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" When my friend Alex recently came to visit with his two boys, we didn&amp;#039;t have to discuss where my 7-year-old, Henry, and I would meet them. We knew. It&amp;#039;s a fact that when you&amp;#039;re in New York City, the best place by far to take kids is the American Museum of Natural History. Okay, maybe our kids might prefer one of those massive toy stores with animatronic characters that sing and pelt you with candy, but those establishments tend to cause adult brains to liquefy and dribble out through their ear canals. The natural-history museum is one of the few places our kids enjoy that can keep our brains nice and firm. Everybody wins!  I couldn&amp;#039;t wait to tell Henry the plan. He would be out of his mind with joy. The last time we were at the museum, about a year before, he&amp;#039;d wheeled from one exhibit to the next, panting &amp;quot;Can I touch the giant meteorite?&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Let&amp;#039;s see the space show again!&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Is that a real whale hanging up there on the ceiling? Can it fall down on us?&amp;quot; He had to be dragged out at the end of the day. If you&amp;#039;re ever visiting the museum, you can still see little-boy claw marks across the floor leading out of Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Hall. The next morning I sprung the news of our upcoming excursion on him as he dug into his granola. I waited for him to look up and beam at me. Instead he glowered down at his cereal. &amp;quot;That place?!&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;Ugh. Bor-ing.&amp;quot; I suppose this shouldn&amp;#039;t have come as a total surprise. During the last few months, Henry had begun expressing the opposite stance to whatever opinions my husband and I held. There was the expected: Vegetables are gross. There was the weirdly stubborn: I won&amp;#039;t eat my favorite cookies anymore because you like them too. And there was the bizarre: I hate the sun.  It&amp;#039;s futile to argue these points with him, but somehow that didn&amp;#039;t stop me this time. I insisted that he loved the museum; in turn, Henry argued that he actually always hated it and he had been faking. The volume and pitch of our voices rose until the dog had to leave the room. There was a lot of whining and stomping and door-slamming, and I&amp;#039;m hoping that if I don&amp;#039;t specify who the culprit was, you&amp;#039;ll assume it was Henry.  Finally I pulled the Ultimate Parent Move: I informed him that we were going whether he liked it or not, and if he gave me any more of a hard time, his beloved Lego collection would be donated to his grandparents, who could use it to build that deck they&amp;#039;ve always wanted.  Henry gave in, but he wasn&amp;#039;t happy. Neither was I, frankly. Sure, his feet were shuffling toward the door, but I wanted them to be skipping. I wanted his heart to be in this as well as the rest of him! Who was this scowling creature, and where had he hidden my enthusiastic boy? Up until this showdown, I had quietly admired Henry&amp;#039;s determination to forge his own path. He resisted his friends&amp;#039; opinions almost as fiercely as he resisted ours, after all. His favorite TV show, Wheel of Fortune, is one his peers had declared &amp;quot;lame.&amp;quot; Then there was the time I watched him stand his ground while his friends tried to persuade him \u2014 hard \u2014 to try a radish. Who wouldn&amp;#039;t want a kid who bucks the trends, who couldn&amp;#039;t care less what everyone else is doing? What parent doesn&amp;#039;t want a child who thinks for himself? Me, it turns out. I mean, sure, my pint-size iconoclast will probably be confident and successful someday, but a weak-willed conformist would be so much more pleasant today. I don&amp;#039;t really want to break his spirit. Not completely. But maybe he could conform just a little bit, in the privacy of our home? Go with the flow when no one was looking?   It&amp;#039;s the knee-jerk contrariness that drives me especially batty. For instance: Henry and I often visit the library to borrow books or a movie. During one of our outings, he chose an animated feature called The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus. It didn&amp;#039;t look promising, but I agreed to try it.  Watching it was, for me, the equivalent of getting beaned on the temple with a Hacky Sack: not exactly painful, but there are far more entertaining ways to spend an hour. In fact, halfway through the movie, Henry wandered away and came back with a comic book, which he perused while occasionally glancing up at the screen. When the movie was finally over, I sighed, &amp;quot;Well, we&amp;#039;ll watch something better next week.&amp;quot; He looked at me. &amp;quot;I loved it,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;If you say so,&amp;quot; I muttered.  &amp;quot;I want to watch it for the rest of my life,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;That is how much I loved it.&amp;quot;  And indeed, every time the next library visit rolled around, he chose The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus. The more I suggested we try something else, the stronger his love grew. Week after week, Santa Claus came home with us, and our lovely quality time together devolved into me sighing loudly and reading a magazine while Santa Claus battled invisible goblins.  One day I insisted we borrow something else. I chose an animated film that seemed educational yet adventure-packed, and Henry agreed to try it as long as he could turn it off the moment he hated it \u2014 which, he knew, would be soon. The movie turned out to be so bad that I pined for Santa Claus. Henry seemed engrossed, though, so I snuck away to do something more fun, like scrub the toilet-seat hinges. When I returned, it had ended, and he announced, &amp;quot;That was the worst movie ever.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;It was pretty bad,&amp;quot; I said. He glared at me.  &amp;quot;Actually, I liked the part where they went into space,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;You missed that part of the movie. Let&amp;#039;s watch it again.&amp;quot;  Given his storied history of digging in, it&amp;#039;s pretty amazing (and a tad embarrassing) that I&amp;#039;m somehow still learning how to avoid direct combat. All I can do is acknowledge his (often insane) opinion, negotiate when negotiation is practical, and roll my eyes behind his back. (Listen, he doesn&amp;#039;t always get to be the immature one.)  On the way to the museum, Henry told me that because he was being cruelly forced to join me on this trip, there was absolutely no way he would enjoy himself. I didn&amp;#039;t say a thing.  In the end, he had a great time. Of course. He hung out with my friend&amp;#039;s boys, he explored all 95,000 exhibits (I&amp;#039;m estimating), and he got to spend his allowance at the gift shop. He even spent a few minutes staring, wide-eyed and slack-jawed, at that whale. Four hours later, I finally persuaded him to leave, and on our way home, I apologized for forcing him to endure such hardship.  &amp;quot;I mean, I do know how much you hate that awful place,&amp;quot; I said.  Henry gave me a pitying look. &amp;quot;Sometimes I just say things,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;Words don&amp;#039;t have to mean everything, you know.&amp;quot; Finally, something we can agree on. Alice Bradley also shares her adventures in parenting at finslippy.com, momversation.com, and lets-panic.com. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, son, dog, and cat. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.redbookmag.com/life/mom-kids/advice/a6362/kids-driving-you-crazy/>