Time and maturity have changed
my mind on kids and discipline

By David McElroy · July 21, 2018

I might have called this little girl a brat if I’d watched this scene 15 years ago. Maybe even 10 years ago. This little blonde girl appeared to be about 3 or 4. She was with her parents in Chick-fil-A — and she was having a loud and sudden meltdown.

I grew up believing children should always be controlled and composed. That belief followed me into my early adult life. I expected children to be little adults in child suits, always in control of their behavior, always perfectly obedient — like little robots.

The little girl in Chick-fil-A seemed sweet. I had talked with her a little bit in line while her parents and I both ordered. She seemed loving and kind. But she was tired from riding in a car all day. Her mom told me they had left Myrtle Beach, S.C., in the morning and they had been tied up for hours on I-20 west of Atlanta by a horrible traffic accident.

The sweet and loving little girl was just tired and cranky. Where I might once have criticized her — and her parents — I now felt empathy for all of them. And it made me think again about how much my attitudes have changed about how to raise children.

I was trained to be a little robot. I was always in control of myself. I could carry on perfectly correct and polite conversations in pretty much any adult situation. As far as I can recall, I was never seen out of control in public from the time I was old enough to understand what behavior my father required. Isn’t that the way all good kids act?

For a long time, I had contradictory attitudes about this aspect of my childhood. I came to understand that my father had used fear and intimidation to control us, but I was still proud of having been a perfect little child. Even though I didn’t think other children should go through what I went through, I somehow thought the perfect, robotic behavior should still be the standard.

It took me a long time to understand why my expectations for children’s behavior had to change. I didn’t want to accept that the perfectly obedient behavior I had displayed was rarely going to exist in a child without the rigid control I had grown to despise.

I know that perfect behavior in children is possible. Not only did I experience that from my sisters and me when we were young, but I’ve seen other families which appear to be the same. I’ve known families in which the children are always perfect, are always subdued, always under control — but I now feel suspicious of those families.

When I experience it now, it seems creepy — and I fear that those children are being subjected to the same sort of fierce anger and constant terror that controlled my life as a child. At this point, I’m more likely to have questions about the parenting of those fathers and mothers than I am of the ones whose children have some meltdowns from time to time.

I have no idea where the right balance is. I don’t claim to be an expert. I don’t expect people to listen to my brilliant ideas about how they ought to raise their children. More than ever, I’m certain that raising emotionally healthy children is the most difficult thing we do in life — and our goal has to be to minimize our mistakes, not find a way to make ourselves (or our children) perfect.

Children can be controlled by consistent force and fear. There was a time I would have favored that — and when I would have parented that way — but I’ve realized that getting compliance in the short term isn’t worth the damage it does to a child in the long term.

I’ve always known I wanted children, but when I was younger, I felt afraid to be a father — because I was afraid I might be too much like my father. I’m glad I’ve learned enough and matured enough that I no longer have that fear.

When I have children, they won’t be perfect. They might have meltdowns. I might not always be fully in control of their behavior. But they’re going to grow up feeling more confident and more loved than I did. I hope I can strike the right balance to raise healthy and happy children who will be able to grow and mature in healthier ways than I was allowed.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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