{"id":5783,"date":"2011-08-03T10:12:03","date_gmt":"2011-08-03T10:12:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2011\/08\/03\/adulthood-never-ends\/"},"modified":"2011-08-03T10:12:03","modified_gmt":"2011-08-03T10:12:03","slug":"adulthood-never-ends","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2011\/08\/03\/adulthood-never-ends\/","title":{"rendered":"Adulthood Never Ends"},"content":{"rendered":"

Several weeks ago, now, SteelyKid flipped out at bedtime. We had told her that the episode of MythBusters<\/cite> playing on the DVR was the last one for the night, but when it ended, she demanded more. When we said no, she went into a full-on toddler freakout, screaming, crying, kicking the floor. I eventually carried her upstairs, put her on her bed, and waited until she could get herself under control enough to talk in a halfway normal voice.<\/p>\n

Once she did, we negotiated a compromise. We wouldn’t put MythBusters<\/cite> back on tv, but we would go back downstairs and watch three short videos on my computer. She agreed to that, and we watched the same old Sesame Street<\/cite> clip three times (Grover serving a sandwich to RNC Chairman Michael Steele), then went upstairs and went to bed. Bedtime got pushed back half an hour later than we really wanted, but that’s what we had to do to get past the screaming tantrum.<\/p>\n

I thought of this again because there are a lot of situations where I see people throwing childish fits and getting at least some of their way. The most obvious of these is the recent debt ceiling debacle, but it’s far from the only example. And it’s incredibly frustrating to watch, let alone be party to. But there’s really no way out of it– in an ideal world, SteelyKid would’ve gone straight to bed without watching any more video media of any sort. It’s not an ideal world, though, so SteelyKid got to see Grover play the waiter three more times, which isn’t the position we wanted to take, but we’re the adults in the house, and knew we had to compromise a little to get bedtime at any kind of reasonable hour. And in an ideal world the debt ceiling would’ve been raised in a clean bill, without any of this dingbat kabuki with super commissions and non-binding cuts projected eight years from now, but, well, you get the idea.<\/p>\n

A lot of what I’m seeing on liberal blogs at the moment seems to me to be of the form “Why do we<\/em> always have to be the adults?” There’s a lot of frustration over the fact that a screaming tantrum seems to have worked, again, to get idiotic concessions from the Democrats, because that’s what it took to get through this mess.<\/p>\n

It sucks. It’s frustrating as all hell, the same way that it’s frustrating to always have to concede more video-watching at bedtime (or swing-riding before leaving the playground, or any of a dozen other things). But here’s the thing about adulthood: it doesn’t end.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Once you’re an adult, you’re an adult forever. And that means that, in any dealings with tantrum-throwing toddlers, you’re going to be the one who ends up compromising. Sadly, some of those tantrum-throwing toddlers will be old enough to have tantrum-throwing children or grandchildren of their own, but at the end of the day, you have to do what’s right for the country, or the company, or the college, or the household. You hold the line as best you can, and concede as little as possible to the tantrum, but you will end up giving up something, because the alternatives are worse.<\/p>\n

If you’re lucky, you’ll get the occasional break– a relative will take the kids for a few days so you can have a weekend to yourself, or an annoying co-worker will change jobs, or you’ll get control of both houses of Congress for a little while. You’ll be able to get a nice dinner and a movie, or vent to sympathetic co-workers, or pass some useful legislation for a change.<\/p>\n

But what you don’t<\/em> get to do is to regress to a toddler yourself. There’s never a time when you, as a parent, get to scream and kick and flail until the kids give in to your demands. You don’t get to dig in your heels and bring the company or the university or the nation to a crashing halt until you get what you<\/em> want for a change. Because being an adult means doing what’s right, and pitching fits that risk the livelihood of others is never the right thing to do.<\/p>\n

Adulthood never ends. Once you’re all grown up, you’re all grown up forever, and have to act that way. Even when that means giving ground to the occasional toddler tantrum.<\/p>\n

Of course, that’s easy to say from the parental perspective, because SteelyKid is growing up herself, and behaves in a more adult manner now than six months ago (though there are days when that’s hard to believe…). On the political side of the analogy, the modern Republican tantrum has lasted at least fifteen years, and shows no real sign of letting up.<\/p>\n

Still, you vent about it for a while, and then get back to doing the hard work required to keep things running as best you can. Because the political side does have one advantage: if you’re sick of the toddlers in your legislature, you get the chance to swap them out for adults every few years. It requires hard and thankless work, true, but that’s what adults do.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Several weeks ago, now, SteelyKid flipped out at bedtime. We had told her that the episode of MythBusters playing on the DVR was the last one for the night, but when it ended, she demanded more. When we said no, she went into a full-on toddler freakout, screaming, crying, kicking the floor. I eventually carried… Continue reading Adulthood Never Ends<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,28,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5783","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal","category-politics","category-steelykid","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5783","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5783"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5783\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5783"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5783"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5783"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}