I want to give some context to this series.
I married a man who likes to play video games. He likes to do a lot of other things too, he has many talents and skills, and he has always been a great husband and father. But when we were dating, I worried about the video game interest. I had heard many stories about new wives annoyed with their husband's video game playing, and new moms who felt like their husbands weren't carrying their share of the work because they played video games. My husband knew I had these concerns, at least I thought we had talked about it.
Fast forward about ten years and we had three boys, all three of which now had their dad's love of video games. Video games were a dad's night kind of activity, and I was in charge of tracking screen time the rest of the week. When we had our fourth child, a girl by the way, I was so full of anxiety and frustration with the video games. I had a lot of fears about my kids being addicted and what that might mean for their future. And a lot of resentment toward my husband for the time he spent on them. I did NOT enjoy being the screen time monitor and I resented it being my job.
I share this because at this same time, I started reading a book called Leadership and Self-Deception by the Arbinger Institute. It talks about having a heart at peace or a heart at war, and another concept called being "in the box" with someone. When you have a heart at war and you are "in the box" with someone, it basically means that you see that person through the lens of what you view as their weakness, and you view yourself through the lens of what you view as your strength. So in the case of my husband and me, I was seeing him as a time- waster and myself as the hard worker. Now, there's nothing wrong with disagreeing with someone, or thinking they have a character flaw you think they should change. The problem comes when you are in this box, to where you can really only see them for this weakness. If you don't see someone, and perhaps more importantly, you don't see yourself, in a more complete view, you don't communicate effectively about the situation or the change you would like to see. You see only confirmations of these two ideas--that he is working less than you and you are working more than him. And you actually end up communicating in a way that perpetuates the behavior you think you are trying to change.
So what needed to change for my husband and me? I realized that I was not only "in the box" with my husband, I was actually "in the box" with video games. When my kids had tantrums or meltdowns or sibling squabbles, what was the cause? Screens, of course. When I felt my husband wasn't being supportive enough, what did I blame? A computer game, naturally. Now, it's possible that yes, he needed to play them less in order to be more supportive. But because I was so "in the box" with the video games, all of our arguments about this sounded like me being mad about the video games, rather than any kind of productive conversation about how we could better share the workload. We weren't having conversations about what made me feel overwhelmed, unsupported or emotionally disconnected. I saw him as loving video games more than me, and he saw me as hating him for liking video games. We were in the box and it was the same argument over and over.
While reading Leadership and Self-Deception, I first tried to see myself more clearly. What do I need? What do I do for fun or for self-care? When do I take a break? Are there things I do that aren't necessarily "productive" or that take time away from our family? And soon, I started to see my husband more clearly. He genuinely thought he was doing what we had agreed to. He looked after the boys and I looked after the baby. When the boys were taken care of in the way he thought was good care, he took a break doing something he enjoyed.
Our conversations were so much more effective when I could approach him with a heart at peace. We talked about my needing more breaks from the baby, more conversations with him, and a date night, etc.
It sounds extreme perhaps, but I think that I had somehow decided that what I wanted were the moral things--I was on the high road. And therefore, because he wasn't doing them, he was not wanting to be as moral as me, and therefore in some way morally inferior to me. I assumed we were working from the same checklist, and so I was mad that I had to be the taskmaster of the checklist. When we shifted the focus to discussing NEEDS, the whole conversation changed. Turns out, we have different needs. I need more one on one time than him. He needs more alone time than me. We have different thresholds for handling clutter. I need to leave the house more and he longs to have more time at home.
This shift led me to re-evaluating our family's system for handling screen time. I wanted to approach it from a heart at peace. I didn't want to make decisions based on fear, and I wanted to honor that each person in my family has different needs. You can make peace with screen time, and still hold true to your family values. This series will teach you some of the things I have learned along this journey, and I hope you will find ideas that help you navigate this new frontier of parenting.
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