folio

We walk on eggshells, lest the mildest intervention, instruction, or expression of dissatisfaction result in another strop, tantrum, or explosion.

In school, teachers don’t have time for tiptoes. Not in a room full of thirty kids with hormones raging.

Their strategy is a loud rebuke in front of everyone, which will prompt an equally loud counteraction from the troublesome one, landing them with yet another detention.

Back home, we’re treading on eggshells again. They bring the rebuke at school back with them and act out in kind, attacking anyone or anything that gets in their way.

Of course, we find this hard to deal with. We wonder where we went wrong. How did those sweet kids, once so kind, helpful, and polite, become these rude, aggressive brutes.

If we too snap, is it any surprise? But when we do, regrets soon follow. Maybe we are to blame. Maybe our own unresolved issues have caused all this. Maybe we didn’t do enough.

So we try another strategy. Kindness. Listening. Encouragement. Guidance. Patience.

But this only disgruntles the concientous one, who has never had a detention and is studying hard. To them, this is so unfair. If they did that, they protest, they would be in so much trouble. And so now it is their time to flare up, spitting insults.

Give em tough love, would be the response of some. Let them learn the hard way that actions have consequences. Let them learn that it’s a brutal world out there.

Well, yes, it is. But our job as parents is to prepare them for that world by giving them the tools to navigate its many paths.

One of those tools is academic success. To intervene where their teachers have already written them off as failures who will flunk their exams. So we offer words of encouragement instead of a self-fulfilling prophesy.

Here, I dig into my own experience, recalling how I interrupted the prophesies of those around me by studying hard in my final months of school. If you put your mind to it, I say, you can prove everyone wrong too.

Yes, we’re walking on eggshells. But that’s not an insult. It’s what you do as parents, trying to bring the best out of your children in difficult circumstances. For adoptive parents, those circumstances could be more difficult than anyone could imagine.

But we try our best, resetting often, tolerating what is sometimes hard to tolerate. Because we want the best for these kids who had the most difficult start to life. We want them to succeed, whatever success looks like.

So to patience. Kindness. Listening. Guidance. Investment in tuition. Encouragement. Friendship. Tolerance. Yes, and walking barefoot on jagged eggshells.