The Dadly Virtues: Adventures from the Worst Job You'll Ever Love by

Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Templeton Press
Published: 2015-05-04T00:00:00+00:00

There were other problems along the way. Personal problems. When my son was around fourteen he suddenly became very morose and angry. I asked him what was wrong, and he told me that a couple of kids at school were giving him a hard time. One kid had a particularly nasty turn of phrase. My son was a big kid; his tormenter was not. I asked him if he was afraid of the kid, and he said no. I told him to go to school the next day, grab the kid by the throat, jam him into an empty locker and say that he would knock all his teeth down his throat if he ever bothered him again.

“But I’ll get suspended if I do that,” he protested.

“Oh. I see. You’ll get suspended and you’ll have to spend a few days at home watching television. Where’s the downside there?”

My son got a funny look on his face. He stopped being morose. He stopped being angry. He never told me what happened the next day at school. But I think that cheap punk got jammed right into a locker. My wife was mortified when she found out the advice I’d given my son. It seemed so crude, primeval. But it worked. As I explained to her at the time, we were both just doing the best we could with the resources available to us. We were making this stuff up as we went along.

Much of our experience as parents was figuring out ways to get our kids through the next school year. I told my son that I would buy him a new, powerful computer if he worked harder at French. His French grades got worse. We took the kids to Australia for two weeks one year in exchange for them no longer bellyaching about school. It was a long, brutal flight, but it meant no school for two weeks. They loved it. We took them to Los Angeles, Dublin, and Paris. They loved that, too. But we also took them to less glamorous places like Port Royal, Minneapolis, Aberdeen, Amiens, and Cardiff. They loved those places, too. One year we packed them up and took them to Raleigh-Durham for a week. They even enjoyed that. Weird kids. Anywhere I went for work, they were happy to go. Anything to get out of school. Anything.

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