My nephew had been badly behaved his entire life, and my sister insisted it was “gentle parenting.” Then he took a baseball bat to my brand-new car while my sister stood there laughing. I didn’t yell or cry. I just got very, very calm.
And that’s when my sister should’ve started worrying. Let me tell you about my nephew, Jeremy, before I tell you what he did to my car. Jeremy is 10 and has been testing the limits of every room he’s ever walked into since he was approximately five.
He ignores rules, talks back to adults he’s never met, and treats other people’s belongings like props in a show he’s the star of. My sister, Kelsey, calls this “gentle parenting.” I call it something else entirely, but I’ll keep it polite. Whenever anyone in the family tried to redirect Jeremy, Kelsey had the same response, delivered in the same breezy tone: “You’re interfering with his development.”
She said it when Jeremy dumped pasta on our cousin’s lap at Thanksgiving because he wanted to sit at the adult table.
She said it again after he knocked over a display at the hardware store and just kept walking away. Eventually, the rest of the family stopped correcting Jeremy at all because Kelsey’s response always landed harder than whatever her son had done. “Kelsey,” I told her once, “your son is going to really hurt someone one day.”
She just laughed.
“You sound like Mom,” she said, as if that was something to be embarrassed about. The clearest example of what I’m talking about happened at our grandmother’s 80th birthday party last spring. My mom had ordered a beautiful three-layer vanilla cake from the local bakery.
It took her two weeks to decide on the design. White fondant, yellow roses, and Grandma’s name in gold lettering across the middle tier. Jeremy wanted chocolate.
He said it so loudly, twice, and when nobody moved to fix it, he picked up a serving spatula and shoved the entire top tier off the stand. It hit the dining room wall and slid down in a slow, yellow smear across my grandmother’s floral wallpaper. My grandmother stood at the head of the table, looked at her birthday cake on the floor, and said nothing.
She knew that some things aren’t worth the energy. When my mother tried to make a toast 10 minutes later, Jeremy talked loudly over her, using words a 10-year-old has no business knowing, let alone directing at his own grandmother. Then he demanded the chair my pregnant cousin was sitting in and glared at her until she got up.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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