You Can Do It!
Don’t forget the fun. The family that plays together stays together.
Some families don’t have fun. We Lemans try to have fun everywhere. When we go into a restaurant, it’s not unusual for us to cheer—clap, hoot, and holler—for our waiter or waitress when he or she arrives at our table. We get to know them quickly—find out their name, what they did when they weren’t waiting tables, and what they’d love to be doing five years from now.
That’s because all of us know that we have a choice in life—we can choose to be all about ourselves, or we can choose to engage others and try to make a difference in their lives.
If you break the communication barrier, you find out that people are people. No matter our age, we all want to belong, to be wanted, to be needed, and to be appreciated. And we all need to lighten up sometimes and have fun.
Want a Fun Family Dinner?
If you want to have some great family fun and also get inside your kids’ heads and hearts—without them suspecting you’re doing so—you can use a trick from ol’ Adler himself (see, I told you knowing something about him would be practical).
Adler believed that if someone walked through his door, and he knew their birth order and asked about their early childhood memories, he could predict how that person viewed life.
If you ask the three siblings in your home to talk about the same event, they’d all report it differently. All of us tend to see life through our own glasses, and they’re different prescriptions, based on our life themes.
So try this at your next family dinner. Say, “You know, kids, I was thinking about an early memory of mine,” and share it. Then say, “Hey, what’s the earliest memory you have, Josh? What about you, Amanda? And you, Nick?”
With your firstborn, I can guarantee one of those early memories will be a negative one—such as falling off a bike or ladder and breaking his arm. Other typical memories of firstborns are ones of achievement—recognition, a star on a paper, figuring a puzzle out. These point out that even at an early age, firstborns are susceptible to thinking first about the negatives—they take life more seriously than the other birth orders. They also have a driving need to achieve.
Why can’t firstborns just think about positive things? Because the nature of the firstborn is that he spends a long part of his life being the standard bearer, corrected by both his mom and his dad. He’s been told, “I don’t care what they did. You’re the oldest. I expect more of you.” Or “Don’t give me that. You’re 13. Your brother is 9. I would think you’d be more responsible.” Firstborns are only tapping into the higher standards they’ve been held to as they recount their memories.
As for middleborns, their memories usually involve their friends and are typically less about family members. That’s because at home, the middleborn is often the invisible one, with the firstborn and the baby both being stars of the family show for different reasons. A common memory is of negotiating something, or of having to wear her older sister’s prom dress because it still looked new and her folks didn’t want to spend another $400 on a dress.
Other memories for middleborns would be ones of rebellion or where they were revealed as unique individuals. They’re the ones most likely to remember Mom announcing, “Here’s Steve, my firstborn, and my baby, Jennifer. And then there’s Jane.” The middleborn is truly stuck in the middle, and that’s why parents would be wise to give middleborns additional time with them, away from the other siblings.
Babies of the family will remember birthdays, surprises, presents, Christmases, special days, and events. That’s because those are consistent with a baby’s life view. Babies have never met a stranger; they’re all about where the next party is. They didn’t have their parents hovering over them (Mom and Dad were too tired by baby number three to hover), and besides, two other siblings were a buffer between them and Mom and Dad. The baby often got off scot-free in family skirmishes: “He’s a baby. He doesn’t know any better.”
Firstborns have adults (their parents) as their model from the get-go. In families of two or more children, each birth order is more influenced by the sibling(s) above them.
All Good (and Bad) Things Will Come to An End
As parents, we can get so caught up in the everyday struggles for attention, power, and control that we wonder, Will this ever end?
I guarantee you this stage of in-the-trenches parenting will be over faster than you can imagine. Your powerful child will grow up. And everything that you’ve taught her will become part of what she carries with her into adulthood.
When things get stressful in your home, you can always break the ice by having fun. Just as an apple a day keeps the doctor away, a dose of fun keeps the family together. Remember, your kids are kids. They need fun every single day.
So do you.
So many of us, though, act like a prison warden carrying a big stick: “You better hop to it, or else.” But you, parent, should see yourself in the role of relationship maker. Part of forming a relationship is providing fun. Even my wife, Sande, who is much more serious than I am, is good at telling me, “Leemie, you’ve got to lighten up. It’s not a big deal.” And she’s always right when she says it. (She is a firstborn, after all.)
Everybody in your family nest has a purpose for being there. Some of your kids will slide through your home like sorbet going down your throat, smooth as she goes. Others are more like peanut buster parfaits—full of bumpy, nutty surprises.
My cousin once reminded me of a wedding we attended as youngsters. As we stood outside the church, everybody else threw rice. I threw gravel.
But people do change, and powerful kids can be shaped to become powerful influencers who help others. When I received an award in my adult years from my high school for being a difference maker, some of the relatives who had been guests at that wedding showed up. They had to see it to believe it, since they knew my checkered history at the school.
Take a look around. Everyone has someone in their family who, like me, was written off by others early in life because he was such a handful. Now he’s the town baker, a respectable city official, or the town attorney.
Change is not only possible but highly probable for powerful kids. All it takes is someone like you to believe in them and to help transform their attention-seeking, power-driven behavior into a determination that doesn’t give up until a task is accomplished.
Then they’ll go far.
Just watch them.