Chapter 2, A Dad's Perspective. Questioning what society says-- My name is Jeff. I'm a dad of three kids living in Southwest Washington state. I started to notice that my kids were on the neurodiversity spectrum early. Zach, my oldest, was slow in early childhood speech acquisition, and there was talk that he might be mildly autistic as young as three.

Samantha is funny. Within the first six months of her life, one of the things that she would like to do is bonk heads with me. If I picked her up and held her, she would look at me and then butt her head up against mine. And so from a very, very early age, I suspected that she was different and in a different way than Zach as well. She's actually a lot like me. I feel for her in that regard.

Beth is probably right in the middle of the bell curve. She's about as in the middle of the bell curve in terms of development and in terms of social skills as you can get. Well, actually, in terms of social skills, she's probably significantly towards the more social, pro-social side of the bell curve.

For Zach and Samantha, we expected they were on the neurodiversity spectrum pretty early on. Now, as a parent, there was a push to pathologize immediately, to create my son's language issues as some kind of a disorder. I had done enough linguistic study when I was in college to know that early childhood language acquisition is incredibly variable from individual to individual. So although I went along with the speech therapy and that kind of thing, I resisted medication until he was probably in fifth or sixth grade. And by then, he had a diagnosis for ADHD. He's been on Vyvanse or Concerta, one of those two, for a long time. Samantha is also on Concerta.

My perspective was that by applying a label like ADHD or autism, what we were doing is pathologizing a portion of the normal expression of two things. We're pathologizing a normal expression of human variability, and number two, we are internalizing behaviors that may very well have strong external factors while not addressing those external factors. We only treat it as a pathology within the individual who's expressing it as if, having a person who had sleeplessness because they were in a room with a chainsaw, we gave them drugs instead of turning the chainsaw off.

The kids themselves have never really either embraced or rejected the labels that have been offered, although both of them are still on the medication and voluntarily. Samantha went off for about a year and a half voluntarily, although I think she felt some pressure from me to try. But she struggled with school and decided she wanted to go back on.

I'm supportive of it either way, and I was really self reproving that, when I went back and reflected on our past, I could see where she got the idea that I disapproved. And I don't. It's just medication is a difficult thing to get into because I had concerns.

Picking and choosing our battles-- I think the biggest thing that has helped my sanity and my relationship with the kids is that, to a large extent, we pick and choose the things we get upset about. So I've released most expectations about their behavior other than common courtesy, although that's never been an issue. For example, if chores don't get done, I don't take that personally or get angry about it. I don't have any attachment to it. I'm just as happy doing the dishes myself if I need to. I'm happier doing that than enraging in some kind of conflict or attempting to extract something from somebody else.

I recognize that's not a universally positive position to be in because I do feel the need to provide guidance. But I don't feel that I have the right to insist that my guidance be accepted. A lot of this is not based in principle. A lot of it is based on observation and experience of trying it the other way.

I was willing to yell and apply whatever pressure, and punishment, and threats, and cajolery in order to try to get something done. And it never seemed to work. It didn't produce any kind of consistent outcome other than conflict. And the kids didn't seem to be getting any better for it. In other words, they didn't seem to be more uniformly fulfilling my expectations as a result of me being the taskmaster.

And it did definitely impact our relationship. It definitely reduced their willingness to be around me and their willingness to be open and that kind of thing. My own personal experience is that, for all the pressure that parents put on kids, most of them do find their way in the long run. And all the trials, and tribulations, and strife, and the conflict, and everything else that happened in that narrow band between age 10 and 20 ends up never having really accomplished much at all other than degrading the relationship and producing a lot of stress for everybody involved.

When my son was 11, I remember standing behind him when he was trying to do his math homework that was way past due. He had told us it was done, and it wasn't done. I was standing behind him while he was sitting at the computer trying to do the homework. There were eight problems that he had to get through, and it was just eight problems.

It could be done in 15 minutes if he just powered through it. But he couldn't make himself do it. And so I was reduced to standing behind him, saying, now do this one. What's this one? And he did it. And then all right, that one's done. Now go on to the next one.

He was crying, and I was shouting. And it was the most toxic thing you can possibly imagine. I didn't like myself. I didn't think that I would be the kind of that a kid would want to remember when they look back on their childhood.

It was right around that time I remembered my own experience in school and said, you know what? It'll work out. It will seriously work out. Life works out. If people are not too emotionally damaged, they figure it out at some point, and it all works out.

Maybe it's possible, if I'd put tons of pressure on Zach and done everything in some different way, that right now he'd be applying for scholarships to a prestigious universities instead of finishing up his general ed at a community college and looking at the University of Washington. But I don't care about that, and I don't think it's really that important.

And who knows? Maybe he'd be applying to universities, or maybe he'd be a basket-case drug addict instead of the generally happy kid that he is. So I feel pretty good. He's not committing suicide. He's not hurting anybody else. He's a good person with a good heart. They all are, really. And that's to me more important than any amount of As, or academic accolades, or that thing.

There's still a lot of pressure from general society, and I'm very fortunate that when I was growing up, my dad and stepmom were very supportive. My parents weren't pushing us kids academically or laying lots of fear messages on me, mainly because I think they were employed as teachers. As a result, the approval of others and making sure that we hit the right buttons in the status game by having our kids excel at school don't really have any place to get a grip on me because I don't acknowledge those things as being valuable as other people pretend they are.

I mean, don't get me wrong. If Zach had an amazing focus on astrophysics and that was all he wanted to do and he wanted to get into MIT, I'd be right behind him doing whatever I could to help him get there. But he hasn't found his passion yet. So until you found your passion, why push into something that doesn't matter?

Raising my kids with different expectations-- the idea that this generation doesn't want to move out and they're still living with their parents is an incredibly recent cultural evolution that is less than 100 years old. The idea that kids at 18 or in their early 20s are out of the house and moving to a different city didn't happen until really recently in history. You stayed with the family until you got married, and then the two families together would help you set up a homestead, usually within a short distance from the other two families.

The idea that kids should leave the home and go out away from the family is such an incredibly new human behavioral pattern, and I'm not at all convinced it's a healthy one. To me, one of the best things that I've observed about kids is that they don't listen, but they do watch. So if you tell them to do something, they're not terribly likely to hear what you're saying. But if you model a behavior consistently, then you at least have the opportunity and the chance that they will pick up on that consistency and integrity in your own actions.

Maybe that's the key difference. I think we see children now almost as a product, something that we are producing that has quality control, that has expectations of performance, that has metrics that it needs to meet because it's a product. It's representative of us as a corporation. We're the producers, and the product is our children.

And that was never a thing before. Children weren't a product. The children were a part of the family. They were part of the tribe.

When people talk to me about how I'm being a bad parent, first of all, I reject the idea of blame. The most I will accept is responsibility, not that you bear responsibility like it's a weight on your shoulders but that you, for whatever reason, are the person who is in a position to be able to respond to the facts and to the conditions that you encounter as opposed to reacting to the emotional weight of those.

For example, if I'm walking down the street and I happen to notice a piece of trash lying on the sidewalk, to me, in that moment, I become responsible for that piece of trash. I'm not going to bear any guilt if I walk away. But because I have noticed it, I now have a choice to respond or to not respond. At that point, it becomes dependent on my own internal moral values, and compass, and ethics, and everything else.

So now that I've noticed the piece of trash, if I choose to leave it behind, yeah, some part of me will say, so you're the kind of person who leaves trash behind. Interesting data point. I don't want to be that person, not because I'm worried about what anybody outside of me would say but because I've chosen to lay that on myself and say, OK, well, if everybody did that, then the world would be a cesspool.

So I reject the idea of blame in the first place. I think that's where a lot of the emotional rejection of responsibility comes from because it's not that it's your fault. It's just that this is where we are. If you wish to change it, you need to put different energy into the situation than you're putting in right now. And if you're not capable of putting in different energy, then maybe that's the place to start. Why aren't you capable?

So if you don't have that extra energy to expand to change your behavior with relation to your kid, maybe it's time to look at whatever it is you're carrying around inside yourself that's making it impossible for you to do that because it's not going to go away. It's not going to change magically by itself. You can't go on being what you've always been and expecting that somehow things will change around you.

So here's my message to other parents. I make a specific effort to always greet my kids cheerfully, regardless of what they come back at me with. Samantha in the morning these days is surly beyond belief. I've had her just walk into the kitchen and say, hey honey. And then she just turns around and walks out immediately.

I could take that personally, but for some reason, I don't. I figure she's dealing with whatever she's dealing with. And my own actions are, at least in my own eyes, defensible.