My four kids drive me crazy.
They are all smart, independent, and strong willed. They all know what they want and they will all fight for it. These are excellent qualities. These are the qualities that make adults successful! These qualities will grow my kids into leaders. These qualities will help them to reach and strive and achieve the great things that God will lay on their hearts. But these qualities also make for lousy children.
Please don’t get me wrong, I really love them. They each have unique characteristics that I admire and adore. I wouldn’t want to change who they are at all. But when you put four smart, independant, strong willed individuals together, all four who want very different things in life, you’re bound to have some tension.
Car trips are torture. Yesterday Kim had the brilliant idea to drive down to Mt. Rainier to hike and play in the snow. We had a blast while we were there! It would have been a wonderful day if it didn’t also include four hours in the car together.
Here’s what I mean- One of my children will want to quietly listen to the radio, another will want to loudly sing along, another will be annoyed by the music that is playing, while the other just wants to talk. Inevitably their conflicting desires lead to arguments and fights. Pleasing everyone is an impossibility, so we just try to maintain some semblance of control through a mix of patient parental instruction and forceful coercion. If we manage to regain control, however, there are a million differences of opinion boiling under the surface threatening to disrupt the relative peace we’ve forced upon them- personal space, device volume, individual vs. shared ownership of books and toys, what to eat, what to do with trash in the car, which dress Barbie should wear, how to develop the plot in whatever made up game they are playing with said Barbie. The list is everlasting, as are the possibilities for conflict. It's a terrible way to relax and enjoy family time.
Car trips are a great way to make me feel inadequate as a parent. I’m sure there are hundreds of people out there who could tell me how to do it better, and a scant few of them might actually have good points. The thing of it is, there aren’t any parents, doctors, or specialists out there who have raised my children. So when I am most discouraged with my kids and our interactions, I have to remind myself that there is no perfect or “right” way to raise a family. There’s just a lot of trial and error, and Kim and I are the leading experts in our Boyd family field.
Nobody knows this family better than Kim and I do. What I know about this family is that their many differences are given to them by God. Their unique personalities are gifts. Their strength of will is going to make them all uniquely great.
And for now, it makes raising them a LOT of hard work.