Anyone Can Go Zero to Sixty. The Real Skill Is Sixty to Zero

If you’re from Detroit, you learn about going zero to sixty from a very early age. We’re car people here.

And around here, how fast a car goes from zero to sixty MPH is a big deal. It’s a measure of speed, power, and legitimacy. Zero to sixty is a proxy for respect, and one of Detroit’s contributions to the American idea of success.

Why go if you can’t go fast? Why be, if you can’t be fast?

One moment at our kitchen table with my sons showed me a different path.

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A week ago, our boys were in a slurping phase. Everything they drank, they slurped. Robyn and I protested, and they kept testing us on it.

One afternoon, I lost it and demanded the smoothie cup, erupting from zero to sixty in less than two seconds.

Unlike in muscle cars, in parenting, going from zero to sixty is rarely the goal. It’s what breaks trust, triggering senseless yelling and tears.

I hate myself when I do that.

I don’t know how it happened, but for some reason — luck or divine intervention, probably both — I calmed myself from sixty to zero just as fast as I accelerated.

It was a stunning feeling. I’d never done that before, never had that physical sensation of rapid deceleration.

As an adult, and as a parent, the skill of controlled, rapid deceleration is essential. It violates my Detroit upbringing to say this, but how quickly we go from sixty to zero is far more important than how quickly we go from zero to sixty.

Usually, rapid deceleration — for me at least — is uncontrolled. Probably for most of us. I say something that makes one of us weep, or grab my son’s shoulder in a way that spooks him, or slam my fist into the table hard enough for the pain to jolt me into a pause.

That’s the emotional equivalent of a car hitting a tree.

Controlled, rapid deceleration, on the other hand, is like having a race car with really good brakes.

In relationships and parenting, we ought to be like skilled drivers who know when and how to brake — not reckless ones who blow through the guardrails.

The good part is, I think we can practice this. Over the past week, I’ve tried it a dozen times. First, I make my body go to sixty in a second — clenching my teeth, muscles, and fists. Then I do the opposite, relaxing fully in the same amount of time.

I can’t prove it works, but I now know what deceleration is supposed to feel like in my body.

I don’t have some profound conclusion here, except for this: parent to parent, adult to adult — practice deceleration.

In America, anyone can go zero to sixty. The real skill is learning to go sixty to zero.

Even though there’s no applause for it, we ought to practice it anyway. Who cares if nobody will ever know? We will. Our kids, our partners, our families will. Our colleagues will.

Having a better, more peaceful life is worth it — even if the world never notices.

Imagining a world with less shouting

Robyn forwarded me a three-day “no-shout challenge” that she heard about through a speaker at conference she attended. I made it two and a half days, and every hour was hard. I didn’t realize how much I shouted at my son until I tried to stop.

The challenge helped me to understand why I shouted and think of an alternative pattern of behavior.

Upon reflection, I realized that I shout because my most foundational belief about parenting is that what I owe my sons - above all else - is to help them become good people. So when my son deliberately screams to wake up his big brother, or bites me, or doesn’t follow what I believe to be a high-standard of conduct, that moves me from zero to ten in a second. That’s my baggage, not his.

I decided that my replacement behavior would be to say, “neither of us are perfect, but we are going to figure this out” when my temper was rising, instead of shouting.

But the point here is not that I am cured of shouting (I’m not even close). The point is to share what happened after I started shouting less.

We have been struggling a lot as a family during this pandemic. In many ways, this period of our lives has been a blessing, but it has been a trying time. Our elder son, now, is very aware of the virus and he misses our family, his friends, and his teachers at school. He’s confused about why he has to give far-away hugs and why he can do certain things but not others.

He’s also a toddler, so we have had power struggles over really small things as is the case with most families.

But when Robyn and I started this challenge and began shouting less, something changed for the better in our house. In a word, everything deescalated.

We still all have tantrums, but they are less intense. We still have power struggles, but we’re able to take a breath more quickly that before. Bo says “excuse me” to get our attention more, instead of screaming indiscriminately. Sometimes, instead of shouting we find a way to talk about his sadness and confusion, even though he barely has grasp of the words and concepts needed to express what he’s feeling.

Again, there is still shouting in our house, and I’m not proud of how I act on many days. But even just shouting less has created more space to listen, love, and resolve the very real problems we have. We have not reached the promised-land of a fully peaceful house, but we are on a different trajectory than we were.

While this was all happening, Robyn and I have been observing, listening, and talking intensely every night about the problems of race in our country. It its something that we are deeply stirred by, personally and professionally.

Because we saw a reduction in shouting bring about real and almost immediate change in our own household, I can’t help but wonder what might happen if we shouted less when trying to resolve community issues.

Say if we all just decided we would stop shouting for a week or a month, what would happen? In my wildest dreams, I wonder if that could be the very humble beginning of a transformation that eventually got us to a moment where we could live in a community where shouting was no longer needed.

The skeptic in me feels that this type of scaling is difficult and perhaps impossible. After all, Robyn happened to attend a conference, where she heard a speaker, who shared a no-shout challenge, and we happened to try it out. Getting to the point of trying to intentionally shout less resulted from a lucky mix of circumstance, humbling work, and serendipity.

In our household - whether it is us as parents or our children - someone had to take the first step. And luckily, it is clear that the first step to a no-shout home was our responsibility as parents.

But with complex disagreements that are compounded by hundreds of years of pain and violence - like race, poverty, and others - it’s less clear whose responsibility it is to take the first step. Moreover, that first step of not shouting takes incredible courage, humility, and grace.

I pray that I can summon that courage, humility, and grace whenever I need to take that first step. Being ready to take that first step is something worth preparing for, even if my number never is called to lead in that way. It is for all of us.