When you thought I wasn’t looking --
I looked ...
And wanted to say thanks
For all those things you did

When you thought I wasn’t looking.

Excerpt from the poem “When You Thought I Wasn’t Looking” by Mary Rita Schilke Korzan

My wife and I work to instill certain values in our children.  We want them to treat people with compassion, help them when they could use a hand up, and go the extra mile to serve others. Of course, most of the time it seems like they completely ignore us - at least when it comes to other family members.  My wife and I try to model the right behavior, but we wonder how much of a difference it really makes.  It seems like my children, like all of us, are often consumed by the petty selfishness that keeps us from living a life of service to others.

I had an occasion recently to be surprised.  A few weeks ago I went through surgery and spent time afterwards recovering.  It wasn’t anything extremely major, but enough so that I was confined to our couch for the better part of a week.  During this time my children checked on me regularly, brought me water, encouraged me, and generally made me feel like I wasn’t in this predicament alone. My biggest concern was overcoming the shock that our children might have actually been listening to us.

As the excerpt from the poem at the beginning of this post indicates, our children are often looking at us and learning from us as we go about our daily life.  We have an impact on them, for good or for ill, which transcends the moment.  As our children reach adulthood, their character will be, in part at least, the accumulation of their life experiences growing up in our household.  It can be difficult to remember this as we go about our daily lives, but every so often we see the fruits of our labor reflected in our children.  It’s those moments that serve as an inspiration to continue teaching our children through our words and our actions.  Because you just never know, they might even be looking.

I don’t recall my mother often getting angry when I was young. I was a good kid, for the most part; for the rest, she had a lot of patience. I remember being slapped—once and soundly—for saying something a son should never say to, in front of, or near his mother. But the one thing that was always sure to cause her lip to curl was, ‘Huh?’

I’m sure I heard her. I couldn’t swim without earplugs, but there really wasn’t anything wrong with my ability to hear. Maybe I was inattentive and lazy, or maybe it just took me a while to realize that 1) Mom was speaking, 2) she was speaking to me, and c) that she should be taken seriously. It was never ‘Pardon?’ or ‘I’m sorry?’ or Excuse me?’ I didn’t even try to soften my response to ‘Hmm?’ It was constantly and off-handedly ‘Huh?’

It is, perhaps, one of the most frustrating things Ian does.

It used to be, ‘Wha’ you say?’, but Ian’s become more parsimonious with his vocabulary. Time is money and chocolate milk and Lincoln Logs, with none to spare for verbs and pronouns. Really, I understand all that. I know he doesn’t want to listen or be told. I understand the power of making Mommy and Daddy repeat themselves, the fleeting joy of having puppets dangle from your strings. I get it. I’d just prefer a little subtlety.

‘Ian, what’d you do in school today?’

‘Huh?’

‘Can you please put your shoes by the front door?’

‘Huh?’

‘Hon’, I ask, as an aside, whispering, Ian in the backseat, singing with the radio, ‘did you want to stop for ice cream?’

‘Where are we going for ice cream? I want ice cream! Can I have some ice cream? Daddy? Daddy? Mommy? Daddy? May I please have some ice cream?’

All I ask is a little consistency and subterfuge. A wink here, a nudge there. For my benefit and sanity. Both his mother and grandmother are drama teachers! The kid knows how to act! In his selective hearing, Ian is nothing if not brutally honest.

But now that I’m on my mother’s side of the fence, relegated to static and muted trumpets, it’s a wonder he hears me at all.

I have talked before about my love of theatre and how I feel when it pulls me away from my family.  Well, I have been either on stage or in rehearsal non-stop for over a year.  I was planning on taking a break after my last show, which ended in September.

That plan went out the window when my son came to me and said he wanted to audition for A Christmas Carol.  Actually, he said he wanted to audition with me for A Christmas Carol.  I wasn’t planning on auditioning, but he wanted to and, quite honestly, we thought he might have a better shot of making it if I auditioned as well.  I don’t know how true that is, but we auditioned and we both made it.

We have been in rehearsals for a few weeks now.  I have been having a blast sharing something I love with my son.  I had forgotten how it feels to share the stage with a loved one as it has been years since I have been on stage with my wife.

We actually met in a production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.  Sure, I had to hold some of her jewelry ransom to get her to agree to our first date, but that is a story for another time.  In between Joseph and the arrival of our kids, my wife and I were able to perform together several times.  Those are some of my most cherished memories and now I get to share that experience with my son.

I have talked before about how my wife and I try to remain open when it comes to finding things our children like to do.  While I would be equally proud to see my son excel at sports or academics or drawing or anything, I have to admit there is some extra fun and pride at watching him enjoy and be successful at something I love to do.

So, I guess I will have to wait until January for my much needed break.  That’s okay.  The memories I will be creating in the meantime are well worth the wait.

There’s no doubt that things have changed since we Generation Y’ers grew up. And though I suppose each generation of parents feels the same, I would venture a guess that few generations before ours have undergone such a dramatic change as we’ve seen in the last thirty years.

A couple of days ago I was chatting with a young lady about my children (naturally!) and I was telling her how my oldest son gets up anywhere between 5:30 and 6 a.m. each morning and my youngest son is not far behind. I explained how they probably got this from me because when I was a child, I’d do the same thing. Only then, I’d get up with my blanket, grab a pillow and go watch cartoons in the middle of the living room floor in front of the only TV in the house. It’s one of the high points of my childhood memory collection.

She then asked why couldn’t my son do the same thing rather than waking us up on the weekend, and this is when I realized what is so different about growing up today versus when we were children-technology. Technology has changed everything...and not always for the better.

The ironic thing is that technology is developed to make a task simpler and faster. Look at microwave appliances. What used to take minutes-to-hours to accomplish, can now be done in a fraction of the time. Same for cars and planes. But take something simple like today’s television. In very few homes do you find just a television set; there’s usually also a DVD/VCR, possibly a cable box or TIVO(tm) unit of some kind. And then bringing this all together is often a very complicated home theatre system.

So let’s take the simple task of watching cartoons:

30 years ago: pull the knob on the television and then turn another knob to one of 20 channels. Turn one more knob to the right or left to adjust the volume. Easy-peasy...bowl of cereal in your lap and you’re golden.

Today: turn on at least three different electronic devices using complicated remote controls with more than 20 buttons each. In many cases, navigate a series of menus to get to live TV and then read a channel guide to figure out what you want to watch. Figure out which of the three remote controls you need in order to adjust the volume, and then find the correct buttons to press.

What a three year old could easily figure out 30 years ago, is next to impossible today.

Now I’m not saying that this is a big problem, but it is indicative of the kinds of challenges today’s children face. I mean, when I was growing up, the most complicated thing I had to learn was which one of the levers to pull on my Green Machine to make it turn to the right; or maybe which tunnel to make Pac Man go through so you could escape those crafty little blue ghosts.

As further proof, have you been to the Sesame Street Web site lately? Even I stumble around for five minutes before I figure out how to get to wherever it is my kids want me to go. The really funny thing about all of this is that we are now developing more technology to simplify the simple technology we’ve already simplified.

I know...it’s mind-boggling.

For instance, take the Fisher Price Easy Link(tm) Internet Launch Pad. Basically, you hook it up to your computer, your child puts a plastic figure in the unit and the unit is keyed to automatically bring up that character’s Web site. So, put in Goofy, get the Disney site. Put in Elmo, get Sesame Street. The whole idea is that it frees up the parent from having to sit there at the computer and be a slave to your child’s ever-waning interests.

It’s crazy really, but we have no one to blame but ourselves. I guess at the end of the day the question we all have to ask is, “Would I rather get an extra hour of sleep on the weekend, or watch my football team play in high-def?”

Is there really a choice?