MORE LOVE, LESS PANIC

In MORE LOVE, LESS PANIC, a parenting memoir Claude Knobler is recounting his years trying to turn his wild, often silly, always optimistic, adopted African son into a quiet, neurotic, Jewish guy like himself, and the lessons gleaned from that experience.

As any parent can tell you, the lessons you learn from your kids never stop. In Claude Knobler’s case, these lessons seemed to occur in a more dramatic and vivid fashion than is usually the case. Already the biological parents of a seven-year-old son and five-year-old daughter, Claude and his wife decided to adopt Nati, a five-year-old Ethiopian boy who seemed to be different from Claude in every conceivable way—from the language he spoke to his joyous personality.

We all want to figure out how to best communicate with our children and Claude did too; the problem was that he only shared five words in common with Nati, and two of them involved going to the bathroom. Many parents struggle with getting their kids to eat more broccoli and less candy. But when your kid describes all pasta, fruit, vegetables, beef, chicken, and fish as being “no yay” and will have none of it…well, that’s when things get really interesting. Call it extreme parenting—these are the lessons you can only learn when life makes things ever so clear. Claude came to the surprising realization that what he was learning from Nati applied to parenting his biological children as well.

As a parent, you want your kid to have the best shot in life, but what Claude learned was that if you're not careful, parenting can become a job done with such fierce determination and focus that it excludes all joy and a good deal of kindness and love. When Claude met Nati’s biological mother—a woman with AIDS who had to give up her child so that he could live—Claude began to see how little control any of us really have. It’s so very important to spend the time we are given with our children to love them and enjoy them, rather than push and mold them into who we think they should be. It is only by having the courage to love, accept, and let go of our children that they and we can be the best versions of who we were meant to be.

Claude Knobler’s essays have appeared in Parenting Magazine and on NPR’s “This I Believe,” as well as in one of the radio program’s literary anthologies, This I Believe: On Fatherhood (Jossey-Bass 2011), and Worldwide Orphan Foundation founder Dr. Jane Aronson’s Carried in Our Hearts: The Gift of Adoption: Inspiring Stories of Families Created Across Continents (Tarcher 2013). Claude’s rather eclectic background includes acting, working as a private detective, delivering singing telegrams in a gorilla costume, and spending a summer dressed as King Kong entertaining tourists on the observatory deck of the Empire State Building. Claude now lives in Los Angeles with his wife and three children.