In the age of GPS, it’s hard to remember that sometimes, before you take a journey, it’s good to have a map. This section describes a few locations on the (patchy, incomplete) conceptual map that guided my approach to parenting. Some of these I walked in with beforehand—a lot of them I learned along the way. Hopefully, a few will be helpful in providing some guidance to current and future parents on their own journeys.

Structure

One of my overriding philosophies toward . . . well, pretty much everything, to be honest . . . is structure.

In our fost-adopt training, we learned about the four kinds of parenting approaches:

* High love/low discipline—This results in spoiled kids who won’t listen to you after about age seven.
* Low love/high discipline—This results in kids who will do whatever you tell them out of fear, but can’t wait to leave home.
* Low love/low discipline—This gives you the worst result: Kids who are afraid all the time and feel like they are on their own. Major trust deficit.
* High love/high discipline—The ultimate.

Someday, when my kids write their own books, they can say how we did on the love side. My own sense is that most days here, especially early on, were something of a love fest, with lots of physical affection. Reading nights on the bed usually turned into wrestling matches, and I was famous at their elementary school for, when dropping them off in the morning, picking each kid up, lifting him to my eye level, and giving him a big smooch on the lips. (As an Italian, I taught my kids that this is expected behavior between men.)

As for the part of love that says, “Hey, somebody is really paying attention to me!” Hmmm. Being one (me) on two (them), I’m sure what they often felt was, “Hey, somebody is really paying attention to [this combined unit known as us kids]!” But I hope I managed to differentiate, at least once in a while. I guess we’ll find out in those future books.

On the flip side, I can say with confidence that I was pretty good about setting up discipline, or what I would call structure—clear expectations, roles, and responsibilities, with lots of consistency around rewards, consequences, and schedules. I guess this comes naturally to me: When I was an assistant director at the special ed high school, one of my tasks was to create the master schedule for roughly twenty students, coordinating their individual and group classes, counseling sessions, and other activities so that everyone got what they needed based on their personalized plans. It was a big puzzle, literally. My colleague Dominique and I used to sit with a big sheet of butcher paper on the floor, make a grid, and color in the different squares to map who was where doing what. Over a two-year span, we managed to get everyone into their slots without even one straggler.

When I got my kids, I made a conscious decision to make myself central in their lives, to a point that others might consider (and that, in retrospect, maybe was) excessive. Want something to eat? Ask. Watch TV? Same. Going outside? Let me know. Have a lot of homework and need to skip chores? Don’t just blow them off—talk to me about it. And so on, and so on.

My reasoning was twofold: (a) They had never had a parent who was a center, so I felt like we had a lot of catching up to do. And (b) I wanted to try to instill the belief—especially in Daveon—that it’s possible to get what you want by going through the person who can provide it to you. You don’t have to figure out everything on your own (he did), you can trust adults (he didn’t), and they won’t let you down (they had). So rather than him raiding the fridge on a whim, or walking up to someone he had just met and fiddling around with their hair, we spent a lot of time—a lot—on, “Ask. If you want something, or want to touch someone, just ask. You can trust that the answer will be yes, or at least, we’ll work something out.”

This message didn’t always sink in—often, for example, when told to close the fridge door and ask for something to eat, Daveon just decided he wasn’t hungry and left the kitchen. But I felt that it was important to reinforce the message whenever possible. You can get what you want, and the people around you will be happy to provide it. And of all those people, the main provider is me.

As part of our discipline/structure puzzle, we had charts. Lots and lots of charts. Schedule charts, chore charts, reward charts, consequence charts. Everything broken down into the most understandable, clearly communicated chunk possible (shades of our school butcher paper grid). Our walls were an art gallery of chart.

The deal with the charts was, anything that went on them was negotiable. We could talk about appropriate rewards and consequences, or how you want to schedule your day (up to a point), or who feeds which pet when, etc., etc. But in the end, if it was on the chart, it was law—at least until someone asked if we could make changes.

The charts faded into history after the first few years, although they clearly served their purpose. I actually had to tell Mark at a later point that I really didn’t need to know if he wanted a snack or was going to watch TV. He was seventeen. I guess maybe I did the structure thing a little too well.

But whether you use charts or butcher paper or some other system, I encourage every parent to come up with some kind of workable structure for your family’s day-to-day stuff around schedules, behavior, and so on. It makes the kids feel safer—extra important for fost-adopt kids—and it makes your life a lot easier. Well, OK, a little easier—if parenting is often like climbing Mt. Everest, in a blizzard, with only a couple of ice axes and no rope, a workable structure least gives you some slightly better quality tools.

Perspective

Over the years, I have spent a fair amount of time rewashing dishes that my kids supposedly washed. (Because I am a Neanderthal, and mean, we don’t have a dishwasher.) This can—and did—lead me to useful thoughts such as, “Boy, when my kids do the dishes, they don’t do a very good job.”

Most of the time, when I have such thoughts, my mind focuses on the last part, and I feel aggravated. The next meal together would then usually include me making such witty comments as, “The whole point of cleaning dishes is to get them clean,” followed by step-by-step instructions. I’m sure the kids were taking careful notes.

However, on the rare occasions that I was in wise-mind mode, I remembered that the first part of the sentence is pretty important, also: “When my kids do the dishes . . .”

From about our second week together, until the day we dropped Daveon off at college, my kids had two dish nights per week. I took the other two, and the seventh day was movie night, where we ordered a pizza or otherwise slummed it.* On your dish night, you set and cleared the table, washed the dishes, and soaked the pots and pans. My kids did this for two nights a week each, for years, without ever complaining . . . once.

(* Hey, it worked for God.)

Other things they did consistently:

* Clean their rooms weekly.*
* Do their own laundry.
* Strip their beds, wash the sheets, and put it all back together. In fact, during his bedwetting years (roughly ages five to eight), Mark would strip the soiled sheets, spray and wipe the mattress cover, and put new sheets on—all by himself, at one in the morning. The more I think about it, the more I realize how impressive that was.
* Feed the rabbits and clean their litter box and cage.
* Empty the trash, recycling, and compost bins on trash night, and spray and wipe them out.
* Cook dinner for the family once a month each, from start to finish—as described elsewhere.

(*As the boys got older, the definitions of both “clean” and “weekly” became subject to increasingly loose interpretation.)

All of which leads to the big lesson learned: When you’re raising kids, it’s easy to lose perspective. Over time, it becomes all too simple to shift your thinking from, “Hey, you did your seventeen chores this week!” to, “Hey, when you did your seventeen chores this week, you left a sock on the floor!”

Not that I’m speaking from experience.

Perspective challenges come in all shapes and sizes. When he was in high school, Daveon came home one day with a backpack he had found on the sidewalk near BART. It contained a laptop and an iPad. He tried to see if it belonged to anyone near where he found it, but when no one claimed it, he brought it home to see if we could identify the owner. We could, and did, and the guy got it back the next day.

Later that night, when Daveon was supposedly doing his homework, I found out he spent most of that hour texting. Right away my mind went to, “You said you were doing your homework, but it turns out you were texting”—as if this were some violation of the sacred family trust. Never mind the fact that this is the same kid who could have easily hidden the cool and expensive gadgets he found in his room, undetected by Dad—but who did the right thing and presented them front and center as soon as he walked in the door.

I was usually better at perspective when it applied to how other people treat my kids. Pretty much always, but during elementary school especially, my kids were quite chatty with their friends in class. This, believe it or not, annoyed their teachers. From kindergarten through twelfth grade, I had more “Daveon/Mark talks a lot in class” conversations than I care to remember. As part of those conversations, I always felt obligated to say something like: “These boys had somewhere between four and seven homes by the time I got them, and have never known either of their biological parents. On the one hand, I understand that it’s a pain when they talk in class, and I’ll get on it.

On the other, quite honestly, if the worst thing anyone can say about either kid is that he is chatty, I think we’re doing pretty good.”

There’s a fost-adopt parent tip that you should give your kids four compliments for every one criticism. I’d say that’s about right. If you have the perspective to see that your kids are taking care of business eighty percent of the time, you’re on the right track.

Fit

To all new and prospective parents out there: After many years in the parenting game, I highly recommend that you become good friends with the concept of fit. This seriously might be the single most important concept that determines whether your parenting and family life will be good, great, or miserable. What I’ve learned is, one size definitely does not fit all. The boys and I spent much of our time together trying to find the right fit—in terms of schools, activities, you name it.

For adoptive parents, you are introduced to fit the day you start the search process for your kids. All children have both good and challenging qualities—what you want is to find the kids who are the right fit for your personality, values, and lifestyle. This is just my opinion, but I believe detecting fit is a matter of gut-level, versus brain-level, knowledge. A kid can look perfect—or very imperfect—on paper, but when you meet him or her in person, something kicks in that tells you “Of course” or “No way” or “Maybe . . . .” (For the maybes, I’d recommend a second or third visit before you commit.)

And that’s just the beginning. From the point at which you and your kids become a family, you can apply fit to . . . well, to pretty much everything that follows. Over the years, we had to suss out fit for obvious things like babysitters, coaches, therapists, tutors, and music teachers—but also to less-obvious things like behavioral systems, travel destinations, movie picks, restaurants, and so on. As just one random example, the boys and I had more fun on our previously-described first trip to Victoria (where there is Nothing. To. Do.), than we did on our one trip to Hawaii. All because the former, with its quirky charm, was more us at the time.

Fit.

Probably the most important area in which fit applies is choosing a school. As I wrote about earlier, between the two of them, my kids over the years attended two schools with great reputations, two with funky reputations, and one that no one ever heard of (school-switching was kind of a hobby in our family). Ranking the schools from the most positive experience to the most negative one, the order looks something like this:

* Funky reputation school 1
* School no one ever heard of
* Funky reputation school 2
* Great reputation school 1
* Great reputation school 2*

(*You remember this place. This experience was so negative, I’m tempted to make up some other schools just to move this one further down the list.)

As you can see, in our experience, the so-called “great” schools ended up as what I fondly refer to as “awful” fits for one kid or the other, or both.

To help determine fit regarding a given school, activity, or person for your kid, I recommend getting as much information as possible. I find talking to folks—administration, teachers, parents—more useful than reading information or looking at stats and achievements. (Believe it or not, most places highlight their most positive stats and achievements in their recruiting information.) Fit is primarily about the human element, so the more human contact before making a decision, the better.

A few more thoughts about this: If you’re getting input from someone and find that you personally don’t have a fit with that person— their values, vision, etc., don’t line up with yours—listen carefully to their advice. And then do the exact opposite. And if someone throws an “of course” into their advice: “Of course you want to send your kid to [name of teacher/school/camp/coach/etc.]” . . . run screaming as far as you can get.

(Full disclosure: Before Daveon enrolled, awful school connected us with a current student and his mom as sort of a “buddy family.” During our first chat, I was struck by how the mom really didn’t have anything positive to say about the place. It was “fine,” there were “challenges,” the support was “OK.” Given that I felt a kinship with this mom—as Daveon did with her kid—I should have taken her at her word. This was, at best, going to be an “ehh” fit. The punch line: She pulled her kid out even before eighth grade. Always pay attention to signs.)

Lest you think finding the right fit is challenging . . . well, you’re correct. Why? Because . . .

The right fit for you, and the right fit for your kid, are often (always?) two different things. The school that you love so much and think, “Shoot, I wish I could go here”? Your kid will hate it. And when you look more closely, you’ll realize that it’s really not the right place for him or her. So, you pick the kid’s best fit—which is, of course, the one you yourself would avoid like the plague—and spend the next several years becoming a master at gritting your teeth during parent/ teacher conferences and on back-to-school night.

As your kids grow and change, so do the things that fit. Much as you spend every six months buying them a new pair of shoes (Payless was my best friend until the boys’ feet stopped growing), you could make a full-time career out of trying to keep up with your kids’ changing interests and needs and looking for the perfect—if temporary— match. This is when you inadvertently become a Taoist, as you seek to attain the middle path between your kids’ needs and your sanity.

Finding fit requires taking the time to learn both yourself and kids pretty intimately, but it has the potential to reap amazing rewards. Plenty of people will tell you what you should do with and for your kids, but when you nail the right fit? Solid gold.

Independence

When I took a Deaf culture class years ago as part of an American Sign Language program, one of the topics we covered was child rearing. In Deaf culture, the point of raising children is to carry on the norms and values of the culture. The expectation is that the children will (a) see themselves primarily as members of the community and (b) remain connected to those norms and values as they themselves become adults. In Hearing culture—as the Deaf community calls the rest of us—the goal of child raising is to emphasize independence and individuality. The thought is that, as an adult, the child will (a) step out from the existing community values and norms and (b) forge his or her own path. Although obviously the child’s own path might include a healthy dose of earlier generational norms—and although most of the Deaf people I’ve met over the years have quite distinct, individual personalities—the basic premise remains: Deaf adults primarily see Deaf children as carriers of existing culture, while Hearing adults push their children to explore and create their own independent experience.

In case anyone is wondering, I am not Deaf.

I started fostering (no pun intended) independence pretty much from the day the kids crossed the doorway officially for the first time. I’ve mentioned many of these examples already. From the beginning, they had to clean their own rooms and make their own breakfasts and lunches. Not long after, they began the monthly cooking experiment I’ve also previously described. There was also a period where they cleaned the bathrooms, on the theory that ninety-five percent of the crud came from them. This ended when I realized that it was faster for me to clean the actual crud than to do a second pass on whatever was left after they … did whatever it was they did in there.*

(*Despite their best efforts, Hazel they are not. And if you get that reference, there’s an AARP flyer in the mail on its way to you.)

Perhaps the most obvious marker of the kids’ independence was how, from a relatively early age, they traveled from place to place by themselves. I did drive them to their elementary school, even though both we and the school are a block or two from BART stations. This was mostly because I wasn’t convinced they would consistently get on the right train. And because I could see lots of arguments when one was sure it was the red line, and the other was sure it was the yellow line, and then I would be getting regular calls from the BART police. On the one hand, being on a first-name basis with a BART officer might not be a bad thing, depending on the gender and level of hotness. On the other … easier just to get in the car.

I usually drove them to their first middle school as well, because there was no easy way to get there by train or bus. But from that point on—say, around age thirteen—they more or less did it on their own. School, practices, lessons, track meets, social engagements—even when I could drive them, more and more we made it a habit for them to get there and back on their own. To the point where, even if I offered to drive, they often preferred to hop the bus or train. Which I’m sure they were doing just to be nice, because clearly, they would rather be in the passenger seat with Dad and his jazz or weird underground hip-hop CDs.

Of course, getting around independently reached a new level when each kid began driving. This cut me out entirely as the middleman, even when a car was required. At one point, Daveon actually offered to drive Mark to his twice-weekly 6 a.m. skating sessions. For Daveon, 1 p.m. is a reasonable time to wake up on the weekend—so this was noteworthy to the point of being a bit alarming. It didn’t stop me from taking him up on the offer, of course.

Remember the whole Hearing culture thing, where the goal in raising your kids is to get them to the point where they don’t need you? I think I might have been kind of an overachiever in that department. Or maybe the kids were just doing me a favor and getting me gradually acclimated to the point where I became an empty-nester, so it wouldn’t be too much of a shock. They’re thoughtful like that.

Communication

I know what you’re thinking: He’s writing a book about raising two boys, and he includes a section on communication? I thought this was supposed to be nonfiction.

Hey: Just because something is important to our story as a family, doesn’t mean we were necessarily good at it.

This certainly wasn’t for lack of effort. I tried every which way from Sunday to stress communication with my kids:

* Ask for what you want.
* Let other people know how you’re feeling.
* If somebody’s doing something that bothers you, tell them (preferably nicely).
* If you do something wrong, admit it.
* If you keep saying, “Gee those just-baked cookies smell good,” you can dream about them all you want, but they’re getting wrapped for the school fundraiser. If you directly ask for one—assuming we didn’t just come back from ice cream*—it’s (maybe) yours.

(*Unless you were our previously-described babysitter, in which case, having a cookie after coming back from ice cream was clearly an acceptable option.)

For what it’s worth, I did try to model this behavior for my kids— directly asking them to help bring in the groceries rather than passive-aggressively waiting until they didn’t do it, and then shouting. For what it’s worth, I’d say I was successful at this maybe half the time.

It makes sense that the kids would have trouble asking for what they want. Their early experiences taught them two contradictory lessons:

* You can’t trust adults. If you want something, you have to figure out how to get it on your own.
* Even with all that figuring, you can’t have what you really want—since what you really want is safety and stability, which is what you aren’t getting from those adults (whose job it is to provide these), which is why you can’t trust them.

I spent a lot of time working with the boys on that first one. As I mentioned, in the first year, I spent all kinds of time coaching Daveon to tell me he was hungry instead of raiding the refrigerator—i.e., you can ask for what you want and trust that you will get it. I like to think that with all that effort, we chipped away at at least a few layers. If you end up in a relationship with one of my kids in the future, drop me a line and let me know how they do with the asking/trusting thing.

Another communication rule: If you are sick, or tired, or stressed, or whatever: Speak up. If you act like a nut, you will get busted for acting like a nut—that’s just how we roll. But if there’s stuff going on that’s making it hard for you to avoid nuttiness—a headache or an exam tomorrow or a couple nights of poor sleep—I’ll cut you a good deal of slack. But I can only do that if I know what’s going on. And I can only know if you tell me.

As I liked to say to the kids: “Of the million jobs I signed up for when I became a parent, mind reader was not one of them.”

Which brings me to the most challenging—and maybe most important—aspect of communication I tried to get across to the boys: If you mess up, admit it. I know this is hard for all kids, not to mention many adults. But for kids who got bounced around a lot, I think “doing something wrong” brings up a particular terror. Messing up equals moving out, another separation, another loss. This is what the kid-mind believes, even though the moves had nothing to do with their behavior. So it became even more important, but difficult, to get the point across that everybody messes up, it’s normal and OK, and the best thing to do is just let someone know what happened.

So again, modeling. When I myself messed up about something (shocking, I know!), I made an effort to come clean quickly and simply. Walk the walk. I also would sometimes adjust consequences for behavior that was reported honestly. If either one fessed up about something that would normally be a level 5 crime—say, the time one kid filched a few dollars out of the petty cash stash—because of your honesty, we’ll move the consequences down to a level 2 or 3. Or even, as in this particular case, drop all consequences entirely (assuming this isn’t a repeat offense, of course).

There’s one more important aspect to our communication life. I did and continue to regularly check in about—and ask the kids to talk to me about—where their thoughts and actions are regarding alcohol, other drugs, and sex. I’ve really encouraged them to let me know if and when they feel ready to explore any of the above—and certainly if they already have. I’ve explained that the goal is not to punish or criticize them, but just to stay in the loop.

I have a few reasons for this. First, I want to try to normalize their choices and behaviors, so they don’t think there’s anything dirty or wrong about them (sex, especially—not that, as a gay man, I’m sensitive about having sex labeled bad or anything). Second, I do want to be able to check in about how they’re approaching any of these behaviors, to get a sense if they’re doing so in as safe, least-health-risky a way as possible. And third, if some unexpected outcome should take place based on their choices, keeping current would help me not get caught off-guard and allow for a better, more reasoned response.

So far, I think, so good. There’s certainly plenty they’ve shared, whatever percent of reality that actually reflects. So maybe our communication story isn’t fiction after all.

Next Chapter: Strategies