Setbacks

 I am vulnerable to black and white thinking, i.e. thinking in extreme terms. I have been thinking and writing about my experiences as a parent and how they relate to my experiences on our tandems, both in terms of the tandem riding as an allegory and as an actual tool in parenting. It's been hard to write these past few days because I have not been living up to my ideal as a parent (or tandem captain) lately. This is not necessarily new, but it's made it harder to write since the persistent thoughts that come back to me are that this blog is foolish and for naught. This is just an error in my thinking, but it is more difficult to write when things are not going according to plan. 

I have noticed that I've bothered lately by my son's unwillingness to help out around the house. In my mind he's not contributing to our family's unity since he doesn't seem to be interested in participating in the household. In addition a combination of my schedule, the weather, and his rigidity has meant that we haven't gone on many rides lately. He wants to go on longer rides on the tandem, but I haven't had time (or the inclination) to do that, so I've asked him to go on shorter tandem rides and some short single rides. He hasn't been as interested. This creates a feedback loop where we don't ride so it's harder to ride so we don't ride. We rode our singles a few days ago and yesterday we went for a 29 mile tandem ride in the afternoon. These were really helpful for us, and they were helpful for me to be able to write again.

The truth is that my relationship with my son is significantly better now than it ever has been before, but we still argue and retreat to our old ways of interacting at times. I have to be careful even how I write about this because he's a child, and the onus is really on me in terms of how I act and react. My wife used to say to me when he and I would get into fights to remember that I'm the adult. My response was usually something yes, I know but he started it. Even so, our arguments now are not that bad, and they don't lead to days of moldering resentment. I do, however, have to take some action to mitigate their damage.

One of the things that has been immeasurably helpful is the tandem rides. As in the Rock, Paper, Scissors post, I cannot think my way out of my malaise, but when he and I hop on the tandem or take a few rides together, it is a relief. It is a good way to get the physical to overtake the emotional, but it is also a genuine opportunity for us to practice working together, to share a burden. Yesterday we climbed a few hills. They were hard and we even had to stop near the top of the final climb, but he pushed harder when I asked him and was a legitimate partner. 

Popular posts from this blog

From Postulates to Working Principles

 Authoritarian parenting hasn't worked for me. Empirically, I can see that it doesn't produce the kind of relationship ideal I want in the family. Moreover, when I think about the assumptions that are behind that model, I see they are cynical and don't really match my view of the world, at least not the view I want to have. I can articulate some postulates to align my parenting with my values, but the question of how to turn those postulates into a working model remains.  I thought about my friend Jim again. We met when I was a graduate student and pretty quickly hit it off. He is the one who had suggested that I write down my ideals for a relationship, which turned out to be helpful. Jim is a sober alcoholic. He got sober in Alcoholics Anonymous . I learned a lot about AA from our conversations, and among the things I found most interesting is the organizational structure of AA. Most people know about the 12 Steps, and some know about the 12 Traditions, or at least many pe...
Read more

The Postulates

I have not found a first principles approach to many things to be effective, that is, when I usually start with a particular view of the world and then push that forward, the outcomes are either not the most desirable or don't match reality. Often this is because my a priori assumptions about the world are not firmly grounded and informed by my actual experience. I just have these ideas whose origins are murky. I have had significantly more success when I have adopted a backwards design approach, i.e. where I start by thinking of some specific outcome(s) I would like to achieve and then develop a model informed by the outcome(s). Further, it has been instructive to look at my current situation as outcomes of a model that I may have unintentionally adopted and examine the beliefs and assumptions that underlie that model. With that said, I decided with my parenting to incorporate some first principles into my model building. Briefly, I look at what my parenting looks like right now a...
Read more