The Boy Who Believed in Magic

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"THE BOY WHO BELIEVED IN MAGIC is stunning in its simplicity, ruthless in its candor, raw in its power." — Brennan Manning

This is about control.

Some people grow up believing their lives are none of their business … they live with what’s called an "external locus of control" — meaning they don’t make decisions about what they’ll do, or not do — or try to do or not do — because they feel powerless in the face of bigger forces they’re convinced are controlling what happens to them.

Maybe they’re angry about that. Maybe they’re sort of glad to be relieved of responsibility. Maybe they simply try not to think about it too much because, whatever happens — good or bad — seems a lot like magic in their eyes.

Of course, they’re not entirely wrong. Most of us don’t have direct influence on the macroeconomy … or global politics … or pandemic disease outbreaks. Does that mean we’re off the hook for making prudent choices about money, or voting, or healthcare?

People who believe in magic think they are off the hook. They may choose impulsively … or delay choices until there is no choice. Either way, what does it matter? One experience after another, they learn to interpret whatever happens as magic.

If you think you can, you might. If you think you can’t, you won’t.

This storybook for big people is about that.

Download the PDF version here or at NoiseTrade. Get the Kindle version at Amazon.

Respect

When I was a boy, my uncle, Bryant Kendall, my coach, Verlyn Giles, my high school principal, Robert Stevens, a youth worker named Shuford Davis, a campus worker named Bob Norwood, and more teachers than I can count. They listened to me and took my ideas seriously. They asked good questions. They talked straight. They gave me training and responsibility. My uncle helped me learn to mow lawns before my parents allowed me to touch anything with a motor at home. I had teachers who encouraged me to think outside the box and helped me learn to sort my thoughts and express them directly and economically. Verlyn Giles helped me learn to think and communicate under pressure and taught me to value ingenuity and skill over brute force. Bob Norwood asked questions that encouraged me choose between good and better. Shuford Davis engaged with me even though I was not part of his youth group, asking questions that caused me to address spirituality with my mind as well as my heart.

    Respect isn’t empty-headed acceptance of any and all behavior. Respect grows from the acknowledgment that all of us are in process. We’ve learned everything we know so far, and we have quite a bit more to learn before we’re done.

    Respect acknowledges that what’s obvious to one person may not be a bit obvious to someone else. And that’s a very good place to begin the conversation.

And isn’t that what life is all about, the ability to go around back and come up inside other people’s heads to look out at the damned fool miracle and say: oh so that’s how you see it!? Well, now, I must remember that.

—Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine, William Morrow, 2001, page xiii

    Shaming is a monologue. Respect is a dialogue. The surest way for me to show respect is to ask honest questions and listen carefully until, whether or not we agree, the other person is pretty sure I truly understand.

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Don’t give in to your need to be needed

If you decline to hijack a young person's opportunity to find or figure out something she needs to know—something that is better learned than taught—it’s possible she will begin thinking about matters for which you’ve been taking responsibility. From there, it's a short trip to shifting responsibility for those matters to her. That’s where it belongs because, sooner or later, that's where it will land, no matter what.

    As this shift begins, perhaps she’ll talk with you about her new experiences with responsibility. For instance, she may want to blame you because she forgot something important. She may attempt to shift responsibility back to you. Positive or negative, if she expresses thoughts and feelings about who she believes should be responsible for managing certain details of day-to-day living, you’ll know your plan is starting to work.

    Look, I get it…this is hard. But don’t give in to your need to be needed. It’s not worth it. Do this: Express your sympathy about each inconvenience she suffers and, without moralizing, decline to take back responsibility. All opinions to the contrary, your success as a parent will not be measured by the things your child doesn’t know how to do at the end of high school. And, the truth is, each time you take responsibility for details your child could be covering, you leave something else undone. It may be something nonessential like working on your watercolors, or something as important as getting to bed at a decent hour. I don’t know: Any chance your personal health and development might affect the well-being of your child?

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Cause + Effect

The line between actions and consequences is severely blurred for a lot of kids because, by and large, they don’t understand the general principle of cause and effect.

    They don’t understand cause and effect because the adults in their lives constantly come behind them to fix things when they screw up.

    This problem is complicated by idle threats and equally idle promises. 

    An example: The promise, If you’ll be good boy (whatever that means) at the store, I’ll buy you a treat, is easily lost in the excuse: It’s too close to dinner; you’ll spoil your appetite.

    Not fair! Sure, we have to be concerned for a kid’s nutritional well-being. So we’d better take care to not make idle promises in exchange for compliant behavior.

    All right, that’s it! One more word out of you and we’re going straight home!

    Really? You’re going to load everybody back onto the bus and go straight home? I’m not saying you shouldn’t do exactly that if it fits the situation. But please don’t threaten to do it if you know you can’t live with the consequences of following through. 

    If I say: Stop nagging! You kids are killing me! I should have the decency to die the next time one of them nags. Otherwise, it’s just an idle promise. 

    More to the point, our children falter in learning the connection between cause and effect when, not wanting them to experience pain, many of us are quick to rescue them from the consequences of their failures and wrongdoing. 

    When they’re young we easily replace a toy carelessly lost or broken in anger and shield them from the cost of their actions. Time passes and we drop what we’re doing to deliver an item thoughtlessly left behind so a middle-schooler won’t suffer a loss of face or miss a meal or fail to turn in a paper on time. Still later, we cover a negligently overdrawn checking account or pay a traffic ticket and insurance increase resulting from a moving violation, or hire a lawyer to rescue our beloved failure from a ruined life. 

    And they resent us for it. Maybe not in the moment, but soon and forever until we make things right.

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One at a Time

My friend Darrell went to a career seminar with the intriguing title:

How to Get Rich Working Half Days

The opening line of the seminar was, “I’m going to tell you how to get rich working half days. The first thing you have to do is decide which 12 hours you want to work.”

    Right.

    I thought long and hard about this. I read a shelf-full of books. I worked with kids and parents daily for two and a half decades. I interacted with the most and the least effective parents I know; and I interacted with the most and least resilient and flourishing children I know. And Susan and I raised an adult our own-selves. 

    And here’s the One True Thing: There are no secrets, keys, or steps. There’s just you and maybe your partner, and one child. Even if you have five kids, you still have to raise them one at a time. Some are ready at three for what other children won’t handle until five. Some learn best by ear, some by eye, and some by hands-on instruction. Try one size fits all parenting (the same goes for teaching, coaching, and mentoring) and the result will come out looking like Class Diagnosis[1] as sure as I’m sittin’ here. So, sorry, I can’t give you three easy steps to raising adults.

    But I do have this 30-Day Guarantee....  

[1] Class Diagnosis is what happens when we assume everyone in a group shares the same characteristics and problems by virtue of being in the group. It’s not that Class Diagnosis is completely without basis, only that it’s a short cut, an easy answer to a complicated question.

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old boys + girls

A portion of these young men and women are in many ways more like old boys and girls.

Included in these numbers there’s an emergent population of young adults living a sort of extended adolescence. A portion of these young men and women are in many ways more like old boys and girls. They remain semi-dependent on their parents, grandparents, older siblings or on public welfare systems. They may or may not be students; may or may not work. They don’t pay significant taxes because they don’t have significant incomes—at least not on the table.

    Men in this extended boyhood are inordinately responsible for teenage pregnancies—legally adult but functionally adolescent males making babies with underage girls. The time-honored American high school custom of senior boys dating freshman girls now extends into the decade of those boys’ 20s. The girls are still likely to be 15. One American president called it child abuse and nobody quibbled with that?

    What’s worth noting is that many of those men are products of parenting in a larger system that raises children. That’s no excuse. But it may help us interpret otherwise baffling behavior. At the risk of being obvious, how surprised should we be when someone raised without an appreciation for cause and effect—without a sense of responsibility—acts irresponsibly and causes regrettable effects for himself and others?

from Raising Adults by Jim Hancock

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it's a start

Nearly every parent I know is trying—hoping—to do better. Fair enough. That’s a start.

An awful lot of parents feel sad and guilty for raising children when the assignment was to raise adults; feel embarrassed by the side-looks they sense from their parents; feel afraid of the consequences of our cultural (and perhaps personal) failures. No one set out to screw this up. Nearly every parent I know is trying—hoping—to do better.

    Fair enough. That’s a start.

from Raising Adults by Jim Hancock

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the question is....

I wish I could say these trials belong to someone else. 

    I wish I could say these parenting challenges are urban issues. I’d like to point to out-of-touch rural communities and say, Look, these are the folks who aren’t raising adults. I wish these were the challenges of single mothers, people of color, the poor. It would give me great satisfaction to say these difficulties afflict only the wealthy. But it’s not true. We’re all in the same boat.

    The problems long associated with our economic underclass—urban, small town, and rural—are, and have long been, present among wealthy city-dwellers and in well-off suburbs. As early as 1981, someone called it affluenza—meaning, an upscaling, to one degree or another, of the toxic behaviors we’ve traditionally attributed to troubled kids growing up poor. 

 Meth? Are you kidding me? Do I look like a hillbilly? I get Adderall from a friend who has a doctor’s prescription. 

    In such equations, vodka cocktails > malt liquors; burgling middle class homes for unsecured hunting rifles and handguns > than robbing convenience stores; and so it goes…. The details are different, the trouble is the same (unless, of course, you factor in that poorer, browner-skinned, kids are still more likely to do prison time for similar offenses).

    And so we’re sad, a lot of us. We hate to see kids get off on the wrong foot. They are, after all, our children, one way or another.

    The question is, What are we doing about it?

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playing with numbers

Parents are not alone—North American teenagers have the admittedly divided but substantial attention of a whole lot of adults.

Parents are not alone. A million middle school and high school teachers, instructors and coaches look after North American adolescents throughout the school year. Add to that figure, half-a-million church-based youth workers, three million after-school employers and 16 million retailers, marketers, officers of the court—and, of course, demographers—and teenagers have the admittedly divided but substantial attention of a whole lot of adults.

    As long as we’re playing with numbers, let’s add that North America kids are just a fraction of around 1.2 billion teens scattered around the globe. 

    Let me repeat that another way so we don’t miss it: 

Right now, 1.2 billion teenagers call this world their home. 

Is it just me or does that seem like an awful lot of kids hanging out after school? Or fighting wars...or spreading disease...or building and buying things...or solving planetary problems.

    A bit more counting: Depending on who’s numbers you like, starting around 1961, American Boomers introduced somewhere around 45 million babies into the mix. They were followed by a cohort of about 60 million younger siblings—the Millennials as folks like to say when pigeonholing people.

from Raising Adults by Jim Hancock

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a hunded percent human

A mental health professional might have predicted the adults my parents would become.

    My dad was out of control: An intelligent, attractive, spendthrift, and compulsive dreamer. He shot himself in the foot over and over till he no longer had a leg to stand on. He neglected his children for the sake of his work. He neglected his spouse for adventures with women he knew barely, if at all. 

    My mom grew up to live the life of a charming control freak. A lovely, personable, competent, hardworking, frightened, realist. At a time when many women in her social set stayed at home, my mom worked to pay the mortgage and car payments.

    She wanted more time with her children, but she was busy ensuring our physical well-being. I don’t have a clue what kind of income my parents had. I’m pretty clear my father spent everything both of them made—and then some.

    After 23 years together, my parents divorced. Some people marry the “same person” again and again. Not my parents. The second time around, they married people who couldn’t have been more different. When I was 19, my mother married an older man and built a lasting, respectful marriage. My father remarried while the ink was still wet on the divorce decree, his new bride already pregnant.

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    My parents were ordinary folk: broken, needy, imperfect…a hundred percent human. Could they have tried harder? I have no idea. They gave it their best shot. My sister turned out well. In my case, the jury is still out. 

    I can’t find the bad guys in my family. The inept, unprepared, foolish, shattered guys, yes—in abundance. That’s what I am. I suspect it’s what you are, too, but what do I know?

from Raising Adults by Jim Hancock

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