Parental Control

Nobody warned me that being a parent is really hard for a control freak. But then, only some people very close to me would see me as controlling. The archetypal control freak is outwardly neurotic, maybe a little aggressive about correcting others. I generally come off as quietly Type A, maybe a little stubborn, and having high standards. At work and in low-stakes personal situations, this makes me competent and put-together. Nobody sees the pressure I unintentionally put on myself to achieve good results. By extension, I put the same pressure on the people closest to me. I expect them to behave rationally and take the most efficient means to an end. And who is less rational than a child?

My husband and I are similar in this way. We're both logical thinkers who work in technical fields. We both get noticeably flustered when our six-year-old makes nonsensical choices, and then joke with each other about how silly it is that we want him to be rational. For instance, we've explained to him that our free time is limited on weekday evenings, so if he chooses Activity A then he won't be able to do Activity B later. Nevertheless, after doing Activity A, he will ask for Activity B after 8:00 PM and get upset when we tell him it's time for pajamas. The concept of trade-offs and scarcity does not jibe with his young brain, just as the inability to grasp that concept doesn't make sense to my overly programmed adult brain.

I'm not sure how my husband or other parents feel when confronted with child logic, but any time my loved one acts contrary to my expectation, it triggers any icy cold "fight or flight" response. The pettiest thing can be a trigger, whether it's his refusal to eat a sandwich that isn't cut the right way, or his insistence that grab is actually pronounced grav. My thoughts spawn too quickly to be coherent, but they amount to: "Oh my god this person is acting the wrong way, and I don't understand it because the way I expected is so obviously the right way, and now I want to correct them but I need to temper my reaction so I don't sound like a nag or a weirdo, but I do need to correct them because otherwise I have to sit with this uncomfortable feeling." This anxious, compulsive thinking is a way for me to avoid confronting whatever's at the root of my expectations.

Take the sandwich example. If my kid refuses to eat something I made for him, then he might eat nothing at that meal, or he will nibble on the less substantive parts of the meal. Either way I feel like he won't get enough nutrition. He is a very picky eater, so I start thinking about the entirety of the eating problem. I tend to fault my own parenting choices for his pickiness, so then I start thinking about my general deficiencies as a parent. There's a rapid spiraling of thoughts into places they don't need to go in that moment, and it typically comes out as anger directed at my son.

My dad used to get mad at me and my brother for petty things. It was hurtful; I hated it while I was growing up. And I don't make excuses for his lashing out, but I understand it now. We pour so much care into our kids, and I think we expect them to reciprocate by behaving properly. For me, there's an extra streak of perfectionism and anxiety that means I want my child's development to be a smooth road. I want him to fully take in the lessons his dad and I impart, to try foods that are good for him, to understand things the first time they are said. We try our best, but the reality is that his brain will develop in the way it is built to do, and life lessons will become cemented in their own time. We have limited control. And that's scary.