Debbie and I have recently decided that it’s very important to socialize Carter, “socialize” in this sense meaning letting him spend time around other kids as much as it does “getting someone else to entertain him for a half hour so we don’t go batshit crazy.”
Now that he’s old enough to respond to commands like “Show us your belly button” and “Don’t go down the stairs headfirst,” I’m taking more and more cues from how we trained Bootsy to keep Carter in line. The teacher at Bootsy’s puppy classes used to say, “A tired dog is a well-behaved dog,” meaning we let him romp around with other dogs as much as possible so he wouldn’t go barreling around our apartment chewing on all the furniture. Since Carter’s energy level increases exponentially with each passing week, I think the same adage should apply to him. He needs more play time outside the house, because if he chews on the legs of the couch one more time, we’ll have to put him down.
We used to solve this problem by taking him to play with his cousin Jacob once a week, plus many random visits and family dinners in between. The boys are only two weeks apart and built for each other’s level of destructiveness. Jacob is a little bigger and stronger than Carter, which counters Carter’s Tasmanian devil-esque energy. Just like the days when we take Bootsy to doggie day care, Carter would come home from Jacob’s house and pass out five minutes after dinner. But Jacob moved away to Wisconsin recently (his parents went too), so Carter lost this regular playmate. Hence the urgency of getting the boy outside.
Our first strategy for finding new buddies was taking him to the park. I was tempted to apply more rules of thumb I learned with Bootsy there, but taking social cues is harder with children than dogs. I’ve decided this is because unlike with their dogs, most people don’t keep their children on a leash, so they can’t immediately signal their wish to let their animal play or not. When I’m walking Bootsy, it’s easy to see that I should keep moving when an approaching dog owner gathers up their leash and starts herding their dog over to the edge of the sidewalk. Parents don’t do that, either because of their inalienable right to charge their Bugaboo right by without giving way, or because they need to slow down to preen and let you admire their adorable offspring. Even when their kids are on a leash, they usually give them a little slack. The dogs make their intentions pretty clear anyway. Rarely do I have to ask another dog owner if their pooch is friendly, or even try to make awkward icebreakers. Once Bootsy sees another dog in the area, he prances like show pony until he gets close enough to shove his nose up its ass. If the other dog doesn’t appreciate this kind of greeting, all it takes is a little snarl and Bootsy runs away like he’s being chased by a plastic chair.
Kids aren’t this forward (un)fortunately. You never know how they’re going to respond to another little one. The other day at the park, Carter wandered over to a little girl playing with sandbox toys in the fountain, and everything was cool until he decided to grab a shovel. She then screeched at him like he’d just bitten the head off her pet hamster, and a whole episode of crying and foot-stomping and apologies between her mother and me ensued. Carter was pretty upset too. When dogs get into a scrap, they usually want to go back at it after a few minutes, but at that point all I could do was scoop up Carter and leave because he wanted nothing else at that point but that damn shovel.
The problem here isn’t the kids’ misbehavior, it’s the unspoken competition between the parents. Since dogs tend to break the ice by doing what they do naturally, it’s really not that difficult to say hi, let them do their thing, and walk away. You assume that they will act a little bit crazy around each other, and unless they go Cujo on each other, there’s no need to apologize for a little misbehavior. That’s what dogs do. That’s what children do too, but for some reason we’re mortified when they basically act like themselves. The kid is an extension of us; bad behavior reflects on our poor parenting skills, and accordingly our worth as a person. “Get your impolite, handsy little kid away from my perfect little robot, you fucking slacker,” those ladies at the park might have well said to me, all the while I was wishing that I still had my old dog, Cleo the Child-Biter, with me.
Since finding playmates at the park is such a crapshoot, I signed up Carter at the local Gymboree for some supervised mayhem. For whatever reason–the padded walls, the folk music, the mysteriously omnipresent bubbles–parents are a little more relaxed there and willing to let things slide. Plus, it helps to see 14 other toddlers running into the walls and grabbing toys from each other. You realize that your kid is pretty normal, and if he knocks down Olivia and makes her cry, that’s okay because Dominic just kneecapped him with a foam bat.
Our dog trainer always said that it isn’t about training the dogs, it’s about training the owners. I’m beginning to understand that Gymboree is running a pretty efficient parent training business too.