Since my last post, Steve Jobs: Innovator, Entrepreneur, and Challenging Boy, we have all heard the sad news of Steve Jobs’s passing. Guy Kawasaki, who worked with Jobs at Apple, posted on his blog in memory of Steve: “What I Learned from Steve Jobs.” Here’s a post on what we can learn from Steve Jobs about life with a challenging boy.
Dealing with a Defiant Child: Lessons Learned from Steve Jobs
1. “You can’t connect the dots looking forward.” Steve Jobs’s 2005 Commencement address at Stanford.
You can’t connect the dots looking forward was Jobs’s way of saying you don’t know what the future holds. It’s natural when you have a challenging boy to be very worried about your child’s future. You wonder if the power-struggles with you, teachers and other authority figures will ever stop. You worry he won’t ever be happy. Maybe you fear he won’t be able to make a life for himself: he’ll drop out of school, or not be able to hold down a job, or not have a relationship, or live in your basement.
These fears, while natural, make life with a challenging child much harder. If we worry that every power-struggle or incident report from school takes our child closer to a terrible future, we feel under tremendous pressure to change things NOW! Trying to change things NOW inevitably makes them worse. Constructive, sustainable change takes time.
Steve Jobs really was a challenging boy. He was constantly testing limits. He was impatient, stubborn, rebellious, and uncontrollable. He had a quick temper and was determined to get his own way no matter what. He overwhelmed his parents and they did worry about him. However, Steve Jobs’s life story tells us that these very qualities played a major role in his success. His story shows us that challenging kids aren’t challenging because they are bad. They are challenging because they care deeply about how things are done. They have great conviction that their way is the right way to do things and they are driven to pursue their vision.
It’s easy for parents and teachers to mistakenly view the challenging boy’s determination to do things his way, according to his vision as self-centeredness, or oppositionality, or defiance, rather than for what it is – the need to follow the beat of a very loud and insistent internal drummer.
We need to remember that these kids have great potential as entrepreneurs, leaders, and agents of change. We need to teach them the skills of leadership and collaboration – not compliance.
Steve Jobs’s commencement address and life story teach us to worry less about our sons’ future and to have more faith in them and in ourselves.
2. “Experts are clueless.” Guy Kawasaki’s blog “What I learned from Steve Jobs.”
Families, friends, and even strangers seem to be always offering advice when you have a challenging boy. It can make you feel like a bad parent and that you are to blame for the struggles that you are having with your son. Well let me tell you, they don’t know what they are talking about, unless they’ve also had a challenging kid. Even if they have had a challenging child they might not know what they are talking about because they haven’t had your challenging child.
The same is true for experts. When it comes to your challenging boy, they don’t know what they are talking about either. On just about every issue in parenting you can find equally experienced, equally well-credentialed, equally well-intentioned experts who will offer you exactly opposite advice.
THERE IS NO ONE-SIZE-FITS-ALL SOLUTION.
Kawasaki goes on to say, “hear what experts say, but don’t always listen to them.” Experts often have good ideas and suggestions that are worth “hearing, “ that is, considering, but you should never just defer to an expert.
An expert’s suggestion needs to feel right to you in your gut. If it doesn’t, don’t follow the suggestion. To implement a solution effectively, you have to believe in it, it has to fit your personality, and it has to fit your son.
It is actually good news that there is no “one-size-fits-all” solution and that experts disagree. It means that there are many different ways to solve the problems that you are having with your challenging boy. Keep trying until you find the right one, which leads to the last of the lessons in this blog.
3. Never give up.
Steve Jobs pursued his vision of creating “insanely great” products and didn’t let anyone or anything get in his way. He didn’t go it alone, however. He wouldn’t stop until he found the people who could help him make his dream a reality.
Life with a challenging boy can be, well … very challenging, but it can be better, maybe even insanely great. Just don’t give up until you find the people and the methods that can help you achieve your dream of a healthy and happy relationship with your son.
