Nobody decided this

Not so long ago, I had just finished up a work day that drained me. Back-to-back calls, cognitively intense, maxed out. I was ready to relax and reset.

Mike had been with Pierce since about 3 p.m. They'd had a good 2.5 hours together in the house, and some of that time could have gone to homework. We've talked about this.

Instead, I joined them and somewhere in the dinner prep Mike mentioned to Pierce that homework would happen after dinner.

I remember thinking:

Oh, are you going to do that?

Pierce needs a lot of support to stay focused on dull tasks like homework. That support had been landing on me at the end of the day, and I had asked Mike to take the lead some nights, and it kept landing on me.

That night, I asked Mike a different question.

"When you were a kid, who did you do your homework with?"

He said, "I always did it with my mom." He said it with a grimace and shifted his weight.

"Did you ever do it with your dad?"

"No."

"Are you also going to be the dad that never does homework with his son?"

I asked this neutrally. He stayed silent, and so did I.

Then he sat down with Pierce and did math homework with him. He brought love, care, and laughter to it. It turned out he wanted to be involved.

Sometimes we don't realize our default behaviors have a root cause, and exploring their origin gives us a chance to make a different choice.