Module 3 · Who You Are Actually Raising · Lesson 1 of 2
They are not a small version of you
Most of what you are calling disrespect is a brain that has not finished being built.
Module 3 of 12
By the end of this lesson
- Name two things a child your child’s age can and cannot do yet
- Move one behavior out of the disrespect column and into the development column
- Name one skill your child is missing and how you will teach it in ordinary time
Your child’s brain is not a smaller copy of yours. It is under construction, and the part that stops a person from acting on a feeling is the last part to be finished.
That part is not done until the middle twenties. Your four year old does not have it. Your nine year old does not have it. Your fifteen year old has maybe half of it and no idea which half is working today.
So when your child falls apart over a shoe, they are not testing you and they are not manipulating you. They are running the only equipment they have been issued so far.
You are not raising a small adult who has decided to be difficult. You are raising a person whose equipment arrives in pieces, over years, and most of it gets installed by watching you.
Under two, they do not understand your words the way you think they do. They read your face, your volume, and the tightness in your body. An argument in a room with a baby in it lands fully, even though they cannot repeat a single word of it later.
Two to five, the world revolves around them, and that is not selfishness, it is how the mind works at that age. So when you are angry, they assume they caused it. When you leave, they assume they were the reason. They are not able yet to think anything else.
Six to eleven, fairness becomes the whole religion. They keep score. They remember every promise you did not keep, and they are now old enough to compare you against other fathers, and they are doing it.
Twelve and up, they are building a self, and part of building a self is pushing against you. The pushing is the work. If they push and you vanish, they learn something about you that they will carry into every relationship they ever have.
Most of what men punish in a child is development, not defiance. A three year old who will not sit still is not disrespecting you. A seven year old who lies about homework is doing what a seven year old brain does when it is scared of you.
Knowing the age changes the response. You stop fighting a child for being the age they are, and you start teaching the skill they are missing.
This is also where a lot of a man’s shame lives. You have been correcting for years and it has not worked, and you assumed the problem was the child or the problem was you. Sometimes the problem was that nobody ever told you what a six year old is.
Nobody told most of us. That is not an excuse and it is not your fault, and both of those are true at the same time.
A child does not remember instructions. A child remembers weather.
They remember what the house felt like when your key went in the door. They remember whether the room got tighter or easier when you walked in. Long after every rule you gave them has been forgotten, that is what stays.
The good news inside that is enormous. You do not have to be a teacher, or educated, or good with words. You have to be steady. Steady is a skill, and steady can be learned by a man who has never once seen it done.
You are the environment your child is growing in. Not a visitor in it. Not a rule giver standing outside it. The environment.
A child does not remember instructions. A child remembers weather.
The workEight questions
Three are answered in your head and never collected. They are marked, so you know before you start which is which.
How old is your child right now, and what is the one thing they do that makes you angriest? Write both.
When your child acts out, what do you assume first?
- AThey are testing me
- BThey are being disrespectful
- CTheir mother lets them get away with it
- DSomething happened and they cannot say it
How much of what you punish is actually about how the day went for you?
Read the part about your child’s age again. Write one thing in it that you did not know.
When you were the age your child is now, what did you need an adult to understand about you?
When you walk in the door, what happens to the room?
- AIt gets easier. They come to me
- BIt gets quieter. They read me first
- CNothing changes, because I am barely there
- DI have never once thought about it
Write one thing you have been treating as disrespect that you now think is just the age.
What is one skill your child is missing that you could actually teach them, in ordinary weeks, without a program or a professional.
DeeperThree reflections
Longer than the questions and harder. Nobody reads these but you. Write them anyway, because the ones you would not say out loud are the ones doing the damage.
- 1
Write about the last time you corrected your child and it did not work. Then write what was actually going on for them, as best you can figure it, at the age they are.
- 2
Write about the weather in the house you grew up in. What happened to a room when your father walked into it.
- 3
Write what your child would say the weather is like around you. Not what you hope. What they would say.
Hold this
Men were pushing children away from Jesus, and he was angry about it. Not annoyed. Angry. They thought they were protecting something important from something unimportant, and he took the children in his arms in front of all of them.
Mark 10:13-16
Before you close this
You cannot father a person you have never studied
Men will study a car, a case, a playbook, a job, and never once study the child. Not because they do not love them. Because nobody ever told them that a child is a thing you can learn.
You just learned some of it, and it took twenty minutes. That is how close it was the whole time.
Find out one real thing about the age your child is right now. Ask their teacher, ask their doctor, ask a woman in your family who has raised one. Then change one thing you do because of it.
Written for fathers who are still fighting.
Legacy · Module 3.1