little boy battles
by tori gallagher

When our youngest sons were younger still and still liked Dr. Seuss, one of my favorite bedtime books was Fox in Socks. It’s always been one of my personal favorites, and they loved all the tongue-twisting sound effects, the rhyming, alliteration, and general silliness. Like this passage:

“When tweetle beetles fight, it’s called a tweetle beetle battle. And when they battle in a puddle, it’s a tweetle beetle puddle battle. AND when tweetle beetles battle with paddles in a puddle, they call it a tweetle beetle puddle paddle battle AND...”

You have to read that last part aloud. Fast. Come on. It’s fun stuff. It sure tickled the little guys. And the more I stumbled, the more they loved it.
Little did I know then, however, that Fox in Socks was more than just fun with language. It was insightful child psychology. It was prophecy. I’ve come to a realization. I am raising tweetle beetles.

Here’s just one example. One day last summer my boys got bored. So they did what little boys seem to do when they’re bored - they did battle. With pillows, thankfully, but George (who is nine) didn’t bank on the fact that his little brother, Ben (seven), was stronger than he looked. I guess Ben walloped him good with that pillow and to George’s surprise and shock, it hurt.

I was in the kitchen when I heard his cry of outrage. I dashed to the den and made it just in time to snag George just as he dropped his own pillow and was about to pound his little brother with one small, balled up fist. Fortunately, I caught him from behind because he kept swinging for a moment until he realized that Ben was out of reach and that I was holding him back. When I thought it was safe, I marched him into the other room telling him along the way that hitting his little brother was not okay. “But I missed!” he cried. I decided not to tackle that for the moment.

I let him sit and cool off while I went to check on Ben. “It was his idea!” Ben cried as I walked into the room, emphatically asserting over and over that the pillow fight was George’s idea. I reminded him that he shouldn’t always do what his big brother told him to and we had a rule about not hitting, even with pillows. “But it was his idea!” he cried again. I decided not to argue with that and returned to George.

His face was fading from bright rage-red to normal so I attempted to explain to him, as I had many times before, that it was okay to get angry. Everybody gets angry, but we have to learn to control our actions when we’re angry and it’s never okay to hit. “But I missed!” he cried. I tried again. It doesn’t matter that you missed I told him. You could have really hurt your brother. I tried to be kind but firm, assertive but unemotional. I tried every trick of assertive communication I have read about to get my point across without shaming him, to help him learn healthy, safe boundaries. “But I missed!” he cried again.

“George,” I finally snapped. “It’s not fair to attack your brother for hitting you with a pillow when you TOLD him to.”

“Oh,” he said in a small voice. I rubbed my eyes in frustration.

What really amazes me is how young this impulse to do battle starts and how drawn they are to toy weapons. (And yes I think that’s an oxymoron but my boys don’t agree.) When they were very young, three and five I think, someone gave them enormous light sabers for Christmas. Ben was still a tiny little toddler so the thing was almost twice as big as he was but still he loved it. It lit up and made noises and this tickled him no end. George, who was obsessed with Star Wars at the time, thought he had died and gone to heaven and immediately began playing out scenes from the movies by using his little brother as a prop (i.e. whacking him repeatedly because Ben wasn’t quick enough with his enormous light saber to block effectively. But he did learn to hit back.)

So I sat them down and explained that hitting hurts the other person. I explained that the people in the movie were pretending and they weren’t really hitting each other. It didn’t work. I ended up banishing the light sabers to the basement until some theoretical future time when they could exercise a little self control and not pummel each other.

A few months later, one of them talked me into buying them plastic pirate swords they saw in Walmart and couldn’t live without. I thought, okay, pirate games are cool. And the swords are smaller and lighter than the light sabers. We’ll give it a try. And I quickly found out that smaller and lighter just means they could hit each other harder. The pirate swords joined the light sabers in the basement. No more weapons, I asserted. There are plenty of ways to play that don’t involve doing battle.

I told a friend of ours this. She had been a teacher for many years and had raised sons of her own. She just smiled at me and said “Good luck with that.” I found out what she meant soon enough. When they have no weapons they’ll make their own. We had a big back yard with lots of trees. So they picked up sticks and brandished them at each other. Try and ban sticks with a yard full of shedding hardwoods. I gave in and found some foam rubber swords. Those seemed to satisfy them somewhat and didn’t deal nearly as much damage. Then I learned to blow bubbles so they had something to attack. Two ridiculously happy little boys battling the hoards of bubble monsters. We went through quarts of bubble juice that summer.

Gradually as they grew older and pestered me incessantly, they reacquired light sabers and all manner of toy swords until we had quite a plastic armory on the back porch. But we firmly established rules: 1) They were never allowed to battle each other. Even once they developed the coordination to have enough physical control over the weapon to avoid accidentally striking a brother, they still have not developed the emotional control not to use the toy sword in their hands to exact retribution in case the brother had some how angered him. 2) They could battle trees, imaginary creatures, their teenage brother (who was old enough to defend himself and who after a couple of years of intensive training, learned to play gently with his little brothers), certain other inanimate objects to be specified by me, and bubbles. Nothing else.

At long last we made progress on the physical aspect of conflict and the little guys graduated to heated arguments. The youngest grew older and learned to assert himself, no longer willing to play whatever George suggested.

George remained perplexed by this development and continued to act as if it never happened, stubbornly directing his little brother as if he were an animate toy. They have always played long, complex make-believe games and they began to emphatically disagree about the plot, setting, characters and every other aspect. They discovered the concept of possession (they had always shared all their toys) and began claiming toys as their own.

And eventually, inevitably, they began to argue about their room. We are a family of five with modest means. So the little guys share a room. For a long time this wasn’t a problem but now they’ve staked out their beds. One is not allowed to sit on the other’s without permission. I figure it’s only a matter of time before they draw a line down the middle. Our oldest son is about to graduate high school and go off to college, and as much as I am truly sad that he will be leaving us, and I’m sure that his little brothers are too, they’ve already started arguing about who will get his room.

So now we’ve now disarmed them, rearmed them with rules and (hopefully some empathy), tried to teach them the power of meaningful communication and eventually, will provide them with separate spaces. The physical battles are now few and far between, thank goodness. The verbal ones are another story. I’m gauging our overall success by the length of time between battles. I think the record so far is eleven hours (if you count the nine of it that they spent sleeping that night). Okay, honestly I think we’ve gone a couple of days before and I think it’s a completely reasonable proposition to try and top that this year. But I don’t know. Maybe once a tweetle beetle, always a tweetle beetle. Wish us luck.

Tori Gallagher lives in West Asheville with the aforementioned tweetle beetle boys, their mom and their teenage brother (who is about to abandon us for college). Any comments or suggestions about fraternal peace-teaching are welcomed at torigallagher@yahoo.com.