Gentle Parenting Travis Kelce

Tonight, I told my son that he needed to wait a few minutes to run his race.

[What is a race, you ask? TL, DR: He likes to run laps around the first floor of our townhouse and pretend he's driving a stock car. He makes us randomly name drivers that are competing against him and commentate on the race as it winds through four laps. Yes, he wins every time.]

He didn't like that, so he slapped me—hard—in the arm.

You know what it reminded me of? Travis Kelce menacing Andy Reid in the first half of last night's Super Bowl.

I didn't see the interaction in real time. (Watching a football game is a challenge when you're corralling two small children for bedtime, who knew?) But when I saw the replays and freeze-frames, I recoiled. I posted a thought to social media that read something like: "Is this the game where we stop talking about how Taylor Swift is ruining football and talk about how football might damage Taylor Swift?"

Look, I'm not a Swiftie. I admire her work, I respect how she goes about it, and she's got a handful of songs I quite like. I find the world's obsession with her and Travis a bit ... much. But our world is such a steaming pile of crap, isn't it nice to see a (seemingly) happy story amid the wreckage?

I digress...

When I saw Travis going after Andy (we're on a first-name basis here, because I'm not the damn New York Times), I felt an instinctual fear for her. If you're going after your coach (or, more specifically: towering over him, pushing him, screaming at him until the veins in your neck pop) in a game where you know the entire country is watching because it's the Super Bowl and you're Taylor Swift's boyfriend—what are you doing when you get pissed off and the cameras aren't rolling?

As the game rolled on, I saw many posts like mine—and a whole bunch that completely excused Travis' behavior. He's passionate. It's football. Andy gets it. Travis is just really amped up for the game. He does this all the time. And this wasn't just coming from men—many women were giving him carte blanche, too.

OK, I thought. Maybe my jumping straight to "You in danger, girl" was a stretch. I'm not new to football. I know it's an emotionally charged, violent game.

But the core of the argument still stands: What Travis did wasn't OK. Why? Because I wouldn't tolerate that behavior from my 4-year-old.

Dan and I are taking the gentle parenting route (read: Big Little Feelings, Dr. Becky, Mr. Chazz) in re: disciplining our kids. We're trying to teach them to recognize their feelings, accept them, and find a healthy way to deal with them.

I looked at the photo of Travis' face that launched a thousand memes and thought: "Oh, man, you're having a big feeling right now, Travis.

"It's OK to be upset that your coach didn't put you in the game. It's OK that you're mad you weren't on the field for that play where that guy fumbled because I guess you think would have done something to prevent the fumble. (I'm not sure how that would have worked, but we'll go with it.) Everyone has big feelings. There's no such thing as a bad big feeling.

"But while all feelings are OK, all behaviors aren't.

"Just because you're upset that you're losing, and this is football, and it's the Super Bowl, and your famous girlfriend is watching, and you're not on the field, and you're mad at your coach—that's not a free pass to act like a toddler throwing a monster truck across the room because his mom told him it's bedtime."

I guess what I'm saying here is, did I err by immediately jumping from "Travis Kelce is behaving badly" to "He's dangerous, Taylor, run"? Probably.

But is it reasonable to agree that the behavior was absurd? To posit that, had he been any other player—not a future Hall of Famer, not Taylor Swift's beau, not the star of a dozen commercials—we'd be having a very different conversation about this today? Also, probably.

Anyway, back to tonight.

I gave my son essentially the same talk I had in my head with Travis: "It's OK to be mad I told you to wait. Waiting is hard. I don't like waiting either. But while it's OK to be mad, it's never OK to hit."

Afterward—unlike Andy Reid—I levied consequences. No races at all tonight, and immediate bedtime.

Granted, the Vince Lombardi trophy wasn't on the line here in our little house. But in the future, my son will probably think twice before raising his hands to me when he doesn't get his way. I wonder if Travis will.

UPDATE: If you missed it, Travis apologized on the his podcast. So maybe he gets it. We'll see.