DOD182: But Will Gentle Parenting Leave My Kid Unprepared?

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:28 Tom: Welcome to Dear Old Dads, the podcast that's not screaming, except on the inside. I'm Tom Curry. I'm joined, as always, by Thomas Smith and Eli Bosnick. Hello, gentlemen.

0:00:38 Thomas: Really funny about that is literally Remy just screamed in the background. I just heard it. And I don't think your comment was related to that, but I don' t know if it'll be picked up on the mic, but yeah, that's wow. Okay.

0:00:46 Tom: It was not.

0:00:51 Thomas: So yeah, I'm screaming in my house.

0:00:50 Eli: I feel like that's kind of like a truism though, right? Is it like, "Oh, Remy's screaming somewhere"?

0:00:53 Thomas: Yeah. Remy update.

0:00:56 Eli: Right, he's so cute.

0:00:56 Thomas: He is starting to turn a corner, man. He has his star. And he's so fucking cute. God damn. He's so

0:01:03 Tom: He is a cute kid.

0:01:03 Thomas: Cute. He starting to do, uh, put together multiple words, which is just that process. Ah, is there anything better? Is there anything better than when your kid starts speaking? Like he's the thing where he loves baby shark. That's obviously his obsession. But then there's of course, all kinds of comedy in that. I watched the San Jose sharks, the, the team, my hockey team. And so now Now that calls it Data Ox, like that's Data Ox. And, you know, his sharks is a different.

0:01:11 Eli: I'm the best.

0:01:25 Eli: He's got Baby Shark. Daddy

0:01:30 Thomas: Yeah, baby.

0:01:30 Eli: Ox and Baby Ox.

0:01:32 Tom: The whole time you're watching the game, does that song go through your head now, though? Like, is it, like, locked in? Like, okay, and the Zarks.

0:01:36 Thomas: Oh, it's playing in our house at all times.

0:01:38 Tom: Do, do, do -do -do.

0:01:38 Thomas: Like we're a CIA tortures facility. So I've

0:01:41 Tom: Yeah, Noriega's going to run out of your fucking back door.

0:01:42 Thomas: Already confessed to several 9 -11s. Yeah. Yeah, I've I've. But the other thing is I'm trying to get him to say thank you. And he says Nanku like Nank Nanko.

0:01:44 Tom: Yeah.

0:01:52 Eli: Adorable.

0:01:52 Thomas: It's like, oh, it's the best. I love that stuff.

0:01:53 Eli: Can Do you ever reach that point? Because I think I've talked about on the air before, when Anna was doing tone scales and I willed myself to not hear things I don't want to hear anymore. Have I talked about this.

0:02:04 Thomas: No, I can't. Yeah, you have. And I can believe it.

0:02:06 Tom: Yeah, yeah,

0:02:05 Eli: Yeah, Okay, yeah. Uh, a moment that's sort of fun, in the song that gets played too often moment, where they're like asleep, right? The song is off, and then you're wandering around and you find yourself humming "Baby Shark," and your partner's like, "Really? Really?" In this moment.

0:02:07 Tom: Yeah.

0:02:18 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah yeah. It's Like if you started waterboarding yourself after the CIA stopped a few times, you're like, Oh, I guess I kind of miss it. Yeah, God.

0:02:25 Eli: So Water stuck in my head But Gentlemen, do you know the only thing worse than hearing "Baby Shark" for the 147 633rd time? Why? It's the auto ads, the Baby Shark of our podcast, coming for your listening experience, do to do to doing, ruining your, your enjoyment, do to do to do.

0:02:37 Thomas: I don't know. Oh, No.

0:02:50 Eli: But you can make them go away, do to do to do, over at patreon.com forward slash dear old dads, to do to do to do. patreon.com forward slash dear old dads, little bonus episodes, little parenting story last week. I'll give you a tease: what happens when someone calls your kid a name? What do you do? Tune in, check it out. Rip Rip it!

0:02:50 Thomas: Oh.

0:03:09 Thomas: Man. Yeah. You got to hear that story. Into it.

0:03:21 Eli: Yeah, this gentlemen, I've brought you a TikTok. A TikTok of old.

0:03:27 Thomas: We allowed to have it? Are we gonna get arrested? All

0:03:30 Eli: They're still legal. I A don't know about you guys, but a gentle parent, as someone applying gentle parenting, you have a lot of doubts. I saw a TikTok recently that spoke to a lot to those doubts and answered them in ways that I thought was interesting. So I thought we might enjoy, uh, it with our listeners, uh, then chat about its, uh, proposals. This is a guy talking to his therapist, is the idea. Yeah.

0:03:54 Clip: What if gentle parenting actually makes things harder for my kids as they get older? Why would it do that? Well, a lot of people in the world don't actually care about how you feel. Like, bosses don't always take the time to explain things to you. Not always. So people need to learn how to navigate that. Why would gentle parenting make that harder? Okay, so we had a blizzard this morning, and my son thought that there was a tornado, so he wouldn't come out of the basement.

And it was really hard to acknowledge his feelings and his emotions while also getting him out the door so he could go to school and we could go to work. I think one of the struggles with gentle parenting is getting parents to recognize that compliance is not the measure of good parenting. Sure, but then I start to think about like our grandparents generation and I bet they would have fully gotten ready on their own and then just gone to school.

Are you saying that it's not so much about compliance but it's more so that as you, you get older, a skill set is being able to just get things done? Right, there are going to be a lot of bosses and people in your life that you don't have the luxury of talking things out with. Do you think that your grandparents were more responsible as kids in some ways? Yeah. Why do you think that is? Probably because they got spanked and they were in charge of their siblings. It was harsher. Listen, I'm not saying that that's how we should parent, I'm just asking, is there a trade-off that we should be aware of?

You were spanked, right? Yeah. I mean, it wasn't like older generations, my parents tried to do better, I think they all do, but I got spank'd, I got my mouth washed out with soap. And you're good at keeping your head down now, right? No, that makes me feel like a kid, I'm not a kid. So what do you do when you deal with difficult bosses now? I have to manage them. It sucks. I've had to learn how to have disagreements and constructive conflict and explain to them why it's in their interest to, to give me the information and the resources that I need.

Which you learned from spankings and soap? No, but that's my point, is that I was already used to that environment and it was hard enough for me to learn the things that I needed to learn, but you didn't learn to keep your head down. What I'm saying is that, I don't need to be coddled. Oh, that's it. What? Coddled. What about it? Am I coddling you right now? No, we're just talking. Is this different than how you talk to your kids? Well, yes and no. Those conversations are more emotional. Sure, their brains are developing, they have different needs. But aren't we working through your anxiety right now? Well, you're helping me think through it.

0:06:22 Clip: Alright, I get your point. But that wasn't my original question, wasn't it? Oh, shit. I'm just modeling the skills that my kids are going to need to navigate difficult people that I wasn't given as a kid. There you go.

0:06:39 Clip: Did you just gentle parent me? No! That was inside you the whole time, big guy.

0:06:45 Eli: So, so there's a couple of points that are made in that TikTok that I thought were really interesting that I wanted to talk about.

0:06:51 Tom: A super interesting TikTok, because I think there's an assumption that a lot of people carry forward, forward, that the way that we are treating a person who is a child is also the only way we will ever treat them, and the also the only way that they will ever learn how they are treated, right? So when he's like, oh, but like bosses aren't going to do this, and it's like Yeah, they sure won't, because you'll be like 18 or 20 by the time you get a boss, and there's a big fucking difference between the way that, like, I treat you as a parent when you're six and the way that, like, other people will interact with you when you are an adult or a semi-adult. Like, those criticisms always ignore that entirely. And they just take what is happening to a young child, and then they write that forward as if there will be no progression or development, development in, in that conversation or

0:07:09 Eli: Right, right. Right.

0:07:13 Thomas: Yeah. Hopefully. Yes.

0:07:45 Tom: In their growth or in their maturation. And that's such a, I don't know if that's dishonest, but it's fucking foolish.

0:07:52 Thomas: And I always think, well, I would want them to know that they are being mistreated if, if someone is mistreating them. I don't want them to be like, well, that's normal. I know, like, I would want them to have the basis in their upbringing to be, be like, boy, this person sucks. You. And I don't know how they have to manage it from there, wouldn't, but you want your kids to be able to recognize that instead of being like victimized without knowing it? Like a lot of people are.

0:08:15 Eli: This joke on the air a lot, but like, I, I don't want anyone to ever hit my son, right? Under any circumstances, right? The joke that I make on the air is if someone tells you that hitting your kids is okay, you should hit them, because they agree it's a great way to change someone's mind. Right. But like that, that's part of it, right, is that by not treating your kid in a way you don't know, you don' t want them to be treated as an adult. You are teaching them what to expect, how to be expect to be treated.

0:08:28 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, yeah,

0:08:41 Tom: It's Interesting too that they only, two examples, that the counter examples that that are being given in the sort of back and forth are about bosses. I think that's really interesting, right? Because like you're, you're right, on Eli, we sort of implicitly understand that, that we want to build and model ways of treating and being treated for other relationships, romantic relationships, friend relationships. But then we're just like, God, what if it doesn't port into a capitalist hellscape? And you're like, yeah, all right. But does it, we leave. We should recognize that that's not less abusive just because somebody wrote you a check for it. And I say that with some knowledge and a raise in my hand. Like there are many times in my life I've had jobs I could not leave but those jobs were often abusive and as soon as I could leave I fucking left.

0:09:07 Thomas: Yeah. Of

0:09:26 Eli: Right?

0:09:23 Thomas: Course. Yeah. And you would want to know that you should leave. Yeah! It's like, I, I don, what are you you talking about? You still want to know that that's a bad situation.

0:09:34 Eli: Right,

0:09:28 Tom: Right. Yeah. Interesting that, like, he doesn't say, well, what if you have a spouse that's you know unreasonable and shitty, and you'd be like, well, wait a minute, or what if he had a friend that treated you like garbage, like we only ever poured it to bosses, that's the only, I've never actually heard an analog that isn't, what, what if you had an abusive boss? How will you, suck it up, buttercup?

0:09:37 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah,

0:09:42 Eli: Right, right.

0:09:52 Eli: Mm-hmm. Yeah. And I a there's a phrase he uses very early on in there that I think really gets to the core of my worry, right? Which is that compliance is not the measure of good parenting. Because I don't know about you guys, but like the 175th time I am reacting to getting punched or slapped in the face with, hey, my friend, that's not a a good good choice. Like, let's make let's make quiet hands or whatever the fuck I'm saying, right Right. That is when I am having doubts about gentle parenting. Right.

0:10:20 Tom: Sure.

0:10:20 Eli: Because I am conflating compliance with good parenting. I'm conflated getting the result I want with the doing and saying the correct thing. And those are not the same thing.

0:10:15 Thomas: Yeah,

0:10:21 Tom: Well, no, But let offer this. I think that it's okay to worry about that and to have doubts about that, because while I would say that compliance is not the only measure of good parenting, compliance on a continuum is a measure of good parenting, right? Kids need to grow up understanding standing and doing the things that we need them to do, right? Like, none of my kids would, on their own, of their own volition, wake up and go to school if I said, "Hey, I'm not going to make you go to school anymore," they would all stop going to school tomorrow. So, like, to some degree, and again, it's on a continuum, to some degree there is a sort of push-pull where they understand, like, "Okay, Dad's gonna make me do some things in my life that I don't want to do do, right?

0:10:58 Thomas: Yeah.

0:11:00 Eli: Right? Mm hmm.

0:11:19 Tom: Like I'm not excited about taking out the garbage or cleaning the cat box or going to school. But these are things that are required to be done. Like they just have to be done. Aislinn You right now is going through feeding therapy. And part of my job is to push, not force, but to push for her to challenge herself in this feeding therapy, she would much rather not do any of this.

0:11:43 Eli: Right, right.

0:11:44 Tom: So there is a certain amount of compliance that is a result of good parenting. It, I but gentle parenting will yield that result. I think the problem is it yields it slower. So I push back on the idea that compliance is not a good measure. I actually think compliance is a fine measure, right?

0:11:58 Eli: Yeah,

0:11:58 Thomas: Yeah. If the thing your kid is complying with is not hitting other kids, then maybe sometimes it's a good measure. Having that problem right now with Arlo, like he just, he, uh, he's hitting some kids randomly. Very weird. Yeah. Came out of nowhere too. Like he He just decided, yeah, he's just like hitting kids. I think he thinks it's a game. Like, I think, sorry,

0:12:09 Tom: That's

0:12:15 Eli: Asses, taking names. Have a bokoblin in his class, you have to meet with the bokoblin parents and they're like, and you're like, I totally get that. Yes, 100%.

0:12:35 Tom: How's his right cross, by the way

0:12:37 Eli: Yeah.

0:12:35 Thomas: Yeah, man, it is weird. I think it might be, yeah, like some sort of impulse control. Troll, um, he's definitely not playing nice lately and it kind of came out of nowhere and and the it's so frustrating too, because the teacher will be like, can you help me tell him that we need to keep hands to ourselves, and we're like, yes, we always do that, like we already obviously are doing that, like, I, I don't know what the solution is there if that's just what they have to say, but like I feels to me is not the best way to solve the problem. If you start with the assumption that we are like telling him like, no, hitting is great. Like, that's awesome.

0:12:38 Tom: Right. Yeah. Yeah.

0:13:09 Eli: Yeah.

0:13:10 Thomas: Like, yeah. Oh, we're supposed to not do that. Oh, okay.

0:13:11 Tom: We're a pro-hitting family Yeah.

0:13:15 Eli: Always like a "what are you doing wrong at home" vibe, that's really, really hard not to push back on, right? When someone's like, so, um, not acceptable in our classroom to poop in your hands and then smear it sort of back and forth and make 10 sets of prints on the wall

0:13:22 Thomas: Yeah. Camera Camera pans across to like poop smeared Eli's face. What?

0:13:31 Eli: Right and I'm I get it. I'm also especially when it's something you're dealing with at home, worse, right?

0:13:35 Tom: No.

0:13:41 Thomas: Yeah.

0:13:41 Eli: They'll be like, well, today he gently pushed a pencil off, and it'd be like, he took a Ming vase and threw it at my face while I was asleep. We've had the conversation

0:13:48 Thomas: Yeah. You're getting the best version of Max. You should, you should be so lucky.

0:13:51 Eli: Yeah. Oh God, I say that all the time.

0:13:59 Tom: Do you think about, like, do, do you agree, Eli, to some degree, that compliance is a measure of good parenting? I mean, like, if you meet kids that are completely non-compliant, how do you feel about that?

0:14:09 Eli: I mean, it's interesting because, like, I of the conversations that Anna and I have quite a bit is like, musts versus oughts. Right, that because of the way we choose to parent, we get a lot less oughts than parents who maybe hit their kids or yell at their kids or treat their kids badly.

0:14:16 Tom: Right.

0:14:25 Thomas: What do you mean by that?

0:14:25 Eli: Right? Um Ought to stay seated when I want you to stay seated, you ought be quiet and calm, you ought not make bad decisions, right? The silly decisions, kid decisions more often rather than less, right? Max is not afraid of us so in any way in any way, shape, or form, Max is at all worried about us, so he does things that he knows he shouldn't do a lot more often, but those things are not musts, right? So, like, example, an that I use all the time and that we talk about a lot is like, Max gets to say tickle time is over whenever he wants, right?

0:14:45 Thomas: Right. Hmm.

0:14:45 Tom: Yeah.

0:15:03 Thomas: Of course.

0:15:04 Eli: He says, "All done, tickles are over," and I always say, "Absolutely," and then I say, "Remember, you always get to decide when tickle times are over," right? I reinforce that to him. He does not get to choose whether or not to take medicine, right? We have conversation and now that he is old enough to kind of grok these conversations, we have conversations where I am like, "Hey, bud, you have to take this medicine, so you can take it now and we can do, like, a fun game and do it in slow motion and do all this, like, crazy stuff that you want us to do, or I can hold you and give you the medicine." But the medicine is going into my son. One thing will be true about today, and it, it will be that you got medicine. Right?

0:15:04 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

0:15:23 Tom: Yeah.

0:15:46 Tom: And isn't, isn't part of parenting is over time, time, shifting some of those oughts into maybe not musts, but a category where it's like, all right, like, I'm going to do the oughts too, right? Think that's just like part of the evolution of parenting where we begin this like really slow process. And I think like our parents and generations prior, I think they tried in many ways to accelerate that process because you can. You can have everything be a must. You can have a kid who's four years old up and brush his teeth and put his clothes on and march out the door without complaint, but like it's it, yeah like we have a history of doing this stuff. Like, I'll tell you what, like my dad, my dad was not physically violent.

I think I got spanked once, maybe twice, but I was afraid of my dad. Like, I grew up afraid to my dad in part because, like, I lived with my mom and then got on an airplane one day and lived with my dad. He was kind of a little bit of a stranger, and so I didn't have a lot of, like, I didn't, that same level of, like, trust built up. I was just, like, all of a sudden kind of in somebody else's house. So I was six. I woke up on time and I got myself ready for school and I combed my hair and I ate breakfast and I walked to school and my dad was off to work

0:16:28 Thomas: Drive the tractor, harvest some food.

0:16:29 Eli: Yeah. Right.

0:17:08 Thomas: Well, a lot of this is a product of of privilege. And I don't mean that in any sort of bad way. Um, but like, yeah, in the thirties, like, I donno, man, maybe people didn't have like the bandwidth and time for gentle parenting. I know that like the times when I'm the worst parent is when we don't have any fucking time. And I think that, like, as we've gotten more comfortable as a society, just the, the baseline, line you going up a bit, and we're not in, uh, Sinclair's the jungle, you know, it's like there's a little more time and bandwidth to be more patient, whereas when you're in a crisis, when you're in a, when, when you are in situations where you just have no wiggle room at all and you just, just, like, you just need the kids to behave, like, it, yeah, yeah, it's harder to take that time.

0:17:27 Tom: And Right. Mm-hmm.

0:17:52 Tom: Yeah, I think it's super I think it is super privileged because I think gentle parenting is slower. I think if I think I think compliance is necessary. I mean, again, like I come from a single parent household. So my lens is shaped by that. But like my dad didn't have time. Like he literally didn't have time, you know, like he's, it's just him. He's working at least two jobs. Like when does that guy have time to do the gentle parenting?

Like he's got to get two boys a year apart in age up and ready for school and, and clothed and fed and looking halfway decent and walking out the door, and then he's gotta do all that same shit you gotta do at night. And like, I think at some point that gentle parenting, which I think is the ideal, I am sympathetic to expediency, you know, I am. I'm sympathetic to a need for how many families, because it's something like 24% of households are single parent households. It's a lot. It's not an uncommon, uh, so like there's a ton of people that like, they look at these parenting techniques, I think, and are like, yeah, I

0:17:57 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah

0:18:45 Eli: Yeah

0:18:54 Tom: Don't have time for that shit that's some pipe dream shit. Yeah, right.

0:18:54 Thomas: With what time? Yeah, totally.

0:18:58 Eli: I, there's aussi like a lot of survivors bias too to that, right? Because like the people who didn't handle tough parenting, kidding, etc., some of them aren't around to talk about it, right? One of the things that have, I sort of had the privilege to experience, because there are ways of treating kids with ASD, right, that we choose not to treat Max that way, right? There were treatments, there are, uh, that we choose not to use that make it easier to have a kid with ASDF, to have a kid with autism spectrum disorder, right? Example of one is like, um, there's a lot of like no-no stimming in previous therapeutic practice, right? Which was that you would stop kids from stimming. And that's because stimming can be disruptive. It otherizes your kid, right. It is in many ways, it is a disruption into your life when your kid stims.

0:19:10 Thomas: Yeah,

0:19:10 Tom: Yeah. Right. Right.

0:19:50 Thomas: What's the definition of that again? Just

0:19:53 Eli: Flapping. It's flapping or rocking, or otherwise making like noise or gestures that don't seem quote-unquote normal. Right. There are a lot of people still today who practice psychiatry and medicine who say that the stimming prevention is a good way to normalize kids. But we, and by that, I mean, Anna and I, have gotten to hear from people who have gone through that therapy, people who've gone through that experience and have said, "I had a really pleasant time during that. And the way I was treated in that matters more to me now than flapping when I get excited."

0:19:53 Thomas: Okay.

0:20:28 Tom: Well,

0:20:28 Eli: Right.

0:20:29 Thomas: So the idea is you're, of, forcefully preventing them from doing something that they really feel they need to do in order to, to blend in or get along better. Yeah.

0:20:35 Eli: Right. Right. And on the extreme end, there's, you know, like, tackling kids to the ground and holding them down so they don't stim, and on the less extreme end, right, which I still see parents of kids with ASD, because we hang out with a lot of kids on the last extreme kid, they're just parents who are like, hey, don't do that. Right? Like it's picking your nose or, you know, another socially unacceptable gesture, and, and we choose not to enforce those mores, especially now that Max doesn't have as much, uh, and control, control over when he does those things. And obviously when he gets older, we will be able to have a much more complex conversation about the, behaviors and how they're reflected on by others. But right now we don't want to put it in the same category as like, keep your hand out of your pants.

0:20:37 Thomas: Oof. Yeah. Right.

0:21:19 Tom: It's like, it, it feels like, it back feels in the day where they would be like, left-handed? No, you're not, and then force people into right-handedness. It also ignores the fact, and I think you just hit on this, Eli, that who somebody is when they're young, I think it actually means much in terms of prognosticating forward with any real accuracy who they're going to be when they're older. I really don't. I think there's some base personality trait kind of stuff, but this idea that, like, oh man, if we don't stop them from, you know, this unacceptable behavior by the time they're six or seven, they're gonna go to college and it's like you know, like my kid's, you know, like amen potty trained late, but he potty-trained, you know what I mean?

0:21:19 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Still

0:21:55 Eli: Right.

0:22:00 Tom: It's not like it's only he's going off to fucking college. And he's gonna be Like, yeah, I'm still pissing my pants, like

0:22:02 Thomas: Pissing on the floor Yeah.

0:22:03 Eli: Yeah. So you promise, Tom. So your promise, Jesus, hit me right in the, the heart.

0:22:09 Tom: Very I think we're just super fatalistic about a lot of that stuff, and, and to our kids' detriment, I think we write forward inaccurately because we're seeing only our kids who they are today, and we're like, oh man, like, this is just gonna be, if I don't stop this now, this is gonna go on forever. And it's like, have you met anybody that, that went on forever for Because

0:22:09 Eli: Right.

0:22:10 Thomas: Yeah. I Absolutely. Tom, it's a great point. I think I've done that I've I've had that thought with several things, uh, with my kids. 'Cause it's like, boy, this is killing me that, our kid is a few months late whatever this milestone is. And that's like, yeah, but do you think they're never going to do it? Like, once they start doing the thing that month or two or three or four or even six, like, it's forgotten immediately. It doesn't matter.

0:22:32 Tom: I haven't. It's fucking stupid.

0:22:53 Tom: Right.

0:22:53 Thomas: Like, oh, they just started, you know, chaining words together a little late. Like, you know, Remy's finally started to do or whatever, you know, like, it's something to keep an eye on, but we should realize that, like, eventually they're going to be a fully conscious human being that can just do the things that we need them to do, more or less, like, it doesn't mean they're always going to to be, uh, involuntarily doing things. Yeah.

0:23:11 Tom: Yeah. But like if you parent and I think this is like kind of what was built into that to clip from TikTok, I think if you parent with a catastrophizing mindset, oh, man, if I don't do this now, it will never happen ever. Right? Or if I do not put a stop to it, it will continue forever. That is catastrophizing.

0:23:29 Thomas: Mm.

0:23:30 Eli: Yeah. Yeah.

0:23:35 Tom: That. That's just a form of catastrophizing, and that's not a good way to think, and it's not accurate, and it is not emotionally fair to anybody, and we know it is just a shit way to behave, but I think it informs a tremendous amount of parenting because we are understandably all anxious about missing something. To give credit where it is due, there is a real necessity to find and notice and see our kids and to give them the supports that they need as soon as you can. So I think there's, like, it comes often from a really well-intentioned place, but if not checked properly, it can, it can yield really negative results.

0:23:51 Thomas: -hmm. Right.

0:24:09 Eli: And So it feels really real in the moment, right? Like, speaking of the catastrophizing thing, like, one of the things that's up for us right now is, like, Max is about to go to kindergarten, and the district is very insistent that when the kids are in kindergarten, they have to be potty trained, and Like Max's potty train, but, like, just won't aim his fucker Derek, and so he'll, like, he'll just not aim his dick and pee all over his pants, or he'll nod him his dick, pee all over his floor, and then we gotta get this fucking bag of clothes, the shame bag of clothes comes. I, I every day when he comes home, I look out the window like a, like a loyal Labrador to see if he's wearing the same pants I sent him out in, and it's just, but again, like, and I know that this is partially because of what happened over the summer, right?

Because, like, I Like Think Max would have really enjoyed that nature camp experience from the one day of videos I saw. Like, I know my kid loves to walk around in the woods, but because he wasn't able to do that one thing, he wasn't able to DO IT OTHERWISE. And especially when you, and not to be the, like, the, oh, I have a kid with a disability, so that's how I relate everything, but, like, especially when YOU HAVE A KID WITH A DISABILITY, people are very quick to put that kid in a limiting category because of something that they're NOT DOING YET. Right? Like, you told the story before, right, of the first conversation I had with the special ed department. That

0:24:22 Thomas: Yeah.

0:24:53 Thomas: With the summer camp thing that Yeah. Oh

0:24:54 Tom: Right.

0:25:28 Thomas: God

0:25:28 Eli: Woman, by the way, was blasted from the earth. I don't know what happened. But like, you're never going to have a normal kid. That stays with me. I think about that because it is only a matter of time until I run into another person with that mindset. Set, and how much power does that person have over my kid's future? How much power does they person have over my kid's experience of school? And it's, but Tom, you're right. Right, you are a hundred percent right, which is like, there are no there full-time-b-pancers, right?

0:25:28 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:25:47 Thomas: Can't I don't know. I, you look at men's bathrooms now. Now I'm, fuck, maybe, yeah, they can't aim their dicks.

0:26:01 Eli: Yeah. Yeah. That's true. Oh my god, it's just the Maxes of the world. Ah

0:26:07 Tom: That's it. Yeah.

0:26:08 Thomas: Learn to aim your dicks!

0:26:08 Eli: Yeah.

0:26:10 Tom: Old dads, learn to aim your dicks. We got some weird T -shirts.

0:26:11 Eli: Dear Old Days You could

0:26:13 Thomas: There's one piece of advice we can,

0:26:15 Tom: We got Some weird T shirts. Yeah.

0:26:15 Thomas: Yeah.

0:26:15 Eli: Say our advice is grip into it.

0:26:22 Tom: Know, the other thing that I liked, no, I, well, we don't have enough time. So I'm starting the other

0:26:22 Eli: That's it. No, the episode's over. This one's 13 minutes because we finished it on the grip into it. The rest of the episode is just me arguing, trying to end the episode.

0:26:29 Thomas: Yeah.

0:26:36 Tom: Episode is over. Other thing that I really did like about that video was the sort of, and I do this all the time with the kids, like, and I like it, the Socratic nature of just asking questions like, Oh, why would that work? Why would that, how would that go? Where you sort of, you lead somebody down that road. I thought that was actually really kind of both like an example of what to do and an example of how to get there, you know?

Because when mean, I'll just say it, like, when you fucking write about something, you can get there by asking questions. Like, my kids have expressed over the years, like all kids do, like some interest in and even some, like belief in alien bullshit and supernatural bullshit, you know, all that stuff. And all kids like go through it. Right. Like I did when I was a kid, like I read all those Whitley Stryber communion books and all that shit and scared myself and, you know, read like Project Blue Book and was convinced of this stupid shit because I was a kid. Like if you just ask enough good questions and not shitty asshole sea lion nonsense, but like good questions, like honest questions, like questions that respect and interrogate who they are in a way that's like emotionally valuable to them.

0:27:18 Thomas: Oh

0:27:44 Eli: Yeah.

0:27:45 Tom: It's, it's a great way to like, to, to move them into, a place of real introspection and get get, somewhere with them.

0:27:52 Thomas: Have to share one of my all -time favorite, parenting uh, stories and it's not mine. It's actually my brother's. His son was having a hard time with being scared by ghosts, which is, if this ever happens to me, it's going to be, I'm going to be similarly in a conundrum because it's very hard to take that seriously for me. You know, it's a little tricky. Like I have to, I have make sure I'm sensitive because it is like, oh, that's stupid. But, but no, this little kid, you know, his, his son at the

0:28:09 Tom: Yep.

0:28:16 Eli: Baby, hold my hand. Dumb. All right. I'm leaving now. Ha ha ha ha.

0:28:17 Thomas: Yeah.

0:28:24 Tom: Well,

0:28:24 Thomas: Yeah, I'm leaving you in this haunted house that you have to stay in. His son like having a hard time. He was like actually scared. And I think, you know, to my brother's credit, it was hard for him to understand at first, if you he was actually scared, you know with kids sometimes it's like, okay, is this a big deal? But no, he was like getting scared about like little noises in the house being ghosts. And so he started, I think hopefully Socratic method a little. And he was like, okay, buddy, like, but like, think about ghosts, you know, he was trying to, you Know, he's trying to figure out how to solve this. And so he's like, think about ghost. Like, do they ever really like do anything to, you know the ghosts that you're worried about being in the house? Do they ever do anything to you? Do ghosts ever really, like harm you at all? Or they're just kind of like there. And he goes, yeah, they boo you.

0:28:26 Eli: Ha ha. Ha ha, ha ha, ha ha!

0:29:08 Thomas: Something about like a five -year -old just being like, like, yeah, idiot. Like they boo you.

0:29:12 Eli: Yeah, my greatest fear.

0:29:14 Tom: Tell you what, it doesn't work on Amon yet. Like, I don't want to, like, sound like it's Like, so far Amon's 10, you know, and like, Amon just deflects if he, like, if the questions start to challenge him in a way that, like, even gently, you know, like, challenge him away, he'll just deflect it. They'll just be like, Well, anyway, Sonic ate a booger and You're just like, all Right, Whatever.

0:29:18 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, boy.

0:29:33 Tom: You know, so like, there is a, there is point at which that is, that more effective rather than less effective with, with aim, and I'm certainly in the less effective zone, but I don't think it's, I just, I still think it's a really valuable tool for parents to use.

0:29:32 Eli: Yep, mm -hmm. Yeah, no, that's Max right now. Yeah.

0:29:34 Thomas: Yeah oh yeah.

0:29:47 Tom: And I really appreciated that the video, cause at no point was the, was the person playing the therapist in that video confrontational or like, well, that's dumb. Obviously you're wrong about that. You know?

0:29:57 Eli: Right, you're a bad dad!

0:29:59 Thomas: Yeah.

0:29:59 Tom: Right. Yeah. You're just shitty at this and you don't understand what you're like. No, it wasn't argumentative. So I really thought that was kind of great.

0:29:59 Thomas: And I think it really works because, as we've talked about a lot, a lot of parenting, really, honestly, in my opinion, is just treating kids like people, and a lot ways that we didn't. And we all, I think we've all said this like a lot, that parenting used to be way worse. Is just not treating kids like people, like they're different people. They're like, their emotions are more intense and all that. But like, you them like, "Hey, that's a person having a very hard emotional time right now. What are they having that about?" Well, it's fucking Mario or something. So that's kind of dumb, but they're having an emotional. You know, it's like and still the bokoblin keeps talking to him and he has to and he can't no matter how much he hits it. It doesn't seem to disappear.

0:30:37 Tom: Yeah, it doesn't matter. Yeah.

0:30:36 Eli: Right. It's the bokoblin in his kindergarten class. Ha ha! Ha ha -ha! He's gotta put on the mask, and then they'll get along. Ha ha... Thank you, Chavez. Ha haa!

0:30:53 Tom: Don't

0:30:52 Thomas: Yeah, that's good. I'm working on it with Kilton or whatever. I got to get enough. Yeah.

0:30:54 Tom: Know what any of that means. Like, I think to, to some degree, kids are almost more human than we are, right? Like, you, you pointed out, like, they're having an emotional experience of the world that is actually way bigger than mine. Like, most of my emotional experience and intellectual experience is kind of, you know, fuck, I'm an old man.

0:31:02 Thomas: Yeah. Right. Absolutely. Mine Mine are almost gone,

0:31:14 Tom: Yeah, Yeah, it's muted.

0:31:14 Thomas: Tom. Yeah. I don't even know that I'm having an internal experience anymore. I don't even know THAT I'M HERE.

0:31:16 Eli: Yeah. I've, yeah. I've repressed so many of my emotions. I'm never mad anymore. I don't know if you guys know this, I'm actually never mad. I'm absolutely never. Hey, let me say, I'm naturally tears are running down my face, but it's because of how mad I am. Not is what's crazy. You are

0:31:25 Tom: By comparison,

0:31:34 Thomas: 100%. Eli, what's that thing where I think this is a theater thing where I've heard, and maybe you'll know if it's a quote or something, where they're like, comedy is like drama except the stakes are higher or whatever.

0:31:35 Eli: Yeah Yeah.

0:31:36 Tom: By comparison.

0:31:46 Thomas: What is that? Something like that. It reminds me of kids where it's like the stakes Are so fucking high.

0:31:47 Eli: Yeah. No, know, like, mm. Hmm.

0:31:52 Thomas: But but that, if you kind of treat it like a real human problem, so a lot of same principles like you need to acknowledge it. They want to feel heard, you You know, like, oh, I'm sorry that fucking the big goblin won't, you know, like you got to like entertain their dumb thing, but like they want, they want to be validated and like validating really, really does help quite a bit.

0:31:52 Eli: Yeah. Right. 100. 100.

0:31:52 Tom: Yeah. Yeah.

0:32:14 Tom: Well, they're having a different experience in the time dimension too. Too. Like, that's something we tend to forget. But it's just, it is a true fact. Like it is a demonstrably true fact that the experience that kids have in time is way different than yours. It's way different. So they're having this experience that is literally longer and more intense than the experience you're having right now. So it's important to sort of keep that in the back of your mind that, like, well, just fucking wait an hour. It'll be fine. And they're just like, an hour an hour is like six weeks for

0:32:14 Eli: Right. Yeah.

0:32:17 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a lifetime. Yeah

0:32:48 Tom: A little kid you know, like, so, so the ask has to respect where they are. I think I

0:32:48 Eli: Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

0:32:48 Thomas: Still to aim your dick. Everybody aim your tick better.

0:32:56 Eli: To aim your All right. Gentlemen, before we go, what is the alphabet's favorite type of clothing? A t-shirt. Oh

0:33:15 Tom: Can we get back to the boomer jokes? I like the boomers jokes I

0:33:17 Thomas: No, no, no.

0:33:18 Eli: I see now we're back to the boomer jokes again now

0:33:20 Tom: Liked the boomered jokes. They were worse.

0:33:21 Thomas: Tom, you're being like the American electorate. You have a slight complaint about the regime, and then you're like, we need Trump again. No, we don't need the boomer the last one Yes, the last one was great. You already forget that, that the economy was picking up and groceries, like, the inflation was going down, is being managed well, foreign policy, yeah, it's not instant, but like, yeah, that last joke about potpourri that was fucking killer. You already forgot, got because I because, because Eli didn't sign the potpourri check and mail it to you with his name on it. Now you're like, go back to the boomer jokes. Yeah, fuck that was

0:33:25 Eli: I

0:33:28 Tom: I don't think it's that bad.

0:33:46 Eli: Forgot I didn't sign the potpourri check Yeah

0:33:51 Tom: Well, sign the potpourri check next time. Look, 100% or nothing. That's

0:33:56 Thomas: One episode ago. You're already done. No,

0:33:56 Tom: The standard.

0:34:00 Eli: Potpourris fire? Is that anything? PotpOURRIS FIRE? I

0:34:07 Thomas: That's nothing. That's

0:34:07 Tom: Nothing. No, that's just sounds that you made.

0:34:10 Thomas: So funny. Oh.

0:34:14 Clip: Want to meet sexy DILFs in your area? Email the dads at DearOldDads.com or, better yet, send us a message on Patreon. You can follow us on all social media by checking the links in the show notes. And if you need more podcasts in your life, you can find Tom on Cognitive Dissonance, Thomas on Serious Inquiries Only, and Eli on Godawful Movies and all the Puzzle in the Thunderstorm shows. Dear Old Dads is edited and produced by my favorite DILF, Tom Smith, who also wrote and recorded the intro music, which is used with his permission. This podcast is a production of Daddy Issues LLC. Copyright 2022. All rights reserved.

0:34:56 Thomas: Learn to aim your dicks!