Some Kind of Life: Screaming at 5-year-olds

Every parent has gotten into battles of wits with a five-year-old. And every parent has lost. More than once.

A useful phrase I once heard regarding parenting—though it applies in any disagreement: “If you raise your voice you’ve already lost.”^[1] If you find yourself yelling at a small child that you should outmatch in wisdom and can easily overpower, then you do not know how to successfully proceed. Proceed you might, but ineffectively, and might feel like you succeed, through chance or stamina, but everyone will be worse off for how you got there.

The reality is that kids, tiny little humans with oversized brains that they are, have incredible instincts honed during the first several years you’ve spent together. By the time they can use words they have already mastered reading your body language and emotional weaknesses. Words are just the latest weapon they have added to a very full arsenal. Any five-year-old can make their parent cry, should they choose. They can rip your heart apart and leave you emotionally weakened, and sometimes all for the purpose of a free ice cream cone from the shitty, self serve, soft serve machine at pseudo-southern restaurants. They can make you rethink your whole decision to have children, breaking you down so that you might allow for a pack of gum at Target.

Know that you cannot make an empty threat. Empty threats will work on some kids, some times, and often only the first time. No dessert, or no tv, or no iPad. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, not a chance you egotistical chump. Empty threats get quickly added to the pile of leverage they carry. If they taste an empty threat, then they know they’ve won and will push until you give in.

Their brains are powerful and not yet filled with responsibility and nuance, so they can store all the arrows they need for the emotional bow they will use to pierce your heart, like some podcaster who owns fifty acres and seeds the “wild” land with soft and slow “wild” boar. Only here, you are the hearty pig that they will slaughter before cooking you under coal and earth.

When they have a goal, they are free from distraction. They don’t care what happens to the car seat, or the electric bill, or the wallpaper, or the people around you in line at Kroger, who will stare at you, not the wailing banshee in short pants and a shirt covered with the remnants of the mac and cheese lunch you already acquiesced to. They will stare at you and the child will know. They will know raising their voice will allow them to win. They will know that you will give in because they know shame exists, they just don’t know what it’s called. They know it because they see it in the red of your ears as it grows inside you.

It is important to understand that these things happen because you are a good parent, not in spite of it. If you were a bad parent they would take threats seriously because asking for more dessert can get someone screaming at them. Climbing out of bed can get them swatted on their bare ass. Throwing the ipad can get them—under the term of art called a time out—locked in a closet with no light, just the smell of dirty laundry. That’s how bad parents create obedience and a false sense of respect which they can’t differentiate from fear.

You are a good parent so you’ve spent the time necessary for them to learn everything they know about you. To know how guilty you feel after you yell; to know how desperate you are to help them when they fall and both palms are bleeding; to know that after you’ve done something and actually achieved consequence that if they don’t stop crying you will pick them up and hold them, more for you than for them, but loving nonetheless.

They do offer some reprieve. The times when they decimate you so completely that they reduce you to tears and then they feel the sting of your shame, then they are the ones to comfort you. They offer a “sorry daddy” and a tiny hug. They have learned the power of positive reinforcement so when you acquiesce and let them toss the broccoli they left for last, devouring an extra two rolls at the dinner table, they chirp out, “thank you mommy”. They know these tools, the buttering up and the building up after breaking down, they know they work. So they file them away and use them to keep things smooth. They know that they help keep some threats empty.

I have two kids, and there’s another reprieve that a pair can offer. Kids know when one of them is the focus of attention and they don’t like to give up the game. So, if one is having a tantrum, the other will back off and kindly be patient. They accept that this is not their moment and that their time will come. They know that two kids striking with cannons shot from different directions can most often lead to disaster and that the outnumbered parent needs to feel just enough control to be manipulated. If mom has to fight all angles like an action hero facing a cadre of henchman, then she will lash out and people will get hurt. If dad has to look for emotional threats he will retreat to what works and raise his voice to levels that a child can’t achieve, pushing in on ear drums so that the messages become bludgeons. And if the caterwauling can bring the other parent until it’s one on one again, then leverage is lost.

A pair of kids will only team up when they themselves are at wits end. When a long day at a waterpark creates exhaustion and heat poisoning and a burgeoning sunburn, eyes stinging with sunscreen and a stomach on edge from too much slushy and fried carbs. Then all bets are off and it’s every adult and child for themselves. Everyone has hit their limit and there’s no one to take it out on except for the people we love the most.

I have no idea how only children fare in these scenarios, I imagine that they are so spoiled that they don’t even bother with the tantrums anymore. And if there’s more than two, well, you brought a plastic spoon to a gunfight, so best just hightail it. Maybe only one of them will follow you while the others enjoy the spoils.

And parents, if you know you know, but if you haven’t gotten there yet, there is a fate worse than being emotionally dominated by the people you would give up your lives for. There is teenage-hood and adulthood, when you become an afterthought. This is as it should be, but the sting of withheld attention is a million times more painful than the focused attention of a child bending you to their will.

Mine are away at college and all I have are the unread messages. I’d give anything for them to press for both a box each of Boo Berry and Franken Berry on a trip to HEB this October.^[2]