My wife and I had modest ambitions about decorating our home before our children arrived. Given our overstuffed work lives, we wanted our home to have clean lines, an emphasis on negative space, and blues and greens to give a feeling of serenity.
By the time our third child reached elementary school, it was clear he had different design ideas. The clean lines had been replaced by shelves full of outsized Lego masterpieces, the negative spaces filled with craft materials and handy tools, and the blues and greens obscured by the wild patterns of fabrics employed in making countless handmade ski hats and movie-night blankets.
Serenity? That went away with not having one tabletop, cabinet, or couch free of clutter.
“Unless you put some of this junk back in your room, I’m taking it all to the garage,” I said to my son one day in a fit of fastidiousness.
“I promise I’ll put it away tomorrow,” he replied, not looking up from the newly assembled cardboard doghouse he was installing next to our couch.
As I stared at the giant canine box with an irritated look, my wife, who had developed a disturbingly higher tolerance for messiness, pulled me aside. “It’s a pretty good piece of work, isn’t it?” she reasoned.
Feeling sheepish — which happened so often I might as well join a woolly herd in New Zealand — I walked over to inspect the structure. It was surprisingly well designed. It had a geometrically balanced pitched roof, a circular window made with a clear plastic takeout lid, and an accurately measured opening perfect for our small dog.
“This is cool, kiddo.” My son nodded imperceptibly and walked away.
When praise gets lost
I turned to my wife. “What was that? I said I liked it.”
“Truthfully, after hearing you complain all the time, the compliment gets a little lost.”
So I went to my son’s room, where he was already using string and an old climbing carabiner to create a pulley. I apologized and told him again that I admired the doghouse. The kid shrugged. I realized this was more than being immunized by my complaints. This was part of a pattern. I would praise his trombone work after a concert, only to get a mumbled “Thanks.” I would remark on his improving math grade, followed by his “I should do better.”
What I came to understand was that my son honestly did not know how to take a compliment. Moreover, neither did my two elder sons or, for that matter, most of the high-school students I taught.
A different kind of gift
I decided to make a goal out of giving my sons a different kind of gift that holiday season: I wanted to teach them how to take a compliment.
Part one was reducing my criticisms and targeting my constructive advice so that, when I did give a compliment, it was not drowned out by negativity.
Part two was giving a proper compliment. The key is specificity — citing a particular action and not just saying, “You’re great.” Kids trust a compliment and actually know how to build off it when they understand exactly where they have gone right.
Part three was trickier: coaching my kids to receive praise with grace and appreciation that someone was taking the time to notice them. We all crave validation, but if we don’t make eye contact with our complimenter and drink it in when it’s served to us, especially since it gets rarer as we get older, then we inflict more ego suffering than we should.
The real gift was helping them savor praise as validation for the hard-working, unique people they are.
If I could do that just a little, I could live with all the messiness my boys could wreak upon my living room.
