Low-Drama Mama

March 10, 2022

"Girls are the worst," a friend complained to me when we were 12. Being a girl myself, I disagreed with the generalization, but I knew it sprang from her frustration with the unchecked social nastiness that would cycle through Orange Avenue Junior High School. "How do they GET that way?" she asked. I didn't know.

Two decades later, after I had my own daughters, I saw this from a different angle. My friend Lisa, a keen observer of social dynamics who also had daughters, noted how sometimes other parents would heighten the drama between their offspring and others instead of diffusing it: Rather than encourage their kids to shrug off small slights—a criticism from a teacher, an off-hand comment from someone in the social circle—these parents would make a federal case out of the situation and thereby make it worse. Their kids were getting a lesson in perspective from their high-drama parents, but it was the wrong lesson.

So Lisa and I came up with the idea of a no-drama pact. It was simple: We decided that if conflicts were to arise between our kids, we would be part of the solution rather than part of the problem: We promised each other we would inject reason, sobriety, and calm cheerfulness into whatever arose, and help the kids do the same. In other words, we would stay adults. We would show the kids, by words and by example, how to stay calm and lower the temperature so that everyone could have the space to work out solutions.

So... DID IT WORK? My answer to that is YES, BUT, because I don't think Lisa and I can legitimately take as much of the credit for it as I'd like. For one thing, our kids are fairly relaxed by nature, which helps to decrease the potential for drama. But also, the pandemic so diminished occasions for in-person interaction that there have just been fewer opportunities for fuss.

I used to think that kids growing into happy, capable adults has much more to do how they are raised than with what's inside them naturally. I've revised that over the years as I watched my kids grow into themselves more than into the people I thought they'd become. But kids aren't born with strategies for socializing, and I'm convinced that talking about the drama issue far in advance showed our girls the advantages of common sense and good communication, and helped them find their own way there.

So I now have an answer for my 12-year old self, even if it's unsatisfying. How do they get that way? They decide to go there. And sometimes they have help.

—Deb