My kids love to play together. For the most part. Does a single day go by without somebody getting upset over what or how they are playing? No. But a day also never goes by without them coming right back to it. And they do come right back to it. Almost like a language of their own, they summon each other back to the game with a simple question – “Still playing?”

You see, my kids are almost always playing, but not board games, cards games, or video games. They play in a world of pure imagination. With no pieces to set up or game board to keep track of they can pick up their game anywhere. And they do. Driving in the car on the way to church I’ll hear “Still playing?” from the back seat. While they are supposed to be getting dressed in the morning I’ll hear “Still playing?” from their bedrooms. While they just got done screaming at each other and giving assurances that the other one is the worst brother/sister in the world, they will extend an olive branch of “Still playing?”

This has been going on for at least two years at this point, and over that time I think they have hit the reset button on their game a handful of times. The current imaginary milieu has been in place for probably two or three months now. My son is a baby named Nicky, his sisters are aunts who have taken him in after his parents died. Or maybe they are his older cousins? I’m sure sure of the specific details, but I do know the characters are heavily influenced by binge watching Full House and that Nicky’s parents are dead. I know this because I overheard their character development session when this version of their game was starting.

“I’ll be the baby,” my son volunteered. “

“Yes, and your parents died in a car accident,” his older sister established. I mean, kind of a dark turn to take right out of the gate when you’re playing with a 5 year-old, but kudos to her using “Yes, and.” I see sparsely attended improv troupe performances in her future.

So parentless baby Nicky and his vaguely related elders have taken up semi-permanent in home home. Outside a few forced family game nights, I’d say that it has taken up about 90% of their play time. Eat, sleep, school, pretend, repeat. Can’t stop, won’t stop. Sounds fun, but my son has been playing the baby so much he is wearing holes in the knees of his pants from crawling. Ya know, when you’re a parent you expect worn-out pants from play, but I guess I assumed it would come from sports in the back yard or general falling down because they have the coordination of an overly excited Muppet. I never thought I’d have to replace my son’s pants because he’d be so committed to his character. Daniel Day-Lewis ain’t got shit on my son.

I love that they have such active imaginations. To this point we have not bought any of them a video game, and we really don’t plan to. The electronic toys we have gotten them mostly sit unused. Part of that is because the batteries have died and I’m pretty sure they’ve lost the chargers, but part of it is they just don’t feel the need to go to them for entertainment. Maybe this year for Christmas I’ll give them imaginary video games. Wrap an empty box and let their imaginations fill it in. Hook style. Bangarang free Christmas presents. I have a funny feeling they would exit their imaginary realm and snap back to the real world with great vengeance and furious anger.

But do they need to be snapped back into reality? Part of me thinks so. I think play can also be a great way to learn real, tangible skills and knowledge. Maybe that is because pretty much all the games I played as a kid were focused on knowledge, skill, or competition. Monopoly, Trivial Pursuit, Scattergories, and Taboo were mainstays in my house as a kid. My Catch Phrase prowess is the stuff of legend. Tell me you’re from the Midwest without telling you’re from the Midwest: I got yelled at more for running afoul of proper Euchre strategy than for breaking actual rules household. Get home a half hour past curfew – just call next time. Trump your partner’s ace – hell hath no fury.

This is not to say we didn’t play pretend. When my brother and I played wiffle ball in the backyard we would pretend to be real major leaguers, complete with mimicked batting stances. I mean, if my son thinks its hard to stay in his baby character, I’d like to see him hit left-handed as Mickey Tettleton.

Not that I need to provide my kids with a duplicate of my childhood, but I do think there is educational value to trivia and knowledge-based games. I learned a lot just from hearing the questions and answers of games. I also think a healthy sense of competition and drive to win is a good thing, and thing that my kids just don’t have. Actually, it isn’t so much that they don’t have a competitive drive to win, but that they have a total aversion to losing. My 7 year-old daughter refuses to play any game that isn’t a co-operative game where all the players are trying to beat the game. Any game where the players are playing each other, she’s out. She’d rather not play at all than run the risk of playing and losing.

Which is another huge benefit of game play – learning to lose. If you can’t lose at Sorry when you’re 7, how are you going to handle losing at something that really matters later in life? I played a lot of sports growing up, and the only score of any game that I remember is losing a football game when I was in the 6th grade. The score was 52-6. I have no idea of any of the scores of any game I’ve ever won. What can be learned from losing in make believe? Based on how my kids play, how to deal with the deaths of your imaginary parents. I’m not sure that grief counseling counts as a game. At least not one that I want to play for family game night.

I don’t think my kids are gaining much useful knowledge by taking their imaginary puppies for pretend visits to the vet while they drop off their orphaned little brother at make believe day care. And I get it, it is still good for their brains, and good for their emotional development. However, my kids are probably the least empathetic people I’ve ever met. For kids who constantly inhabit an imaginary world, they couldn’t possibly imagine somebody else’s perspective or feelings. If they aren’t developing their EQ, I think they could at least pick up some facts.

I do think it helps them cope with each other though. I love that that they can fall right back into play after any kind of screaming match or fit any of them happen to throw at each other. The question of “Still playing?” serves as a panacea for whatever issues there are between them. Perhaps that is the lesson they are learning from their play? That play itself is the lesson. They need to learn to play anything together so that they can live together. They’re using play to form bonds and building a foundation of knowing that whatever else happens that can always come back to each other. You never know where your kids are going to end up in life, but whatever they end up doing, I hope they’re still playing.

It is no secret that one of the great causes of divide in our times (and probably all of time) is that every one is completely certain they are right. Their point of view is the correct one. Their sources of information are the truth. Their pizza toppings are correct and you can take your pineapple and go straight to hell. For the record, pineapple does belong on pizza given the correct pairing of other toppings, which is neither here nor there for the purposes of this discussion but I felt it needed to be said.

And there it lies the problem. I felt it needed to be said. I not only brought up the conflict, but I welcomed it with crossed arms. Without a second thought I found even the most benign subject and found a way to invite disagreement. Though not for the sake of debate, for the sake of feeling right and feeling supported in my rightness by people who agree. And the people that don’t agree? Well I’ll have to assume they’ve clicked away in anger by now. They are not hear to listen to some schmuck tell them something they don’t agree with. They will go find an anti-pineapple blog to read and dig in.

This is the pattern we are in as a society. From pineapples to politics and everything in between, we find the information that makes us feel good about what we already think. It is a hard habit to break, but we need to try.

On a recent trip to the library I was looking for a book to read with no particular direction in mind. Somewhere in the social science section I found “A Gentleman’s Guide to Manners, Sex, and Ruling the World.” The title caught my eye. I mean, I am already a proper man and I’ve already sired three children so I’m pretty sure I’ve got at least one of those down, but there is always room to learn. I grabbed the book and went home ready to become enlightened to gentlemanly ways. A few pages into it was ready to close it forever and be perfectly content having mastered on my own 33% of the topics it claimed to cover. Not that it was poorly written (though he seemed to go out of his way to showcase his vocabulary – you’re a smarty pants professor, we get it) or the things the writer was saying were out and out incorrect. It was that the writing clearly had a different world view than me. I could tell he was older, more upper-crusty, and more on the conservative end of the spectrum than I. While I learned that when sitting in box seats at the opera or theater, a gentleman should sit behind the seat the woman he is with and not next to her, so that the other woman in the box can have a seat in the front as well. After all, women want to showcase their pretty dresses and have a better opportunity to be seen, while a gentleman is content to fade into the background at such an occasion. Tips on where to sit at a minor league baseball game are conspicuously absent. Also, a gentleman wears a suit or at least shirt and tie to work. I don’t remember all the details of the points he was making but he made a case that casual dress has led to gender identity issues.

I put the book down and really debated not picking it back up. I mean, why would I want to fill my head with this?

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In one of life’s funny timings, just as I was having this struggle in myself, my daughter brought home something from school. They were learning about communities, and not just what they are, but also how people live in them together. Her answers on a worksheet were brilliant in their simplicity.

1. Why should you listen to other ideas? I should listen because it will be easier to solve the problem.
2. What if your idea isn’t picked? You could maybe do it next time.
3. Why is problem solving and agreeing on a solution so important for the community? Because then there will be a lot of conflict with out it.

Much can be learned from the perspective of a second grader. A lack of gray area, nuance, and complexity in the best possibly ways. Listening to other ideas helps solve problems. Can something seem like a breakthrough and a “well, duh” statement at the same time? So I’m going to keep reading this book, but because I expect it to really provide any kind of guidance (unless of course I suddenly get invited to the opera), but because I should fill my head with as many ideas as possible. Not so I can agree with them or support them, but so that I can understand them. Even if I disagree with it or find 99% of the book irrelevant to my life, that 1% of opportunity for growth is worth it.

It is crazy how much we can learn from our children, when we put so much effort into it being the other way around. But maybe the effort parents put in, or more accurately where we put it, is the issue. We put in effort to make sure our kids know the basics – reading, math, how to make their own breakfast without waking you up. But do we put the same kind of effort into problem solving? In to how to understand different ideas? Into moral, ethical, or philosophical questions? I think we think a lot of that is too heady for a kid to understand, but maybe it isn’t. At least not a basic introduction. My daughter actually took it upon her self to make her own introduction. A few days after her Solving the World’s Problems for Dummies breakdown, she started reading her first philosophy book.

Stole it from me is more like it. There I was sitting at the kitchen table reading the book “Happiness Times Two: Live Each Day Like You’re on Vacation”, and she walks over and starts reading over my shoulder. Buddhism was a funny word and it caught her attention. Not satisfied with her partially obstructed view, she proceeded to take the book out of my hands, laid down on the couch and read it herself. She read a page about The Eightfold Path, or at least moth of page. I think she may have just read the bulleted list of the eight right things over and over again and giggled at the word Buddha a few times. Either way, it is a start. It is an introduction to learning different ideas, and how to use those ideas to be the best person she can. I don’t know if her path is eightfold, but she is on one. Now I need to help her stay on it. Challenge accepted.

My kids are listening. I don’t mean specifically to me, that would be ridiculous. How would the dishwasher get emptied if I didn’t have to remind them five times? I mean in the sense that they are constantly taking in information, some of it intentionally given to them, and some of it they are just absorbing. As a parent, I can mostly control the intentional stuff. I know what I can and can’t say to them, I know what they watch on TV, what they listen to, and what they learn in school. It has become very clear to me that I cannot control what they absorb on their own, and as they get older they are absorbing more than I thought they did. And wouldn’t you know it, kids absorb the darnedest things, like how the president of the United States treats people with dark skin.

I have my political opinions and my beliefs on good governance and effective use of tax dollars, but that isn’t something I talk about with my kids, or even here for that matter. However, my kids (especially my 9 year-old) are old enough to be at least generally aware of the last presidential election. Which I get. I was her age when Clinton was elected the first time, and I remember the debates on TV and being curious to know who my parents were voting for and who was Ross Perot. This year my daughter asked the same thing. Well, the who am I voting for question, not the Ross Perot question. I told her I voted for Harris, and when she asked why I really didn’t get into much of it. To keep it on her level I said something along the lines of how I think she would do a better job and I trusted her to make good choices. She would follow up with flip side and ask why I don’t want to vote for Trump. Again, I would keep it general with something along the lines of how he treats people and that isn’t how a leader should act. Good answers I thought.

That was the information I could control. Clearly there was more absorbed that I could not. On at least a couple occasions my older daughters would come home from school and say something about kids in their class who said their parents voted for Trump. Based on my highly scientific eyeball test of area yard signs, this is not surprising, and at this point I don’t really care. What was more surprising, or maybe eye-opening is a better word, is when they would come home from school and say something about Trump kicking people out of the country if they have darker skin. My kids were absorbing. I am not sure from where, as I doubt this kind of topic was covered as part of phonics – unless they used raid as the example of a long “a” digraph? More likely, a kid heard a thing on the news or around the house and passed it a long in apparently a much deeper playground discussion than I ever got into in school. Sure the Barry Sanders vs. Emmitt Smith debate could get intense, but nobody got deported over it.

So like a game of telephone, the message got passed down the line from kid to kid getting a little fuzzier around the edges with each retelling, until it reached the point where my 5 year-old son is afraid Trump will kick him out of the country if he gets too tan. Why? Because Trump is kicking darker skinned people out of the country. Pass the SPF 100. And also the constitution. But first the sunscreen. One issue at a time. Specifically, he was asking my wife about getting tan in the Summer, and wondering when he’ll go back to being “bright again.” He doesn’t want to get too dark, lest he be shipped out.

Legal and political accuracy or inaccuracy aside, my son has heard and absorbed enough to form a basic understanding of the situation at hand and applied that to his own life. Which, on one hand is exactly what we want for our kids isn’t? To take in and process information, and then to form their own independent beliefs. Now, I could call into question the reliability of his sources – the messaging passed down from his older sisters – but given the information he had at his disposal and his limited understanding of international politics, I think he pretty much nailed it. Of course on the other hand, of all the things for my son to take in, why does it have to be the racist tendencies of politicians? Sure, I’d like all my kids to be socially aware and consistent voters, but first I’d like them to be more aware of the proper volume to speak at in public and consistent bathers. I wonder if I could infiltrate the playground communication network with rumors that Trump is kicking out kids who don’t shower well enough. Make America lather, rinse, and repeat again.

My son’s fear of being too dark was one opinion he formed and chose to vocalize, but I now wonder what else is rolling around in his head. My kids have asked me many times about why I need to put gas in my truck, perhaps he’s got thoughts on the future of clean energy and the dependence on foreign oil? My daughters know about the war in Ukraine, do they have thoughts on Israel as well? They are starting to spend their own allowance money, so I’m sure they’ll have a take on taxes and tariffs as soon as the price of a squishy ball goes up. Our kids are always paying attention, just not always to things we want them to pay attention to. We can do the best we can to keep what they see and hear as age-appropriate as we can, but we can’t put blinders on them. I want my kids to see what is going on in the world and how it impacts them. Even more so, how it impacts people who aren’t them.

No, my son doesn’t really need to fear getting sent to an El Salvadorian prison for getting tan after a day at the beach. However, he might sit next to somebody in school who legitimately fears for their parents. If what he is hearing now and the opinions he is forming now give him a better sense of understanding and empathy in the future, then I’ll be happy to help him better understand the world he lives in and the people he lives in it with. Parents can’t control all the information our kids take in, but we can do the best we can to help them understand what that information means. Not just for their own good, but for the greater good. That is what separates intelligence from wisdom.

Advancements in technology are, for the most part, great. Take what I am doing right now for example. I’m sitting in a coffee shop using free internet that somehow is beaming its way to my computer. Full transparency, I have no idea how WiFi actually works or what the hell the difference is between any amount of G’s. All I know is that I have a magic machine that puts the world at my fingertips nowhere where my fingertips are in the world. Such is the relationship with technology of somebody who remembers life before the internet. My kids do not have that relationship.

It has been true of every next generation since there have been next generations, but my kids have only known a world with technology that I had to adapt to. I have to believe there were primitive parents out there telling their children that they didn’t always have the wheel. You had to drag the animal carcass back to the fire, it took 13 hours to get there, and that’s how it was and you liked it. The technology changes but the situation is timeless. Also timeless, is the parental idea that your way was better and your kids don’t know what’s good for them. Insert my kid’s relationship with TV, and my relationship with that.

My kids only know streaming. The idea that a show would only be on a certain day at a specific time that is determined not by them is complete nonsense to them. Telling them that Santa Claus picks what shows people get to watch based on where they rank on the nice list would make more sense to them. (Site Note: that is a genius idea to use to Santa to both manipulate behavior and to limit screen time. Two birds one fanciful stone.) It isn’t like they need to wait for the next episodes of shows to be released either, because for the most part all the shows they watch are several years old. The only new they got into was “Wizards Beyond Waverly Place” and when they watched to the point where the new episodes hadn’t been released yet, I’m pretty sure they thought that was that and they stopped watching. Which brings me to the worst part of how my kids watch TV – they watch a show to death.

Like locusts moving from field to field extracting anything of sustenance or value from the land, my kids move from show to show latching on and devouring every episode over and over until no actual entertainment value remains. For the better part of the last year they have watch, re-watched, and watched again episode after episode of “Wizards of Waverly Place” and “Elena of Avalor.” In a world of nearly endless entertainment options, they watch two shows. Part of me is grateful that despite the vast library of content they have access to, they are content with a small portion. In a way, I appreciate their minimalist tendencies. Though in another way, what the hell is the matter with them? Not only do they watch the same shows over and over again, they watch the same episodes repeatedly. It isn’t like they are cycling through the seasons, they go back and re-watch the same handful of episodes with complete disregard for any plot line that crosses multiple episodes. The idea that shows were meant to be watched in a certain order for the sake of the story making sense is lost on them.

To them, entertainment options are self-contained bits of content. A single song, not an album. A single show, not a season. A single YouTube video, not anything that requires any context at all. If anything, the one they do understand comes in a series devoid of technology – books. Books come in series, and each book has a number. Baby-Sitters Little Sister and Dogman are numbered, and they understand when they have read one of them, they read a different one next. My daughter will spend a considerable amount of time on our library’s website looking for the next book she can request, and will patiently wait days while it is on hold until she can check it out. This is in sharp contrast to the four seconds she spends scrolling through the Disney+ menu until she finds the episode of Wizards where Justin goes on the date and ends up kissing some guy’s belly.

Telling my kids about how I used to watch TV is the new walking to school up hill both ways. A badge of honor for the fortitude that only having seven channels to watch built in me. Though even my example of how good my kids have it is lost on them. They don’t know what a channel is. To them Disney+ is a channel, Hulu is a channel, and PBS Kids is a channel. They only know this because when they ask for a show or movie that isn’t on one of those, I tell them “we don’t get that channel.” That is the only context they have for different sources providing different options. Otherwise, everything they want is always available all the time. I dare not even try to explain the Disney Vault to them, I would only be wasting my breath.

The only hardship of my childhood entertainment that has now been thrust upon my children are commercials. A few months ago we changed from the ad-free Disney+ to having commercials, and oddly enough they seemed to enjoy this novel new disruption in their viewing. They quickly had favorite commercials, and because each ad break usually shows the exact same ads, had them memorized. I’m pretty sure my kids can recite multiple Capital One or Marriott Bonvoy ads word for word. They also view the function of ads differently. I think they think they are supposed to watch them. They will sit and watch the commercials, then ask to pause the show so they can go get a drink or go to the bathroom.

Though, why wouldn’t they just pause the show that everyone is watching because it fits their entertainment need of the moment? They live in a world where content is consumed completely on individual terms. If my daughter doesn’t want to watch what everyone else is watching on TV, she’ll get out a laptop and stream something else. In the same room with headphones on. Just because she doesn’t want to watch Mickey Mouse Clubhouse doesn’t mean she doesn’t want to be part of the group. It seems that is what advances in technology have brought about – being included in the group, yet having your group experience completely customized to your needs.

Well, my wife and I have instructed a new rule to bring back how it was before such individualized entertainment. The kids are only allowed to watch Wizards of Waverly Place on Fridays. In our house, that is now the only day it airs. It took a few Mondays and Tuesdays of reminding, but they caught on. My kids have never been more interested in what day of the week it is. It is summer, so they don’t have the schedule of school to mark the days. Their only point of reference is now being allowed to watch Wizards or not. Technology has taken man from measuring the passage of time with complex arrangement of rocks to viewing Selena Gomez on demand. Somewhere in between kids forgot how to read an analog clock and watch episodic TV in the appropriate manner.

A good apology goes a long way. A bad apology is worse than none at all. An apology from my children is essentially none at all. My kids are terrible at saying they are sorry. An apology from them falls into one of three categories – forced, insincere, or forced and insincere.

For young kids, I get that most apologies are forced. Much like most thank yous, you’re welcomes, and excuse mes, I’m sorry’s are almost all prompted by a “What do you say?” from mom or dad. However, the teaching tool of a gentle prompt has seemed to transform to a cattle prod. Figuratively, of course. Though, note to self – invent kid-safe cattle prod and become billionaire. The Kiddle Prod we’ll call it. Or perhaps the Aprodogy? Patent pending. Anyway, apologies come from force in our house, not from any feelings of guilt, empathy, or regret.

If anything, the apologizer becomes the victim. As if we are the ones inflicting some grievous harm on them by making them admit that they did something they weren’t supposed to do. How dare we make them consider the feelings of another person. Especially when the other person is crying so loudly. I mean, all they did was wack them in the face with a toy, but the other person is the one making a whole thing out of it. So an equal parts forced and annoyed “sorry” gets spat in somebody’s general direction. Then we play the game of “say it like you mean it”, in which now the apology comes off as even more fake and sarcastic because it has been doubly forced. Or triplely forced. Or how many ever times we need to go through this charade until something resembling a real apology is muttered under defeated breath.

However, I find the more annoying terrible apology from my kids to be the one they try to pass off as real but is really just them trying to get out of trouble. They aren’t sorry for what they did, they are sorry they got caught. Whatever the behavior was, they will do it again, and apologize again, and do it again, and apologize again, and so on, and so on. When I told my daughter that I didn’t need her to apologize, that I needed her to not do it again, she took the first half of that to heart. When of course she repeated the behavior, she seemed off-put by the fact I expected her to apologize. “You told me not to,” she said. How quickly she disregarded the second half of my instructions.

I get that giving a real apology can be hard. Even for adults. How many times do you hear the “I’m sorry if…” or “I’d like to apologize,” instead of a real “I’m sorry.” Perhaps my kids are bad at apologizing because it hasn’t been a behavior properly modeled by me, just something I make them say? Not that I am too stubborn or proud to apologize, or even too arrogant to think that I’ve never done anything to apologize for. I just don’t know how many times the situation has come up where I need to give my kids an apology more meaningful than “sorry I at the last cookie.” Which, to be honest, we both know I’m not sorry for.

I just don’t do the kinds of things to my kids that they do to each other which require apologies. The next time I ruin a game of pretend school because I want to be the music teacher but I was the music teacher last time and I never have a turn being a kid and always have to be the teacher or the mom and it isn’t fair that I always make the other kids be students but never give them a chance to be a teacher, will be the first. Also, is it just me, or is there just something odd feeling about a parent apologizing to a kid. I don’t know if it is the power dynamic, or the sense that the parent is always right, but the bar for what a parent needs to apologize for just feels higher. Does it not? Or is that just me and I’ve been glossing over times when I should have said I’m sorry to my kids?

A few days ago a real opportunity came up for a real apology. My daughters were being too silly at bed time – a common source of them only being sorry they got caught – and my 6 year-old daughter was just too wound up. So I went in the room and put her back in bed with something less than great vengeance and furious anger, but enough to really scare and upset her. Honestly, my reaction was overkill. It wasn’t her, it was me. It wasn’t about what was going on in that moment as much as it was the culmination of the five hundred or so other other times that they were doing whatever they wanted to do instead of listening to their parents. She cried herself to sleep. I genuinely felt bad about it. Especially knowing how my daughter is. She is a delicate soul.

Hearing her cry in her bed, part of me wanted to go in there and calm her down and apologize right then. But, part of me wanted to just let it be. She was in bed. They were quiet. Mission accomplished. Sure, with some collateral damage, but accomplished none the less. And what is the better lesson to teach? That if dad is mean he’ll come back and make it ok, or that if you don’t do what dad says he’ll make you cry? Debatable, but I let her, and me, sleep on it.

The next morning I still felt bad about it. While the kids were getting ready for school I called her over, knelt down to her level, and gave her a real apology for reacting the way I did. I asked for hug, and she gave me the biggest hug she may have ever given me. The kind where I would ease up to signal the end (multiple times), but she stayed clung to me. That little peanut is all heart.

She felt better. I felt better. We got on with our days on a positive note, and hopefully I instilled some kind of lesson the proper way to say “I’m sorry.” Now, I say this next part with the disclaimer that I love all my kids equally – differently – but equally, and that they are all great in their own way. However. Naturally, of my three kids, she is the one who needed the lesson in how to apologize the least. Yesterday, my 8-going-on-16-year old daughter gave me an eye roll and a sarcastic thumbs up in place of an apology. Whelp, guess I gotta make her cry now.