You Have to Fight Your Child
When my wife and I moved from the Bay Area to Seattle with my family in 2015, we first settled on an overpriced but otherwise unremarkable rented home. It wasn’t big enough for what we needed, delivery trucks rumbled down the street at all hours of the day, and the apple tree behind the backyard – which I suppose should have been a bonus of sorts – threw bitter, inedible lumps all over the place. in the yard in autumn.
But the highlight of this house was the bedroom we gave to our son, who had just turned two. It offered the best natural light, a place for a crowded collection of stuffed animals, books and puzzles, and a huge multi-colored carpet on which we first began to struggle with it.
We practiced the basics of freestyle wrestling there (“takedown on one leg!” He shouted), but also delved into the stupidity of professional wrestling and eventually moved on to inventing our own techniques. His trademark was SlapJack, in which he lifted my shirt and slammed me open with his open palm – a stinging but playful punch that always led to a pin. He still uses it three years later.
Later I found out that these wrestling competitions confused my wife, who at first did not understand why it seemed to me that it was easier to be rude to my son than to hug. Apparently, she never envisioned mastering theScorpio of Deadly Adventure as a valuable component of parenting.
In general, children tend to seek out men for rough play. In my podcast, Yale University Child Psychiatrist Dr. Kyle Pruett , who wrote a book titled Paternal Care: Why A Father’s Care Is As Important As Mothering Your Child, told me, “Kids learn pretty early on that if you want to mess with business, rude and fall, and fall, and get dirty, go find dad. He will most likely tolerate it. “
This, of course, does not mean that one parent should be involved in the struggle. Back in 2011 Anthony T. DeBenedet and Lawrence J. Cohen co-wrote a book about the art of Roughousing: Good old-fashioned fuss and why every child in need in this , and found that the benefits of a range of physical play across the board for the children, no matter what kind of parent they have in a suffocating grip.
“When we are rude to our children, we model for them how someone bigger and stronger is being held back,” DeBenedet and Cohen write. “We teach them self-control, fairness and empathy. We let them win, which gives them confidence and demonstrates that winning isn’t everything. We show them how much can be achieved through cooperation and how to channel the energy of competition constructively so that it does not prevail. “
Pruett also supported the idea that boundaries are perhaps one of the most important benefits of physical play for a child. Fighting and being rude can also help a child learn when an activity has become too destructive and is no longer fun or painful.
“Understanding where this land is located is incredibly important for people,” Pruett told me. “And when you learn this from someone who loves you, cares for you and is willing to be strict with you, this is actually a very important form of comfort for the child.”
A few weeks ago, I heard a bustle in the bedroom of our new home – no more busy street, no more bitter apples – and found my wife pinned to the bed with my son squatting on her chest, my daughter applauding triumphantly.
SlapJack never fails.