Is it working?

I have many ideas that are not particularly effective if I judge them by the results they yield. What I mean is that I may have some goal or desire, which may or may not be explicit in my mind, and I have a set of actions that I take to achieve it. Often my goals are nebulous, and the associated actions, upon inspection, do not seem to take me toward that goal. The actions sometimes have no effect and sometimes they actually have negative effects.

My parenting has been this way. I have suspected for a long time that something is amiss with my particular style of parenting. For many years my son and I have had a contentious relationship. We have a lot of good times, and we definitely love each other, but we have also argued a lot and both get easily frustrated. Here is a typical example: I want to make sure my son takes care each day of the things he needs to do, e.g. his homework, eating good food, brushing his teeth, showering daily, etc. I almost always leave for work before he's awake in the mornings and return after he's been home from school for a couple of hours. I used to walk in the door and ask him whether he'd done his homework or brushed his teeth that morning or some other thing; that was almost always our first interaction. Our next interaction was almost always my getting on his case about the thing, whatever it is. Thus the evening was on its way to tension and frustration. Now, in my mind I'm not being responsible as a parent if I'm not getting him to do those things, but day after day we would just argue. Then I decided one day on my commute home that I would stop doing this, and that the first thing I would say would be something positive. This was a great idea, but then I walked in the door and he was doing something--I don't even remember--that I was sure demanded my immediate attention and correction, which led again to the same evening as before. 

We probably could have middled along this way indefinitely, but things really changed around the end of 2019. I left the country for work for several months. My family and I set it up so that we would use a freely available messaging app to talk each day I was gone. This was fine for my wife and me; we talked at least once a day and almost all of our conversations were perfectly lovely. I wanted to talk to my son daily or at least several times each week. It started fine, but when we'd talk I would ask him about his schoolwork and whether he was taking care of all of his responsibilities. Sometimes he'd tolerate it and other times he would get frustrated. Eventually, he stopped taking my calls and stop responding to my texts. I could probably have coerced my wife into forcing him to talk to me or to respond, but to what end? What had been slowly dawning on me over the course of several years was brought into stark relief over the course of a few weeks: something was broken in my parenting. Whatever ideas I had about what I should do or what my parenting should look like were clearly not working. The parenting principles I had been using--tacitly it turns out--had led me to a place where my son just didn't want to talk to me at all, and I could see that forcing him to talk to me wouldn't work then and in fact, hadn't ever worked. 

Here is one other anecdote to illustrate this point. When I was in graduate school in the early aughts, I taught a couple of classes in my department. The standard teaching model was to go to class and lecture. I would spend the first part of the lecture giving some theoretical reason for what we were doing followed by some examples. Then I'd assign some homework or maybe give a quiz where they emulate what I had shown. After a few weeks I'd give them a test and see whether they had learned what I'd taught. We'd do this cycle about once a month, and then I'd give them a final exam and determine their final grade for the course based on a 0-100 scale, where and A is in the 90s, a B in the 80s, etc. Once I finished graduate school and got my first job on the faculty at a small liberal arts college, I did the same thing. I noticed though, that my students weren't learning as much as I thought. It's tempting--and I fell prey to this notion for several years--to think, "well I've done my job by showing them everything they need to know and if they fail, well it's because the can't or won't do the work necessary to learn the material." The revelation that my teaching may actually be ineffective was easier to come by in this case. I suspect it's because I had less of my personal identity invested in my teaching than in my life as a father, but whatever the reason, once I applied the least scrutiny to my ideas about teaching, they fell apart. 

Empiricism is my friend. It may be difficult to see that a specific idea isn't working, but I have had a lot more success personally and professionally when I more readily jettison old ideas (and ideals) that just don't work. This raises several questions:
  • How can I tell whether a given idea is working? 
  • Why does it take so long to see that something is wrong?
  • Where do these ineffective ideas come from?
  • If not this thing I've been doing, then what?

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