How to Train Your Dragon

Children are not dragons. But a good number of parenting models treat them as if they were. Okay. So there are some similarities. Like being loud and unpredictable, tendencies toward mass destruction and general chaos, supernatural abilities like shape-shifting and breathing fire, and acting as the genesis and origin of many wondrous legends.

Regardless, the popular new movie sensation, “How to Train Your Dragon,” makes a valid point that applies to both children and dragons: They are nothing more than another one of Earth’s living and breathing creations: complex and mythical, often misunderstood, but deep inside looking for the same thing all creatures seek—love.

So how do we train them?

Parenting is an enormous responsibility and should never be taken lightly. But the numerous parenting techniques and styles that exist prove nothing more than the fact that there is no perfect answer when it comes to raising children. What works with one child will fail with another. What fails with one child will succeed magnificently with the next. Most parenting books will try to convince you that they have found the perfect solution. The key. The secret. The Scooby Doo moment at the end of the mystery funhouse tunnel. But they are wrong.

Authoritative. Permissive. Strict. Nurturant. Attachment. Detachment. Independent. Dependent. Slow. Indulgent. The list is never-ending. And while all these models may have excellent suggestions and useful theories, there is no one-size-fits-all answer when it comes to children.

Teaching children self-discipline, kindness, generosity, love, and all the other virtues that will help them to grow into loving, compassionate adults is not always easy. In the past, many parenting models treated children like beasts to be tamed. And while many children will respond to whipping, yelling, and other forms of corporal punishment, these children are not learning why and how they should behave, they are just being frightened into doing so.

On the other hand, if you use no forms of discipline or consequences whatsoever, children will not realize that negative behavior comes with negative consequences. And they may not learn to care about the feelings of anyone but themselves.

What children need is a good balance of love, compassion, attention, fun, a safe environment in which to learn and grow, and gentle but strict boundaries. They need to know that they are important to us and deeply loved. But they also need to know that negative behaviors are consistently met with unhappy consequences.

When you have just one baby, you are likely to go through a phase where you believe that there is a perfect way to parent and a perfect way meet all your baby’s needs. But by the time you have your second child, you realize that this is a unicorn fantasy. Each child has infinite needs and you cannot always attend to them. Does this mean your toddler is being emotionally scarred when he cries for 10 minutes because he desperately wants juice while you finish up nursing your newborn?

Of course not. But the height of emotion children are capable of eliciting during their emotional outbursts can make even the most organized and nurturing mom feel like a mess.

For example, my son Nino (who is truly a sweet child most of the time and up until this point has been a delightful playmate) has recently started having meltdowns while playing with his friends because according to him, “They won’t play with me.” At first I found myself concerned and upset about this situation. What was going on? Why would his friends leave him out this way? How could they be so mean?

But when I questioned him more specifically (and also observed the play dynamics in action), I realized that it’s not that Nino’s friends won’t play with him, it’s that his friends don’t want to follow along in his (sometimes) tyrannical dictatorship of playtime. If Nino wants to play Lego, then it is high treason if your son wants to play Power Rangers or Mr. Potato Head. Punishable by death or at least a full-scale temper tantrum.

Navigating how to deal with this playtime drama was more challenging than I expected. I like to be nurturing and kind, especially when someone is upset. But after listening to Nino and giving him hugs, I realized that what Nino needed was not someone to fan the flames of his hysteria, but a stern voice telling him that he needs to learn to compromise with his friends during playtime.

To me, this is one of the hardest parts of parenting. Setting limits. Setting boundaries. Saying no when you want to say yes. Being stern when you just want to comfort your child. Because I remember being a kid and feeling left out. I remember being excited to play some special game with my friends and finding that no one wanted to play it with me. I remember being the last one picked to play dodge ball.

But I also know that I don’t want Nino to turn into the bratty kid that no one wants to play with because he always wants his way and doesn’t know how to take turns or compromise. And so I was stern when I wanted to be soft. I gave him a serious face when I wanted to give him another hug. And I said, “Nino, go back outside and find a way to compromise with your friends. Or this playdate is over.”

There is no way to know how each parenting choice we make and each instant of our shared lives will affect the ultimate growth of our precious children. In moments like these, I can only hope that I’ve made the right choice and that the discomfort we both felt as I sent him back out to work things out with his friends was going to be helpful in the long run.

For me, parenting is full of these kind of moments. The moments where I know that the choice that feels instinctively right is also the one that makes me feel most uncomfortable. And so I try to toe the line that I’ve made for myself. And believe that these moments of discomfort will eventually be moments of growth. For both of us.

And I try to remember that spending too much time agonizing over whether or not I am doing everything perfectly (I’m not) or whether or not my child is developing perfectly (he isn’t) is a waste of time.

Learning to parent is a humbling experience. It makes you laugh, but it also makes you cry. It makes you realize that you are not perfect and neither is your beautiful, amazing child. But it also makes you step outside your comfort zone to take chances and learn things that you would never learn otherwise. And if any dragons are to be tamed, they aren’t the ones you expected. They are the ones lurking deep inside your heart. The ones you didn’t even know were there. Before you had children.

Naomi de la Torre is a stay-at-home-mom with two delightful boys, ages two and five. Naomi has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Arizona, is a self-proclaimed salsa diva and can make a killer octopus out of a single hot dog.