

  I rolled my eyes. The women giggled. “That’s the answer I’m supposed to give,” Mrs. Kim said.

  “I’ll tell you the truth,” interrupted her friend Connie O. “My son wants to be an artist. He loves drawing and is really into music. I want him to be a neurosurgeon.” Her friends nodded. Career choice is a point of dispute already between these moms and their 12-year-olds.

  “Just the thought of him doing something that’s not with his mind, that doesn’t involve some mental achievement, really bothers me,” Connie said.

  I asked why.

&nbs
p; “Because of who we are,” she said. “You know.”

  No, I didn’t know.

  “Because we’re Asian,” answered the third woman, Eve G.

  “We’re tiger moms,” Connie chuckled. A first-generation American, Connie considers herself fully assimilated but barely clinging to the middle class. “I know it’s not politically correct, but intellectual and career status means a lot to Asian parents. There’s a lot of pressure on our kids to succeed in this world, and a lot of pressure on us to make them succeed. And I’ll tell you this…”

  Pulling a plastic fork out of her son’s half-eaten cake, Connie swept a gob of white icing into her mouth and closed her eyes. She gathered her thoughts before sharing them, speaking slowly for emphasis. “My…precious…little…boy…is going to be…a goddamned neurosurgeon.”

  —

  The consummation of all parental expectations are the aspirations tied to adulthood—what career paths our kids will take, what kind of people they’ll marry, where and how they’ll live, and how many grandchildren they’ll give us. Often when we ask our children, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” we’re actually telling them, This is what I want you to be.

  In 1930, behavioral psychologist John B. Watson said, “Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select—doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors.” Watson considered children to be balls of clay that parents can mold for life. He was wrong. Children are more like foam balls. They yield easily to pressure, but once the pressure is released, they return to form. Unrelenting pressure can crush them.

  Modern child behaviorists are united in the belief that parents should embrace the fact that a child’s future depends chiefly on the child. Focus on the moment, build a loving relationship, and redefine the perfect outcome. Don’t limit yourself to standard measures of a child’s success, such as grades, trophies, and acceptance letters from elite preschools and graduate schools. And don’t swaddle your kids in praise and privilege.