Is “pick your battles” good parenting advice? Dr. Ray says it is fine for kid junk but a problem when it means letting disrespect go, and uses the broken window theory to explain why.
What the experts say
Never in human history has raising children been taken over by experts like it has in the last 40, 50, 60 years. The experts conveyed to parents that there are certain psychologically correct ways to raise children. And you parents, not being professionals, how do you know if you’re doing the right thing? I get that all the time from parents. Am I doing the right thing? Am I talking the right way? Am I saying the right things? Experts have all kinds of ideas and notions, almost as many as there are experts, and they have phrases to summarize their notions. There are a lot of them, but I’ll just pick one for this audio blog. “Pick your battles!”
In other words, there are certain things as a parent that I assume they mean you should stand firm on, although they might think you should stand weak on things that you think you should stand firm on, because many experts are not religious and therefore don’t have your worldview. They say, in picking your battles, as a parent let some things go and then intervene and teach, or maybe, as a last resort, discipline. I have a real problem with “pick your battles.”
Kid junk
You can interpret it two ways. The first way I pretty much agree with. If the child is being a kid, he’s not doing anything wrong. He’s watching TV and he’s standing on his head. You may think to yourself, “What are you doing? Why are you standing on your head?” But he’s just being a kid. He doesn’t hurt anything. My son used to stand on his head in the crib when he was about two until he fell over and fell asleep. Or you send him to bed and he’s in bed but he’s just kind of singing to himself. He’s not getting out of bed. He’s not saying he has to go to the potty 26 times. He’s just kind of in bed singing. Is that a battle?
I think a nice way to separate it out is kid junk, the stuff of kidhood, which isn’t irresponsible or immoral or hurtful to anybody else. Let it go. A lot of times we’re tempted as parents to pick on something, comment, nag about something that’s not wrong. There’s nothing bad about it. We just don’t like it. It irritates us. He’s outside running in circles. “Hey, settle down. Settle down. Why are you just running?”
Where the experts trip up parents
But here’s where I think the experts trip up parents. I’ll use a teenage example. Teens are notorious for rolling their eyes at parents, and that’s just viewed as standard teenhood. It’s what they do. They’ll grow out of it. That kind of demeaning disdain is, “Well, that’s standard adolescence. Let it go. Pick your battles. He’s not throwing a brick at you. He’s not cussing at you. He’s not screaming at you. He’s not being loudly disrespectful. He’s just rolling his eyes. Come on. Pick your battles.” That’s where I really have a hard time with experts. Basically, they say if it gets really serious in your eyes, then you do something about it. But the little stuff of disrespect, or the little stuff of mistreating a sibling, or the little stuff of not cleaning their room? “Pick your battles. Let the room go. It’s not a big deal. Who are you to ask that they keep their room clean?” I think that dramatically undercuts parents’ decision-making authority.
We didn’t allow rolling eyes in our house at all. That’s disdainful. That’s nasty. That’s nonverbal disrespect. That’s basically a slap on the right cheek. When our Lord said, “Turn the other cheek,” he wasn’t talking about parents saying, “Well, okay, you can be disrespectful to me, kid. I’ll just turn the other cheek.” No, our role is to teach.
I’ll draw a parallel. There was something called the broken window theory of law enforcement. This was tried, I believe, in New York City. For a while, the approach was, “Let’s just tackle the big stuff. Let’s just go after the larger rule-breaking offenses. The smaller stuff, couches on the curb that are set on fire, or broken windows in abandoned buildings, let it go. Pick your battles.” What they found was that translated into more rule-breaking of all kinds. When they took a zero tolerance toward the small stuff, “You’re going to get in trouble for setting a couch on fire. You’re going to get in trouble for breaking a window,” they found that the big stuff declined. Why? The theory was it conveyed an impression: someone is in charge. When all this little stuff, relatively speaking, but it’s still law-breaking, still vandalism, was allowed to go, it created an overall impression that there’s deterioration, nobody’s really in charge.
I draw a parallel to parenthood. It creates an overall impression. The kid can roll his eyes at you, and you let it go. Is he going to stop there? “I rolled my eyes at you, but the next thing out of my mouth is going to be snotty.” “Pick your battles” is not good advice if you’re trying to teach virtue. It’s good advice if you’re letting a kid be a kid. Childhood stuff. It’s not hurting anyone, it’s not irresponsible, it’s not immoral. Just kid junk. There’s a lot of that. Pick your battles. Well, let me put it to you this way: that’s a phrase that I’m going to pick my battle about.
Dr. Ray explains how to teach virtue and keep parental authority in Discipline That Lasts a Lifetime.
Transcript of Dr. Ray’s audio blog, lightly edited for reading.