I have never quite understood how to create "quality time. " Family for us was about dragging sons everywhere we could. This included eating meals together, going on vacation together, going to their sports together, etc.

It tires me out just thinking back on it. Spending quality moments took many forgettable hours and many moments that were an aggravating pain in the butt. Fortunately, I could be the biggest pain so we could keep things under control some of the time.

The major exception was when grandma and I would drive all day from  to Florida while the kids (your dads) mostly ate and slept. Trying to sleep in a motel after kids just slept for 14 hours in the car tended to bring out the worst in their father.

Grandma and I were younger with more endurance back then. Have you ever noticed the biggest, toughest kid tends to dictate what the peer group does? Until they were teenagers and because I haven 't matured, I thought of myself as that kid. Unfortunately, our sons were never intimidated by size.

We did, however, tend to maintain the illusion of control. The appropriate word was probably more like "contain. " Being in control or trying to contain a gaggle of energetic children is not like single people who delude themselves by repeating "I 'm finally in control of my life. " It 's more like a surfer who maintains control while riding a twenty-foot wave. One misguided move and it 's chaos.

My sons are doing far better than I at parenting, but I must have done something right or maybe they just used my bad example and corrected from there. Whatever the case, here is a systems engineer 's view of child rearing.

A key point that many parents seem to miss is "negative feedback. " I never viewed myself as an authority figure or a good example, but a negative feedback specialist. Most mechanical and electrical systems require negative feedback signals of some sort to keep them under control. Unchecked positive feedback will accelerate a system to a point where it burns out.

Creative negative feedback varies with the child. For example, being very calm and putting Jamison in his room would drive him absolutely crazy, PERFECT. If I put John in his room he 'd just read a book; whereas making him write something over and over again drove him nuts, PERFECT.  

CHRISTMAS 1981 25 Jeff drove me nuts - he wasn't allowed to drive, until he was 17; I should have waited until he was 21. Most parents try to reason with children. Recent research indicates that development of judgment doesn't emerge in the brain until the early twenties and in some of us it doesn't develop at all.

So, parent-child relationships are less about reason and more about POWER. Here are two things that I may have gotten right:

1] My anger didn 't mean that they did something wrong, it just meant I was pissed off (anger is a form of insanity). 2] When I was done being angry, if appropriate, I would administer creative negative feedback for inappropriate behavior.

 I've read that most teenagers are more afraid of what their peers think than what their parents think. But creative negative feedback, administered calmly and academically is an excellent tool to maintain the illusion of control with energetic sons.

One of my sons told me that he HATED my lack of emotion (awesome). Some teenagers' favorite trick is to make their parents angry so that they are free to scream that their parents don't care and that they are not understood.

Calm, authoritative, academic response (usually not my first emotion) to inappropriate behavior frustrates the crap out of screaming teenagers. It also works with belligerent confrontational business associates.

Telling your children that you love them may be important, but taking the time to care is much more important for their welfare. Telling someone you care takes two seconds, showing them that you care takes a lifetime.

That means showing up at events that are important to them and dragging them everywhere that 's important to you. The latter category included having three sons in a two person sailboat when grandma and I were racing. Imagine our competitors surprise when we would WIN while the kids played with their Superman and Batman.

Our sons did pick up on that intensity in their view of life, but are not particularly fond of being in a boat with me. Growing up in this family probably made life in the "real world" seem easy.

Loving children ferociously is every parent 's job. But as children get older, a parent must develop the attitude that Sun Tzu in the "Art of War" calls the characteristics of good generals: "action and inaction are a matter of strategy and they cannot be pleased or angered."

Every parent wants their children to be able to function as an adult and a parent in a complex and confused society. Commands of a Household General are best phrased in terms of "thou shalt not," because freedom comes from identifying and administering appropriate constraints - not from doing what you feel like.

Now it 's up to our sons and their wives to deal with the power struggle of what 's right for their kids. Early on parents are overwhelmed with the first child, but then they are heavy into correcting mistakes that they think their parents made. We grandparents have to learn our role all over again. Our family got considerably more complicated with the addition of five females.

It is clear to me and others that I do not understand women, but granddaughters have given me some perverse insights. With sons, the conflict was: get out of my way so that I can do what I feel like. With granddaughters, it becomes you must want to do what they feel like because it is the reasonable, sensible thing to do. So they make up rules, to which you must conform.

This behavior evolves as most married males know. My ability to submit to arbitrary rules is extremely limited. I am sure grandma would whole heartedly agree. Granddaughters have given me much greater but still limited insight into the female psyche; partly, because there is no attempt to justify the rules with obfuscating rhetoric.

You are just supposed to do what she tells you, which I do. But, as I said before, my capacity is limited; so I begin to insist that she abide by her own rules which of course results in a new set of rules. This continues for a while until we both get bored and I buy ice cream or some other forbidden treat.