The Kid Tamer

Four days after the Dixons' family coaching session with Lisa, Sheila is standing in the kitchen in her bathrobe at 6:45 a.m. watching Dorion shovel a bagel and scrambled eggs in his mouth before he runs out the door to school.

"Did you make your bed?" Sheila wants to know.

Dorion is a beautiful child, a cap of dark curls on his head and long lashes framing guileless eyes, but his mother isn't seeing this now. She is watching him ignore her. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand.

"Dorion!" she says, sternly.

"What?" he asks. He genuinely doesn't know what he's done.

She decides to skip the scolding about napkin use and returns to her question. "Have you made your bed?"

Dorion shrugs -- an indecipherable answer -- and Sheila just looks at him. She glances at the clock and wonders if he has enough time to run back upstairs and make his bed. "Do you have your homework ready?" she asks.

Lisa's conversation about helicopter parents is fresh in Sheila's mind. She doesn't want to be one of those parents who micromanage and never teach their kids responsibility. Why does Sheila still have to remind Dorion to clean his room? To use a napkin? To remember his homework?

"Dorion?" she prompts.

He tells her his homework is ready.

"Run upstairs and make your bed, then," she says.

He looks at her a second, as if trying to decide whether to argue, then jumps up and thunders up the stairs to his room, where he pulls up the blue comforter imprinted with basketballs, baseballs, soccer balls. It is the same blue comforter that already neatly covers his brother's bed a few feet away .

For Sheila, the made bed is a symbol -- it means the family has standards it maintains, that order has been imposed and that responsibility has been taken for the ephemera of one's life -- and over the next three months the boys' bedroom will emerge as Dorion's Waterloo. The boys clash in concrete ways in their bedroom: Part of a miniature odd couple, Damon is immaculate, while Dorion's a slob. There's conflict when they play there, too: The charming and athletic Dorion unknowingly attracts Damon's friends away, and an impatient Damon often speaks for Dorion.

Sheila's been around the block before when it comes to Darron's issues, such as potty training. She believes she can go it alone. But tidying up the older boys' room, and their relationship, could solve a lot of problems, Sheila figures. She'll ask for Lisa's help with it.

After all, the Dixons' insistence on order triumphs in the rest of the household. No boots or soccer cleats or shoes clutter up the cavernous entry hall of their Chantilly house. No dirty glasses, teaspoons or bowls from late-night ice cream edge the sink. No Legos surprise the bare feet in the family room where toys are piled in tidy plastic bins.

This is not just Sheila's doing; Ernest spends one morning every two weeks vacuuming the house from top to bottom, and, because he finds their carpet steamer/floor washer inadequate, he uses a dust mop and spritzer bottle of disinfectant to sanitize every inch of tile and wood laminate. The older boys are both conscientious about picking up after themselves downstairs, though Dorion sometimes needs a reminder.

At 6:03 a.m., Ernest had been the first to rise in the Dixons' very clean house, padding around the kitchen in pajama bottoms and a gray henley, moving from the fridge to the stove to the center island in the vast kitchen, making a special breakfast for his boys: Pillsbury crescent rolls. He was intentionally steering them from the sugary Honey Nut Cheerios they typically opt for because he figured they needed to be focused when they took their annual standardized tests later in the day. As he laid out the crescent rolls in tidy, perfectly even rows on a cookie sheet, he ran through his day in his head. First, make breakfast. ("I made you crescent rolls, special," he would tell 11-year-old Damon as he entered the kitchen a few minutes later. "You've got your tests today." "That was yesterday, Dad," Damon would correct him with a hint of get-with-the-program impatience.) Then Sheila would get the older boys out the door by 7 a.m. Then he would drop Darron, the 3-year-old, at nursery school by "circle time" at 9 a.m. Then he would have meetings with wholesalers at 11 a.m. and 12:30 p.m. to discuss supplying his new pharmacy. He will come home and do some work toward opening the pharmacy. He'll pick up Darron from nursery school at 4. He'll have dinner with the family, take a nap, then go to work at the CVS pharmacy in Manassas, leaving the house around 9:30 p.m. for his overnight shift.

At the moment, Ernest works seven days on (a 10-hour shift from 10 p.m. to 8 a.m.) and then has seven days off. When he and a partner open their own pharmacy in the fall, he will drive directly from his night shift at CVS to work from 9 a.m. till 1 p.m. at his pharmacy, then he'll come home, catch about six hours' sleep and go back to his CVS night shift. On his seven days off from CVS, he will work a regular day shift at the new pharmacy.

It is a daunting schedule.

"I've had worse," Ernest says with a shrug. He's sure he can handle it.

Sheila, standing in her jade bathrobe unloading the dishwasher, weighs in. The one with the flexible schedule, she knows, will be the one to pick up the slack. "Tomorrow will be my 10th official year at home," she says. She freezes, the clean glass she has just removed from the dishwasher forgotten, and does the math. Yes, it has been a decade since she left her job as a systems manager for Hecht's department stores shortly after Dorion's birth.

In the adjacent family room where Dorion had turned on the flat-screen and promptly forgotten about it, Jimmy Neutron, boy genius, is doing a science experiment. "It is going to explode!" one of Jimmy's sidekicks warns. "Think. Think. Think," Jimmy says to himself in this race against time.

Sheila verbally runs through her day, committing it to memory as she returns to unloading the dishwasher, multitasking. Kids on bus by 7 a.m. Glass in the cupboard. An appointment with a client at 12:30 p.m. Glass in the cupboard. A phone appointment with a client at 3 p.m. The clink of spoons in the silverware drawer. Another at 3:30 p.m. Forks in the silverware drawer. Dorion to soccer at 5:30 p.m. Knives.

"Think! Think! Think!" a frantic Jimmy Neutron warns from the other room, as he casts about for a solution.

At 6:59 a.m., Dorion tears back down the stairs, gives his mom a kiss on the cheek and walks out the door to the bus stop with his brother.

***

Ernest goes upstairs to get ready for his day while Sheila moves into the breakfast nook with her mug of Gevalia and curls up on a stuffed chair for a few quiet moments. It is sunny and pleasant looking out at the back yard right now, but Sheila acknowledges she finds it a bit isolating here. Three years ago, the Dixons bought their brand-new house, and the neighborhood, being so recently manufactured, has yet to develop into a community.

The homes here rise up out of the fields on either side of the road in tidy lines -- as if one inspired farmer planted rows of brick in the spring and reaped McMansions in the fall. A few saplings, ready to take flight for more hospitable woodlands, have been staked and tied to the ground. An apron of carefully tended grass surrounds each home like a moat.

"People seem disconnected here," Sheila says. Before they bought the house, the Dixons lived in Alexandria in a townhouse complex, where parents of young children gathered in the park to let the kids play. Neighbors socialized more and got to know each other. "Most people here have play sets for their kids in their back yards," Sheila says. "Around here, a lot of people just stay in their homes."

Sheila says she doesn't really have any close friends to talk to about parenting issues. She knows the parents of her sons' friends, but conversations usually take place on the fly and tend to focus on logistics -- who's picking up whom and when, etc. "Plus, being here, you don't have family around," she says.

It's exactly this kind of social isolation that Berkeley sociologist Hochschild sees as another cause of parental anxiety. "We are each other's audience," Hochschild notes, explaining that spouses, friends and neighbors offer "the gift of being seen parenting." Family coaching might serve that same function now, she says. "It's a social vacuum into which commercial interests have moved."

With no sounding board, Sheila says that she is caught in a circle of worry. She elaborates. "There is this sense of chaos because of all the activities we have going on," she says. "The kids, the household, his business, my business, our families -- all the activity that happens sometimes can -- " Her voice trails off. She tries again: "Sometimes, I guess I get overwhelmed by it all." She and Ernest talk about their parenting, Sheila says. But she tends to see more causes for concern than he does, and neither has many fresh ideas to try. That's part of why she sought out a family coach in the first place. "I really try to tune in to the three kids, their different personalities, to make sure they're being nurtured as wholly as they can be."

As Sheila slowly empties her coffee mug, Darron comes in and climbs on her lap. He holds her cheeks between his chubby hands and kisses her. Then he smiles, tiny white Chicklet teeth in a broad grin.

All is forgiven for his restless night, which meant Sheila had to comfort him back to sleep. He holds onto his mother's hands and swings himself backward so that he is hanging upside down from her lap. Sheila smiles at her son, who is suddenly quiet -- awed by his new perspective -- and she frowns, returning to the effort to articulate why she has sought professional help for her family and home life. "I want to make sure I have balance," she says, but she's not sure exactly what that would look like. "I always feel like I have to be productive, or it is wasting time . . . I've been on the move the past 10 years, being home with them, so when I actually sit down, I have to say to myself, 'It is okay to sit down.' "

"I upside down!" Darron says.

"Yes, you're upside down," Sheila affirms, then she frees one of her hands. "And I'm going to tickle you!" As Darron squeals and wiggles, his "Thomas the Tank Engine" pajama shirt comes untucked, and his mother kisses his bare round belly. He escapes her grasp and runs into the other room, and Sheila begins to worry out loud. While Ernest prepares to open the pharmacy in the next month, Sheila frets that the burden of parenting will fall completely on her. "And I can't be full steam everywhere," she says.

Sheila knows the family will see far less of Ernest. And he'll no longer be able to pinch-hit so that she can grow her business. On the days when he is home in the afternoons, he takes Dorion to soccer practice so Sheila can answer some e-mail; he is happy to snuggle up with Darron for a nap so Sheila can return some phone calls. Still, as the one with the hard-and-fast work schedule, Ernest's work takes precedence, and Sheila seems to make the compromises here. "Basically, he is the breadwinner, so his goals come first," she says. (And, indeed, later this very afternoon Damon will twist his ankle playing football at school, and it will be Sheila who gets the call from the school to come get him -- scuttling plans for the client meeting she had scheduled.)

Her company, founded in 2003 to help female entrepreneurs network, is not yet generating income. Members pay annual dues of $100 to $200, which entitle them to participate in events and other services, but so far Sheila has put that money back into the company, Women Building and Investing in Success. Someday, she dreams of "going global," but for the moment, WBIS has only 50 members and is limited to two Virginia chapters, for which Sheila orchestrates monthly luncheons with speakers to discuss such topics as marketing or improving communication with employees. Her "office" is steps from the kitchen, and when she can steal three or four hours on the three days a week that Darron is in day care and the other boys are at school, she spends the time on the phone or e-mailing members with solutions to challenges that small entrepreneurs face. To drum up new members, she offers free advice via the Internet through her "15 Minute Business Mentoring Moment." The business helps her keep her skills honed and résumé growing in case she wants a fulltime marketing job some day. "I need to keep going with my business," she says. "This is who I am. This is what's important." She knows Ernest's new pharmacy will take up most of his time. "Are there some things we can put in place now for our family, some systems or structures, so that when that change occurs, we're okay? Is there something Lisa can do to help us so it is okay when that happens?"

In the adjacent family room Jimmy Neutron is back to beating himself up for a solution: "Think. Think. Think."

***

One month into the coaching sessions, Lisa sits in the Dixons' sunroom chatting with Sheila and the boys, wondering how things are going as Sheila begins to shift some responsibility to the children.

Dorion fidgets on the edge of the couch by his mom, impatient to be outside on this beautiful summer day. Damon sits erect and tells Lisa that he made dinner all by himself the other night: stuffed peppers. And he wiped the supper table and helped unload the dishwasher.

"That's huge!" Lisa says. "I bet your mom appreciated that." She turns to Sheila, urging her to agree.

Sheila nods. "I really did."

"What challenges do you want to work on this week?" she asks Sheila.

Sheila, who has had a few weekly phone coaching sessions with Lisa to get the hang of the parent-as-coach philosophy, says she is ready to tackle the Battle of the Bedroom.

Here the battle lines have been clearly drawn -- right down the center of the room and straight across the middle of the dresser, where two identical toy robots stand back to back, dutiful border guards. "I like it when I can find things," Damon says. Dorion couldn't care less how tidy his half is -- and is largely oblivious to how his laissez-faire attitude annoys his older brother. Damon gets mad. The boys fight.

It drives Sheila crazy. How hard can it be to keep a room clean? That's the way her mother brought her up. It is tough to let go of that.

But when Sheila attempts to hold up her mother's standards to the boys, Dorion resists. She begins with the time-honored I-had-to-walk-10-miles-to-school-in-the-snow argument. "You've got it easy," she says of her own mother's higher expectations.

"Grandma's house is so clean," Damon confides to Lisa, that she has a whole room -- the living room -- that no one is even allowed to enter. "I bet no one has sat on that couch for 30 years!"

"Maybe when you're older -- " Sheila says.

"What? When I'm 21?" Damon scoffs.

Lisa laughs and asks Damon whether he keeps his own side of the room clean. "I do, but Dorion leaves it dirty for 10 days or a week! He leaves his pants on the bed after his shower. And towels on the floor."

"No, not me!" Dorion insists.

"Then who?" Sheila asks.

"It's Darron," he says, blaming it on the absent youngest.

"And under his bed it's full of dirty socks and stuff," Damon says.

"No! I take that stuff out," Dorion says.

"What? Every 10 months?" Damon demands.

"Can I go outside and play now?" Dorion says.

"Me, too?" Damon adds. He will later confide that he suspects "Coach Lisa" is undercover FBI because of all the questions she asks.

Sheila waves them away, and as soon as the door bangs shut behind them, Lisa is all business. During their coaching sessions this first month, Lisa and Sheila have been talking about a parent's evolving roles. (After the first session, Ernest mostly leaves the family coach meetings up to Sheila.) Lisa has explained that for children from age 0 to 6, the parent is a "teacher"; from 7 to 12, the parent functions as an "administrator" helping the kids remember what they need to do; by age 13, it is time for parents to start serving as "coach" to their teens. She told Sheila that her oldest boys are transitioning now and that she needs to be shifting her role from an administrator who is on them all the time with reminders, to a coach who cedes them more responsibility.

This process begins with "requests and agreements." If it drives them crazy that Dorion can never find his shinguards when it's time to rush out the door for soccer practice, get him to sign an agreement saying that he will have them lying by the door an hour before practice -- or he won't go to practice.

They craft a plan to buy Damon some new socks with a different colored stripe or design, so he can tell his and Dorion's apart. "Also, I think Damon is really ready to start doing some of his own laundry," Lisa says.

Sheila hasn't thought of that, she says, pleased at the prospect.

Finally, Lisa suggests that Sheila request an agreement from Dorion that he will have his room clean by 11 a.m. every day or he can't go outside to play. The catch is, Sheila has to step back and let the agreement take effect -- no reminders, no rescuing, no last-minute reprieves.

This will be hard.

But, on Lisa's advice, Sheila corners Dorion later that week to explain "requests and agreements." When she is sure he understands the concept, she tells him that she would like his room clean every day and asks if he can think of a consequence, should it not happen.

There's a little bit of Brer Rabbit in him when he suggests his punishment: He should not be allowed to play video games on weekdays.

Video games are always off-limits on weekdays, Sheila points out.

"What if I'm not allowed to skateboard in the basement, only outside?" he asks.

Hmmm. "How about, if it's not clean by 9 a.m., you can't play outside that day?"

"What if it's not clean by 1?" Dorion counters.

"How about 11 a.m.?"

Deal, the two agree.

Dorion, who has taken to calling Lisa "the etiquette coach" because he once saw a "Simpsons" episode where Bart was thus consigned, thinks the whole thing is a bit weird. Still, he agrees to give it a shot.

***

"So, how did it go?" Lisa e-mails Sheila a few days later, wondering if the room got cleaned.

"Dorion agreed to have his side of the room picked up by 11 a.m. It's 9:13 a.m., and I'll ask the question and remind him of the time," Sheila e-mails back.

She is not optimistic. "On the same note, he has been responsible for his swim pass," she writes, explaining that she is using Lisa's suggested natural consequences: If he can't keep track of it, he can't go to the pool. "He could not find it yesterday and wanted to use the guest pass or his friend's guest pass or go with the neighbor who knows the lifeguard." Sheila told him, no -- and reminded Ernest to back her up on this. "Ernest did, without comment," she tells Lisa.

The next morning, Dorion tells his dad that his room is clean -- and his dad says he can go outside. But later, when Sheila checks Dorion's room, well, their definition of "clean" differs. She scolds Dorion -- and she and Ernest decide a visual inspection needs to be part of the deal.

"This is going to be a process of working on respect and boundaries for a while," Lisa encourages Sheila in an e-mail the following day. "And this is entirely normal. He is in the testing process, and right now that is his job. As a person, he needs to understand limits, and it is much better to learn those from someone he loves and loves him than a stranger. This doesn't make it any less of a challenge -- but remember it is a normal process of growing up." She offers a tip: "Ask him what he thinks respect is about. Once you have a mutual understanding of that, then make sure that you take the opportunity to let him know things that he does [and] how he acts that you respect." Don't be discouraged, Lisa says, reminding Sheila that there has been progress on the room-cleaning. "Just hang in there."

Several days later, an ecstatic Sheila e-mails Lisa. Dorion had his bed made and his room clean by 10:30 a.m. -- half an hour ahead of schedule. "I yelled down to Ernest to say what Dorion did. Ernest said, 'What made him do it?' My response, 'We'll have to ask him.' About four minutes later, Dorion went to the office and said, 'Dad, I made an agreement with mom that I would clean my room by 11 or I can't go outside for the day.' It was amazing," Sheila crowed.

***

As she sits on a picnic bench one late August afternoon and watches Damon, Dorion and a friend swooping up and down the half pipes at a local skate park, Sheila has time to reflect on where she is with her parenting efforts. The summer is drawing to a close, and so are Lisa's coaching sessions.

"I just want to make sure that the boys are well-rounded and able to make good decisions without having to work too hard at it," she says. "I want them to be mature and be leaders, but I also want them to be boys and have fun . . . So, how do you do that? Through working with Lisa, I'm trying to balance that." She says she doesn't want them to be impulsive because that means they may one day jump from job to job without feeling accountable. But then she wonders whether that isn't the wave of the future, anyway. "When I went to school, the expectation was that you'd be in your job for seven to eight years. That's what you did because you needed to get your 401(k). My parents' generation stayed in their job for 30 years. Now, you can skip jobs every two to three years." She mulls over this. "What's the trend of the future, and how do I make sure my kids are working toward that trend? What do I need to do to make sure they're okay?"

Sheila says her challenge is to let go of her worries a bit and be confident that it is okay to let her sons be who they are and to trust that they will be okay.

"Mom, can we go?" Damon interrupts over and over. Finally, Sheila relents and packs the boys into the van for a trip to the mall to buy grip tape for their scooters and skateboards and pizza for lunch.

The boys have been doing so well lately, and Sheila's been feeling so good about her parenting, that she decides to up the ante a bit after lunch with a culminating test that moves her firmly away from "parent-administrator" toward the new title of "parent-coach." She takes the boys to Target for school supplies and preps them in the car: They are in charge today, and it is their job to find everything on their supply list and put it in the cart -- by themselves.

Inside Target, she takes them to the school supply section and simply steps back, waiting with the cart at the end of the aisles to see if they can handle the exhaustive lists on their own. It is a challenge for the boys. And for Sheila.

When Damon keeps getting confused between two separate notebook items -- one two-inch, three-ring vinyl binder and two 1.5-inch, three-ring vinyl binders -- she has to intervene.

"Here," she tries to explain that 1.5 means one-and-a-half inches. "And you're getting the two rows mixed up."

"No, I'm not!" Damon is exasperated.

The organizer in her rears up. "You need to check off each item on the list," she says, digging in her purse for a pen for each of the boys. She hands them the pens, and starts to add, "You need to --" but stops herself. She crosses her arms, keeping her advice to herself -- she can do this -- and resolutely returns to the cart at the end of the aisle.

"Maybe this wasn't such a good experiment," she worries. Her own mother would have whipped down the school supply rows with her in tow and been in and out of the store in 15 minutes.

Dorion comes down the aisle with three folders the same color and drops them in the cart.

"Dorion, maybe you want to get different colors so you don't accidentally think you're bringing home your science folder homework when it's actually your math folder."

"Mom." Dorion says, in a voice that reminds her it is his choice.

Sheila closes her mouth. It is true that this will result in the natural consequences that Coach Lisa is always advocating for. She bites her tongue.

A moment later, when his mother's back is turned, Dorion grabs the folders and discreetly replaces them with different-colored ones. She pretends not to notice.

Damon finishes his list first and, as they prowl the aisles, grows bossy.

"Dorion," he chides, "you can't get this kind of Kleenex. Get the Target brand, like me. It's cheaper."

Dorion's face drops. He likes the soft kind with lotion in it.

"Sorry," Damon says, putting Dorion's Puffs back on the shelf, "but you need to get Target."

"Damon!" Sheila sees the usual dynamic unfolding, where Damon wants to run Dorion's life. "He can get whatever kind of tissue he wants."

From halfway down the aisle, a pleased Dorion retrieves his box of tissue, aims, and sends it soaring toward the shopping cart. He shoots! He scores!

***

On a crisp day at the end of October, Sheila and Ernest stand behind the counter of the Centreville Medical Arts Pharmacy in a strip mall off of Lee Highway. The Dixons' new pharmacy has been open for nearly two months, and Ernest -- who worked the overnight shift at CVS the night before, buzzed home for a shower and came right here -- looks exhausted as he stands among the rows of medicine in his white lab coat. Even so, he is pleased. "We had 20 prescriptions yesterday," he says. This is double his projection for daily business the first two months.

(Later, The Dixons will say that they are worried about how their new business will fare in a souring economy. "Fortunately, we are in a business where people need medication," Sheila will say.)

The sessions with Lisa are over, and Sheila declares them a success. "I've gotten a lot of really good suggestions from her, because she's really looking at our family from the outside," she says. Mostly, Sheila sees this objectivity as useful -- though there were a few moments when, as the woman who knows her children best, Sheila challenged Lisa. (Lisa recommended Dorion get some time to play after school before settling down to homework, and Sheila rejected the idea, saying she'd tried it in the past and it didn't work.)

Sheila's general satisfaction aside, it's hard to know how deep the changes will run. Recently, Sheila has devoted a lot of time to the pharmacy, including making sachets for Ernest to give out to nurses so they'll remember to refer patients. With the extra load at home, Sheila still hasn't worked much on her own business -- one of her primary concerns.

But family life is still going relatively smoothly.

"Damon needed a few reminders about his laundry this week," Sheila says. But for the most part, she says, he has ably tackled his new chore. Dorion is remembering to bring his schoolbooks home after Sheila took Lisa's suggestion and made a chart to help him keep track of what he needs each day. And there's been a permanent cease-fire in the Battle of the Bedroom, with Dorion working steadily to keep it clean.

"And middle school is going good for Damon," Sheila says. "He is even class president."

Suddenly, her husband interjects from behind the pharmacy counter.

"He is?" Ernest says. "I didn't know that."

***

Join Lisa Carey, Sheila Dixon and Karen Houppert for a live discussion about this story Monday, Dec. 22, at 12 noon ET.

Karen Houppert is a contributing writer for the Magazine. She is the author of "Home Fires Burning: Married to the Military -- for Better or Worse." She can be reached at me@karenhouppert.com.