Discussions with Dad & Lessons on Listening

A car in my neighborhood bears a sticker that reads It's more important to be kind than to be right. I learned this myself in a roundabout way, thanks to my dad.

At age 12  I started to question certain assumptions held by members of the community we hung out in. Like many adolescents, I thought that you could gauge the depth and sincerity of an opinion by how loudly and frequently it was proclaimed. Testing this theory led to some debates with Dad.

We had plenty of topics to choose from. In 1972 the Vietnam War was on. The older brothers of several of my friends had been drafted, and one of them never made it back home. There was Watergate, the proposed Equal Rights Amendment, Affirmative Action, poverty and the ever-present A-list topic at church, abortion. Several of the teachers in our small school encouraged honest discussions about these issues in civics and current events classes but in the community as a whole, both sides of a position were rarely presented.

The best way to ignite interest in any topic is to censor it, so of course a certain number of my classmates and I found these issues fascinating. They provided a springboard for late-night discussions with Dad whenever he picked me up from an after-hours activity such as school plays and choir concerts.

We had some heated debates in the car but he never punished me for disagreeing with him, something that was fairly common back then. He didn't ground me, restrict my reading material or make me get out of the car and walk the last mile home, as had happened to one of my friends who'd talked back to her father. Dad and I had a good relationship regardless of the issue of the moment.

He listened to what I had to say. And in the course of our talks, the listening habit began to rub off on me. By 14 I was learning to bracket my opinions and inner yakking long enough to hear him.

I think he knew that eventually kids become adults and will make up their own minds about the issues important to them. I also think that to him it was more important to be a loving dad than it was to be "right." I've noticed that for the happiest and healthiest adults I've known, relationships trump opinions and listening to each other is crucial.  It's something I've tried to keep in mind not just in parenting but in friendships as well.