Our son Raffi has always been a handful. He is wild, willful, easily frustrated and disappointed. He is also curious, adorable, and full of joy. These qualities alternate in him in approximately five-second intervals. It has always been this way, but things got worse—a lot worse—when Raffi’s little brother was born, last summer, just after Raffi turned three.

Raffi’s mother, Emily, had to this point spent more time with Raffi than I had, but she was consumed with the task of keeping the baby fed, clothed, and sleeping regularly. Raffi missed her attention, but he did not seem to resent the baby. He just wanted to play with him. He wanted to pull on his face, tug on his head, sit on his back. The baby was not necessarily ready for these activities. Keeping Raffi from killing the baby, and keeping myself from killing Raffi, became my job. I was not very good at it.

Twice in the summer after the baby was born, I raised my hand to Raffi. The first happened when the baby was just a few weeks old. One evening, while Emily was cooking dinner, I was holding the baby in my lap when Raffi came over and started trying for some reason to slap the baby’s head. “Stop that,” I said. But he kept doing it. So I held the baby with one hand and with the other tried to move Raffi farther away. But, instead of pushing him in the chest, as I’d intended, I pushed him in the forehead. He staggered back and then ran to his mother in the kitchen. “Dada hit me!” he said.

The second time was about a month later, at my father’s house. The baby was lying on the carpet, trying to learn to hold his head up, when Raffi started grabbing his face and tugging on it. I told him to stop and he didn’t. I told him again and still he kept doing it. Finally, I slapped his wrist. It was just his wrist, but I slapped it hard. “Ow!” he said, and then ran downstairs to find his mother. He stopped harassing the baby for about an hour, then went back to it again.

I was ashamed and bewildered, but those weren’t even the low points. The low points were the times I got so mad at Raffi that I would yell and hector and explain. I would put him in his room for a time-out, and then I would come in and lecture him. I loved Raffi so much, and yet he simply refused to do anything I told him to. I could see him almost getting used to the yelling and lecturing. I could see that it wasn’t working. But I couldn’t stop.

When Raffi had turned two, someone told us that the truly difficult part was just beginning. It was hard to believe. We had finally emerged from two years of Raffi screaming, crying, shitting, and trying to eat various things off the ground. How could it get anything but better? At the same time, we knew that setting boundaries and telling him no would actually, for us, be harder than all the physical labor that we had just done. For all the debates Emily and I had over sleep training, screen time, and whether the ancient baby carrier I’d inherited from a relative was going to make Raffi bowlegged, it was the work of discipline that was the public work, the place where we’d determine what Raffi was going to be like in the world and what we were going to be like with Raffi. We weren’t prepared.

Near our place, we had two playgrounds—a rich one and a poor one. The rich one was well kept, shaded by old-growth trees, and surrounded by beautiful converted carriage houses. The poor one was a little parched, a little run-down, and next to a public-housing project and a police station. In both playgrounds I saw good parenting. And in both playgrounds I saw lousy parenting. One time, on the poor playground, a little boy of about three came up to me, crying a little, because he had scraped his knee. It wasn’t a terrible scrape, but it was bleeding, and I said, “Let’s get some water on that.” I walked with the boy toward the water fountain. His father intercepted us. “What are you doing?” he said to the boy. “Stop complaining. Go back and play.” The father didn’t say anything to me, and I didn’t say anything to him. The boy was his son. His son was going out into a tough world. He would probably be fine without putting any water on his cut. But his father was still an asshole. I went back to Raffi, and we continued playing.

At the rich playground, a few weeks later, I witnessed a different scene. A little boy, maybe six months younger than Raffi, was playing with a ball. Raffi, as is his wont, ran over to him and grabbed it. The boy started crying. I watched to see what would happen: sometimes when Raffi grabbed someone’s ball, it was an invitation to play. And that, in a sense, is how the action was interpreted by the little boy’s father, who looked to me like a guy who worked on Wall Street. “Go get the ball,” he told his son. But he did not say it in a playful manner. He barked it like an order. “You want the ball, go get it.” The boy was confused. He did not chase Raffi. The father was disgusted. “Let’s go home,” he said to the boy. I got the ball from Raffi and brought it back to the father. “Here you go,” I said. He did not answer.

And I thought, Well, at least I’m not like that. But I also thought, Raffi is going to go out into a world filled with boys raised by fathers like these. Both were training their boys to be aggressive. One father wanted his boy to toughen up and not complain. The other wanted his boy to learn to take whatever it was he wanted. And I, too, in my way, by blowing my top too often, by not controlling my emotions, was teaching Raffi aggression, though not in any systematic or deliberate way.

The baby got a little bigger and I learned to take him out of harm’s way, most of the time, when Raffi was on the loose. But mornings and late evenings continued to trouble us. Raffi was always the first one up: around 6 A.M., we would be startled awake by him noisily climbing into our bed and demanding that we bring him some milk. Emily would have been up several times during the night to feed the baby, so she needed more sleep. Most mornings, I would get up and stagger with Raffi into the living room. Then the battle would begin to keep him out of our bedroom; what he wanted was his mother. He would try to sneak back in while I was making coffee or going to the bathroom. I would have to go after him and drag him out, sometimes kicking and screaming. It wasn’t the best way to start our days.